Steal This Game (Ep. 1)

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Gamecraft podcast. I'm your host, Mitch Lassie. I'm Blake Robbins. And this is a podcast about the modern history of the video game business. Episode 1, Steel this game. The Rise of Free to Play. This is Steel this game. One of my personal favorite topics in all of gaming. We're going to dive deep into the subject of free to play. And what actually gave the rise to free to play. I think free to play is one of those weirdly misunderstood topics within gaming. But everyone is interacted with it. Mitch has some amazing stories to tell within all of that. Couldn't be more excited to talk about it. Yep, this is the free to play episode. And again, as you say, free to play kind of has a bad rap in the video game business. I think the core and a lot of long-term gamers who came from the earlier era of gaming where it was sort of by a game and you got the whole game. I've always felt that it was a bit creepy. But it solves a very important problem in the video game business that we're going to address. So we'll come back and talk about that. But let's go back and talk a little bit about its origins. So one of the interesting things about free to play. And frankly, about a lot of things when we really explore them and unpack them in the modern video game business, really start with a little company that was initially formed in Shreveport, Louisiana, back in the early '90s called id software. So Shreveport was important to this story because Shreveport was the home of a company called Softisk. And Softisk was a company that was really unique to this weird period in the software business generally for both computers and games. They made a thing called a disc magazine. And a disc magazine was literally a magazine, like a paper magazine in shrink wrap that had a little three and a half inch floppy disk wrapped into the magazine so that when you bought the magazine you got the floppy. And in the magazine proper, they talked about the various things that were on the disk. And you could put the disk in your computer and you'd had access to all of these various programs, utilities, games, productivity software, all kinds of things like that. And that was a weird way that games were initially distributed because at this time games were a package good. And the only way that you could really get them was to go to a store and buy them on floppy on CD-ROM, put them into your computer and play them. There wasn't a real way to get them, the internet existed as a sort of idea, but largely it was confined to academic uses during those days. And so it was very hard to get software any other way. And this disc magazine was a way to leverage something that existed back in those days, which was the magazine stand. It's kind of a relic of the past now with magazines pretty much all but gone. But in those days you could go and there'd be the car magazine section and the equestrian magazine section and the guns and ammo magazine section and whatever and lifestyle magazines and there was a software and hardware computer magazine section, bite magazine and PC magazine and these other early magazines from those days. And soft disk was a company that was making this magazine that was put on the shelves of these of these distributors and that included software. And so they were working, you know, kind of on their own down in Louisiana and they decided that they really wanted to create a subscription product. They wanted to make a service where every month, if you were a subscriber to their magazine, literally a magazine, you'd get a disc that would include a new game every month. And so in order to do that, they had to put a team together. So they went out and they recruited a group of young programmers and designers and through the most unbelievable luck of the draw, they were able to recruit four guys, John Carmack and John Romero, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall, who went on to become four of the most important figures in the history of the video game business. First that it's software and then it a variety of other companies over the years up until the present day. Yeah, it's honestly insane. Like when you were telling me this, all I could think is just like one, the task at that time to create something that can actually power new games so frequently. I think gamers edge as a concept was so ambitious and it truly took this team of four in my mind. Obviously a shaped entire industry. If anyone else was tasked with creating this gamers edge concept at that time, they probably would have failed. Oh, they absolutely would have failed. I mean, there was no conceivable way that you could pump out a new game a month. I mean, think about how hard that is, right? I mean, unless you were just going to make utterly terrible games. I mean, but to make a decent game once a month is an absolutely herculean task. And there was literally no way it could have been done without John Carmack. And so that brings us to one of the first really important characters in our story. And that's John Carmack. So Carmack, he was kind of an auto-died act. He was a self-taught programmer. He was attracted to developing video games. And when he looked at the problem that soft disk was trying to solve, which was how do we get a game done every month? He thought the only way that they could really get this done was to develop an engine that they knew would run predictably on PCs. And then they could iterate on the design on a monthly basis as long as they knew that the fundamentals, the thing that kind of got the images up on the screen and interpolated the movements and took in user input and translated it into movement on the screen that that engine technology was actually in place. People did they know that they had hired maybe the greatest video game engine programmer in the history of the video game business, if not the greatest video game engine programmer in John Carmack. And so Carmack got to work and he built a first version of this engine, first soft disk that allowed his right hand man and friend, John Romero, to start designing games on top of. And as he was sort of going through this process, he had an insight. And he figured out a way that he could make platformer, side scrolling platformer games work really almost as well as on a console itself, which was really the holy grail in a lot of ways of PC gaming back in those days. So he showed it to Romero and Romero was like, don't show it to the soft disk guys. Let's quit our job and go start a company. And that's essentially how it was born. There's a relatively good book, Masters of Doom that sort of goes into the story in a lot more detail, particularly about these early days. But having ultimately gotten to know these guys later in their careers, it rings true to at least the origin story as they tell it of how this got started. Just to frame it within the context of all of this history, like what year is this actually? I think it was 1990 or 1991 that they even started. Is that right? Yes. They're about. They leave to start it. Do they immediately create what we now know as doom or what does early games look like? You know, they started out doing more limited versions of those games, but Carmack again continued to do his research and development. And he figured out a way to do something that looked more like a simulated 3D environment. So they, the early games like Commander Keane, for example, were kind of more like console platformers. But after he iterated on the engine again and came up with this, I mean, it was really a two and a half D technology. It wasn't full 3D, but it's more quibbling at this point. They did Castle Wolfenstein, returned to Castle Wolfenstein. And that was their first kind of big flag in the ground. And then they followed up Wolfenstein with doom in 1993. And doom was really, it's hard to describe how important doom was when it came out. I know about doom. I was born in 1993 and I still know about doom and have played doom. And I'm familiar with its significance. You've been quoted before saying that it's one of the most important games in all video game history. What do you think that is? What truly was the significance of doom at that time? Well, there were so many components of it that it's probably worth unpacking a little bit because a lot of the things we're going to talk about what went into the success of doom and of id software as other titles going on through the 90s. We're going to come back and revisit in a lot of different contexts because remarkably, they anticipated so many interesting trends that the video game business came to adopt over the next 10 to 20 years. So I think it's really important to think about those things and spend a little bit of time unpacking them. So in the first instance, they pioneered local area network and what we would today think of as online play online didn't really