Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…It was so funny because when Nick and I did meet later—I didn't know they talked to other folks—I told him this, oh man, this could be the same people, wait, we're talking about the same person here? I think the learning curve was sharp. We just started at zero. Our first couple of interactions with ventures did not go very well. We were also looking for publishers. Publishers, if you're not familiar in the game space, they'll basically pay you per project. You're like, this is the project I’m going to work on, it's going to cost me $10 million to do this thing that I create. We’ll front the money. You’re talking about Electronic Arts, Activision. Yes, totally. There's a bunch. We’ll front you the money and we'll pay you for this very specific project, and at the end of the project we want to get paid back and then we want X% of the X’s Capital that this thing brings in. That can be the right decision for a lot of games, but because of the way it's financed, it really does finance a very specific type of game. You are not going to build a services game that has an uncertain roadmap with that model because you have to know upfront, like two years from now I'm going to ship this thing. The moment it ships I have to step away because I actually can't finance it anymore. The publisher has only financed it for these two years. That's where you get these disks that ship, and then the moment it’s out the door, you're like, we're on to the sequel for that thing because you have no way to finance the continued growth in iteration of the project. Even if you could, the economics are really not in your favor. You're probably splitting the revenue 50/50, maybe worse with the publisher. Probably worse, yeah.…

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