Navigating the AI Future (Ep. 30)

Mitch and Blake offer their thoughts about how to navigate the introduction and impact of large language model AI in the video game business. They begin by discussing their opinion that AI represents a significant technological innovation with potentially profoundly disruptive implications. Beyond even a simple technology innovation, AI is likely to be a paradigm-changing event, that calls into question many of the accepted methods and ideas underlying current game production and marketing.

After discussing their intentions in recording this episode -- that this is very real and very threatening to the competitive positioning of western developers -- they introduce their thesis that AI is going to hollow out the middle of the game development cost stack, and in so doing, potentially put the middle tier of games under even more pressure than it's been under lately. It will reduce the costs of prototyping, but perhaps not the overall cost of development and go-to-market. And it will cost jobs, just as every previous paradigm change in gaming has done.

After a brief interlude to discuss the often ill-considered backlashes against AI from inside the games business, they finish the episode by discussing in great detail the five categories of companies and professions that they think will be outside the immediate reach of LLMs -- categories that may actually get more valuable and defensible in an AI-dominated world.

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Avsnitt(34)

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Mitch and Blake conclude Season 4 with a review of a new kind of games company that is getting significant attention from investors: casual game portals with integrated AI game generation engines, see...

27 Maj 51min

Funding & Founding (Ep. 32)

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20 Maj 55min

A Theory of Fun

Blake and Mitch discuss the possibility that games -- mainly mobile and live service games -- have concentrated on providing fun through progression and engagement mechanics rather than fun in the gam...

13 Maj 1h 5min

How Istanbul Won the Mobile Puzzle Wars (Ep. 29)

Mitch and Blake discuss the rise of the Istanbul gaming scene, which has exploded in the last 15 years and come to dominate the incredibly lucractive "match 3" mobile puzzle genre -- a genre which rep...

29 Apr 1h 6min

The Attention Drain (Ep. 28)

Blake and Mitch discuss the thesis that the games business is losing share of attention to non-game interactive applications. They discuss whether there is actually a defined market for interactive en...

22 Apr 1h 8min

Roblox (Ep. 27)

Mitch & Blake discuss one of their favorite companies in games, Roblox. They start by outlining Roblox's core competitive advantages, and how they are unique in providing creation, consumption, aggreg...

15 Apr 1h 21min

2026 Trends & Specific Predictions (Ep. 26)

Blake and Mitch return! They begin with a discussion of the "Great Inflection" in software in the last several months. They then do some follow-up to last season, particularly their "deadpool" episod...

8 Apr 1h 9min