Kelvin Hill April 11, 2024
Introduction
Joost Van Dreunen has made a career out of helping people understand the game industry. In his day job, he teaches gaming strategy at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
And he also the author of the 2020 business book, One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games. Van Dreunen was also the founder of Superdata, a game industry research company that tracked the virtual reality segment and was sold to Nielsen in 2018.
Van Dreunen has been a big fan of using data to analyze gaming. And we’ve had a lot of it lately. Microsoft completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in October, then it laid off 1,900 people to cut costs. That was part of a larger 10,500 layoffs in game companies in 2023 and another 8,000 so far this year.
With Apple’s push into spatial computing, Disney’s $1.5 billion investment into Epic Games and the European Union enabling alternative app stores, 2024 promises to be another transformational year for interactive entertainment. Apple has also been fined by the EU and sued for antitrust by the U.S. Justice Department. How do we make sense of all this?
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Recent Events and Future Project
At the recent SXSW event, Van Dreunen gave a talk showing off his latest data. And last week at the Game Developers Conference he also said he is launching Aldora, which focuses on the transition from games as a service to games as a platform, and tracks consumer behavior beyond just playing time and spending (like SuperData did). He also publishes the weekly newsletter SuperJoost Playlist.
I caught up with Van Dreunen at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Van Dreunen also has a second book in the works, and we talked about that.
Interview Transcript
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Discussion Highlights
GamesBeat: What are you up to?
Joost Van Dreunen: I have a few different projects in the works. One of them is the second book. It focuses on the transition. The first book was from product to service models. The next one is from service to games as a platform. I’m fascinated by these models like Roblox and Fortnite, how they propose not just gaming, but all these other behaviors. People watch movies with Mario, but you can also go online and build things with other people. There’s a variety of things around games that…
