It’s always a dangerous thing when I’m writing posts at 4am. Jetlag is a demon that demands awakeness but is pretty inconsistent with the other side of the trade. This newsletter could go either way.
When the Collisons talked about the beginning of the singularity in their latest Stripe investor letter, I eye-rolled a bit. Sure.
But actually I realised that’s the best way of understanding what is happening to gaming right now. My (somewhat non-Kurzweilian) definition of the gaming singularity is zero distance between the creative idea for a game and the completed development of that game.
Game development is now on a path where cycles are getting shorter, improvements compound and ultimately the concept of game development will evaporate and only creativity will remain. At some point on this timeline you can imagine a thing and it will instantly exist. For now, we’re at prompts and tokens. The transition to vibe generated content (VGC) has begun.
This is not a small deal. UGC gaming was already a ~$2.6b market (primarily Roblox and Fortnite). However the wider gaming market is two orders of magnitude larger. Gaming is BIG and people are always shocked when I explain just how much bigger than movies and music it is (the mobile/console split is roughly 50/50).
Simplistically, this market size is the best expression of how much games customers value the output of games creators. The difference between what the ultimate creators (generally professional studios) take and what the users pay is (very simplistically, it is still 4am) distribution and marketing.
In ecommerce it seems increasingly clear that agents replace search. And we’ll probably see some form of this in gaming too. But unlike ecommerce, where the production function remains (I am unlikely to start building my own coffee tables), a gaming singularity solves the discovery (marketing/distribution) challenge through hyper-personalisation. I just vibe code whatever I feel like playing.
Decades of consumer behavior suggests that people aren’t all that imaginative though. Instead we’re going to see more of this $200b shift away from professional studios to individual VGC creators. The gaming singularity is going to be massively disruptive to one of the biggest entertainment markets on the planet but it’s also going to create a golden era for creators.
Reading/listening
I read Ari Emanuel’s biography which is much better than I was expecting.
Graeme Lawson was fascinating on the study of ancient musical instruments
I know it’s everywhere and sounds a little back-slapping in places but John Collison’s interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang is very good overall.
Following the singularity theme, I experimented with getting Claude to write a book on the history of YouTube MCNs. Predictably it’s called The Middlemen and actually isn’t terrible. DM me if you’d like a copy (although you can just make your own obviously).