Y Combinator forged a long-term, high-trust ecosystem to the benefit of all tech founders. The video games industry needs to do the same.
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How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
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Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#12Y Combinator forged a long-term, high-trust ecosystem to the benefit of all tech founders. The video games industry needs to do the same.
YC works because B2B can survive early with a few paying customers
Gaming is pure B2C: hit driven, capital intensive, and unforgiving
Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#13Talking about the shift raises the question of why it used to be the other way. Were VCs bad at picking founders who were honest and/or competent, or were VCs always wrong to mistrust founders?
Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great point, I think I'm just being overly pessimistic Related, I find it interesting is that gacha games seem to ahve the highest possible returns but almost none are made by western game companies.
Aren't games like CSGO, FIFA, and Overwatch almost exclusively run on gacha-profits?
Overwatch is not
Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't games like CSGO, FIFA, and Overwatch almost exclusively run on gacha-profits?
Yes they are. The implementation tends to differ from how eastern-developed gacha games work, but they're making billions from virtual slot machines nonetheless.
Yeah, I still indulge in video games, and understand that on the surface CSGO skins feel different than Genshin summons, but from 100 feet up it's all the same crap, imo
I do kinda get what you mean, though. Gacha mechanics feel expected in anything western, while 'loot boxes' are still a 'feature' of some games in the east. Eastern studios have definitely noticed, though, and are running the same playbook.
Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a YC founder turned gamedev, I can tell you that failure is the norm in both pursuits. As with YC, the question is: can we create more outsized outcomes when we succeed?
I don't think that's possible and frankly I'd much prefer capital not even try. To the best of my knowledge, the only games which generate the really outsized outcomes you'd need for a VC portfolio do really gross, anti-player shit (gacha, lootboxes, whale fishing, etc.) to get it. Or they become distribution monopolies like Valve, which is fine-ish when Valve is private but would be a ongoing catastrophe if it had b…
I agree. I'm not the moral police, but video games ultimately have to walk a line where they serve up entertainment that is engaging/addictive without being all-consuming and abusive, and do so for an amount of money for which there is general consensus is "reasonable".
Trying to ride that to the moon is a very different proposition from a B2B play where you sell some service that concretelt delivers $X/mo recurring value to each customer for a $Y/mo price tag, and X > Y, but Y - your costs still turns a healthy profit. If you do that right, everyone is winning and the economy as a whole grows, not at all the same as the zero-sum game that is soaking a few whales and ruining their lives.
Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#17Y Combinator forged a long-term, high-trust ecosystem to the benefit of all tech founders. The video games industry needs to do the same.
YC works because B2B can survive early with a few paying customers Gaming is pure B2C: hit driven, capital intensive, and unforgiving
Fair point though Humble Bundle was B2C.
There are clever gaming platforms out there and the best games seem to turn into platforms effectively.
Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#18Y Combinator forged a long-term, high-trust ecosystem to the benefit of all tech founders. The video games industry needs to do the same.
YC works because B2B can survive early with a few paying customers Gaming is pure B2C: hit driven, capital intensive, and unforgiving
It’s a little more nuanced than that. B2B offerings cost money, video games cost time haha
Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#19Y Combinator forged a long-term, high-trust ecosystem to the benefit of all tech founders. The video games industry needs to do the same.
I feel like this is impossible given how many games flop each year.
On some level it's the role of the publisher to pick winners and guide them over the finish line. See for example the hit machine that is Devolver: https://www.devolverdigital.com/games
I'm not an indie dev, but if I was I would happily give up a chunk of my potential profit to be listed on there, knowing the size of the market that says "oh yeah... a Devolver title, I would blind-buy this, it's probably pretty good."
Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders
#20Talking about the shift raises the question of why it used to be the other way. Were VCs bad at picking founders who were honest and/or competent, or were VCs always wrong to mistrust founders?
It was all of the above in my opinion.
VC’s raised easy money (ZIRP era) and they wanted to deploy fast. Founders told VC’s what they wanted to hear to secure capital.