Category Archives: Business

Video Games, not just for Kids

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So, today was one of those days where I had a few different topics that I wanted to write about. I had a request to write about video games. I’ve written one or two blogs about video games in the past. However, I think that there’s always more to be said about them.

I think it’s fair to say that video games are a bit of the red headed step child in the entertainment industry. They aren’t taken as seriously as movies and it’s not as culturally acceptable to geek out over video games as it is to geek out over movies (some movies) or television shows. However, I think that this is going to change and it’s not because of the video game designers and publishers.

I think that Twitch is going to drive to make video games more acceptable and shift video games location in culture. Through events like Intel’s championship series or DreamHack which is a collection of tournaments for games like DOTA 2, League of Legends, Star Craft, and many more, I believe that there is an opportunity for video games to reach an acceptance level akin to golf. For the most part these games are multiplayer and very team based. There are leagues, trading of players and everything else you would expect in a major league “sport.”

It’s not just these events, it’s the personalities that drive watching live streaming. As I’ve mentioned in the past I have a few friends that stream and there is a community that has sprung up around watching these guys play. It’s pretty awesome.

Through these streamers, I’ve been able to experience many more interesting games than I can actually play or even afford to play. This allows me to keep abreast of the video game landscape without having to really play (I play Civ V, Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy mostly). In the case where the streamers are playing single player games it’s similar to watching a movie with someone guiding the movie. It’s a lot of fun, especially since you’re able to have a conversation with the star and his fans all at the same time.

Furthermore, I think that video games have not been given enough credit for pushing the boundaries of technology. Game designers and players for PC together drive companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to keep designing newer and more powerful products. Intel is able to make a massive profit on their platforms designed for gaming – they know it, they’ve changed their strategy a few times in regard to selling stand alone chips because of gamer’s demands. We should be praising the hardcore gamer because they are helping us continue to advance in one of the few bright spots in our economy.

Each video game community has it’s own quirks and idiosyncrasies, which can be seen in how new games are developed as well as in business practices for the developer. For example, Valve has several economists studying the naturally occurring economy around trading in games like TF2, I believe that through controlled economic settings like TF2 where there is no central control (Blizzard I’m looking at you!) unique economic conditions can emerge that will shape how the designers develop future releases in the game. This has been clearly shown in how Valve continually releases new hats (yes, hats).

Compared to Eve (a massive multiplayer online role playing space video game) TF2’s economic system is rudementary. In Eve you can buy, build, trade and develop true economic systems. Furthermore, it’s possible to see the effect of war and diplomatic missteps on the economy. Recently nearly $200k worth of money was wiped out because someone missed a monthly payment. It’s possible to see how various factions have recovered after a serious economic, material, and military shock hit the entire game.

Games are vital to our culture. We’ve always had both physical (sports) and mental (chess) games. I believe that video games are simply a new extension to both of those. Many games require you to think quickly and have quick moving fingers (Star Craft) while others are almost as passive as watching TV. Understanding the value of video games and the culture about them is important to understand how our culture can grow and develop in new ways.

Kickstarter, Oculus Rift, and internet rabble rousing

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The internet is mad that Facebook bought the VR company Oculus Rift. We shouldn’t be surprised that someone bought this company, it was going to have an IPO or be bought. There’s no doubt about that. The problem isn’t that it was bought, but the company that bought it.

Oculus Rift was a startup. Startups need money so they launched a Kickstarter Campaign and raised $2.4 million. Startup money typically comes from three groups of people in early stages (3Fs) – Family, Friends, and Fools. The Kickstarter campaign clearly is the fools. Not because they didn’t think the company would succeed, but that they thought they’d have a say in the end result. Kickstart has had other scams, such as the feminist blogger that was going to buy a bunch of games and show how awful they were (but didn’t). Kickstarter has always said that you are donating and has no control if you ever get anything out of it.

