Mitch and Blake look at the current state of the vitally important Chinese gaming market, on the precipice of a bitter trade war resulting from the Trump tariffs.

They review the history of the games business in China, discuss the reasons China is so competitive in the global gaming market, and look at how some of the ways the Chinese market diverged from other markets influenced the strategies of Chinese game companies.

In particular, they look at how China's relatively late entry into the games business proved to be a benefit, by allowing them to skip the packaged goods era and therefore avoid all the ways that the packaged goods legacy has burdened incumbent US and European publishers. They discuss how the restrictions that the Chinese Communist Party places on the games business have influenced the development of the market, for better or worse.

They analyze how this unique domestic situation pushed the top Chinese companies to look outside China to deploy capital to secure various strategic content and distribution advantages (e.g., Riot, Epic, Garena). They discuss the strategies of top Chinese publishers TenCent and Netease in this light. They talk about how US national security interests affect Chinese publishers' ability to invest in and potentially acquire US game companies.

They discuss how, over time, homegrown content has come to dominate the Chinese market, and the way that pattern is similar to what happened in the film business, where China migrated from importing Western content to creating its own.

Mitch and Blake marvel at how China has gone well beyond replacing Western game imports, with Chinese products such as Genshin Impact and Black Myth: Wukong emerging as viable AAA games suitable for successful export to the US and European markets. They also look at the success of Chinese mobile games such as Last War and Block Blast! and how good these companies are at distribution arbitrages.

They conclude the episode with a look ahead and discuss how the current global political situation may affect the future of both Chinese and Western game businesses.

Show Notes:

Mitch and Blake take an in-depth look at one of the most important companies in the global gaming business: Valve. They trace the company's origin as the developer of first-person shooter Half Life, their use of the Quake engine and the benefits Valve derived from their relationship with id, and their development and deployment of the Steam platform.

They explain how Valve used content like Half Life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and other games to aggregate audiences on Steam, and how they used those audiences as the bedrock of their move to platform-based publishing on Steam. They discuss the evolution of Steam and its competitive advantages as an internet business, and how Valve used those advantages to become the publisher/distributor of choice for independent PC games, and later a key distributor of games from incumbent publishers -- including the rumored launch of the PC version of the much-anticipated new Grand Theft Auto VI.

Finally, they look at the Steam's success in China, how the increasing market power of Steam could pose a problem for the PC gaming business, and how Valve is attempting to leverage Steam into a hardware platform.

Show Notes:

GameCraft S1E2: The Fall and Rise of Publishing

Aggregation Theory

Valve 25th Anniversary Documentary

Michael Abrash

"The Fragile State of Steam in Mainland China" - gamesindustry.biz

Steam Anti-Trust Litigation

Mitch and Blake discuss the mobile duopoly in which Apple and Google exert extraordinary power by tying their app stores to hardware and software platforms. They warn that the inflexible and expensive distribution systems on iOS and Android could be models for future PC and console distribution systems.

They briefly review the history of mobile distribution and mobile technology innovation from the late 90's to the present, and what that development meant for content on the platforms. They discuss the similarities between the JAMDAT and Scopely content portfolio strategies as responses to their very different distribution situations.

They discuss in depth the often perverse incentives that are created by platform dynamics and distribution expenses, which lead to content and customer acquisition strategies that are designed to maximize return on invesment rather than quality entertainment. Blake explains the particularly dark advertising strategies of companies like Playrix that intentionally deceive users.

They make the case for government regulation as perhaps the only solution to the current mobile distribution cost gouging problems, given the market power of the two duopolists, and explain why sideloading isn't a simple solution to the distribution problem. Finally, they discuss the increasing similarities between the iOS App Store and Steam, and why that is a frightening development.

Show Notes:

Macworld 2007 iPhone Announcement

Do [Steam] Wishlists Matter Any More?

Mitch and Blake kick off Season 3 of the podcast with a high-level look at the current moment in the video game business, critiquing both the idea that the business is cyclical and we are in a downward phase of the cycle (and the naïve notion of "survive 'till '25"), as well as the idea that the business has simply matured, suggesting we are in a new phase of low growth and consolidation.

Instead, they propose a framework for thinking about the games business that argues for the continuous interplay of three innovation forces: content, distribution, and technology. They outline how each of the three forces have played out historically, and offer some examples of the discontinuous inflections that have occured along these three vectors of innovation. They also try to explain why innovation is currently stalled, and how that creates a downward spiral that affects valuations, risk-taking, and ultimately what kinds of games get made.

