- How gaming industry has evolved
- Network effects in gaming
- Rise of livestreamers
- Similarities btw eSports & ecommerce
- What media can learn from PC gaming
Thread👇
Despite skepticism about gaming among investors, it is a massive and rapidly growing market. The global market is $152 Bn and growing ~10% year over year.
nfx.com/post/what-vcs-…
2. Games aren't as much hits as franchises
3. Platform convergence will create massive hits
4. Game discovery will be organic and social
5. The next Marvel universe will be born from games
6. Consumers are co-creators"
- a16z.com/2019/10/16/tre…
New network effects (social, competition, UGC) in what used to be pure content businesses
These also shift ad-model from billboards to videos
Also enables real-time content generation (e.g. "Choose-your-adventure"
a16z.com/2020/01/14/clo…
- Not just live-gaming, but live-cooking, live-eating, live-sleeping(!), etc
- Not just making $ on ads, but also:
- Private chat groups (cc bunches.app)
- Expert paid content
- Paid Q&A
- Coaching
- Native e-commerce
a16z.com/2020/04/08/lif…
- Enables them to collect payment information.
- Diversifies them from ad model
- Strengthens influencer-fan relationship
a16z.com/2019/12/19/mak…
Related:
1/ ppl overvalued IRL
2/ influencer-driven
3/ legacy distributors can’t keep up with digitally native ones.
"Who’s the Shopify, Amazon, the 3P shippers, the packaging companies, etc. of gaming/esports?"
h/t:
- Experiment w/ revenue models
- Embrace remixing & mods. Steam has about 4500 games but about 400 million pieces of user-generated content. In contrast to music w/ its legal protections
- Embrace crowd funding
h/t: medium.com/software-is-ea…
zelos.gg
100thieves.com
themeta.com
Recorded a related podcast w/ @RohnJobinson & @blakeir:
stitcher.com/podcast/villag…
Curious to hear feedback & more thoughts on where the industry is going.
"People will never play video games for hours
People will never play video games w/their friends
People will never watch video games at scale
People will never pay to watch video games at scale"