exist in those days other than dial up modems at 56k. You weren't really going to play a 3d video game over a 56k modem, although people tried. But really it was for local area networks and those local area networks expanded to the point where convention rooms, which they then they used to call land parties, they would have these sort of large scale land parties, they'd wire up a convention hall and everybody would bring their own computer, their own desktop computer and plop it down and with a monitor and fire it up and they would play tournament type games. So not only was that online play pioneering, but also this idea of competitive play so that people would take part in these tournaments during those periods. And again, as we know, having seen how the story ends or at least how the story unfolds over the years, that's come to become an incredibly important component of the video game business. So that was number one. Number two, Carmack understood that a really important part of that engine creation for the DOOM engine that he really had seen going back to the soft disk days where the idea of creating these engines to allow for rapid iteration and for other games to then to be built very quickly without having to go through these intense R&D phases was really appealing to him in a lot of ways. And he then opened up the Doom engine to allow third parties to build mods. And this was in a very early form of user-generated content in the video game business. And interestingly as we will see when we go on to talk about some of the other games that came out of the modding community over the years to go on to become some of the most important titles in the history of the video game business. That first real example of a hit game that was open to third party content, to user-generated content was a very important component of the modernity of the id team. So you had that. And I think you also had really this kind of fierce independence of the team. They were in Mesquite Texas when I first went down to Mesquite to visit them in the mid-90s. They had this very dark and creepy kind of office vibe with lots of monsters and lots of toys and other things like that in the environment. And you know, they just had this culture unique to them as a developer. And again, we take that for granted today. We really think of these video game teams in that way and that they have really formed cultures around them. But it was quite unique at the time back in the early 90s to have a company like that that really had an identity and almost a kind of public persona that was that sophisticated and that unique. So I think that's a third way they were extremely modern. And then probably the most important way was their pioneering use of free-to-play. Hmm, say more. I mean, from obviously soft disk and gamers' edge to product they worked on, is this really interesting first look at that for maybe the earliest look of what a game distributed to refloppy disk and sort of bundled together and a subscription. How did it take that a step further? So back in the early 90s, when they were first getting started and relocating to the Dallas suburb of Mesquite to run the business of id, they had some friends across town in particular Scott Miller at a company called Apigee. And Apigee was famous for the Duke Nukem franchise, which was sort of the rival shooter franchise back in the day. And Scott had worked with the id guys earlier on in distributing Commander Keen and Castle Wolfenstein through this thing he had, this business distribution business he had called shareware. And the way that worked was he would put these games on a disk. He would sell the disk into retail for a relatively cheap price and then the retailers would sell those disks again for a relatively cheap price and then the games were unlockable. Like you could then call up and get a code and unlock more levels of the game. So you could play let's say the first two, three, four levels for free and if you liked it you could go and pay more to play more of the game. But it was still kind of a paid model, the shareware model in those days. It wasn't fully free. There was still friction in the system because the retailers were having to buy the floppies and that was really an income stream for Apigee and then the users were having to pay for them or you know sometimes the retailers would use them as a loss leader and they would give them away for free. But somebody was paying in that process. And so it wasn't quite the free to play model that we understand today. But it was kind of an early signal of where it was going. And so understanding Scott Miller's business, the IT team decided that they could take it one step further. So they really needed to generate a lot of marketing buzz for this new product that they were coming out with this game doom that they knew when people played they were going to love because all of us who were who grew up in that era remember the first time we saw doom being played on a really good computer on a local area network and it was magical. It was something that's hard to describe how cool it was to see because there really weren't games like that at the time where you moved around in 3D and that had the speed and the sort of visceral impact of doom. So they knew they had something magical on their hands and they wanted to get it out there and into as many people's hands as possible and they wanted to do it in a way where they could make most of the money because again in those days and we'll talk about this a lot more in the publishing episode episode two. But in those days the developers really weren't in a position to make the most money off of their creations. Most of the money went to the publishers and developers often earned very small royalties, single digit percentages of net income often and that net income was usually like in Hollywood accounting subject to a lot of deductions for marketing costs and sales costs and other administrative costs that really put the developer in a tough position and it didn't want to be in that position. It had a real DIY independent filmmaker kind of vibe and they wanted to own the Y and share of their spoils and so they decided that they were going to use this shareware concept that they had learned from Apigee and they were going to do it in a way to blow doom out. That seems like a very risky strategy. Is that fair to say at that time because the current paradigm at that time was what's always just published through either the standard distribution of packaged goods or maybe you had gamers at your Apigee as an alternative but to fully just put it out there and bank on this idea that eventually people will pay it on lock it, that feels like a very extreme move to take at the time. It really was and they had the confidence of knowing that they had a hit on their hands and I think that's what gave them the confidence to utilize this form of distribution in a way that would have been hard to do if you were just taking a flyer on a game that you didn't know if it was going to stink or swim. They had enough good early signal on doom I think that they had the confidence to put it out there. The innovation that they adopted was they were just going to give the discs away for free to the retailers. They had a bunch of these dismayed. This was the same year basically 1993 that AOL started carpet bombing America with AOL floppies. If you remember back to that, people would wallpaper the walls of their bathrooms in AOL floppies. That was how ubiquitous they were. In those days, that was doable. The cost of goods for floppy was relatively comprehensible and not huge and they just absorbed it as a marketing cost, as a customer acquisition cost. They printed up a bunch of these floppies and they just went out to the various retailers. The egghead software is the babbage, the targets and the best buys and they offered them in these bubblegum packs and they let the retailers either sell them or give them away as a loss leader to bring people into the store to buy other stuff. It really worked well at least initially to get the word of mouth going. But ultimately, it didn't work well enough because that disc model and that requirement of getting people into retail and the lack of the internet really, let's be honest, had this happened 10 years later when the internet was a thing, it would have been crazy disruptive. But unfortunately, they were just too early and this disc thing just imposed way too much friction on their ability to get these discs out into commerce. Where those discs fold games, you just had to unlock. I think you just mentioned you would call a number or you'd put in a code. Was that just the full game that was on that disc, you would only get the first three levels and then you unlock it or how free to play at that time was that actually? It was limited. It wasn't the full game. It was basically the first couple of levels. But it was