https://open.spotify.com/episode/60MKDviyMQlVkf6PTFVVi5

Context: Blake Robbins is a partner at Ludlow Ventures. Blake is being interviewed by Patrick O'Shaughnessy, the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management and host of the Invest Like the Best podcast.

One of Blake's many superpowers is his genuine curiosity, his ability to explore and dive deep into sub-cultures that people would often overlook - a passion, skill, and interest that comes through in this interview.

These are my abbreviated notes and commentary from Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Blake Robbins's interview. Everything is from the perspective of Blake Robbins.

// @thejerrylu

/// jerrylu.substack.com

Table of Contents

01:35 Growth of the gaming industry

The explosion of the gaming industry is largely credited to the tailwinds of games starting to realize that they should become free-to-play and become platforms rather than pure one-time purchase type games.

That's really what led to this massive growth, especially growth in terms of now gaming being part of the conversation vs it being a pure hits-driven business.

03:46 Biggest players in gaming

The real giant in this space is Tencent, completely proactive at acquiring studios and buying large stakes in studios, owning: 100% of Riot Games (League of Legend, Valorant), 40% of Epic Games (creators of Unreal, Fortnite)

The other big players:

05:30 Monetization of games

Most people viewed free-to-play games as you have to pay to win (pay to unlock certain elements, buy expansion packs). That's not true of the major games today like Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike which are completely free-to-play.

These games are able to be free-to-play because they make the majority of their revenue via in-game items (emotes, cosmetics, items that don't impact your gameplay but are purely meant to flex).