Speaker unverified: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Is Steam itself an $8 billion or Valve all up? I think it's Valve overall. When you think about actually the strategy that happened there, which is really the essence, and we talked about this in episode two of Gamecraft, where it's actually releasing the game like what we're talking about with Half-Life. It's like this sneaky route of, oh, wait. I don't know how intentional it actually was in hindsight, but they've ended up building this platform and they're like, oh, wait, now all these other developers want to use this. Now, it is the go-to place and a lot of people have followed. You have Activision having their own launcher. You have EA as their launchers. They all have launchers, and they all are still really pushed by the market to launch on Steam as well. We had breakfast with Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft games yesterday. We were talking about Steam. Phil was like, I put my games on Steam. This is Microsoft, which has the most market power of any company, maybe apart from Nintendo and Sony, to roll their own. He's putting games on Steam. You fish where the fish are. I think there's a new iteration of that. The latest attempt of being a platform-based publisher would actually probably be Epic, which Epic has Fortnite, it does incredibly well. They've launched that on their own launcher. Now they've been spending the past couple of years really trying to build up the Epic game store. From my vantage point, it hasn't made nearly enough of a dent relative to Steam. That's one of the things I wanted to ask you guys about, which is, where are we in the business model journey of the platform-based publisher? It almost feels like the rest of the internet. The platforms are starting to ossify. Is that fair, or are there still opportunities?…

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