Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lasky: Traditional sports owners who bought franchised esports teams hold dead assets
“I spent five years talking those owners, like the existing sports owners who had terrible FOMO from like dumping money into these things, and some of them took my advice, and some of them didn't, and ended up in, you know, with some really dead assets. But tha…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lasky: Nintendo engineered artificial Black Friday scarcity to create retail panic
“They were very clever about only releasing a limited amount of inventory for Black Friday, and then the parents would go because that was on the kids Christmas list, and they would go to buy the disc and it, and they would be sold out and panic would ensue. An…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lasky: Nintendo is about to meaningfully expand its app store business
“I think the next one to go is going to be Nintendo, right? I think they're, I think that's, if you're looking for a reason to invest in Nintendo as a company, it's, I think they're about to crack that nut, right? And enter the app store business in a meaningfu…”
Insight
Lasky: Microsoft's Activision deal mimics Netflix's exclusive content strategy
“And you look at the Activision deal, sixty-nine billion dollar acquisition of Activision. It's basically like, you know, Netflix or Apple or one of these other companies buying exclusive content.”
Insight
Lasky: Gaming VCs must back durable platforms, not sequential game studios
“I invest in businesses, not in studios. Right? And the, and those businesses have to have a strategy that transcends, I want to make a game and put it on Steam, or I want to make a mobile game and put it in the App Store, right? And I'm really interested in th…”
Assertion Supported
Lasky: Early Riot Games acquired DotA community websites to redirect player demand
“We bought the websites that we bought the Defense of the Ancients websites and just turned their editorial to-”
Insight
Lasky: Paid customer acquisition in gaming is a dangerous, addictive slippery slope
“I resist as long as possible going paid, although sometimes you're so profitable that you can with and not really mess your margins up too much, right? But I think once you start down the paid path for customer acquisition, it's kind of a slippery slope and it…”
Insight
Lasky: Annual LiveOps spending matches or exceeds original yearly game development costs
“Like, I think you can expect to spend as much or more on an annual basis than you were spending in development in LiveOps.”
Insight
Lasky: Web3 games must solve token-spending hesitation to succeed
“And so, when you're, when we're looking at web three related deals, like solving that problem, like incentivizing you so that you don't feel like an idiot for utilizing the token is a key, key factor in these games.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lasky: AI will not easily generate complete, satisfying video games from prompts
“There's a train of thought that, that has been advanced that, oh wow, this is really going to democratize the game industry in, in a way where now, kind of like you're seeing with mid journey, for example, where you can just describe a piece of art and it magi…”
Insight
Lasky: Platform publishers dominate gaming by aggregating demand to leverage supply
“Where you aggregate demand On an online platform, and then you utilize that demand to leverage the supply side of the, of whatever industry that you're entering. And I think you look at steam and steam shares many of those attributes. And I think that move, wh…”
Insight
Lasky: Proprietary game launchers reduce customer acquisition costs to zero
“So you're, you've got this audience there that's pre-qualified where you've got their credit cards, hundreds of millions of users. And so you just use it as a way to lower your customer acquisition cost effectively to zero for the next products that you launch…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lasky: Sony's resistance to cross-play will hurt it over time
“I think it's going to come back to bite him in the ass over time.”
Disclosure
Lasky: Startups should never launch games on consoles before finding product-market fit
“I would not counsel any of my portfolio companies to launch on the console because the hoops that you have to jump through for approvals, for manufacturing, et cetera, for just in general are dire, and they're not the kind of thing that I would sort of put in …”
Disclosure
Lasky: Pushing Discord to build a game store was my failure
“It's like we tried this at Discord. Right? And we tried to start a game store. This was obviously my failure, because I pushed them very hard toward becoming a platform-based publisher, because I thought, hey man, this is a great way to leverage this audience.”
Disclosure
Lasky: thatgamecompany rejected an Apple Arcade deal over strict exclusivity demands
“Apple wanted us in the arcade. We couldn't do it because we want it to be cross-platform, right? And they wanted exclusives.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lasky: A Chinese team winning Worlds created $150M revenue for Riot Games
“I mean, when the Chinese team won Worlds, the Riot guys were like throwing confetti because like when the Chinese win, it's like a hundred and fifty million dollar revenue opportunity in terms of increased, like, you know, unexpected sales of skins.”
Assertion Supported
Lasky: Roblox extracts a massive 60% aggregate gross tax on its developers
“I think the last time I calculated the total tax, the gross tax was somewhere close to 60%. It was like 57%.”
Insight
Lasky: Packaged-goods video games required planned obsolescence to sustain business
“In the packaged goods era, your goal was to sell a disc and then get somebody to come back a year later and buy another disc, and that's a business model choice, and therefore what you're going to put on that disc is going to be informed by that business model…”
Assertion Partly supported
Lasky: Bobby Kotick crashed Cattleman's Ball to secure Steve Wynn's Activision financing
“Because he basically, Bobby crashed the cattleman's ball, and without an invite, and basically did it so that he could buttonhole Steve Wynn and get him to put the money up for the act to buy Activision out of bankruptcy. And it was a genius deal because they …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lasky: Casual Titles Make Up Over 50% of Modern Gaming Industry
“It's probably more than 50% of the video game business these days would be considered casual gaming by 19 nineties standards.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lasky: Valve generates eight billion dollars in annual revenue
“I mean, now it's an eight billion dollar a year business, right?”
Assertion Supported
Lasky: Nintendo's third-party revenue per active user drastically lags console rivals
“I mean, they have the lowest third party revenue per active user by like an incredible amount, right? I mean, like hundreds of dollars to like 25 dollars. Right? Like, versus the rest of their console competitors.”
Insight
Lasky: Cloud game streaming is now viable due to bandwidth and scale
“So with the new xCloud platform, and I was a pioneering investor in this with Gaikai back in the day, and it wasn't really economically viable, but now with scale and, Moore's law and all these other things we, and bandwidth improvements, we can now really do …”
Mitch Lasky