enough to get you hooked and to allow for the upsell. That was an important thing because they got 100% of the revenue from the upsell. Even if they weren't selling quite as many, if they look at their friends down the street, for example, who are doing publishing deals with big publishers who in those days maybe were paying them 15% of net revenues, they could sell five times fewer games than those people and still make more money through the shareware model. You mentioned that it works and it works well, but it doesn't work to the level of they can do this sustainably forever. It seems like so. It ends up happening next. They stay and continue to try and make that happen and it doesn't work or what happens as the next step in this journey. I think they recognized that in order to really make the money because this game was now a monster. They got that first wave going and they were on magazine covers of not low circulation PC magazines, but real national publications. It became a phenomenon. These were banning doom from their local area networks because the doom clients were saturating the local area networks with packets for gameplay and people couldn't download their spreadsheets or whatever it is that they were doing in corporate America in those days. It was a real thing. It was a real cultural phenomenon doom and it knew that if they were really going to maximize the economic benefit of this, they were going to need to get into legitimate distribution. They were going to need to bite the bullet and go and do a package goods deal. Unfortunately, I hadn't landed at Activision yet at this point or I would have been down there knocking on their door, but they ended up doing a deal with these guys publishing outfit called GT Interactive. GT Interactive was one of these weird companies that you see from this early period of the video game business. They had started out basically doing rip offs of Disney titles that were in the public domain. Things like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. Those are in the public domain. Disney always puts their own spin on things to kind of provide copyrightable elements in those films. But the fundamental stories of those are non-copy-rightable. They're public domain. So GT would put these really low-rent, direct to video animation things that they would source out of Asia, and they would put them on the shelf, I think, hoping for a little bit of consumer confusion that people were buying the Disney title as opposed to buying their kind of low-rent version of Cinderella. That's where GT started. They decided that this video game thing was going to be big, which, you know, to their credit. And they started a video game division called GT Interactive. The GT came from the video side of the business. Good times video was what their video business was called. So now they were GT Interactive. And they very smartly went down and did the deal with id for doom, and it became an absolute monster. I mean, it was, they knew the retail business. They knew how to get units into commerce, and they just pumped it in. And on the backs of really the id software profits, they went public in 1996 at like a $400 million market cap. Do you know if they, like, at that time, they, I'm assuming, were not a tier one publisher, right? Like this had to have been a massive deal for them at that point, or why would doom go with them over, I have to imagine they tried to talk to some of the other publishers at that time, or maybe I'm making assumptions, but, like, why then? I don't know the story that well of how GT came to get the deal, but they were good sales people. So I'm sure they were very convincing. And it had a pretty good deal, you know, not as good as the deals that they would be able to negotiate later with me. But they had really good deals. And so they were making money. I mean, these guys ran it like a partnership in Mesquite, and they had very, very, very strong cash flow. If you took a tour around the parking lot of their offices in Mesquite, you would see, you know, exotic car after exotic car, they were well known for their love of exotic cars back in the day. So they were making bank these guys. They were making a lot of money. And I don't think they were looking at it in a kind of hyper optimizing kind of way. They just needed a vehicle to get them into broader distribution and GT provided that vehicle. But I think the IPO, the GT IPO, when all of a sudden, they realized that this company that pretty much didn't have much beyond doom was going out at a $400 million valuation. And the principles were making tens of millions of dollars in stock appreciated compensation here. I think that's when its eyebrows suddenly were raised. And so interestingly enough, that proved to be my opportunity. And starting in 1997, I started to make the pilgrimage down to Mesquite kind of begging for scraps at first to see if there was something that they would let us publish. And trying to drive a little bit of a wedge in there between it and GT. And that's when you are several years into your role as head of publishing an Activision or first year, like what's the context there? Yeah, it was first year, year and a half that I was there. But you know, they were the big prize in a lot of ways. And so I went down and formed a relationship with them. And ultimately they let us start publishing a couple of quake mission packs. Quake was their follow up to doom. Came out a couple of years later in the mid-90s and 97. And GT still had the rights to that as the follow up to doom. And so they put out quake. But it had all the other rights. And so it started to put out these mission packs that were kind of mod extensions to the quake engine. And they started publishing them with me in Activision. That's incredible. I mean, it's a perfect example of just you played a huge part in so many people's of life. Like getting the distribution of quake three at that time, you know, which goes on to be one of the biggest games of that era is just remarkable. Before we ever talked, I knew about doom, but I never fully appreciated just how important it was to this whole journey. Like it seems like it in a lot of ways understood everything and way before everyone else. They were the first modern publisher in a lot of ways. The first modern video game company. And it was again just a sad sort of trick of fate that they came up when they did again because had they come up in the internet era, they're savvy in terms of marketing, promotion, their culture, they had Trent Resner do the music for one of the quake skis. It's like they really understood their audience in a fundamental way that would have made them the equivalent of a riot or a blizzard or epic in the modern era. And they get so much right even the open platform stuff of modding and these engines that we will soon learn plays a huge part in just all the future games that exist. If you look at just what the doom engine or any of these engines that were created at that time ended up leading to, it's just absolutely mind blowing the games that we know today that were built off of the bass. Absolutely. So unfortunately the deal they did with us and we were, you know, we did, it was the richest deal for a developer in the industry at the time. If I remember correctly, it was roughly 40% of net receipts they got from that deal so it was more or less even split with us as the distributor publisher. And in a lot of ways unfortunately the sad consequence of that was that it just made the shareware business which they had pioneered. This early example of free to play just a lot less profitable for them. They were making so much money from the mainline skis in real retail distribution that they just didn't have the appetite for the shareware business in quite the same way that they did before. And so in a lot of ways their dream of becoming that sort of first platform based publisher in a lot of ways kind of ended with the Activision deal. They parlayed in a lot of ways that like they use that free to play or that shareware model to gain a lot more leverage at that time, right? Like that's an important part of the story which is the reason they were able to cut that deal with you at that time is because they had such a big advantage from that early shareware. They had an alternative, right? I mean, it wasn't a great alternative and we knew it wasn't a great alternative but it was an alternative and there were very, very few developers if any that had an alternative in that era. So they did that deal with us and they continued with their engine business. Their engine business was a multi-million dollar annual business for them, right? They were licensing to companies like Raven which we at Activision then went on to acquire. So we were in the it engine business through them valve a company that we're going to spend a lot of time talking about in the next episode. They were an early licensee of