❝Story08:00
How Nintendo used Black Friday sell-outs as a weapon
Lasky, then running studios at Activision, describes competing with Nintendo for finite shelf space at Best Buy. Nintendo would release only a limited amount of inventory for a new Metroid or Zelda before Black Friday, let parents find it sold out, then flood shelves a week or two before Christmas. He calls it genius, and something only Nintendo could pull off because of its luxury-goods aura.
- Retail shelf space, not software quality, was the binding constraint in the packaged-goods era
- Deliberate scarcity at Black Friday created panic among parents buying from Christmas lists
- Inventory was released late, pulling shoppers back to stores twice
- Only a brand with luxury-good perception could run the play without damaging itself
“there's there's limited shelf space in Best Buy and so for they were very much a competitor for that shelf space”
“they were very clever about only releasing a limited amount of inventory for Black Friday”
#nintendo#retail#scarcity#competition
❝Story24:30
Steam started as a patcher Microsoft refused to build
Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington wanted a software updater so Valve could fix bugs, rebalance and validate licences after shipping boxed games in a piracy-heavy era. They asked their former employer Microsoft to build it and were told no, so they built it themselves and put it on the Half-Life disc. Over the following decade they added community, an app store and mod support, incrementally eating the games industry.
- The original purpose was patching and licence validation, not distribution
- Microsoft declined to build the tool, so Valve built it in-house
- It shipped on a physical disc and auto-installed with the game
- A decade of incremental feature additions turned a utility into the default PC storefront
“they asked if Microsoft would be willing to build this tool for them and they said no so they built it themselves”
“very incrementally over the next decade they just kept adding features Community uh an app store mods all of these various features and and and…”
#steam#valve#distribution#platform history
❝Story48:00
Lasky on pushing Discord into a game store that failed
Discord's audience self-identified as gamers and its founder is as deep a gamer as you can get, so Lasky pushed hard for the company to become a platform-based publisher and start a game store. It did not work. He calls it his own failure rather than the company's, and uses it as the counterexample proving that owning a relevant audience is necessary but not sufficient.
- The logic looked airtight: a large, self-identified gamer audience and a gamer founder
- Discord's original audience was gamer-centric before broadening to crypto and AI communities
- The game store did not stick despite genuine intent and capability
- Lasky takes the failure personally rather than blaming the team
“we tried this at Discord yes right and we tried to start a game store this was obviously my my failure because I pushed them…”
“it seemed very logical to me that you could try and leverage that intentionally into the game's business and it didn't work so it doesn't…”
#discord#platform strategy#failure#venture capital
❝Story52:30
Riot told Lasky they wanted to be Blizzard - and he was wrong
After League of Legends became a hit, Lasky pushed the founders to leverage the audience into another title, a third-party game or licensed IP. They refused, saying they wanted to be Blizzard and make a game every five years. Riot instead tripled down on League of Legends, building a billion-dollar-plus revenue base and an esports ecosystem, then shipped Valorant and Teamfight Tactics. Lasky concedes they reached the destination he wanted, roughly seven years later than he would have.
- The disagreement was about sequencing, not about the destination
- Riot chose global expansion and esports over rapid portfolio expansion
- Blizzard itself only had to self-fund for three years of its history
- Lasky's self-assessment: he was wrong, and he is not that patient
“they were like nah chill man we want to be blizzard we want to make a game every five years”
“and I was wrong because they just took their time to become a platform-based publisher but uh did it I'm not that patient”
#riot games#portfolio strategy#patience#board dynamics
❝Story57:00
The pitch that never mentioned the game
Jenova Chen pitched the Benchmark partnership without describing the game at all. He argued the video game business was stunted by serving only a narrow band of human emotion - anger, violence, envy, accumulation - while music, art, poetry and film explored the rest. Lasky ducked, expecting a blast from his partners. Instead Kevin Harvey told him to chase Chen into the parking lot and give him a term sheet.
- The pitch was entirely thesis, with no product description
- Lasky lacked the seniority at the time to champion it openly
- Kevin Harvey's reaction reframed it as exactly the kind of founder Benchmark funds
- The investment predated Snap, Discord and Riot in Lasky's Benchmark run
“he basically talked the whole time he didn't talk about the game he wanted to make at all he just talked about emotions”
“Kevin Harvey turned to me and said chase that guy out in the parking lot and give him a term sheet”
#pitching#venture capital#thatgamecompany#benchmark
❝Story1:38:00
Evans and Sutherland: the Fairchild Semiconductor of computer graphics
Lasky's correction to the hosts' Nintendo episode is a lineage story. Two University of Utah professors formed the computer graphics practice there and spun out with a bucket of DARPA money to build the first commercial flight simulators in the late 1970s. The programme produced Ed Catmull, Alan Kay, John Warnock and Jim Clark, and the company itself moved through supercomputers into console silicon, helping develop Namco's Ridge Racer.
- The Utah graphics programme seeded Pixar, Adobe, Apple's interface work and Silicon Graphics
- Nolan Bushnell went through Utah roughly a decade before that cohort, as an electrical engineering student
- DARPA funding built the first commercial high-fidelity flight simulators
- Former employees went on to start a cluster of games companies
“this utah-based company called Evans and Sutherland”
“all of these incredible people came through the that University of Utah computer Graphics program”
#computer graphics#history#university of utah#flight simulators