Interview Transcript

How do you look at that landscape? It’s fairly complex for the console players, for streaming and, obviously, the changes in distribution. How do you look at the planes of competition and who is set to take share or be best positioned?

You’re right; it’s a very complex space, at the moment. As well as the current players of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, you’ve got Google coming in, with Stadia, you’ve got Amazon announcing that it’s going to come in with its service. In fact, it’s already in the business of providing games to Twitch subscribers or Twitch Prime subscribers. All the while, you’ve got a very consolidated set of game developers and publishers. You’ve got very dominant and important players, in the form of EA and Activision Blizzard, who are also looking to develop their B2C offerings. What we’re seeing is, a lot of people trying to move, to displace the kind of position that the console companies and Steam have had, around being the B2C touchpoint.

That’s quite natural because games are now connected, in that there is a relationship between the developer and the consumer. That relationship is now longer and closer than it ever was. It’s quite natural that a developer and a consumer will start to have closer and closer interactions and that will affect how you think about the business and how you want to monetize that relationship. I think you’ve got this heady mix and, as a result, you will see that there is a great emphasis on content ownership. If you look back at the history of the game industry, to the extent of you question about who is going to win, I think that answer usually comes down to content and who is able to marshal together the strongest set of content.

I don’t have a crystal ball on this, but the platform players are in a fairly good position and the existing publishers are in a good position. If your question is about who is going to come out on top, I think it’s going to be about who can marshal that combination of alliances and maybe mergers, that are going to see the strongest possible content position.

Arguably, this was the big challenge for Stadia, for Google, where they just didn’t have the content to drive the engagement for the consumer?

Yes, that’s correct. Google can deal with that in many ways. They can buy their way out of it which, to some extent, has happened. They can acquire as they are a very cash-rich company. They can solve the problem; I think it’s just a question of when and whether they want to.

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