State of Play: Six Trends Revolutionizing Games | Andreessen Horowitz

Gaming is expanding its reach into every part of our lives (education, medicine, music) and is becoming the foremost battleground for the future of big tech. This strikes me as analogous to the Facebook story from above. The market clearly believes video games represent a valuable opportunity, but may be underrating the scale by orders of magnitude... See more

This trend is driven in part by the rise in technical sophistication for more complex game ecosystems, which are expanding and becoming democratized through game engines like Unity and Unreal.

In a world awash with information and eye candy, “social gaming” is rapidly evolving as the largest existential threat to legacy media’s claim on engaged consumer attention. Trust and manipulation issues are also causing people to look beyond incumbent social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

With more than 30% of the world’s population playing games today, gaming and social behaviors are beginning to blur.

Despite skepticism, gaming is big & rapidly growing: $152bn and ~10% CAGR. Netflix said “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO”. Very few business models work in gaming other than simply building successful games: most of the money in the industry stays with the game developers/publishers and the major gaming/streaming platforms.

All the major gaming platforms are getting crowded. Unexpected success stories where games become viral are becoming further apart. Gaming founders need to be data driven even in their early creative iterations, have marketing professionals embedded in their team from the get go and carefully and ensure a healthy CAC-LTV formula from the early days... See more

Games also continue to be a de facto social network. They’re the only kinds of social networks that don’t have to overcome strong network effects to challenge incumbent social networks. If you can consider Fortnite a “social network,” Fortnite grew to 100 million MAU faster than any conventional social network because it was bootstrapped by the gam... See more

The gaming industry reaches a point at which even adjacent markets suffer from this growth. Indeed, Netflix thinks ‘Fortnite” is a bigger threat than a direct competitor like HBO. The video games industry is silently taking over the entertainment world.