1/ There is an under-appreciated point in @ballmatthew's recent deck that anyone looking to understand the next 10+ years of gaming needs to process: kids don't care about AAA, and **probably never will.**

This connects directly to the new Xbox CEO @asha_shar and to the recent decisions at Playstation, among others.

If you look at Ball's slides on Roblox you'll be blinded by the sheer growth of the platform. But if you have a kid, like me, you wouldn't be surprised by it.

My son is eight. When I was eight, I subscribed to Nintendo Power. I had Mario and Zelda bedsheets. I bought the cereal! I was obsessed with these games. I'd played Final Fantasy. Dragon Warrior. Bubble Bobble! Any bit of news about the NES or upcoming SNES and Genesis systems I devoured.

My son has at home a PS5, a Switch, an Xbox, a gaming PC, because I have them. He never turns them on. He and his friends only play Roblox games.

Kids today have access to more games than I can ever have imagined for way cheaper than what cartridges cost me. Super high quality ones too. He could play any Mario game in history. My kid could not care less. He only thinks of Mario as a character from a movie studio whose opening logo has Minions on it, and he thinks the Minions are funny.


2/ What happens to this generation when they hit their teens and twenties?

My kid isn't playing console titles. Zero interest. Its for old people. Roblox is like YouTube for him. It offers thousands of shiny, stupid distractions for him and his friends to play together.

There's a very strong connection between YouTube and Roblox. When you're growing up on Mr. Beast and YouTubers and unboxing videos and dumb brainrot AI slop video feeds, Roblox is an interactive, social version of that.

This is a long thread about Square Enix, the Microsoft layoffs, AI, and Metcalfe's law. Fifteen years ago I used to work on the translation of our Annual Reports at Square Enix into English.

One area that often required editing was the word "content." It was a commonly used word in all our IR materials.

The Japanese write コンテンツ (Kontentsu) which is plural ("contents") and I would have to re-edit non-native speaker's edits of "contents" back to the correct "content" because otherwise the report would go out saying Engrish like, "Square Enix provides high quality contents.”

A thread on the recent Square Enix news regarding FF sales numbers and expectations. ign.com/articles/final… As a reminder I reported to two CEOs of Square Enix for the better part of a decade and ran a subsidiary. I also correctly predicted last year that Square Enix was going to break exclusivity. I'll note I have no confidential information that I'm basing my arguments on.

To start, we need to look at decisions made on the titles under development within the lens of 2015-2022, not the lens of 2023. For example, FF16 would have started pre-production prior to the release of FF15, which was released in 2016.

This is a pre-Fortnite era. Budgets for FF7 Remake and into Rebirth would have been around this period too. This is important to note and we will get back to it.
axios.com/2023/09/25/squ…

1/ Yesterday’s closure of Stadia’s internal studios and business realignment shuttered Google’s cloud gaming platform strategy. In this thread I'll explain why.
theverge.com/22260994/googl… 2/ In the history of the game industry, first party content has been required for the success of platforms. Mario for Nintendo, Uncharted for Sony, HL2 for Steam. Microsoft knew this when they bought Bungie to release the Xbox.

1/ There are four sources of value in games. The first, and by far the largest, is CONTENT. The second is PLATFORM. The third is DISTRIBUTION. The fourth is TOOLS. 2/ Let’s start with CONTENT, which I define as IP ownership and not content creation. The lion's share of power in the games ecosystem belongs to the publishers and IP owners. They also consistently generate the most profits and sometimes expand into platform and distribution.

1/ The flaw in cloud gaming strategies today is the platforms see the opportunity as enabling distribution rather than creating new content. Cloud gaming should enable new experiences around centralized AI, physics, rendering. We explored this ten years ago at Square Enix. 2/ Google had glimpses of these cloud gaming opportunities at their Stadia announcement last year. EA spoke about it a few years ago too. But nothing innovative or new has come out. And what we're left with is underwhelming.