Earlier this year, Nintendo launched Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Attack on Titan wrapped up its storied run as one of the most popular TV shows for the year.
Mihoyo made $3.8B in revenue last year (PocketGamer), nearly half of Activision Blizzard. Here's why anime games / culture are taking over🧵
1/ The Rise of Anime
69% of GenZ watch anime, up from 57% of millennials and only 23% of baby boomers. What was once a niche genre has now gone mainstream!
There's a reason why Mihoyo's motto is "tech otakus can save the world."
Distribution has grown. More than half of Netflix's subscribers have watched anime on their platform, while Funimation and Crunchyroll continue to grow as anime-dedicated platforms. No longer do we have to wait for neon fansubs of our favorite anime to come out.
33 of the best companies hand picked from 1600+ applications that are innovating at the frontiers of gaming, AI, mental health, ed tech, social, etc. Lots of long nights for this one 😅
Top developers from Riot, Nintendo, Blizzard, Discord, Epic. Technical, GenZ influencers with millions of followers. Second time founders of unicorns. AI engineers working at the frontiers. Even a company partnered with Leo Messi!
3/ We've got a little bit of everything.
Fintech platforms. Fitness games. On-Chain Factorio. Discord growth tools. Browser tools and platforms. Social MMOs. AI animation and asset generation. Edtech. Indofuturism PUBG. Emerging AI narratives. And many many more.
Games VC is a unique job that didn’t exist 10 years ago.
So here are 5 lessons I learned from working @a16z for the last year 🧵
1/ Metrics > Team > Ideas. Doesn't matter what kind of genius thesis you have on a particular market, if a startup is blowing up everyone knows it. Strong retention, high growth, tons of deal heat. The hard part is picking out a sustainable game from overnight flashes in the pan.
After metrics, we look for great teams (production, design, tech, and art). That can be second/third time founders, EPs of great games, high derivative younger founders... They come in many shapes and sizes but the team and the people are the nexus of great companies.
How did this janky game get so popular? A theory on how BRs like @PUBG/@FortniteGame caught lightning in a bottle. 🧵
👀 Session novelty
🧭 Market/player opp
👯♀️ Fun alone, better with friends
📈 Monotonically increasing intensity
Battle royales were first popularized by fiction, the 2000s Japanese film "Battle Royale," The Hunger Games, etc. Transmedia works!
Brandon Greene (aka PlayerUnknown) took these ideas to a DayZ mod (itself a mod of Arma) back in 2013, inspiring a proper mode in H1Z1. Those mods proved the core loop of the battle royale genre, the foundation blocks for what became PUBG
@Believer_Co is led by legendary game developers Michael Chow and Steven Snow, the EP of @wildrift and one of the OG EPs of @LeagueOfLegends respectively.
They're building the type of open-world multiplayer PvE game that will redefine the genre and bring delight to new players across the world. I'd love to fast forward a few years and play the first build now :)