Gamecraft

The "Second Tournament" begins with 4 tasty quarter-final matches. Mitch and Blake break down the Round of 32 and Round of 16, rate their recommendations from last episode, and then dive into the quarter-finals and trace the paths of the 8 teams competing for the Jules Rimet trophy.  Then they look back at the trends they identified in the last episode, and talk about what changed in the knockout...

Mitch and Blake look back at the group stage and talk about the main themes from the tournament so far. They review their picks for matches to watch from the last episode and what they got right and wrong. Then they turn to the knockout stage and break down the road to the quarter-finals for each of the 8 mini-brackets, before walking through their picks for what to watch in the Round of 32.

Football nerds unite! Mitch & Blake are back with a special episode on the 2026 FIFA World Cup. In this episode they provide a very opinionated "Consumer Guide" to the most watchable matches of the Group Stage of the tournament. Show Notes: Mitch's previous World Cup Consumer Guide blog on Medium AFCON final controversy (Morocco v. Senegal) Brazil v. Morocco (6/13) A- Ecuador v. Ivory Coast (6/14)...

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, seeking to become a "feed" for games akin to social media platforms like TikTok or YouTube. They show how these companies sit at the intersection of several of the most significant topics the hosts discu...

Blake and Mitch discuss the current environment for funding games and some of the challenges and opportunities for founders in the games space. They begin with a short survey of the current venture capital environment and the difficulties presented by industry consolidation, which has taken several of the important buyers out of the market. They also look at the pivots of some of the major game-sp...

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 game experience itself. They point to signs that the market is showing signs of a backlash -- and a re-focus on fun game play -- and the potential implications of that backlash in the marketplace. They d...

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 qu...

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 represents a significant percentage of global mobile game revenue. They discuss some of the important metrics that demonstrate just now important mobile game development in Istanbul has become -- not jus...

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 entertainment, and whether applications like TikTok should be considered "interactive."  They discuss and try to quantify the impact of game-like retention and engagement mechanics being adopted by such...

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, aggregation, and monetization in a single platform. They also discuss how unusual it is for a company to get to Roblox's scale with a pure platform strategy and no first-party games. They then discuss the h...

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" episode that turned out to be way too kind to the companies they profiled.  The hosts then "draft" six trends that were visible in 2025 that they think will continue and define 2026, alternating picks. Rema...

In this Special Edition of the GameCraft podcast, Mitch and Blake discuss the $55 billion leveraged buy-out of Electronic Arts by the Private Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, Siliver Lake Partners, and Affinity Partners -- the largest LBO in US history, and the second largest transaction in the history of the video game business after Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision. They discuss...

Mitch and Blake explore the role of consolidation -- primarily through mergers and acquistions -- in building some of the biggest and most durable companies in gaming.  They begin with a discussion of the four major strategic uses of mergers and acquisitions: economies of scale, entry into new markets, control of talent and intellectual property, and new technologies. They provide many examples al...

Last season, Mitch and Blake discussed the implications of new Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence in games. In this episode, they return to the topic, this time focusing on games that are using AI as a platform -- meaning, the games are predicated on the use of LLMs to manage gameplay in some way. After introducing the central ideas, they list a series of games they have encountered that...

Mitch and Blake look at two of the largest toy companies in the world, Hasbro and Lego, and discuss their divergent but ultimately very successful forays into the games business as licensors of intellectual property. Your hosts discuss how both Hasbro and Lego tried to enter the games business directly as developers and publishers of digital games in the late 1990s, how they had very different exp...

Mitch and Blake address the unpleasant topic of how and why venture-backed games companies fail. They look first at the nature of venture financing and the inherent differences between venture and publisher money. This leads to a conversation about how developers who were used to working with publishers treated venture capital like production financing as opposed to company financing, and why that...

Mitch and Blake look at the current state of the vitally important Chinese gaming market, on the precipice of a bitter trade war resulting from the Trump tariffs. They review the history of the games business in China, discuss the reasons China is so competitive in the global gaming market, and look at how some of the ways the Chinese market diverged from other markets influenced the strategies of...

Mitch and Blake take an in-depth look at one of the most important companies in the global gaming business: Valve. They trace the company's origin as the developer of first-person shooter Half Life , their use of the Quake engine and the benefits Valve derived from their relationship with id, and their development and deployment of the Steam platform. They explain how Valve used content like Half...

Mitch and Blake discuss the mobile duopoly in which Apple and Google exert extraordinary power by tying their app stores to hardware and software platforms. They warn that the inflexible and expensive distribution systems on iOS and Android could be models for future PC and console distribution systems. They briefly review the history of mobile distribution and mobile technology innovation from th...

Mitch and Blake kick off Season 3 of the podcast with a high-level look at the current moment in the video game business, critiquing both the idea that the business is cyclical and we are in a downward phase of the cycle (and the naïve notion of "survive 'till '25"), as well as the idea that the business has simply matured, suggesting we are in a new phase of low growth and consolidation. Instead,...

In their final episode of Season 2, Mitch and Blake take on the complex and highly speculative topic of the impact of recent improvements in artificial intelligence on the games business. Your hosts acknowledge that the sector is moving so quickly that this episode could be obsolete by the time it airs, and warn that it's difficult at this early moment to look too far into the future. Mitch offers...

Mitch and Blake look at the ins and outs of intellectual property licensing in games. After discussing the checkered history of the practice, they look at the creative and business reasons why licensed IP continues to be valuable to game creators.  After a quick look at how IP licenses actually function and what to expect from licensors, Mitch and Blake discuss IP arbitrages -- finding gems in the...

In perhaps their most important episode of the series, Mitch and Blake explain what they mean when they use the term "distribution" and why it is so important to their understanding of how the video games business functions. Like they did with the term "publishing" last season, they try to recontextualize distribution as a much larger and more important concept than simply moving atoms or bits int...

Mitch and Blake discuss the massive expansion of gaming in emerging markets around the world. The begin with a discussion of the big-picture factors driving this expansion -- primarily mobile technology, but also new business models, payment systems, and demographics.  They then take a closer look at the Middle East and North Africa, and how the different approaches that companies are taking in Tu...

Mitch and Blake explore the idea of independent game development. They attempt to define "indie" in the video game context -- something that proves more difficult that it might seem on the surface. They discuss the early successful indie developers in the 90s, and examine how the technology and business innovations that revolutionized the industry in the 20th century (online distribution, new plat...