At least one finance person has made the jokes about GAAP and how it does not mean what a game developer thinks it means. GAAP in this conversation means Games As A Platform. Consider yourself disambiguated.
We are all watching the conflagration in the mobile app stores and eating our popcorn. The view from down here is magnificent and… big enough to see from space. What is selling today? Recent studies show many six-year-old franchises and [checks notes] Monopoly-plus-coin-master.
You might narrow your eyes and proclaim, “But whaddabout Balatro?” Or you could point at me and mumble, “Something something Palworld!” Yes, you are right. Four or five amazingly successful indie games exist out of at least ten thousand published annually.
I keep telling people every year, “Right now is both the best time and the worst time to be making video games.” Yes, that is right, I am very conflicted about this. Too bad I cannot channel that into a career making the Toktoks.
Let’s throw some more conflict on the fire. I am a gigantic fan of true player ownership of digital goods. I believe that web3 represents a possible means to this end. I am also a fan of distributing games on the open internet. That last point represents a conundrum because the best path to tackling the existing mobile dual monopoly is yet a third closed platform: The Epic Game Store. The enemy of my enemy is not my enemy. While he is still fighting the Apples and the Googles, Tim Sweeney is my favorite person in the games industry every year.
Let’s bring that back to GAAP. Roblox. Fortnite. Minecraft. Zepeto. These are a few of the names I have heard for GAAP. Roblox is presently the incumbent in this space, possessing full facilities for developers to sell virtual goods, mass adoption, and a thriving developer ecosystem. Fortnite is on its way there. You cannot directly sell your items yet, but we must believe this capability is coming. Minecraft is still unsure what it wants to be when it grows up. Zepeto is just this strange international platform that smart people keep yammering about. I am including Zepeto in this conversation out of respect for their pattern recognition skills.
So how do we know that GAAP will be so gosh-darned big?
The first thing to point out is that making games is expensive. Let’s pretend that game developers are construction workers for a moment. How much more expensive and time-consuming would it be to build a house if the construction workers were not allowed to reuse their hammers from job to job? Unreal Engine, Godot, and Unity are all engines that make it easier for people to make games; however, the production pipelines and intermediate tools made on top of them generally do not enjoy portability from game to game or company to company. This is one of the reasons that GAAP is attractive. There are already companies founded by Roblox players who have turned their passion into their livelihood. One of those games is so popular they had a toy included in Happy Meals from McDonald’s!
The creator programs for Fortnite are not far behind Roblox. They understand this is their future. It took years for Roblox to reach Seven Hundred Million Dollars in payouts to creators. In a year, Fortnite got halfway there. Fortnite is kind of cheating a little because it is paying creators out of the revenues generated by selling items and V-Bucks. I strongly believe that a real creator economy will be coming soon.
What makes this interesting is that you can make some comparisons to the dual monopolies in mobile app stores. For example, you can argue that Roblox is like Google and Fortnite is like Apple. There is some delicious irony in that last comparison.
Like in mobile app stores, a dual monopoly creates pressure to compete. Similar things are happening in ridesharing. Uber and Lyft essentially keep themselves honest with their customers. There are more disturbing comparisons to be made between ridesharing drivers and game developers, and we will choose to have that conversation later.
The last interesting point that makes me believe more firmly in the GAAP future is how hard it is to publish… anything. The Friction Is Too Damned High. This will eventually be a problem that comes to GAAP, but today is not that day. Going through all the submission processes for mobile and console games is hard. I cannot speak to the Steam submission process here because I have never done it. I see developers begging to have their game wishlisted on the socials all of the time, and it sounds like it has its very own rituals and observances.
If I started my career fresh today, I would make a game on Roblox or Epic’s UEFN. Heck, the desire to try making games for these platforms is even non-zero for me. I can feel the pull, and it is stronk.
I have declared that GAAP will be a “Next Big Thing” and might even be here in 2025. There are lots of people who believe that “something something AI” is going to be a “Next Big Thing” and are puzzled that I left it off my list. I feel like I should address this.
AI tools are coming to games, and I believe they will be here in the next few years. I also do not think they are a revolutionary change. LLM-based AI will be an evolutionary step that reduces studios’ costs. I do not think it is an automobile; I think it is a faster horse. I will let you all puzzle out what that means. If you need help, you can contact me on my socials.
On that perplexing note, I hope you all are here again next week!
