Mitch and Blake discuss perhaps the most important developments in the video games business since the 1990s: the explosion of casual and mobile gaming. Mitch explains how the casual business was catalyzed by the most unlikely of heroes. He talks about his time as the CEO of the first public mobile game company in the US (JAMDAT) leading up to the launch of the iPhone. They look at the rise of so-called "social gaming" on Facebook and how it was enabled by new advances in analytics and data science. They do a deep dive on the iOS App Store and Mitch talks about how Apple's desire to curate its end-user experience inadvertently led to the rise of Facebook as a customer acquisition gatekeeper. They end with a discussion of why SuperCell succeeded in building a multi-billion dollar mobile game business while Rovio did not. Links & Show Notes: Robert Westmoreland EA's “We See Farther” Ad Ion Storm Taneli Armanto / Nokia Snake JAMDAT Mobile S-1 Steve Jobs Announces the iPhone Mobile Games Dominate User-Acquisition Spending (2021) SuperCell
Om Podcasten
Gamecraft is a limited series about the modern history of the video game business.
Beginning in the early 1990's, the video game business began a radical transformation from a console and PC packaged goods business into the highly complex, online, multi-platform business it is today. Game industry legend Mitch Lasky and game investor Blake Robbins go on a thematic tour of the last 30 years of gaming, exploring the origins of free-to-play, platform-based publishing, casual & mobile gaming, forever games, user-generated content, consoles, virtual reality, and in-game economies across the eight episodes of Season 1.
In Season 2, Mitch and Blake are back with a new series analyzing the state of the video game business in 2024. They start with a macro view of the current business, before looking at some hot topics in gaming: the rise of powerful independent game studios, emerging markets for games around the world, how innovations in artificial intelligence will change game creation, and the renewed importance of intellectual property in the game business.