Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming

Mitch Lasky opens by describing a credibility problem familiar to people who have worked in the subject they are reading about: details they know can make a writer look careless, while unfamiliar subjects still seem compelling. He says Acquired has earned his trust because episodes about work he participated in—and others he knows well—have been unusually accurate. The hosts explain that this special episode departs from their usual format to talk with Lasky, a former EA and Activision executive and investor in Riot Games, Discord, Thatgamecompany, and Snapchat, and Blake Robbins, a current Benchmark principal. Their new Gamecraft podcast examines the game industry from a business perspective. (s00001-s00010)

Lasky says he wanted to show how business structures shape creative work, inspired by Thomas Schatz's history of the film industry, The Genius of the System. This challenges a common game-industry story in which a creative genius invents a game and the business follows. Lasky argues that business models constrain what designers can make. In the packaged-game era, publishers needed players to buy another disc later, which encouraged content designed around repeat purchases. The recurring releases of FIFA and Call of Duty illustrate how familiar franchises can keep selling under changing business models. The point is not that creative talent matters less, but that commercial incentives influence which creative ideas reach players and how long they can last. (s00015-s00023)

The hosts connect this tension to luxury brands and retail scarcity. Lasky recalls competing with Nintendo for limited software shelf space at Best Buy. Around Black Friday, Nintendo could release only part of the available inventory for a new Metroid or Zelda game, let demand build as parents found it sold out, and then replenish stores shortly before Christmas. He says the tactic worked because Nintendo had a luxury-like brand. Their discussion uses the example to show that distribution and perceived scarcity can shape demand as much as the product itself. (s00024-s00028)

Gamecraft grew out of a roughly 200-page manuscript Lasky had written as eight thematic episodes spanning the 1990s to the present. After friends told him that few people read books, Malcolm Gladwell encouraged him to adapt the material as a podcast. Lasky rewrote it as a dialogue and invited Robbins, whom he had encountered through public commentary on the games industry. Their generational perspectives create a structure for the project: Lasky began working in the 1990s, while Robbins experienced many of the games Lasky helped publish as a player. (s00029-s00044)

Lasky's early career also illustrates how difficult it once was to imagine games as a profession. He entered the industry through Disney Interactive in the early 1990s, around the time Bobby Kotick bought Activision with financing from Steve Wynn. Lasky recounts Kotick arriving uninvited at the Cattlemen's Ball to persuade Wynn to fund the acquisition, then restructuring Activision's debt into equity. At the time, Lasky thought he was making games for himself and other enthusiasts: consoles had only recently returned with Nintendo's 1985 system, and the market was still largely viewed as a niche within toys, generally dominated by Japanese companies. (s00045-s00056)