The Venture Deadpool (Ep. 21)
Mitch and Blake address the unpleasant topic of how and why venture-backed games companies fail. They look first at the nature of venture financing and the inherent differences between venture and publisher money. This leads to a conversation about how developers who were used to working with publishers treated venture capital like production financing as opposed to company financing, and why that distinction matters. They then turn to the flawed strategies and tactics of gaming funds and investors, who tried to make up for their lack of judgment and taste by placing many bets on startup studios. They address several other factors that made games investing tricky for venture capitalists who often had little experience managing creative businesses and lack a basic understanding of the peculiarities of game production. Mitch and Blake look at reasons why venture backed companies fail, and why catastrophic failure appears to be more common among venture-backed games companies than other software companies. They discuss the concept of the "naked B," why growth rounds are rare in games companies, and why games companies are uniquely difficult for conventional venture capitalists to evaluate. They conclude with a look at some examples of companies that failed to return capital to investors -- in some cases very significant amounts of capital -- and discuss a few companies that appear to be in danger of following suit. They explain why the cumulative effect of these failures is one of the factors behind the current difficulties game companies experience raising money from venture capitalists. [Ed.: since recording this episode, one of the companies in the deadpool, Elodie Games, has shut down.]