And Mochizuki, the best in the world, continues to study. Like nearly everyone else, he records his games to video. He then uploads them to YouTube, where he pays a different set of humans to transcribe the raw video into machine-readable game records, ready for XG’s analysis. Ancient board games, meet advanced capitalism.

It is our understanding that Sony and Microsoft charge lower per-unit royalties for games that sell many copies.18 This interesting form of nonlinear pricing strengthens game developers’ incentives to focus on a few good games rather than many mediocre games.