Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think that it was a revolution of that import. I think we're still feeling the reverberations of it to this day, the impact of free-to-play and how it's changed, how people consume games, how they play games, and how games are made, because it requires a very different kind of game in order to be susceptible to a free-to-play mechanic than the old school stuff, everything onto a disk and hope that it's worth 60 hours for $60. That's one of the episodes. We do an episode on the change in publishing from packaged goods at retail business to an online distribution business. Really, the rise of Steam would be indicative of that particular part of it. We do an episode on game economies and how they've evolved from their very, very earliest stages to these incredibly sophisticated, and now even Web3 enabled economies of our era. One of my favorite episodes is the Forever Games, which is really around this idea of with the shift to free-to-play, can a game actually be there forever? What do those play patterns look like? Mitch has these amazing guidelines or just rules of making things about it. Going into listening to Gamecraft, I had this high level idea that there's more durability in the video game industry now than there used to be. It used to be very hits-driven. I think a lot of people still believe, or a lot of investors look at the category as very hits driven. There are two different and very distinct reasons why there's more durability now. One is this concept of Forever Games. The other is the concept of—Mitch, I think you coined this term of platform based publishers. Can you talk a little bit about each of those, how they fuel each other, and how they're different, but how they both provide durability in the industry? Sure. I think the Forever Games are part of a continuum. There was durability in the early video game business. It was just not the games themselves that were durable. Either the franchises were durable. You look at FIFA. I started playing FIFA on Trip Hawkins' 3DO back in 1993. I've been playing every year continuously for the last 30 years. If you think about it, that's a 30-year persistent play pattern, very much concurrent with what we've described in the Forever Games episode with some of these long duration play patterns. It's just that they packaged it very differently. You were playing the same game, but you just have to go buy it again and again and again and again and again. You look at the Nintendo portfolio, which you guys have done a really good job of exploring. You look at the continuity of their brands. where they've been able to bring the same characters and the same kinds of play patterns back again and again as they shift from NES to SNES, to Cube, to Dreamcast, to whatever. That is, in a sense, of durability.…

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