Gamecraft

Mitch and Blake offer their thoughts about how to navigate the introduction and impact of large language model AI in the video game business. They begin by discussing their opinion that AI represents a significant technological innovation with potentially profoundly disruptive implications. Beyond even a simple technology innovation, AI is likely to be a paradigm-changing event, that calls into question many of the accepted methods and ideas underlying current game production and marketing.
After discussing their intentions in recording this episode -- that this is very real and very threatening to the competitive positioning of western developers -- they introduce their thesis that AI is going to hollow out the middle of the game development cost stack, and in so doing, potentially put the middle tier of games under even more pressure than it's been under lately. It will reduce the costs of prototyping, but perhaps not the overall cost of development and go-to-market. And it will cost jobs, just as every previous paradigm change in gaming has done.
After a brief interlude to discuss the often ill-considered backlashes against AI from inside the games business, they finish the episode by discussing in great detail the five categories of companies and professions that they think will be outside the immediate reach of LLMs -- categories that may actually get more valuable and defensible in an AI-dominated world.

Mitch and Blake discuss the rise of the Istanbul gaming scene, which has exploded in the last 15 years and come to dominate the incredibly lucractive "match 3" mobile puzzle genre -- a genre which represents a significant percentage of global mobile game revenue. They discuss some of the important metrics that demonstrate just now important mobile game development in Istanbul has become -- not just to the global mobile games business, but to the nation of Türkiye itself, as a source of foreign currency and tax revenue. 
In order to interrogate how Istanbul rose to dominate this genre, the hosts discuss the creation of Peak Games and the importance of Sidar Sahin and  Rina Onur, two of Peak's founders and two important figures in the development of the Instanbul scene. They trace Peak's development through its sale to Zynga in 2020 for $1.8 billion. They discuss how Peak alumni were directly responsible for the formation of 65 new game studios, including Dream Games, which ultimately eclipses Peak as the most valuable game company in Istanbul.
The hosts turn to the four factors that contributed to the success of the Istanbul scene: dollar/euro currency leverage; local government subsidies; local talent -- both a source of talent specifically adept at the Match 3 genre as well as a magnet for Turkish tech talent broadly; and the distribution advantages that flowed from the choice to work in the globally-relevant Match 3 genre.
They conclude the episode with a look at the Dream Games transaction that cashed out investors and injected $1.25 billion of debt financing into the company. They then discuss some potential challenges to Istanbul's position in the future, and the overall durability of its current competitive advantages.

Blake and Mitch discuss the thesis that the games business is losing share of attention to non-game interactive applications. They discuss whether there is actually a defined market for interactive entertainment, and whether applications like TikTok should be considered "interactive." 
They discuss and try to quantify the impact of game-like retention and engagement mechanics being adopted by such disparate applications as Snap, Duolingo, Strava, Fan Duel, Polymarket, Tinder, and OnlyFans. They conclude that it is not only a problem of "share of day" -- the hours that are being devoted to these addictive, interactive apps -- but also "share of wallet" -- the disposable income they are harvesting. 
They discuss the structural change that they noticed coming out of the pandemic: that children in the pre-teen and teenage cohorts sought a different kind of pleasure in gaming during lockdown -- the pleasure of sociality. Mitch and Blake both feel that this change is endemic, and as this cohort has now aged into the key 18-34 demographic, that change is being reflected in gamer taste. They riff on some of the games and games-adjacent companies that anticipated or reacted quickly to this audience change, and reaped rewards for doing so. 
They conclude by discussing how these new non-game interactive competitors are tapping into ancient human interaction patterns around things like gambling, social competition, and sex that have been part of human culture -- and important categories of human spending -- for millenia. They warn that the games business needs to react to this current attention drain as an on-going competitive threat, and learn back some of the lessons these new competitors learned from games.

Mitch & Blake discuss one of their favorite companies in games, Roblox.
They start by outlining Roblox's core competitive advantages, and how they are unique in providing creation, consumption, aggregation, and monetization in a single platform. They also discuss how unusual it is for a company to get to Roblox's scale with a pure platform strategy and no first-party games.
They then discuss the history of the company, and what it was doing for the decade before it appeared on the radar screens of most game industry observers. Mitch talks about hearing the pitch from CEO Dave Baszucki back in 2007. They discuss the period of inflection when they simulatenously launched on mobile platforms and significantly invested in upgrading graphics and the overall experience. 
After reviewing Roblox's enduring advantages, they turn to the "bear" case for the company as a public stock and address some of the company's perceived shortcomings.

Blake and Mitch return! They begin with a discussion of the "Great Inflection" in software in the last several months.  They then do some follow-up to last season, particularly their "deadpool" episode that turned out to be way too kind to the companies they profiled. 
The hosts then "draft" six trends that were visible in 2025 that they think will continue and define 2026, alternating picks. Remarkably, they don't pick overlapping trends despite choosing blind and not disclosing pre-show. 
Finally, they each offer three specific predictions for 2026.