Show Notes:

Matthew Ball's state-of-the-games-business deck

Joost van Dreunen's newsletter

Live Service Games

The Demise of Mid-Budget Cinema

Sideloading apps on IOS

Discord's new ad units

In their final episode of Season 2, Mitch and Blake take on the complex and highly speculative topic of the impact of recent improvements in artificial intelligence on the games business. Your hosts acknowledge that the sector is moving so quickly that this episode could be obsolete by the time it airs, and warn that it's difficult at this early moment to look too far into the future.

Mitch offers a loose framework for thinking about AI in game production, mapping this framework to specific areas of game creation and publishing that could be effected by AI. They discuss in particular the disruption that could be caused by massively increased efficiencies in the creative pipeline, the impact on the game labor force, and how the incumbents may be more vulnerable in games than in other software spaces. Mitch tells the story of his first meeting with then-game developer Demis Hassabis (today the CEO of Google DeepMind). Mitch and Blake look at the unpleasant prospect of what behavioral analysis, population clustering, and dynamic ad personalization may mean for the dark arts of paid customer acquisition.

After a look at what AI-enabled game creation might augur for distribution platforms already choked with content, they look at the bull and bear cases for game AI, and its implications for the future of the games business.

Mitch and Blake look at the ins and outs of intellectual property licensing in games. After discussing the checkered history of the practice, they look at the creative and business reasons why licensed IP continues to be valuable to game creators.

After a quick look at how IP licenses actually function and what to expect from licensors, Mitch and Blake discuss IP arbitrages -- finding gems in the rough that can be licensed at lower cost but with considerable customer acquisition lift, using the examples of Tony Hawk, Kim Kardashian, and Sponge Bob. They draw an important distinction between celebrity endorsement and IP licensing.

The move on to a deep dive on EA Sports, one of the great IP licensing-based businesses ever created in video games. They talk about the EA "house style" of realism based on actual teams and players, and what that meant from an IP acquisition standpoint. Mitch explains their high-priced exclusive licenses with the NFL as well as their complex clockwork licensing regime for the product formerly known as FIFA, which was so resilient it allowed them to cease licensing the master IP itself. They also talk about the sports where EA lost -- like baseball and basketball.

Your hosts turn to the topic of the recently-announced Epic/Disney deal. They present their outsiders' view of Epic's IP partnership strategy, and how Epic has tried to weave media IP, celebrities/influencers, and music licensing into a massive re-engagement scheme of on-going eventfulness for their "forever game" Fortnite. This leads to a discussion of Disney's struggles in gaming and comparisons to the game strategies of their studio competitors Universal and Warner Bros.

They conclude the episode with a look at outbound licensing from game IP -- so-called "transmedia." They look at some early examples, then turn to the recent break-out hits like Super Mario Brothers, Five Nights At Freddy's, The Last of Us, and Arcane. With dozens of new game projects in development in Hollywood after the success of these properties, Mitch and Blake wonder whether outbound licensing will add a new revenue stream for developers who take the risk to develop original IP.

In perhaps their most important episode of the series, Mitch and Blake explain what they mean when they use the term "distribution" and why it is so important to their understanding of how the video games business functions.

Like they did with the term "publishing" last season, they try to recontextualize distribution as a much larger and more important concept than simply moving atoms or bits into commerce. Your hosts define distribution as the myriad of systems that exist in between the developer of a game and the ultimate end-user of that game, all intended to enable access to the game. They explain how every choice of system extracts a cost, how the sum of these costs -- both monetary and non-monetary -- effects enterprise value creation, and how the colloquial notion that "distribution is a commodity" is incredibly naive.

They provide many examples of how this concept actually functions in the real world of the games business, including how packaged goods distribution worked, why customer acquisition is almost always an arbitrage, and what happens when a distribution system breaks.

Mitch and Blake discuss the massive expansion of gaming in emerging markets around the world. The begin with a discussion of the big-picture factors driving this expansion -- primarily mobile technology, but also new business models, payment systems, and demographics. 

They then take a closer look at the Middle East and North Africa, and how the different approaches that companies are taking in Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia are making that region one of the fastest growing in the world. They contrast it with the Latin American market, which has had a longer history but which operates quite differently. 

They turn to Southeast Asia, why it's so interesting as a gaming market, and then discuss the explosive growth of Sea Ltd. They discuss the imporance of Singapore as a trade and banking hub, and how it's attracted investors and operators to the region.

After a quick look at the Sub-Saharan African market, they discuss India, the sleeping giant of gaming markets, and why it has failed to deliver on its promise for the last several decades. Mitch shares some personal anecdotes about doing business in India, and traveling to a remote area that has become the flash point in a geo-political rivalry.

They conclude with a discussion of developments in the Chinese game market since 2020, and consider why the market has stalled. They look at the impacts on economic issues and intervention by the Chinese Communist Party, and the toll that the latter has taken on China's largest domestic publishers and on the perception of the market in the West.