The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 11 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
Lasky: Early cloud gaming failed due to audience-hardware mismatch
“So you could stream these games without owning a gaming PC, but all the games that were really viable to stream were the kinds of games that gamers who already owned a damn PC were wanted to play.”
Lasky: Cloud gaming's opportunity is casual-identifying hardcore mobile youth
“I do think, however, that the audience has expanded really in the last 12 to 15 years, and that this next generation of kids who've grown up on Fortnite, who've grown up on harder core games but are still casual in their self-identification, who don't think of…”