Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Tech themes. Oh, man. Per usual, I think we’ve covered a lot of them. I think for me, we’ve talked about a lot on this show already but one that I think is super powerful is just this idea of building and then creating, enabling a platform for users of all types of it to then be creative themselves. If you can execute that well in whatever domain and essentially create a marketplace around what you’re doing, but a marketplace where you’re enabling new types of creativity and really entrepreneurialism, that's how you can grow just an enormous ecosystem in any type of business and so specifically I'm talking about the modding engine and the campaign and maps editors that Blizzard releases. It literally created this industry that is tens of billions of dollars now combined in esports and MOBAs. I think about in other... I think Apple was like this in a way. The industry that was created around software was really Apple enabling and then NeXT and object-oriented programming, enabling people to build things and release it on the platform or iOS or even sort of like Square in a way enabling people to go into business and be merchants or Stripe. Yup, I think so. Another big one that we keep touching on is really this concept of sort of the IP flywheel that Blizzard released the Warcraft movie recently and it will be interesting to see how well they’re able to parlay the IP from these games into physical locations, into cinema, into TV shows, into toys. It’s nowhere near the level that Disney is now but it’s an open question to me if the sort of storyline and character development and affinity for these characters that Blizzard Activision and that Riot and these games are doing for the heroes and characters and champions in these games if they’ll be able to really parlay that the same way that Disney has with the characters in their universe. Well, and you can start to see the pieces falling into place with the Major League Gaming acquisition and the analogies to Disney and all of the assets that Disney owns that are part of its flywheel and I'm thinking in particular of ESPN. The challenge I think for Activision Blizzard is they don’t own Twitch, right? Amazon owns Twitch, and is Twitch the ESPN here? I think that obviously the dynamics will be slightly different as it’s a different world but as we pointed out throughout the show as they sort of relate to the game with MOBAs sort of laid the groundwork for the MOBA genre to emerge but then didn’t participate until too late, there are several elements of the flywheel that are kind of missing that are holes in the chain for Blizzard right now. So it will be interesting to see like do they continue trying to build them in-house, do they buy things? I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see more acquisitions coming down the pipeline for Blizzard.…

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