Hope Cochran and Daniel Li, Madrona Venture Group
Does it ever get any easier to bet on a gaming content play? What do you look for?
Hope Cochran: I feel like there are a couple different sectors in gaming. There’s the actual studios that are developing games and they have several approaches. Are they developing a brand new game, are they reimagining a game from 25 years ago and reskinning it, which is a big trend right now, or are they taking IP that is really trendy right now and trying to create a game around it? There are different ways to predict which ones of those might make it, but then there’s also the infrastructure behind gaming and then there’s also identifying trends and which games or studios are embracing those. Those are some of the ways I try to parse it out and figure out which ones I think are going to rise to the top of the list.
VCs discuss gaming’s biggest infrastructure investment opportunities in 2021
We last polled our network of investors on the topic of gaming infrastructure startups back in May just as it was becoming clear what pandemic opportunities were in store for gaming startups.
Accel’s Amit Kumar told us at the time that “social and interactivity layers spanning across these games” were poised to be the big winners, highlighting his firm’s investments in startups like Discord and Mayhem. In December, Discord announced it was raising at a valuation of $7 billion and this month Pokémon Go creator Niantic announced it was buying Mayhem.
Extra Crunch roundup: 2 VC surveys, Tesla’s melt up, The Roblox Gambit, more
This has been quite a week.
Instead of walking backward through the last few days of chaos and uncertainty, here are three good things that happened:
Google employee Sara Robinson combined her interest in machine learning and baking to create AI-generated hybrid treats.
A breakthrough could make water desalination 30%-40% more effective.
Bianca Smith will become the first Black woman to coach a professional baseball team.
Despite many distractions in our first full week of the new year, we published a full slate of stories exploring different aspects of entrepreneurship, fundraising and investing.