Game industry leaders believe the future of the space is still bright — if gaming evolves in the right directions.
The second season of the BIG Show, GamesBeat’s podcast featuring gaming industry leaders in an intimate, after-hours setting, wrapped up earlier this month. This season came during a particularly challenging period for an industry rocked by thousands of layoffs in recent months. While our guests remained optimistic about the future of gaming at a macro level, they also shared a healthy amount of skepticism about some of the current trends and buzzwords dominating the conversation at industry events like GamesBeat Summit, where we recorded many of this season’s episodes.
The latest season of the BIG Show featured eight guests across seven episodes, including two sponsored bonus episodes. You can head to GamesBeat’s Spotify page to listen to the episodes, or click through to the BIG Show homepage to watch all episodes on video. Not sure where to start? Here are some of the key takeaways from each of this season’s episodes.
Jenova Chen thinks the rise of ‘pseudo-gambling’ is hurting gaming
After a rousing speech celebrating the 20-year anniversary of his studio thatgamecompany at GamesBeat Summit in Los Angeles this May, legendary game maker Jenova Chen sat down with GamesBeat lead news writer Alexander Lee (that’s me!) for an episode of the BIG Show. Although Chen believes gaming’s cultural star is still rising — he said he thinks gaming is on track to replace cinema as the world’s dominant form of entertainment — he spent a fair amount of time criticizing trends he said were damaging the medium of gaming, including loot boxes, gacha mechanics, and other forms of gambling injected into gameplay.
“We were very proud to say that our gaming industry makes more revenue than music and movies combined — but if you remove the pseudo-gambling out of those revenues, I think we are just slightly above cinema,” Chen said.
Eunice Lee believes games are all about making connections
Fresh from receiving GamesBeat’s inaugural BOSS Mode Woman of the Year award at GamesBeat Summit, Scopely chief operating officer Eunice Lee joined GamesBeat’s Rachel Kaser for an episode of the BIG Show that covered the positive benefits of gaming amid an increasingly disconnected culture. Lee, who has helped scale Scopely into a predominant mobile game publisher since joining the company in 2021, has had a front-row view of the industry’s evolution — and said one of her biggest takeaways from her experience was that fostering connections through play was key for both gamers’ happiness and Scopely’s long-term growth strategy.
“I think we need more connection through games, more than ever,” she said. “I feel like we’re on the forefront of that, and I’m excited about that.”
Owen Mahoney believes AI will not change game makers’ core mission
Nexon president and chief executive officer Owen Mahoney joined GamesBeat’s executive director Dean Takahashi for an episode of the BIG Show that packed a laundry list of industry topics into just under twenty minutes, including the interplay between Eastern and Western gaming culture and studios and the rise of AI-powered development tools across the space.
Mahoney was enthusiastic about AI, which he described as a factor behind the revival of Silicon Valley in recent years. However, he made it clear that he believed any industry changes sparked by AI should preserve the fundamental goal of game development —to make something fun.
“You can think about it as a tale of two cities,” he said. “Are we, as an industry, going to end up like LA, meaning the Hollywood industry, or are we going to end up like San Francisco?”
David Lee thinks gaming can’t afford to ignore creators
In a sponsored episode of the BIG Show, Webtoon global chief financial officer and Wattpad president David Lee — a gaming industry veteran who previously served as the CFO of Zynga — said he believed creators could help game makers surmount the growing challenge of user acquisition. It’s no secret that standard UA strategies have had diminishing returns over the past year, and Lee believes game makers would be well-served by being a bit less precious with their IP. By allowing creators on platforms like Webtoon to build content and narratives within their IP, game makers can reach creators’ audiences within their natural habitats.
“In gaming, oftentimes you’re talking about customer acquisition and the cost of it because you have a source of IP that you want to create fandom around,” Lee said. “You’re trying to create a destination in this competition for time across so many possible uses of it.”
Dmitri Johnson and Amanda Kruse want Hollywood to keep its eye on the gaming ball
Dmitri Johnson and Amanda Kruse are two of the most accomplished executives working at the intersection of gaming and Hollywood. Johnson’s company Story Kitchen has produced game adaptations for years, including the currently-in-production Tomb Raider series; as the head of video game publishing for the prominent horror film studio Blumhouse, Kruse is responsible for hit video game film adaptations like the Five Nights at Freddy’s series. At GamesBeat Summit, Johnson and Kruse joined GamesBeat editorial director Dean Takahashi for a podcast discussion about the future of the ongoing relationship between gaming and the wider entertainment industry.
“I think we can coexist,” Johnson said during the twenty-minute episode. “Do you remember the fear that games were going to stop kids from going to the theater and watching TV? I don’t buy into that.”
Both Kruse and Johnson have plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the future of gaming in Hollywood, but they noted that both the film and gaming industries in the U.S. are vulnerable to negative macro-trends, such as an increasing level of competition with production companies in global markets.
“Film and TV is going to have to take that lesson from games — that it is a global world and a global industry now,” Kruse said. “And I do think you see more Hollywood writers and directors leaving and being able to come back, and it’s not so taboo now.”
Mike Minton thinks the clipping trend is overplayed
Twitch’s chief product officer Mike Minton spent most of his episode of the BIG Show talking about his life and career, and I take the blame. There are few tech executives like Minton, who spent years fighting in the U.S. Marine Corps and built his own home in the woods of Michigan — so I couldn’t help but ask for the full rundown. But Minton spent a significant chunk of his 28-minute episode giving his takes on some of the latest and hottest trends impacting the social media and livestreaming space, including the rise of clipping. From his vantage point leading product development at one of the leading video content platforms, Minton was relatively unimpressed with the clipping trend.
“People are not buying ad products, and instead they’re paying clippers at a tenth of the rate,” Minton said. “And if you’re a large platform that owns an algorithm, and your algorithm’s being abused, it doesn’t seem like that’s going to be a sustained way for creators to think about long-term growth.”
Jude Ower wants to game makers to understand that altruism can help boost business
The final episode of the second season of the BIG Show was a podcast about a podcast. GamesBeat’s Rachel Kaser joined Jude Ower, the chief strategy officer at Planet Play and co-founder of the Good Game Club Podcast, a podcast series shining a spotlight on the positive cultural effects of games. Throughout the 23-minute episode, Ower stressed that focusing on positive impact was not just important for game companies to make the world a better place — it actually has a knock-on effect on their business, too.
“If we can give players the chance to do something good in a game, we’re seeing more and more players want to do that,” Ower said. “So, think about that, in terms of user acquisition, monetization, retention, lifetime value.”