There is an often-repeated but mistaken belief that core gamers and games companies in general are some sort of vanguard of innovative business thinking. I’ve heard this quite a bit lately in the context of crypto gaming. It’s wrong. 1/9

While the games industry has been a laboratory of experimentation (mainly because it’s not an oligopoly like other media), most key business model innovations were originally met with intense skepticism bordering on religious hatred by core gamers and incumbent publishers. 2/9

In 2003, when EA was trying to invest in my mobile game startup, an executive reviewed our products and said, “A monkey could make these games.” He was looking at the world thru a lens of PC-game quality, like DSLR camera companies thinking mobile phone photography sucked. 3/9

18 years later, mobile gaming is 50% of the $160B games industry. The key that unlocked mobile — in-app purchase — was similarly met with resistance. Incumbents were trying to sell $15 mobile games, and getting crushed by King and SuperCell. 4/9

Same thing happened with downloadable content. Publishers and gamers were skeptical of the Steam store on launch; console DLC was hated and shunned by the core as a "money grab" -- today FIFA Ultimate Team alone is a billion dollar business. 5/9

Free-to-play, the now-dominant business model, was considered a weird Asian sideshow in the mid-2000s. When I was on the Riot board and we were launching LoL in the US, the conventional wisdom was heavily negative. “Core gamers won’t buy virtual goods.” 6/9

This view was so widespread at the time that we actually pursued a deal to publish a LoL sku for brick & mortar retail pre-launch, as a hedge against free-to-play not working out. I still have the mock up in my office — a box product from now-dead “incumbent” publisher THQ. 7/9

And today we are hearing the same things about NFTs and crypto gaming. “It’s all a scam” — sounds oddly familiar to what people were saying about Zynga's free-to-play games in 2007. 8/9

That doesn’t mean crypto gaming is necessarily going to succeed (although I think it will) — but it’s funny how the things core gamers and devs have broadly agreed upon (VR, HTML5) haven’t worked, while things they feared and hated have. 😀9/9