Part 9 - Multi-platform and anti-synergy
As top games become increasingly indistinguishable from filmed entertainment, expect more and more cross-over between interactive and passive entertainment, like PlayStation’s Last Of Us and Twisted Metal.?
But don’t expect media companies to build successful game divisions. Over the past fifty years most big media companies have tried and failed to build game divisions. They aren’t technology incubators. They don’t understand that starting up a game is like any other technology startup, requiring either extraordinary luck or years of dedication, brilliance, passion, technology expertise and high risk tolerance, as even with all the prerequisites, only one in ten succeed. PlayStation and XBox gave up trying to build new studios long ago. Disney has been trying and failing to build game studios since 1988. Instead it’s investing in a $1.5 billion partnership with Epic Games, part of the Tencent gaming empire.?
Netflix started out distributing media; only much later, with House of Cards, creating their own shows. Then in 2021 it started building its own gaming studio, so far without success. With their recent deal with Take-Two they have belatedly realized they can leverage their world’s biggest and best entertainment distribution network, to sell under exploited games just like they sell under utilized movies and TV shows. Expect them to cut deals with Tencent, EA or other game makers, distributing their games to Netflix’s 250 million subscribers, without the huge tax (30%) that Apple, Google or Valve charges.
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Even Sony, who’s been building entertainment on multiple platforms since 1983, doesn’t build multi- platform entertainment. It makes games, movies, TV shows and music all very successfully, but all in separate divisions. Each media type is a different business, each requiring its own business unit. The lesson of the past 50 years is anti-synergy, that competing businesses within large enterprises fight for money, power and dominance, crushing creativity.?
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