Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think after I retired from Benchmark a couple of years ago, retired from active investing, obviously, the glide path out of venture is a long glide path. I'm still involved to this day. But after I retired from frontline investing, I really started to think about ways that I could be useful and helpful in the video game business, whether that was doing boards without compensation, whether it was helping young entrepreneurs, or mentoring younger venture capitalists. I thought, maybe I should just write a book. I was very much inspired by a book that I think you know as well, The Genius of the System by Thomas Schatz. That book is a remarkable book in my opinion because it really takes the business side of the film business back from the 20s to the 50s, really elevates the business side of the business, and shows how a lot of what we understood to be the creative part of the business really was a collaboration between creative people and business people. I've always had that same sense of the video game business. I thought it might be fun to do something in that vein, where we showed what was happening on the business side and how it was informing what was happening on the creative side. I think the common narrative is, video games are something created by creative geniuses, a Miyamoto type person, and then the business models rearranged around the creative vision having consumers that flocked to it. I think, already, you're introducing this interesting wedge of, actually, there are very clear business models that guide where the water of creativity can flow. That has been, for the last 50 years, what has defined the video game industry, not the other way around. Yes, and not to take anything away from people like Mr. Miyamoto, who I have infinite respect for. He's a legend. He's a God amongst video game designers. I have had the great pleasure in my career of working with some incredible designers. They are the leaders of the industry in many ways, but they are constrained quite a bit by the business models in which they operate. Just to give you an example, in the packaged goods era, your goal was to sell a disc, and then get somebody to come back a year later and buy another disc. That's a business model choice. Therefore, what you're going to put on that disk is going to be informed by that business model. It's got to have a degree of planned obsolescence to it because if it doesn't, if you just bought one game and played it forever, that's the end of the video game business.…

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