Gamecraft

Mitch and Blake really know and love games and the games business. Mitch has been in the industry since the 90s. In 1996 he gave me some advice that I really should have taken (ship and iterate our online game) Blake is an experienced investor and lover of games. Highly recommended!

I’ve been a fan of the art of gaming for most of my life. As part of that, I’ve become familiar with corporate takeovers and executive meddling destroying creative and uniquely talented teams. Common practices of forcing a single player studio to add unnecessary multiplayer, loot boxes, cosmetic DLC or any other type of skinner box mechanism. We often hear about these things from the artist perspective. In this series, you get to hear about it from the corporate executive perspective. The host are very knowledgeable and give a great account of the history of the business of video games. And it’s their type of analysis that can help financially stabilize companies in a very unstable industry. In general, I think the host are correct in their assessment of what makes money. Though they are sometimes lacking in the analysis of what these models do to the consumer. For them, whales or nothing but a positive. Where I find it to be predatory. But I do find hearing their thought process to be an enlightening experience. And so I highly recommend this podcast. Though it’s a shame they didn’t bring on a developer from that game company to add more perspective to the conversation. It would’ve been interesting to hear the give-and-take between those worldviews.

I was initially very impressed by the credentials and experience of Mitch Lasky. (Blake Robbins is only there to give him someone to talk to.) Unfortunately, as I listened I found their opinions and tastes more and more off-putting. Talking about how cool or exciting immoral business practices were. Speaking glowingly about some of the worst trends the industry has had to offer. This culminated in their S2 AI episode, where they reveal that they are badly falling for the same AI scam that a lot of investors are, and largely dismissed and downplayed the concerns of critics, almost completely ignoring the moral component. I recommend this podcast if and only if you need to get into the heads of the game industry investor class and it’s amoral, artless industry gatekeepers. A reality that many of us have to contend with. After seeing such blatantly ignorant and harmful viewpoints from the show, it really calls into question everything else they have said.

This podcast is incredibly high quality content. I have been running my own game companies for 18 years and I learn something with every episode. If you are an exec in the games industry, it’s absolutely a must to listen to. It’s not unbiased, and I disagree with some of the analysis, but the discussion is top notch.