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Happy New Year!!
We’re back! The Pause Button took a long, much needed rest over the holidays. Fawzi finally tried his hands at Arena of Valor (and now is addicted). Max snoozed the whole holiday season.
We have a lot of catching up to do this week so we opted to pay homage to Benedict Evans in a blitz-style of content. We sort of like this format, and in the future might intermingle this newsletter format with long form content; but if we’re being totally transparent, we’re not quite sure what form we want The Pause Button to take. All we know is there’s a lot of gaming news we want to write about and share with you. Feels like a pretty good idea for now.
On a side note, we’re located in the Bay Area and would love to meet with any local readers. Please shoot us a note!
Wishing you a wonderfully game-filled 2020.
Cheers,
Fawz and Max
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Analysis:
Matthew Ball on why gaming will increasingly permeate tech (Link). Central to this is his most recent essay on the concept of Metaverse — the idea that reality will be manifested in virtual spaces — which is becoming central to discussions about video gaming. Link
Amid pessimism on cloud gaming, Jon Lai’s a16z wrote about the fundamental shift that cloud experience will offer gamers and developers: frictionless purchases, socialization, data analysis. Mostly positive things (Link). He also recently spoke about his well-known thesis around how gaming will become the future of socialization, and how Fortnite, as the first-generation ‘cloud game’, is driving this hypothesis forward. Link
Niko Partners released their predictions for the Asia Games Market. Link
News:
Exclusive streaming deals continue to proliferate with Youtube’s recent signing of three creators (Link). Facebook Gaming and Mixer are gaining market share, while Twitch declines slightly. When will content creator contracts expand out of gaming? Link
Tencent acquired maker of Bayonetta, Platinum games. Ultimately, this is a common strategy/partnership done in order to enter the China market or to create mobile games. Tencent is an expert at both. Link
Sony will skip E3 this year (again), citing the compromised ‘vision’ of the event. This is big news considering that they plan to release the PS5 in 2020. How will they compensate? Link
Culture:
Twitter’s annual breakdown of gaming topics, its top subject category. Link
The Witcher began streaming on Netflix earlier in December. Despite well-founded criticism, it stands that the omni-channel media strategy actually worked, brining in 100k concurrent Witcher 3 players on Steam. Link
Epic Games announced that they will continue to release free weekly games into 2020. Epic’s user acquisition strategy is on point. Link
New Smash Bros. character tomorrow. Link
Pokemon’s DLC plans and the Mystery Dungeon comeback. Link
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