If you want to start your own competing store, spend 11 million on buying the rights to various games, and that brings you 18 million players. So you spend less than a dollar to acquire a user, 10 dollars to acquire a customer:
Two observations: rights to older games are being sold at bargain prices. And AAA games with their more sophisticated business development teams can command higher licensing fees, but are worth it.
It is basically a money printing tree:
The document is a good study for anyone in sales and marketing, the 5-year projections and plans for sales are pretty good, and shows the plans they had at the time ("get more exclusives/increase value" vs "surf on userbase"):
Fortnite might be making a pile of cash today, but it is brittle money - a fad and can go away at any time. They might or might not ever produce another Fortnite.
But a nice % cut on every game sold, that thing is sticky, and it is a business for life.
Another interesting tidbit.
Fortnite had reached an impasse in 2020, and Epic asked Apple for help growing. This is why Apple kept bringing up in their filings that "We helped Epic on X and Y" - they were stagnant.
Another great lesson for future game studios: mobile and PCs were a good way of acquiring customers, both the friction and low price, but they were not sticky - they moved to the consoles to play, despite the higher cost of acquisition
What I suspected (and tweeted last year), Fornite was no longer growing, the market was saturated, from the Finance report in Jan 2020 to the Board.
By April a plan is put in place, to add a separate payment system:
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Been thinking about this call to action from Google’s CEO and the challenges he faces.
The problem Sundar has is that he was appointed CEO during a rosy period. Things were selling themselves, growth was booming, and all he had to do is keep turning the crank. 1/
And sometimes what you need is someone that can turn the crank, so this is a match made in heaven.
What Sundar is asking for from his employees are a list of band aids and some red tape removal here and there and hoping this solves the problem.
This is lipstick on a pig 2/
Google’s challenge is that they structurally have designed an organization that is optimized for the good times, and rewards bad corporate behaviors. Chipping at the edges won’t change the deeply embedded behaviors, Sundar needs an organization reboot. 3/
1. given that WebKit is based on the LGPL KHTML, how is it that I can’t replace the system WebKit with my own engine?
2. I don’t think Chromium could be published to the AppStore given the LGPL and AppStore conflicts.
Clarification: this is on iOS.
Another clarification for the iOS scenario: I should be able per the LGPL to patch the LGPL portions of WebKit and replace the system version with my own version:
If your company has a PAC, they are asking employees for donations. Go to Fec.gov and see which colleagues are funding the PAC, and if you have a relationship, reach out to them and ask them to withdraw their donations - you must starve the beast
Example. Go to here and type a company name, in this case I randomly picked my employer (but applies to all companies with PACs):
Then, in the next page click “browse receipts”. In this example, this PAC raised 800k from employees. Once you tap browse receipts you should see a list like the second:
This I believe is a perfect example of a bad business decision. Customer acquisition is quite expensive, so much that sometimes the cost of acquiring a customer is only justified if you can retain them for years 1/
When you force customers into exploring other options you don’t only lose the customer, but also the resources you spent acquiring them, and their free advertisement/advocacy 2/
Even worse, you might create negative advocacy, which can raise your customers acquisition costs.
Your goal should be to never push the user to re-evaluate their decision by bending backwards for them 3/