Dec 24, 2018
“Just by looking in your eyes, I can tell you don’t know the first thing about eating pussy.”
suki waterhouse as sarah lacey in assassination nation (2018)
seen from Germany
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seen from United States
“Just by looking in your eyes, I can tell you don’t know the first thing about eating pussy.”
suki waterhouse as sarah lacey in assassination nation (2018)
sarah || suki <3
...and to be honest, i don’t know if we’re going to live through the night.
The Unsustainability of Silicon Valley
When people get fed up with Silicon Valley's value of companies, I can certainly understand.
WhatsApp being bought for $19Billion, that I'm okay with.
What I cannot wrap my head around is a games company like Zynga and now King Digital Entertainment launching an IPO after a one-hit wonder (Farmville and Candy Crush, respectively) and being valued for billions of dollars. I realize they've worked hard, I know it's not an overnight sensation and that it's taken years to create a viral hit like Farmville or Candy Crush.
But a viral hit is just that, viral. It's unsustainable and can't be repeated. The mechanics of what makes a game wildly popular is outside the control of the company who makes it or anyone in Silicon Valley for that matter. It's the high school kids throughout America who are on Facebook and iPhones playing games. And like any teenaged kid, their attention rarely stays focused on one thing for very long.
And it's this known unsustainability that boggles my mind.
Yes, I know there's a bit of gambling in every startup and that every company has its ups and downs. But the entire nature of the gaming industry is, outside of EA, mostly obscurity with a few megahits here and there. If owning a digital games company was baseball, the score would be rarely getting on base, a homerun here and there, and a whole lot of strikeouts.
So why does it make sense that the first hit on your hands spells I-P-O?
Maybe because they (the game companies executives) know they have a lemon on their hands.
That it's just a matter of time before the shiny-ness wears off and everyone else sees it. They're essentially building a ship knowing it will drown everybody aboard; they just need to bail before everyone else. And that's what upsets me about the culture in Silicon Valley.
I remember a discussion recently with Jason Calacanis and Sarah Lacey on the same subject and their question was: what investor is getting excited about a game company's IPO? You would think no one after Zynga's performance but it seems like a lot of people have yet to learn a lesson on betting on flameouts.
Right now, other than EA, arguably the financially strongest games company is Rovio, maker of the Angry Birds series.
But even Rovio has stagnated in bringing new hits other than continuous spin-offs of Angry Birds.
Did they reach their peak early and everything after is all downhill, or will they hit another success? Only time will tell. But one thing Rovio is not currently talking about is being publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange like King Digital Entertainment is. And maybe Rovio's just smart. Or maybe they know that, like one of the birds in their games, they'll drop a bomb if they were to IPO.