If a startup is successful with the money provided by the 3Fs (and this is a huge IF as this is typically called the Valley of Death in startup parlance), these companies try to get Venture Capital Funding. The VCs are the people that have a boatload of money and try to make even more by getting companies to “exit.” There are three options for “Exiting” a startup – IPO, Purchase by another company, or failure. VCs prefer your startup being purchased by another company – it has the least risk (you never can tell what your stock price will be – see Facebook’s IPO. To get this money you typically have to give up control of your company. This comes in two forms ownership and members on a board of directors. In some cases the VC will take less ownership for more members on the board. Apparently one of those people that owned a large portion of Oculus Rift was Mark Zuckerberg – he reportedly made $337 Million on the Facebook purchase of Oculus Rift. That means he owned roughly 1/6 or 16% of the company ($2 Billion sale and all). Supposedly 2 other VCs made roughly the same amount of money on the deal. Which means that the founder likely owned less than 50% of the company and could have been forced into the deal.

Effectively, the moment Mark Zuckerberg invested in Oculus Rift, the company was going to be sold to Facebook – as long as it was shown to be successful. What this means to me is that if you read or see Zuckerberg personally investing in something, expect Facebook to eventually buy it. Additionally, with Zuckerberg owning that large of a percentage of the company, there’s no way it could have been sold to any other company. It was IPO, Facebook, or bust.

With this broader context, I cannot be mad at either Luckey or the other leaders of Oculus Rift. They knew the game when they got into VC – even if you aren’t into making a lot of money when you start, your VC will push for a positive exit for themselves.

One of the angriest people about this whole thing was Notch, the Minecraft guy. He finds Facebook creepy and is upset that his $10,000 facilitated that sale. Even if he had gotten stock for his investment, he would have only had 0.42% ownership share over the company (assuming Luckey sold all his stocks through the Kickstarter which is unlikely). Unfortunately, it’s likely his stocks would have been diluted and the VCs would have controlled enough of the board and stock to force the sale to Facebook despite all the people that could have owned stock if the money had been raised through a Kickstarter alternative like Fundable.

When investing in a Kickstarter, you can’t get emotionally attached, you need to look at it as if you’re gambling. You might never get anything from it, but at least you helped someone else’s dream come a step closer to reality. I’m happy for the folks at Oculus Rift because they got lucky in a very unfair game. I don’t like Facebook either – but it was unlikely for any other outcome unfortunately.

Culture wars: the battle we didn’t know we’re losing for access to our culture

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Our culture is being held hostage

Humans are a collection of story tellers. When we hang out with our friends, new and old, we spend a great deal of time telling stories. These stories define who we are. In cases where we first meet we try to find common ground through current events, current cultural experiences, like the Olympics – TV shows, books, and movies. When you know nothing about another person, these are the only basis you have for building an understanding of what they stand for and who they are. To be honest, in many ways they are terrible indicators of what type of person they are, but they can help you identify if that person is someone with a similar world view to your own. Once you move past those conversations you move on to personal stories. The things that made you laugh and, conscious or not , enter into a game of one upmanship. Now most of the time you’re just trying to find a similar experience to relate to theirs, but it can be misconstrued.

In many cases the only context you’ll ever have with the person is through a shared experience, access to our communal culture. Regardless of our awareness or how willing to admit it we are, we have cultural gate keepers. To access any of our current culture we have to pay to access it. That’s fine, the people that produced it should definitely get paid for the work that they did. However, the people we’re paying are necessarily the people that produced the work. We’re paying for internet access at least twice (if you have home internet and a mobile data plan). In some cases that means you’re paying the same company twice for access to the same thing (verizon wireless and verizon FiOS).

Additionally, these companies have no incentive to provide better access to the content that you want o see. It’s actually in their best interest to make it more difficult and have worse service, so that the services that you want to access will pay them again for you to access the service that you are paying to access. Furthermore, these same companies think that if you use the internet a lot you should pay a higher rate!

This isn’t really anything new. I’ve been saying this for a few years. But what drives this is rent seeking behavior, investors that don’t really know what’s going on, and arrogance.

Shrinking Public Domain

The public domain is the area of our culture that no one owns any more. It’s been published for so long that it’s free to be consumed by everyone. Disney hates this. The main reason is that Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain, or would be based on the laws at the time of his creation. However, Disney is not above using the public domain to make a lot of money. Here’s a list of movies they’ve created based on public domain (over 50). FIFTY movies based on the public domain – it’s great for a corporation to exploit the public domain, but if you try to do something you’re going to get sued.

