Matthew Ball

There are a few employers who have effectively guaranteed revenue in perpetuity through what's known as "forever games". EA's sports division prints money. Valve prints money. Call of Duty prints money. Valorant/League print money. Fortnite prints money. Roblox prints money. Their products have been around for 10-20+ years and will seemingly never die. But that's not representative of the industry as a whole, and is not representative for the average game dev. See https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 and others. The other bit to notice about EA in particular is that its share price has been flat for the last 7 years, they've continuously failed to figure out how to change that, which is a problem. Selling and layoffs are a lever to get out of that hole, although it remains to be seen how great of a move it turns out to be.

I do agree that $80 for digital is a little insulting. Games, in general, probably should be $100+, and consoles for ~$400 is about right if simple inflation from the 90s is just taken into account. Games are now longer, have more production, and cost more to produce. Additionally, cost per unit of entertainment time for games has much more value than most other entertainment options, theoretical infinite Netflix-type streaming notwithstanding. https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 has a great and extensive dive into this topic.

Game industry is going through huge cuts right now[1][2] after a covid/free money boom over the last few years and stagnant revenue growth now. If you end up staying in this field, one very valuable piece of advice is use your free time, while looking for work, to prepare for interviews and specifically leetcode and other interviewing processes you're likely to face. It's basically standard operating procedure right now for both big and small companies. Look online at tech interview guides. If you're in the US, when hiring picks up again, it's probably the single best chance to financial well being, getting into one of the cushy tech jobs. [1]: https://gamecraftpod.com/podcast/episode-02/ [2]: https://www.matthewball.co/all/gaming2024

I'd disagree here. Would recommend checking out this piece [1] on Nintendo's failure to expand as an IP brand. https://www.matthewball.vc/all/onnintendo

Tim Sweeney is really interesting. He coded Unreal Engine 1 and is controlling shareholder of Epic. He gave a speech[0] January at a game conference arguing against the App/Play store 30% mark. I think he has internalized Ben Thompson's FAANG strategy concepts and created the best denunciation of the mindset, in this speech attacking the concept of "owning the customer." He joins Shopify in trying to create platforms in the Gates sense where most of the money goes to consumer and 3rd party. And a lot of his actions, in the short term, are against Epic's financial interests, commodifying and cannibalizing their own dominant market position for the sake of growing game industry TAM and a vision of future interoperability[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFO2k1-tyg [1] https://www.matthewball.vc/all/epicprimer1

I think you might want to read this[1] excellent series on Epic and their ecosystem. It covers most of your questions. [1] https://www.matthewball.vc/all/epicgamesprimermaster

https://kottke.org/ - love Jason's blog, https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ - great news aggregator, https://pluralistic.net/ - another good one, https://www.drudgereport.com/ - as someone that leans left I sometimes check drudge out to see what my dad is reading, https://www.matthewball.vc/ - recently found this guy, been enjoying some of his essays

> [Microsoft] were even more obnoxious in their anti-competitive practices. I'd love to hear why you think that. Microsoft never stopped consumers from installing Linux on a PC. Microsoft never stopped anyone from installing software on Windows. You could always buy a PC and do whatever you wanted to with it. Meanwhile, Apple doesn't let you do anything on an iPhone if it isn't bought from their app store. The level of control that Apple has over iOS is ridiculous compared to what Microsoft had. Apple is 10 times worse towards consumers and developers than Microsoft ever was. I can't even install my own apps on my iPhone without paying Apple $100 per year. Without a developer account, having to re-install the app every 7 days (only from a Mac) is nearly useless. How could I ever take a 2 week vacation and still use my apps? > Apple doesn't have majority market share Yes they do. "Today, the iPhone has 66% market share in the United States, 75% of U.S. App Store revenues, and over 80% of time spent on the mobile internet (iOS’s share of physical e-commerce transactions is likely somewhere in the middle of this range). And this dominance is also growing. Eighty percent of U.S. teenagers have iPhones and the device held 90% of smartphone activations in the week after Christmas 2020." [0] [1] [0] https://www.matthewball.vc/all/applemetaverse [1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/8/18/app-stores

There are still a lot of people, especially on the general web stuck in the Steve Job's era believing in bad developers, quote; "What happens sometime though is that some people, uh, lie. Some people use unpublished APIs and their app gets rejected. Some people submit an app that they say does one thing, but really does something else. They try to hide it from us, they get very clever about that. They try to hide it from us and we find it and we reject it. And they run to the press and tell a story about oppression and it gets written up and they get their 15 minutes of fame because they hope it will convince us to change our minds which never does, but they keep trying to do that. And it’s unfortunate, but we take it in the chin. That part of what we do. We don’t run to the press and go, “This guys a son of a bitch liar.” " That was in All Things Digital D8 Conference 2010. Nearly 11 years ago. The landscape has changed, the context has changed. iPhone has only sold 50M unit in total since launch in 2007. These days Apple has 1 billion active user and Apple sell about as much iPhone per quarter. Smartphone and Apps went from nice thing to have to near or already a necessity in modern society. Surely you cant apply the same rules in a modern era, not to mention those App Store rules has evolved since Steve Jobs passed away. Many Apps that Apple used to exempt from the 30% cut now has to comply. I really wish HN folks read the great piece from Benedict Evans (…

https://www.matthewball.co/all/presentation-the-state-of-video-gaming-… You need an email address to access it but it’s good, if bleak, reading.

