Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…You're pulling forward the playbook theme. Yeah, but anyway. Would Epic be what they are without the Tencent investment? Absolutely not. If you think back to 2012—probably 2011 when the conversation started—they had no or very little digital distribution expertise. They had most recently shipped Gears of War on some disks to some Xbox customers. They had no live ops experience of running anything like the platforms that they have today that are constantly changing and constantly getting updated and constantly getting new seasons. There were no games as experience. I think Tim would be the first to tell you. There's a quote that I grabbed here that Tim says which is, “Tencent is the number one operator of live games in the world, the number one game publisher in China, and the number three internet company in the world. They're not game developers. Their expertise is how to operate these games on a very large scale and appeal to customers, and we found that their values are very similar to ours and that we have a great deal that we can learn from them. ” I think that was in like the 2013-2014 time frame that he gave that quote. I think not only are they investors, but the leadership team at Epic thinks of them really as strategic advisors, and people who brought them into this Epic 4.0 era of the company. Yeah. It's telling that all of the three major strategic moves and then the game development in this new way that have remade Epic all happened after the Tencent investment. It just underscores too this theme serves up so much, even though it's specific to Tencent. That company has been so misunderstood for so long. When the investment happened in 2012—we didn’t talk about this in history and facts—but a lot of people left Epic because they thought that Tencent coming in meant that they were going to turn into Zinga. They thought of Tencent as free to play. This is not what we want to build. This is not how you build real games. The reality was it was totally wrong. It was this whole new version of a much more sustainable, more democratic way of building games, and vision for the industry. And people are only now just starting to wake up to that reality of Tencent.…

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