the Quake engine and so the tentacles of Id's reach in the video game business really extended well, well beyond the games that they would pump out once every couple of years. I think it's clear that Id's impact on the entire industry is truly like it touches everything. Like you said, the tentacles are everywhere and if you look far enough back in any major game company, there's clear inspiration to it. I think what's interesting is what happens next, right? So we have Id has a successful path as a game developer and obviously has some really amazing things that emerge from it and amazing games that have huge cultural impact. But what happens next in within this journey? The unfortunate answer to that question is it sort of what happens to a lot of like famous rock bands. The egos of the various characters inside of the business come to the forefront. They start to think of themselves as rock stars and there's creative differences and ultimately the band kind of breaks up. So Carmack continues along making his engines and doing his R&D projects with the new set of designers and John Romero and Tom Hall leave and they start a company called IonStorm in the late 90s. And Idos, the publisher comes in and funds IonStorm. I took a look at it but it was a level of ambition and frankly capital cost that wasn't really in our Bayley Wicked Activision. We were a little more conservative than that and they get to work on a game called Dicatana which proved to be one of the most outrageous flops in the history of the video game business. I think Romero is a great guy. I've spent a lot of time with him over the years but his feeling that he could do it without Carmack I think was a significant mistake on his part. In the meantime, Idd continued to make games and to make engine technology for a while but ultimately they ran out of steam and by the early 2000s the company ended up getting sold to Zenomax, part of the Bethesda group of companies and then ultimately to Microsoft as part of that acquisition. So now I think the Id assets live at Microsoft and Carmack up until very recently was one of the main programmers in the Oculus group at Facebook working on virtual reality. Yeah and he continues to be sort of this figurehead of within this industry where if you're familiar with him you just know how brilliant he is and he really is like a pioneer. He's innovated so much of this industry. So the ironic part though of this story is that even though they kind of fail, I mean look they did very well for themselves it's very difficult to save that the result here is failure but in the grander scheme where we now see what was possible in the video game business and you look at the trajectory it's like companies like Activision where I was working in the late 90s are now multi billion dollar a year you know you were quoting the stead it's like eight billion dollars a year I think in revenue from very humble beginnings in the late 90s so there really you know there was a future it wasn't like all of those companies couldn't cross that divide but it just didn't really work out for Idd but interestingly if you just look at the shareware and again we could pull any one of these strands we could pull the mods we could pull the independence we could pull any one of these strands where they really were pioneers but the one that ended up having the most impact on the industry was this free to play concept. That for it obviously was a huge part but where did that actually go? actually go next. So you have to free to play concepts. That sits in the early 1990s and obviously they try and leverage that up until they eventually decide, "Hey, we're going to do a publishing deal with GT Interactive or Activision or whoever." Where does that emerge next? Is that in America? Is that overseas? Where do we see that happen? So what's really interesting about this is that the thing that free to play solved that almost no other technology solved was the problem of piracy. So if you think about the business in those days, the publishers were selling shiny disks basically for 60 bucks. And when you're selling shiny disks for 60 bucks, if there are people out there who are taking those bits off of the shiny disk and just freely distributing them, you're in trouble. And you really try and protect against that happening as hard as you possibly can. So we in the 90s and into the 2000s went through technique after technique after technique to try and protect the bits on those shiny disks. And whether it was copy protection, whether it was they would ship with a little decoder ring that you would have to put on and figure out what the code is to type in or license keys that only had one time uses, et cetera, but it was a massive game of whack-mull. Every time you close one door, the pirates would open another door. And nowhere was this more of a problem than in Asia. So you had, I mean, it was a big problem in the United States too. Don't get me wrong, but it was kind of a comprehensible problem in the United States. But in some of these Asian territories, particularly in Korea and in the upcoming markets in China and in Southeast Asia, it was 90 to 95% piracy. For every disc that was sold between 10 and 20 of them were copied illegally and either sold or simply given away. That's just crazy to think about. And I mean, it makes sense. And I imagine in other regions outside of Asia, you probably had just like poorer countries as well, where they wanted to play those games. It was probably very similar where you just can't simply afford a $60 game or whatever the price was for a skew at that time. And we tried some strategies to fix that, right? So for example, we would try and sell games tied to, if you've ever seen in the economists, they have like the Big Mac index where they look at the relative cost of a Big Mac in local currency as a way to look at buying power of currencies. And you know, we took sort of those learnings and we would, for example, in some English speaking territories like in India or in Singapore, we would sell software at a local price. And of course, the pirates just took that as an opportunity. And they would buy those discs at retail in, let's say, Singapore, the English language discs for, let's say, $20, which was what they were in the local currency. And they would bring them to the United States and sell them on the gray market for near full price, like for, you know, instead of $60, maybe 40, and they would make a hundred percent markup on those discs. And so we had a massive gray market problem when we tried to solve that problem by actually pricing software to the local markets. And again, it was a consequence of the fact that these, these were packaged goods. And that once you bought the package, you owned the good. You didn't have this world that we have today where the digital bits can cross borders with great ease. And those days, that wasn't the case. You needed the discs. Yeah. And you actually still see there are some of these sites that still exist on the gray market side of this where you can still try and buy, you know, localized copy of, I don't know, insert your favorite game that's still $60. You can buy it for probably $40. That one of these gray market sites, which is crazy that the biggest publishers in the US still, that haven't moved to a full free to play model, still struggle with this. And so it's clear that this is still a problem. And really, the only solution is free to play. Yeah. I mean, again, it's a philosophical problem in a lot of ways because if you're the publisher and you're the one who's shouldering the cost of development and manufacture and pickpack and ship and whatever, you see piracy as theft. But really, if you think about it, piracy is just mispricing. Piracy is just the fact that you haven't found the price at which the product is viable. And so as a result, you're only offering your customer two choices, not play the game because it's unaffordable or steal it. And that's a bad bargain. That's a bad way to interact with your customer. And I think the beauty of free to play as it started to emerge in Asia as a response to this piracy was that it sort of entered the market as a way to solve that pricing problem. And it ended up utterly revolutionizing the video game business. Let's talk about it in Asia specifically because culturally, there's some other pieces within that, right? Like they might not all have PCs in their own house or they might not have councils like why specifically in Asia was it such a big problem? The piracy side. So partly it was the cost as we discussed before. Western pricing for these discs made them unaffordable with the local buying power. It just didn't work except for the very rich. So you had that. You also had a phenomenon in Asia that you didn't really have in the United States, which was the concept of gaming cafes. So when the internet started to come to the fore in the late 90s, early 