Unity is Unreal Engine's biggest competitor by far. Godot competes with Unity (mostly for 2D games) but is at least a decade off being any threat to Unreal. So yes, funding Godot is A Nice Thing To Do but it also conveniently puts a bit of pressure on Unity, their biggest competitor, without impacting their own business. Also, if you believe Matthew Ball's take[0] then Epic is all-in on fostering as many gamedev-ish creators as it can so that it can loop them all into making content for its metaverse later. As you alluded to, in the long term funding a FOSS game engine which is focused on ease of use helps that too. [0]: https://www.matthewball.co/all/epicgamesprimermaster

Related: EA's Next Act and It's Vision for Sports and Sports Fandom https://www.matthewball.co/all/ea2025 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46125048)

I work in the video game industry and recently saw a chart on the predicted growth of AR/VR (as calculated at the time) over the last decade (i.e. updated predictions over time by various groups). The curves all start curving straight up at the beginning of the chart, and each successive year, they become flatter and flatter. The amusing thing is that the actual sales are drawn below all the predictions and it's basically a flat line (averaged out) Source (Page 48): https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 Im really curious what Meta/Apple/Microsoft are predicting for the future

Matthew Ball had a good essay on this about a month ago: https://www.matthewball.co/all/gaming2024 The industry as a whole is facing huge financial pressures, Sony included.

Real revenues dropped 12% since 2021, investor funding fell off a cliff and then smashed through the ground like Wile E. Coyote, paid user-acquisition got stupid-expensive due to regulatory changes, inflation screwed up everything, then interest rates rose faster and higher than most people expected, all while the market got overcrowded. See charts inside. Matthew Ball’s new essay convinced me things are worse than they seemed: https://www.matthewball.vc/all/gaming2024

Instead on only watching videos you can read about it, Matthew Ball is a good start https://www.matthewball.vc/metaversebook

One big reason for this is some strange social stigma surrounding VR. Matthew Ball, the venture capitalist, argued last year that the social stigma ended during the pandemic. People are walking around looking at phone screens while wearing iDweebs hanging out of their ears without being laughed at. VR is just the next step. [1] https://www.matthewball.vc/all/userbehaviorsmetaverse

Seems pretty clear companies are talking about "the metaverse" as broad concept. https://tech.fb.com/connect-2021-our-vision-for-the-metaverse/ https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/announcing-a-1-billion-fundi… https://www.matthewball.vc/about

You may find https://www.matthewball.vc/all/epicprimer1/#section1 an interesting discussion of the interlocking parts of Epic's business plan.

Link from the tweet: https://www.matthewball.vc/all/digitalthemeparkplatforms Exciting, because I've been waiting for these platforms for like 15 years, since I played Warcraft 3. But also bittersweet, because I have already resigned to having to eventually make one myself, and now it's done.

I bet it was Matt Ball. Maybe this? https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse

There's also the Epic flywheel as described by Matthew Ball: https://www.matthewball.vc/all/epicprimer1

This is just a wrapper around "an essay by venture capitalist and former Amazon executive Matthew Ball": https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse

There isn't yet a game that involves all the players in one huge level, without shards, but there might be eventually. Current game engines don't support levels with that many players simultaneously. There is an interview with Neal Stephenson and Tim Sweeney on the Metaverse where Sweeney says supporting massive multiplayer is what he plans for Unreal Engine 6: https://www.matthewball.co/all/sweeneystephenson > So one of the big efforts that we're making for Unreal Engine 6 is improving the networking model, where we both have servers supporting lots of players, but also the ability to seamlessly move players between servers and to enable all the servers in a data center or in multiple data centers, to talk to each other and coordinate a simulation of the scale of millions or in the future, perhaps even a billion concurrent players. That's got to be one of the goals of the technology. Otherwise, many genres of games just can never exist because the technology isn't there to support them. And further, we've seen massively multiplayer online games that have built parts of this kind of server technology. They've done it by imposing enormous costs on every programmer who writes code for the system. As a programmer you would write your code twice, one version for doing the thing locally when the player's on your server and another for negotiating across the network when the player's on another server. Every interaction in the game devolves into this complicated networking…

What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two different things. This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0]. It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection. [0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025

It may not just be for a lawsuit. They may provide fuel for a change of law, as Congress bumbles through an attempt at anti-trust enforcement, maybe they can become a test case for lawmakers looking for loss of competition and consumer choice. (Although existing lobbying dollars from Google, Apple, Facebook, & company may be effective in holding back representatives. Money in hand, in election season no less.) Epic Games can show just how much the on-going appstore tax prevent new business models from taking hold. They shown an incredible ability to entice people to separate from their money, even convinced Disney?! to partner for branded content. Alongside Epic Games licensing of the Unreal Engine at-or-below cost (12% [1]), I believe Sweeney's commitment to growing a "Metaverse" market at the expense of Epic's short-term profit. This comes alongside EPIC(.org)'s comparisons about American vs Chinese & emerging markets competitiveness, linked today [2]. [1]: https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse [2]: https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai-commission/EPIC-19-09-11-NSCAI-FOIA-20…