I’ve written about Lawrence Lessig a lot, he’s a bit of a hero of mine. He’s got a lot of integrity and really pushes for what he believes. He recently was sued (he’s a copyright lawyer) and forced a settlement with the company. He’s one of the few people that can do this, he has the knowledge, the money, and the desire to do this. In many other cases, it’s up to pro bono lawyers to fight these cases because the person in the wrong cannot fight. It’s literally David vs. Goliath. However, if David is provided the right resources most of the time Goliath goes down.

This is the case we’re dealing with in the propose Comcast Time Warner merger. Where the people most impacted have little voices. Companies are pushing to turn more of our activities into opportunities to make money. Gamers that stream on Twitch are going to be pushed to pay more, Twitch is going to be pushed to pay more for high quality access for uploads and downloads, and the people watching those streams are going to be forced to pay for quality streams. This is our culture. We are people that don’t want to be controlled by cable companies. We don’t want to be forced to deal with this. Our needs are not being met by the market.

Because we’re disparate, companies and incumbents are winning the culture war. Most people aren’t aware that we’re in a battle over affordable access to our culture. Memes, TV shows, Movies, and whatever retarded shit we watch on the internet is our culture. Making it inaccessible is a battle our gate keepers are winning. We need to figure out how to fight back. I plan on switching from Comcast when I move and never going back. I plan on switching to T-mobile and never going back to Verizon. It’s time to put our money where our mouth is. It’s going to be painful, but without our support those companies can’t oust the incumbents and cannot force change.

We need to force change with our wallets.

What’s the difference between Ma Bell and Comcast?

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If you were born in the 80’s or before you know that Ma Bell was the only phone company in town. Born any later than that you were born into a world without a single monopoly for telecommunication. That’s right, we’ve had a point in our collective history where there was only a single phone company. There are rules in place that prevent something similar from happening with Comcast, but we’ve been there before. However, I believe there are critical differences. AT&T knew they were a monopoly and they were a state sanctioned monopoly. They did everything in their power to keep prices down to prevent being broken up. AT&T actually had a broader monopoly than what Comcast could ever hope to have. They made the phones that worked on the line, they made all the telecom technology that made it work, and they designed the services that made it work. This is something called a natural monopoly, which I’ve written about before. A former founder of Comcast has declared Comcast a natural monopoly.

The biggest difference between Comcast and AT&T, back in the day, was that they did everything they could to keep the government happy. Was it perfect, no clearly not, there were shady business practices, but we as a society benefited greatly from Bell Labs. To this stay is still one of the greatest research facilities that ever existed. If it wasn’t for Bell Labs our current way of life would be very different. I highly suggest checking out the book on it.

Comcast claims to be pushing innovation with their X1 Xfinity platform, but that’s not really true, it’s simply a new operating system pushing content. Voice activation isn’t innovation and if that’s your main selling point then you’re in serious trouble. As I mentioned yesterday, the Netflix deal is a major concern, the Verge is saying the Internet is fucked and that we need to be contacting the FCC daily to un-fuck it.

I’m not entirely sure that the FCC can fix it. Congress has greatly hamstrung the FCC in dealing with internet companies, furthermore, their solution of calling the internet a Utility won’t work. If you aren’t aware we’ve had big pushes to deregulate the utility industry which unfortunately hasn’t really made rates better in many cases or in the long run. I think that it’s fair to say that in the telecom industry this is true as well. The impact of the AT&T break up has been this long term collection of conglomerates that continually increase price as well as “Fees” which similar to baggage fees are hidden from the “price” of the service. So, treating the internet like a utility isn’t going to work. What we need to do is treat it like a road.

Everyone that uses a car on the road is taxed based on use (Gasoline taxes) everyone pays for a portion of the maintenance based on other local taxes too. No, these aren’t perfect and are going to be under pressure based on hybrid and electric cars – and new models are being proposed. Of course one way to do this is through toll roads (which really never work) or through some sort of black box in the car to measure mileage (which no one wants).

