Tacter: A Vertical Gaming Community - Part 2
We believe the vertical gaming community is a $1B opportunity within the intersection between games, content, and social. Let's discuss some ideas around it.
Some time ago, I shared our vision for the next $1B consumer company opportunity, what we called: The Vertical Gaming Community. Today, we’re going a little bit deeper on that idea.
If you have not read the previous post, I highly recommend you read it to have the full context before continuing:
We believe this $1B opportunity is within the intersection between games, content, and social. A niche that is being heavily impacted by new technology like web3 (blockchain) and AI, alongside massive cultural changes.
This context is the perfect primordial soup for a new disruption. We’re not 100% clear how the final product will look like, but here are six ideas that we believe are closer to it:
1. New games need the Creator-Content-Player flywheel.
Today’s biggest games: Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox were the innovators around the idea of “the game as the playground and the stage.”. They have changed the world by leveraging user-generated content for massive distribution and awareness.
Any new game aiming to compete should nurture the Creator-Content-Player flywheel natively.
2. The easier to create content, the more content is created.
This is obvious but still reinvented one time after another. Creating a Tiktok is easier than creating a Youtube video. The result is a content explosion on Tiktok.
Reducing the barriers to creating content is one of the top priorities if your business relies on content. IA will shock the world in non-imaginable ways by reducing this barrier. Tomorrow's creators will not be making videos or guides about a game but creating games themselves with the same effort.
3. Financial Incentives for creators were the innovation. Now, they are the norm.
Previous generations of online creators were surprised when they discovered how much money someone can make online. However, for the newer generations is the norm. They know the value they create for the platforms and have raised their standards about capturing part of that value.
Any consumer platform aiming to have a chance to become relevant must leverage a native creator program from scratch. Creators should be treated as one additional stakeholder. In fact, technology like web3 (blockchain) will push this in non-expected ways.
4. Organic Growth is king, as it always has been.
LTV & CAC formula and perfect targeting are a thing of the past. ATT changes, privacy legal battle work, and the new generations' awareness have broken a model where you could substitute a good distribution strategy (hard) with tons of money (easy). Distribution is being reinvented one more time and must be integrated natively into the product.
5. There will be games played for more than 100 years.
Why risk creating and releasing a new game when you already had one hit? How would new games compete with games with +10 years of accumulated content, player base, ecosystem, etc.?
Counter-Strike, League of Legends, or Clash of Clans are over 11 years old, setting all-time high player records, and not going anywhere anytime soon.
In the same way that other games like chess, poker, or football are centenary, there will be centenary games, and some of those games’ economies and player bases will be (and already are) bigger than some countries.
Bonus Point: Data Ownership could not be leveraged anymore as the defensive moat.
I’m still making up my mind about this idea. All of the biggest monopolies of the last decade were profiting from the ownership of their users' data and using it as a defensibility moat. The whole idea of the Aggregation Theory is around this.
New generations seem to notice this, and new technology (blockchain) allows the creation of new models and the delegation of data ownership to the users, not the platform. However, the power of existing platforms is so big that they’re the ones controlling this technology evolution, and we might end up in a different scenario.
Still, if the platform of the future could not leverage data to build defensiveness, then how do you defend yourself? Without defensibility, there’re no incentives to innovate. I do not have a clear answer to this yet.
