Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, really they did. I think this is also a dynamic that happens with these waves that I think is super interesting, is that the old paradigm of video games didn’t go away either and Activision’s great at that, like Call of Duty, like you were saying, makes billions of dollars. But it just makes it in a way that is an inferior business model because it's like you invest hundreds of millions of dollars in creating the content just like movies and then you release it and then you monetize it for a window and then it fades. Like they still would have done fine but all of the growth and the innovation and the better business model that Blizzard has, they would have missed out on. And then two other things that I want to point out that I think are questions that I don’t have answers for. And listeners, if you know about the video games industry, join us at Acquired.fm in the Slack. We would love to hear your answers to these. But Blizzard Activision, as we put it at Pioneer Square Labs, when we work on something for a long time and don’t create a company out of it, a very expensive kill called Titan where they worked on this game for a long time and it was supposed to be the next big thing and it was killed. The question is, in my mind, if it were just Blizzard, like would they have believed in it and persevered through it and shipped at any way? Or would the expensive project, would they have continued to pour money onto it and it wouldn’t have seen the light of day? I don’t know. But I speculate that that has more to do with Activision than Blizzard. And then the other thing I want to point out is the next big thing was also supposed to be Diablo III and that was a total flop. Well, I don’t know that it was a flop. But I think it was successful but just not to the degree of these other franchises.…

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