Essentially it’s a pay for bandwidth consumed, so if you’re a high consumer of bandwidth you’d pay more, but the rates need to be realistic and the goal would be to cover expenses and continually improve service while making it cheaper. Which brings me back to AT&T – the president of Bell Labs had one mantra anything could be tested but only if it could lead to a “Better, cheaper or both” network. A public internet similar to a road that was paid to continually get cheaper, better, more secure, and faster is the only way to truly un-fuck the internet. It’s not likely to happen because it’s not a capitalist response. However, the internet these days is similar to public transpiration – it’s goal isn’t to make money, it’s goal is to enable economic activity. If think of it that way, then we can see the long term benefit of the whole economy rather than singular actors.

Data, Monopolies, and the Comcast/Netflix Deal

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So, apparently, there are these groups that sell bandwidth for data transit to companies like Netflix. These companies interface with the major ISPs like Verizon and Comcast and connect the broader backbone of the internet to specific ISPs. These interfaces, like any interface can become over burdened – similarly to a congested intersection on the road. The problem is that with data information can be lost or transmitted extremely late, the lost data is called a “dropped packet.” These packets are like little packages of data that will likely provide some desired bit of image, article, or video.

These companies have typically provided “peer connections” that are free to transmit data because, well you’re paying to access the data and Netflix is paying to allow you to send the data. Win-win for both user, ISP, transit company (Cogent), and Netflix. Pretty good system right? Well it was until Verizon and other ISPs went and decided that they wanted to charge Cogent to for access to their networks so their users can access the data that Cogent is transmitting for Netflix.

Why can the ISPs do this? They are acting like monopolies in many ways. These companies are essentially islands of monopolies that do not compete with each other. With little incentive from the market to change behavior they are able to seek additional monies from their customers and providers without much risk of member defection. Furthermore, as Verizon is continually posting higher and higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), they are making more from the same number of people. When you have no where to go, that means raters are going up, and if they aren’t investing that additional money, that means profits are going up.

What does this all mean? It means that Netflix is getting the squeeze in a way that they weren’t expecting and with the proposed merger between Time Warner and Comcast things are only getting worse. The ISPs are able to say that they aren’t negatively hurting Netflix alone, because everyone that uses Cogent is getting hit the same way. It’s intentional according to the Cogent CEO. To get around the Cogent bottleneck, Netflix has decided to have a direct connection between Comcast and Netflix. This means that Netflix services will have less of a bottleneck to compete with other bits of data. This is a big deal for Netflix as lost data packets likely mean blocky video or video that is unwatchable.

Netflix decided to push for their members by paying for higher speed access directly to Comcast. This is great, but on the other hand terrible. It’s terrible because one of the greatest champions of Net Neutrality has bowed out of the fight giving in and paying to provide higher speed video quality to their members. It’s good because they are doing what’s right for their members, even though Comcast is at fault here by making cynical business choices to negatively impact the quality of the services provided over their pipes.

This could have interesting implications if a company decides to use this clear agreement as an obvious breach in the NBC/Comcast Net Neutral agreement. This could, if pushed correctly, have serious far reach implications for the company. However, I’m not sure who would push for this law suit. Hulu won’t, as it’s partially owned by Comcast, maybe Google will as they are looking to compete head on with Comcast as an ISP, video content provider, and in other realms. Another potential is Aereo that has already won a few major victories over NBC/CBS in copyright (The company streams over the air HDTV as a DVR service). So if they don’t have equal access as Comcast or Netflix, they could certainly sue over this – as it would hurt their business growth possibilities.

Update: Apparently Netflix is in negotiations with both AT&T and Verizon as well. Furthermore, Verizon believes that these agreements are clear that we don’t need more “regulation”in the form of net neutrality. Clearly, if a monopoly can extract as much money from both their members and the content that brings value to their networks, there’s no need for regulation!

I think that these practices are going to seriously impact the ability of smaller firms to compete. I also would fully expect a company like Twitch to start feeling the pressure next.