David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. Let's take a little detour and tell the Pokemon story here because it is incredible. I think this is not a super deep story, but so cool. So many little aspects of this are one in a million chances. You mentioned a $100 billion lifetime franchise since 1996 when it came out. $60 billion of that is merch. Video games is only $35-ish billion of the $100 billion. People became such big fans of this that they tripled, quadrupled the actual video game sales in merch revenue. That's $60 billion if you compare it to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which people think of as a big media property. The MCU is $30 billion lifetime, which is half of Pokemon's merch revenue. Yes. Pokemon is a masterfully managed business franchise IP. I don't know for sure the breakouts, but I believe a large portion, if not maybe even the majority of that merch segment is the trading card game all the way back to Hanafuda cards and Nintendo. Almost $50 billion cards have been sold. That's 50 billion Pokemon cards exists in the world. Wild. All right. Pokemon, 1990, Gameboy comes out. Satoshi Tajiri had started this thing called Game Freak a decade before with some of his friends. It's a fan magazine for video games. They eventually get into making their own video games. None of them really necessarily take off, certainly not to the extent of Pokemon. At Game Freak, Satoshi Tajiri is pitching internally, hey, we should make something for the Gameboy. I saw the functionality with the link connector. I loved collecting bugs as a kid, and it made me think about bugs going back and forth on the link cable between these two Gameboys. I wonder if there's something we can do around kids and bug collections, trading them, battling them, or something. He comes up with this concept, and he pitches it internally. Internally, what is it? It's four programmers.…

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