Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
31 published records
01 / belief
“Now, this has vastly changed with the internet, but I think about John Malone, TCI, and the cable business.”
02 / belief
“Of course, there’s a lot of controversy over if this idea is theft or if this is above the bar. But you have this very similar-looking game that I think you’re referring to, David, being started by a plucky startup in LA in 2009.”
03 / belief
“By the way, the title Fortnite inside of Epic started in 2011, so it’s been six years of development and you have this other Unreal Tournament team that I think had already given up at this point.”
04 / belief
“Now, I think you can start using Unity for pretty low, or no fees as an indie developer.”
05 / belief
“To be fair to the Eventbrite episode, I think Kevin or Julia, or maybe both—when we're talking about this—said, yes, there are situations where being private is better.”
06 / belief
“I never even noticed that. Growing up I would say orange. Jenny has taught me to say orange.”
07 / belief
“The issue is, when push comes to shove like it did after maybe Gears of War 3, Epic wanted to do a multiplayer-only version. They said, look, we think multiplayer gaming is the future.”
08 / belief
“I think you could also maybe it’s a stretch, but maybe you could apply it here at Apple and Epic too.”
09 / commitment
“One is that he loves tinkering with the guts of how things work. Both mechanical—and as we will soon see—computers and technical things.”
10 / belief
“There's some middle ground where they just keep them banned, but I think that's just as bad for them.”
11 / commitment
“If Unity made Fortnite, I think then Apple's like, we will definitely not kick all Unity games off of the platform.”
12 / belief
“Finally, on August 13, 2020, Epic pushes a new version of Fortnite to the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store that offers a permanent discount on V-Bucks—the in-game currency in Fortnite—if you buy directly from Epic. Which I believe you could do now in this new version of the app.”
13 / belief
“In fact, I believe some of the first games that were made by third parties on the Unreal Engine came out within a few months or a year of Unreal itself.”
14 / belief
“Now, interestingly, that's not like there was one room with 14 million people. It was limited (I think) to 50 actually for the Travis Scott concert.”
15 / observation
“The only way to compete with one of those products—once it has momentum behind it—is in a displacement of paradigms, so mobile is coming out.”
16 / belief
“Yup, or AWS—same deal. I think there are switching costs. That might be the most directly powerful here.”
17 / belief
“I haven't run the math on Meituan, but in Pinduoduo, two episodes ago, that stake (I think) is worth $20 billion some odd now.”
18 / belief
“I think that's probably also what's scary to Apple, to Google, and probably to Facebook too.”
19 / commitment
“When you look at who develops their own proprietary game engines, it’s only the Activision Blizzard of the world, the Riot Games. But very large publishers that you know of, so think Bluehole for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which of course we will talk about later.”
20 / belief
“I think that the way that he thinks about the world and this metaverse that he wants everyone to live in is commerce is going to be online in this digital space.”
21 / belief
“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.”
22 / prediction
“It's doable. I think the reason that it hasn't happened is because of this economic issue.”
23 / prediction
“The implications are so huge, but I think where we're both landing is Apple needs to give on something here, and it probably needs to be either on economic terms or letting people use alternate payment methods in apps.”
24 / prediction
“Let's say Epic holds strong and decides that we are going to leave the version in the App Store that lets me buy directly from Epic.”
25 / evaluation
“Here's a company that's been growing incredibly quickly, incredibly capital efficiently Zoom (I believe) generated over $1 billion in free cash flow last quarter.”
26 / recommendation
“A much better aspect is if you can find a way to just enable entrepreneurship and creativity writ large and be able to say, hey, I don't know what's going to work, but I'm going to let lots and lots of people try and have their shot.”
27 / evaluation
“You probably know of them since Fortnite is an absolute international phenomenon, the most played game in the world, and for parents out there—the way Gen Z hangs out with each other, or because they are currently the most credible threat to the world’s largest company—Apple.”
28 / prediction
“I believe that’s $12 million across development and marketing because Microsoft is handling so much of the marketing budget.”
29 / evaluation
“What Epic and all of the people who want to play Fortnite on Androids realizes, there’s a litany of oh my God, you’re about to get your phone hacked dialogues that come up between downloading that app and getting to play it, and every time there’s an update. This is something that Epic walked back from and eventually did list on the Google Play Store because Google, as Tim calls it, has a fake open ecosystem.”
30 / evaluation
“Which sounds really scary, and most people analyzing this are looking at it saying, well, that's the real problem here because the Unreal Engine loses credibility with developers if this major platform—where there's an incredible amount of spend going on in the App Store—no longer has Unreal Engine as a deployment target.”
31 / prediction
“What that means—if you dig into it is—we are going to make it so that you can no longer distribute new versions of the Unreal Engine to your developers that they can compile in their code and then submit to the iOS or Mac App Stores.”