2000s in Asia, they were centered around these internet cafes where you would go and have metered access to the internet. You'd buy a little card or you'd buy time and you could go and do whatever you did download porn. I don't know whatever people were doing in those days in internet cafes sending email messages to your loved ones. And some of those entrepreneurs who owned those internet cafes saw the opportunity to put games in them and sell metered access to games. And this should have been okay from a publisher perspective. There should have been a way for the publishers to go in there and figure this out because technically these internet cafes, these gaming cafes, which were called PC Bongs in Korea and they had other names throughout throughout Asia, they should have been a source of sales for Western companies. But it turned out that most of them were just stealing the games that they were selling on metered for metered access. So it just compounded the piracy problem in a lot of ways. And if you played a game and you were paying metered access for that game, you were still paying for it. And there was still an incentive to steal it. So again, I think those cafes didn't solve the problem. I wouldn't say they really necessarily added to the problem, but they were kind of a double edged sword for the Western publishers because on the one hand, they were more legitimate than buying something out of the back of a pickup truck, but only a little bit more legitimate. It's super interesting because like those are, there's all these factors that emerged within just culturally where they needed solution. And so I imagine they're looking at the game developers in those areas at the time are looking at what is the possible solution. I imagine that they look at it and they're like, hey, they have something with this shareware thing. What happens next? Like who actually comes up with this real concept of free to play? Well, so it's interesting because as you say, and I think it's a really important point, it's the Asian companies themselves, the Asian video game developers who solve the problem. The Western companies were still over there. I remember when I was at the Walt Disney company, you know, our general council was going over to China and trying to negotiate, you know, Western style copyright laws in the fingers in the dyke hope that they were going to kind of build a Western copyright enforcement regime in China, which was absolute madness. If you think about it. So while the Western companies were really playing defense during this period, trying to figure out how to protect their investment, it was the Asian companies themselves that looked at this problem and said, look, if we want to be in business in the long haul, we're going to need to figure out how to make this work. We're going to need to figure out how to make these markets where there's clearly an interest in gaming work at an economic level when we know that if we start trying to copy the Western publishers and printing shiny disks, we're going to end up in the same piracy situation that they have ended up in. So the brilliant thing that happened here was that it was the Asian companies themselves in particular nexon who solved this problem. And obviously you have even even the best example in the West, which should have been it. They actually end up folding on the strategy. And they're like, wait, we're just going to go to the old package, good bottle themselves. And so it really does take this nexon or anyone any of the Korean developers or Chinese developers to be like, oh, wait, we have to think of a native solution because whatever is going on in the West, they didn't think about innovating in the way that these people actually have an existential threat where they need to. And so what happens with nexon, like nexon, obviously you just mentioned is the real innovator here. Does they just immediately like copy the strategy of shareware or what happens? No, they turn to the internet. So I think by this point in our story, we're well into the 21st century. So now it's, you know, it's probably 2004, 2003, 2003, nexon puts out a game in Korea called MapleStory on a free-to-play basis. And you're playing it online. So there isn't really a disc to, you know, there is a client, obviously that you kind of download. But it's really more of an online play experience. As a result, you have a little bit more control and they can figure out ways to sell you things in that context. But the real innovation happens in 2005 when they put out this game called CartWriter. And it's actually funny. I played MapleStory back in the day. And like that was like the first nexon game that I played. What is CartWriter? Because it's like, I've looked up CartWriter and it looks like it's just like a Mario Kart. Is that fair? It is absolutely fair. It is essentially Mario Kart. It's an online version of Mario Kart. You're playing against other people on the internet. It's Cartoonie. It's fast paced. And it's a racing sim, basically. And the innovation here, and this was, you know, you get back, you use the word innovation when you were introducing this a few moments ago. And I think that's really important to focus on because The Western publishers had what we classically understand to be an innovator's dilemma. You ask about why IID was already on the decline here in 2005. Why weren't they apioneering this? And partly it's because they had so much stake in the legacy business. Just the catalog sales of their old games, the sales of the games that were running on the Quake engine that they had licensed, the anticipation of Doom 4, which was coming out in a few years and they'd already taken large advances against that, which are going to need it to be recouped, etc. Created this pressure, this economic pressure that put them into this innovator's dilemma, where they were almost incapable of seeing this next turn of the page, this next innovation. You had to really start almost from first principles like Nexon did in order to really make it work. And I think that was the brilliant thing that Nexon was able to bring to market with games like MapleStory, and particularly Cart Rider. And I think they could see in particular that there was an opportunity to sell things in the game that weren't necessary to complete the game, if you will, and that was really the distinction that they made from shareware. Because as long as the shareware model was in place where there was this monolithic thing called the game, and you only got a part of it, there was still an incentive for piracy. The way they turned the model on its head with Cart Rider by giving the entire game away for free, the whole game, all the fun bits, there was nothing you didn't get as a purchaser or as a player of that game for free that you would have gotten had you paid for it. You got everything. And so by doing that, and again, so radical, I remember talking to Western publishers at the time, because I was on the speaking circuit in those days, and I would be giving talks at GDC or whatever, and I would mention Cart Rider, and I'd talk to some of the old school publisher friends mine in the audience, and they would be like, "It's crazy, whether they're crazy, they're giving the whole thing away for free." And it was crazy on a certain level, but it was also genius, because they realized that their audience was a huge pipeline now, where anybody who was interested in the game, there would be no friction to them playing it, because there was no barrier, there's no financial barrier. So as long as they were capable of downloading the game, they were capable of playing it at the same level as any of their friends. And then they just upsold you cosmetic goods, other items that gave you status in the world. And again, that was just brilliant, because when a community formed around the game, suddenly things like cosmetics and things like status had real value, had social value, and they capitalized on that. And Cart Rider was a massive success, and I think an underappreciated product in the history of the video game business. To take it a step further, it transforms the actual like, addressable market, right? Like you and I are investors, and so we think about total addressable market. They completely uncapped that. They removed all the friction of, you don't have $60 to play your game, so you can't buy it. So instead, you're not going into this world of, it's completely free to play. And if I have a computer or if I have access to a PC bomb, whatever it might be, I can go and play that game. That's a completely innovative way to think about this world. It is. And I think it's important to take a step back at this point and really talk about why, to unpack that a little bit more and talk about sort of what problem does this really solve? And the problem it solves is the problem of elasticity in video game pricing. So I've told the story enough