Gamecraft

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.

In this Special Edition of the GameCraft podcast, Mitch and Blake discuss the $55 billion leveraged buy-out of Electronic Arts by the Private Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, Siliver Lake Partners, and Affinity Partners -- the largest LBO in US history, and the second largest transaction in the history of the video game business after Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision.
They discuss the deal itself (and how to properly characterize it), some of its immediate implications, and why Mitch's take on the possibilities created by EA going private went from excitement to disappointment in the two weeks following the deal's announcement.

Mitch and Blake explore the role of consolidation -- primarily through mergers and acquistions -- in building some of the biggest and most durable companies in gaming. 
They begin with a discussion of the four major strategic uses of mergers and acquisitions: economies of scale, entry into new markets, control of talent and intellectual property, and new technologies. They provide many examples along the way.
Mitch argues that M&A is so important to the business that it's actually difficult to avoid ending up on either side of that equation, as an acquirer or as a target of aquisition. Mitch and Blake map that idea onto their dictum that venture backed companies need to decide whether they are building a product or a company.
They talk briefly about the financial engineering side of M&A, particularly in the form of the "roll-up" -- where companies are entirely build from acquisitions with a (usually mistaken) hope that the value of the whole will exceed the sum of the parts. They discuss why this rarely works, and try to explain why Embracer is in such trouble as a result.
They close the episode with a closer look at EA, Activision, Sony, Microsoft and other companies and show how their acquisitions map clearly onto the four main consolidation strategies. They argue that leverage is the key component of M&A success -- that buying companies against some pre-existing competitive advantage (rather than just buying randomly) results in a much higher likelihood of success.