that people who've heard it are sick of it, but I'll tell it again, which is in the old days when we would sell a game for $60, if you sold it to someone like me or you who was a game geek who would go home and play it until their fingers bled, that person would pay you $60. At the same time, a casual player who was interested in the title had to go to the store, pay the same $60 that you or I would pay, would take it home, potentially only play it for an hour, or five hours or 10 hours. And yet their cost for that experience was equivalent to our cost. So from the publisher's perspective, they were the same user, even though their play experiences were completely different. And so the beauty of the free-to-play model was that if it's tied to a flexible and interesting enough monetization system, you unlock the elasticity of the market. So that five hour person may be pays you nothing because they don't find the experience to be that meaningful and they don't really want to pay for it. But the 150 or 250 or 500 hour player pays you way more than the $60 that they would have paid you because suddenly this game is now an important component of their lifestyle. And that is just a transformation in the video game business that really unlocked the future in a lot of ways. And we owe it in many ways to CartWriter and to the antecedents that they themselves studied in the Western markets, the rare goods economy of ultimate online, something we'll talk about in episode four in the Forever Games and the shareware model from Id. It also transformed an incentive model of a game publisher at the time. You were no longer thinking about, okay, I need to go and release a sequel or I need to just release a fourth game of the exact same genre that IP. Instead you're thinking about, okay, how do I actually just increase this lifetime value of this player? And so if there is someone that wants to play this game for a thousand hours, I need to figure out how to incentivize or update the game or think about building a game that truly can be played for a thousand hours. And so you start to see with CartWriter from my own perspective, this very early look of what a game can look like as a service. And CartWriter will continue to be mentioned throughout this entire series, but my gosh, it really did create that elastic demand where at that time, and even for me, I don't see free-to-play games as a gamer myself until really League of Legends, which we'll touch on later on. But that, for me, I would think about a game. I'd buy it for $60 and I would be like, am I going to get $60 of gameplay from this? That was the simple calculation that I was thinking through. There was never this idea of, oh, I'm going to play this game for a thousand hours. And maybe it was FIFA or maybe it was called duty where I'm like, $60, that's no brainer, like sure. I'm going to play this game for a full year and I'm only going to pay $60 for it. And so that piece, CartWriter really does help solve. And interestingly, it wasn't just you, the consumer, who were thinking about that. It was us, the developers and publishers who were thinking about it that way too. We were thinking, wow, do we have enough gameplay in this to justify a $60 cost of goods? And so we, ourselves, looked at the 60 hours of gameplay for $60 as a metric by which we were trying to scope the games themselves. So I remember Lord of the Rings game that came out from Electronic Arts back in that period that was massively criticized for being short. It was like, it was 15 hours of gameplay. And the critics were like, oh, it's too short. And EA's response was, well, there's four characters. And if you play each one of the four characters for 15 hours, it's 60 hours of gameplay. I mean, those were the headstands that people were doing in order to come up with these backdoor justifications for the price of these products. And free to play just took that completely off the table. It's hard to really imagine how important that was at the time. So Korea takes off. And we, in the West, those of us who were a little bit forward thinking back in that period, we were studying CartWriter. If you go back, I had CartWriter in slide decks go back in the first years after it came out because I thought it was so significant and something that I really wanted people that I was talking to to focus on as like the next innovation in our business. And so while that's happening, the free to play model starts moving to China. So China is an interesting market. You think about it. It's like the Chinese, they just really gave their PC business rocket boost because they banned consoles because they thought, oh, consoles were just for use as game devices. And so they were sort of morally less defensible than PCs, which could also be used for legitimate work. So by banning the consoles in this kind of morality way, they opened the door to a new PC industry in China that persists in, it's one of the most robust PC gaming markets in the world to this day for that reason. So without console, they had PCs. They had their own version of the PC bang from Korea, this Chinese version called the Wangba. And they started to make games for their own market. And the first of them were basically rip offs of some of the big Korean games, but with Chinese mythology and Chinese characters bolted on in place of the sort of the Korean games that they were copying. But very quickly they became innovators and they started to work on their own versions of these free to play games. And then around the same time, the mobile business took off. And as we'll talk about in a future episode, mobile was absolutely the best soil to plant free to play. I mean, mobile took to free to play like no other platform. And so between those two things, almost all of the free to play innovation thereafter started coming out of China. All the things we think of today like loot boxes and you know, all this stuff, they were all, they all had Chinese roots. It seems like they perfected the virtual goods model. You know, again, they innovated on what Korea came out with and they took it to one step further, which is now obviously the groundwork for almost everything in the gaming industry. You mentioned the Western side of this where at some point the West wakes up. What does that look like? Do you have the incumbents waking up and being like, hey, China and Korea have figured out something that's actually working or is it more startup? Like, you know, you know, you're going to be like, you know, you're going to be like, You're being scrappy at the time and you're like, "I'm trying to push this through." - Well, there was an appetite in the Chinese and the Korean markets for some of the Western IP. So that really was the door opener. But again, the innovators dilemma really prevented a lot of the Western publishers from letting too much of those ideas of free to play into the market. Again, there are executives in the video game business who'd break out in a cold sweat at the mention of the word free. They had a lot to defend and they still do to this day. - Yeah, I mean, maybe we should talk about that, right? Like, there is a risk in going to free to play, right? You are making some calculation and bet on the conviction of your game will have, I don't wanna say wails, but you'll have people that will pay back, the people that will only play for five hours. Where in a traditional sense, you're like, 60 dollar game, I know what I'm getting. Like, I can do the basic math of the calculation. There is this element of, oh my gosh, I'm taking a little bit of risk. You know, if you and I both see that as there is an anterior-infinite upside, whereas there's kept upside in a traditional packaged good model, but that innovator's dilemma is really scary for these traditional publishers. - And it became even scarier as the development costs of the frontline products started to skyrocket. So it's one thing when you're investing a million to $5 million in a product and you're basically saying, I'm not gonna have an opening weekend. You're not gonna be able to do the kind of crescendo marketing that they got very good at about driving people into those big box retailers to buy the end caps. There was a whole system that they had orchestrated that allowed them to move units of product and get, as you say, recoup those production costs. But when you were no longer in the realm of $5 million games or $10 million games, but you were now in the realm of 30, 50, 75, $100 million games as we see today, things like Elden Ring. You got a real risk on your hands. It's much easier to justify to yourself doing it on a one-time purchase basis and relying on your marketing, again, like in the feature film business. You know, a lot of times the studios will know they have a dog, but they'll put it out, they'll market the hell out of it, they'll know it's only gonna last in theaters for two weeks, but they're just gonna try and blow those two weeks out so they can recoup as much of the production costs as they possibly can. And honestly, the video game business wasn't that different in those days. Sure, there were some products where you knew they were franchises, the maddenz, the FIFA's, the Call of Duty's, where you knew they were predictable hits year after year. And oddly, those were exactly the products that should have gone free to play. FIFA should be a subscription product. Like a guy like me, I love FIFA. I've been playing FIFA since 1993. I was playing it on the 3DO. Trip Hawkins' console, short-lived, but a great platform for FIFA back in the day. But anyway, FIFA, I should pay a subscription fee every year. - Yep. - Yeah, it's just there's debate in like, oh, I know I'm gonna make X hundreds of millions of dollars from it, and I don't wanna risk even if that could be higher giving up that, which is obviously a bit of an insane thought for you and I where we're sitting. But that is still how they think. The fact of FIFA is still a $60 game in 2022 is pretty mind-blowing to me. - And interestingly, some of the free-to-play developers have learned from the video game publishers, some of those tricks of crescendo marketing. So you now see, for example, with Fortnite or with Riot Games League of Legends game, we're gonna talk about in a minute. This idea of like the season, for example, or like the campaign or however they're branding it. But basically, it's an opportunity to re-energize the install base, to bring people maybe who have lapsed or who are playing less frequently, to bring those people back to the game and get them back into a commercial frame of mind, to buy the tools and to buy the things that they're gonna need to be successful in those next missions. - Yeah, and you think about like, the battle past that Fortnite and Dota, and I mean, Fortnite really took it to a different level, but you have Dota coming up with these season passes, and that is a real innovation, where you know that there's events going on in League of Legends, which I play way too much of, they'll come out with, hey, this is the lunar event or something like that, and it's like, play these missions, you get XP, but if you pay for the battle past, you'll actually get there faster, where you'll unlock better things. And that is really how you can imagine FIFA being, where when FIFA today, if it went free-to-play, you can imagine they actually tie it into the natural seasons, whereas it's like, okay, we now have the new rosters coming out. We can update it for you, and do you wanna buy the battle past for this year? That's an amazing thing. And the key thing, I guess for me, that's really interesting around free-to-play, is that the core tenor of it actually did give the game away for free, and what you see the traditional incumbents fall into this trap of is they still wanna grasp on to a little bit of pay to win, or like, any ways that they can sort of get the guarantee that they're gonna make their money, and that seems like almost the worst place to be within this, where you have the traditional incumbents trying to switch, where they're like, oh, look, like, free-to-play can make a lot of money, maybe we'll do a hybrid, where we'll do some DLC or something like that, or downloadable content, and that is clearly the piece of this industry that a lot of people are very upset about, because it's just like, I already paid the $60, I'm not even getting the full game, now I have to pay it on lock characters, or have to pay to win, and those pieces are really broken within this industry still. - Yeah, I mean, I think to your point, I think the conventional publishers were dazzled by the revenues and particularly the profits, because the profit margins on a game that's gonna be in commerce for 10 years that's gonna be iterated, let's say, on a seasonal basis, but really the fundamental game is still the same that's underlying it. The R&D costs, the development costs necessary to create that game are far, far less than they are to get the whole studio infrastructure cranked up on an annual basis to hit this gold master deadline so that they can get the games pressed onto CDs and into packages. It's a very different kind of experience. There's a lot more overtime in that model. Now, not to say that there's not a lot of work involved in supporting a game as a service over time, and we'll talk about that a lot in the forever games episode. But frankly, the cost structure makes it such that those long-term free-to-play games are way more profitable. And so they looked at that and they were dazzled by it and their response was things like FIFA Ultimate Team, where you're buying card packs on top of a game you already paid $60 for, so you could get players that you'd want, I mean, I think as part of the underlying experience, but I think you're absolutely right. I think DLC is kind of a broken hybrid in that regard because it takes in some ways the worst of free-to-play and marries it with the worst of package goods. - It works to a certain extent, but you also, this is where the innovator's dilemma comes in where that's their innovation, right? It is like, we're still gonna do our $60 game and we're gonna have this other somewhat free-to-play aspect with any ones who have it or some extra content. And that is just the worst case scenario. - Well, there's two reasons. Again, we go back to the fundamentals of free-to-play. One of them is expanding the funnel, so it's broader reach. And one of them is monetizing in an elastic manner and really DLC only hits the monetizing in the elastic manner. DLC is whale bait. - Yes. - But it does nothing to expand the audience because the audience is still limited by the $60 initial purchase. So I think that's my objection to DLC really. I don't think DLC is as disruptive. - I couldn't have said it better myself. It's just that they went after the one part, which is like, let's capture the whales and you actually could have had way more whales. Like that's the part that they're missing is you could have expanded this to a way bigger audience and that's the unfortunate part. - So let's go back and talk about how these models came back to the Western markets, which I think is fascinating in a certain way. So initially, as we saw it, like these were propagating through the Asian markets, initially in Korea, then in China, whereas you say they were pretty much perfected in the Chinese PC gaming market and later in the Chinese mobile market. And suddenly the Western companies started to get hit to this. And I think the first people who really understood it were the casual games publishers. And in particular, companies like Zingha, because Zingha, by and large, I mean, their big hit Farmville was kind of a clone of a Chinese game called Happy Farm that had come out a couple of years earlier and it was a free-to-play game. So they sort of understood kind of how to do it from looking at the Chinese example and they did it really well. And Farmville was a massive success in the West. But the video game business, as they often do with casual gaming and we're gonna return to this theme again and again in our episodes, the core business looks at the casual business as being somehow a different business. They just don't even see it as being the same video game business. And so it's a terrible shame because so many innovative and interesting things come out of the casual business, but that the core business ends up being blind to. That said, a bunch of these innovations that were coming back into the Western markets in the form of real free-to-play, not the shareware model, not any of these other kind of early models, but like real free-to-play. We're showing up in casual, we're showing up in Facebook games, things that the core games industry could easily dismiss as being kind of compartmentalized and not really worthy of their study. - Yes, and that's a key part, which is you, let's talk about in 2010, right? You end up studying it. I imagine at this point, you're paying attention closely to Farmville and you're seeing, okay, look, this is a real thing that's working in casual. In 2010, what happens? There's this amazing moment, I think, in your career, where you finally get to apply all of your learnings that you're paying attention to. - So yeah, in 2010, I get a call. I was working in Los Angeles. I was, at Benchmark, but I was doing a lot of work in Los Angeles at the time. And I got a call from like three different people that I knew in the LA business community who all wanted to introduce me to the same company at the same time. I'm a curious person and I want to go and investigate. And so I schedule a meeting and I go over there and the company was Riot Games. I come in, they have nothing. They had a wireframe kind of, they had a design and they had a pitch. And they started to go through their pitch and it was unbelievable. They were so, so smart. They were so smart and they understood not only the free to play concept, but they understood how to bring an audience to the table to prime the pump of free to play. And so they said, look, we're going to make a hardcore game. There's this play pattern called defensive the ancients that is a mod of Warcraft 3, a very well known game. The problem is that this defensive the ancients mod, again, mod, remember that. We'll come back to that. But this defense of the ancients mod was a pain in the ass because Warcraft 3 is out of print. Like you can't, you have to, you're buying copies off eBay of Warcraft 3. So you could play Dota and they were like, look, we're going to modernize that game. We're going to make it free to play. We're going to do it all games as a service on the internet. You're not going to need anybody else's engine. We're going to rewrite the engine ourselves fundamentally. We're going to build our own commercial layer on top of it. We're going to sell virtual goods to the hardcore gamer. And we're going to reinvigorate this by essentially bringing a lot of the people who were involved in the Dota community over to our side to kind of join the Pirate Army here. And we're going to use that to build a bridge that's going to prime our go to market. And it was so brilliant. I mean, it's just, it's even brilliant talking about it now. If somebody came and pitched you that today, you'd be like, hell, I'll do that. So that's how I felt. And I came back and told my partners, like, this is it. This is the thing. This is the virtual goods for the core game that we've been looking for. Because my partners and I had all been studying the Chinese models and looking for ways that we could build bridges from those Chinese models back to America. And this really was it. So so we did it. We greenlit it. And we made the first institutional investment in Riot Games. The amazing part of that story to me is, you know, they almost didn't pitch like, hey, we're going to innovate on gameplay. Like, it was more like, we know there's a great play pattern. And we're actually going to innovate on distribution and business model. And that is such a unique pitch at that time. I mean, it's still a unique pitch. You just don't see too many game developers come into this thinking like that. They didn't know me at the time, but they played me like a violin. Because you think about it, that's exactly right. And it's something that I had been proselytizing. Don't get so hung up on innovating on gameplays. Again, when we're going to discuss this in the context of the forever games, there are some really durable play patterns in the video game business. Celebrate that. Utilize that. Don't make that an added risk to your go-to-market. It's risky enough to put new products out into the market. So if you're going to innovate fundamentally on commerce, in particular in those days, we take it for granted now. But again, with this Zingha shadow looming over the market, there was this sense that the core gamer would not do free-to-play. They would not participate in a game environment in a game community where they were going to be asked to buy things on an ongoing basis. They was just anathema. And yet, that was totally wrong. And these guys were smart enough to understand that if they were going to innovate on games as service, if they were going to innovate on free-to-play from a commercial perspective, don't take an additional crazy risk on the gameplay. This ties back into almost the entire purpose of this podcast, which is the business models and the business itself plays a huge role in this. The fact that League of Legends exists or Riot exists or Valorant or any of those games exist actually came from an innovation on the business side. And that to me is so mind-blowing, but it makes so much sense. Like there was a great game, but if it ended at defensive day-enchains, we would have never seen as true potential, which was League of Legends. Yeah, defensive day-enchains was entirely dependent on this old, creaky system of buying a $60 disc, so you could have access to a product that you didn't even want, so that you could put another thing on top of it, the mod, and play that. And the idea that that could be swept away, and that now you get League of Legends, and League of Legends has gone on to become one of the most, if not the most popular game in the history of the video game business. That was enabled by a business innovation, and we're going to see that same story again and again throughout this series. And I think by the end of it, you're going to realize that we do live in an industry here in the video game business where art and commerce are joined at the hip, and it's impossible to separate them, and that it's as important when you're coming in to pitch and potential new games company or to make a game as an independent, that you pay equal attention really to the art as you do to the commerce. So we get to the end of the story, and League of Legends blows up. The free-to-play model becomes the new paradigm. Mobile explodes in the teens, in the 2000s. Again, something we're going to come back to in a later episode, but with the explosion of mobile and the fact that mobile was just the perfect, perfect environment for free-to-play. Free-to-play becomes the dominant pattern in the game's business, and it happened really because it took that risk early on with that hit game that they knew people would love to play, and that if they could just get it into as many people's hands as they could, they could make money. And in a lot of ways, that's the same way we're utilizing free-to-play today, and it's just remarkable that that's the arc of the story from Mesquite Texas, to Korea, to China, to San Francisco, and then back to Los Angeles in the hands of Riot, and then blows back out worldwide. Again, you were too humble, but you made a major investment that helped shape this entire industry, and you will say that there wasn't a risk in that bet at the time, but the risk more than anything was will the core audience actually monetize, right? Will there be true lifetime value? You're betting again that you're going to fund a game up front. They're going to ship this game, and you're going to hope, at the time, you don't have a great read that the core gamer is going to monetize well, but you had conviction in that, which to me is just amazing. That's just incredible that one have conviction in that and just predict it the way that you did. Thank you, and I think it came down to kind of an understanding of audience, and it's Riot was saying at the time that I made the investment, I think they were estimating there were somewhere between 11 and 15 million Dota players. Who knows what the number was? Who knows? But I would thought to myself, if it's only a million, if it's two million, that's enough to get the ball rolling downhill. And then if the content really is good, and the commercial systems really are tightly tuned to harmonize with that content, this could work. And it turned out there were probably a lot more Dota players than I was willing to admit at the time. And these guys executed way better than we could have expected. Yeah, it's amazing. The crazier part is we have Ed and Doom start in matter on the 90s and early 90s. It takes two decades later for Riot to actually launch and set the gold standard for the entire industry. That is actually pretty shocking to me, but it's even more shocking that today the biggest public gaming companies that are out there still haven't fully adopted what is the free to play model that we recognize as the superior business model of this industry. I take some issue with that because I think the biggest fair, Tencent has adopted this model and has acquired Riot. So I think that that was the smart play, right? I think it's the Western publishers who have that is that that's a good clarification. I think it's the Western publishers that have still the major income and still have that innovators dilemma. Well, this has been a fascinating dive into the origins of free to play. And I think it really tees us up for our next episode, the next episode where we're going to really get into this concept of platform-based publishing because married with the free to play model, this idea of platform-based publishing, which is really the child of the internet. You can't do platform-based publishing really without the internet because you need a platform on which you can aggregate users and fundamentally that's an internet concept. We're going to talk about that in a lot of detail, but the rise of the platform-based publisher and the incredible success of that platform-based publishing model over this sort of similar period from the late '90s through to the present is the next page in our story. And I think it's going to be a really interesting episode and really build on a lot of the concepts that we've established in this episode. you