Football nerds unite! Mitch & Blake are back with a special episode on the 2026 FIFA World Cup. In this episode they provide a very opinionated "Consumer Guide" to the most watchable matches of the Group Stage of the tournament.

Show Notes:

Mitch's previous World Cup Consumer Guide blog on Medium

AFCON final controversy (Morocco v. Senegal)

Brazil v. Morocco (6/13) A-

Ecuador v. Ivory Coast (6/14) B+

Netherlands v. Japan (6/14) B+

France v. Senegal (6/16) A-

England v. Croatia (6/17) A-

Mexico v. South Korea (6/18) B+

Argentina v. Austria (6/22) B+

Japan v. Sweden (6/25) B+

USA v. Türkiye (6/25) B+

Norway v. France (6/26) A-

Uruguay v. Spain (6/26) A

Colombia v. Portugal (6/27) B+

Mitch and Blake conclude Season 4 with a review of a new kind of games company that is getting significant attention from investors: casual game portals with integrated AI game generation engines, seeking to become a "feed" for games akin to social media platforms like TikTok or YouTube. They show how these companies sit at the intersection of several of the most significant topics the hosts discussed throughout the season: artificial intelligence, casual games at scale, threats to the games industry from the feed-based "attention drains," and the human experience of play.

After discussing some key examples of this new company type, they show how this strategy is just a new spin on an old idea. They talk about the early in-browser portals like MiniClip and Kongregate 20 years ago, which got to large user scale but failed to monetize commensurate with their reach.

They then discuss how some modern attempts to do similar feed/portal UGC strategies pre-AI failed to work out, and why. They theorize that the friction of re-learning game mechanics and play patterns works against the idea of a game-feed -- and how the successful user-generated content platforms like Roblox and UEFN route around that friction with constraints.

They return to the new AI portals and talk about the bull and bear cases for their longer-term success.

The episode, and the season, concludes with the hosts saying farewell and thanking the audience for listening.

Blake and Mitch discuss the current environment for funding games and some of the challenges and opportunities for founders in the games space. They begin with a short survey of the current venture capital environment and the difficulties presented by industry consolidation, which has taken several of the important buyers out of the market. They also look at the pivots of some of the major game-specific venture funds, and how their investment strategies are changing to meet the current moment.

They turn to discussing the need to do more work, to show more proof, with less cash. They talk about the need for founders be prepared to answer questions about AI (and its implications for reducing costs). Regardless of whether AI will actually make games less expensive to create, venture capital investors will assume AI leverage in a new studio. They warn against trying to hand-wave or finesse the AI question, and instead argue for a purposeful, first-principles approach to this new, disruptive technology.

Your hosts turn to a look at the history of Stardew Valley and show how it has become a shining example of an independently-developed Forever Game that reached extraordinary success in an incredibly capital-efficient manner. They talk about how Stardew Valley (and Jenova Chen's Sky) might be templates for a low-burn, long-iteration approach to making a successful Forever Game.

Mitch and Blake close the episode with a look at how intellectual property has changed from marketing and customer acquisition leverage to a stand-alone value creation opportunity itself. They look at Hollywood's current obsession with games, and how some of the most successful movies in recent years have been based on game IP. They also look at the recent deals where game companies licensed their telemetry data to AI companies for training purposes, and how the new General Intuition company is using game telemetry from their previous Medal clip business to train AI models.

Blake and Mitch discuss the possibility that games -- mainly mobile and live service games -- have concentrated on providing fun through progression and engagement mechanics rather than fun in the game experience itself. They point to signs that the market is showing signs of a backlash -- and a re-focus on fun game play -- and the potential implications of that backlash in the marketplace.

They discuss a working "theory of fun" based on three core elements: mechanics that elicit emotions, elegance, and enjoyable experiences at each temporal layer of gameplay.

The hosts look at examples of good and not so good design from the perspective of this theory of fun. They highlight the way Nintendo's games succeed at delivering fun. They also look at one of the best examples of progression-based fun, Royal Match, and how it "solves" a fun but repetitive gameplay pattern with various meta-game challenges and incentives.

Mitch and Blake offer their thoughts about how to navigate the introduction and impact of large language model AI in the video game business. They begin by discussing their opinion that AI represents a significant technological innovation with potentially profoundly disruptive implications. Beyond even a simple technology innovation, AI is likely to be a paradigm-changing event, that calls into question many of the accepted methods and ideas underlying current game production and marketing.

After discussing their intentions in recording this episode -- that this is very real and very threatening to the competitive positioning of western developers -- they introduce their thesis that AI is going to hollow out the middle of the game development cost stack, and in so doing, potentially put the middle tier of games under even more pressure than it's been under lately. It will reduce the costs of prototyping, but perhaps not the overall cost of development and go-to-market. And it will cost jobs, just as every previous paradigm change in gaming has done.

After a brief interlude to discuss the often ill-considered backlashes against AI from inside the games business, they finish the episode by discussing in great detail the five categories of companies and professions that they think will be outside the immediate reach of LLMs -- categories that may actually get more valuable and defensible in an AI-dominated world.

Mitch and Blake discuss the rise of the Istanbul gaming scene, which has exploded in the last 15 years and come to dominate the incredibly lucractive "match 3" mobile puzzle genre -- a genre which represents a significant percentage of global mobile game revenue. They discuss some of the important metrics that demonstrate just now important mobile game development in Istanbul has become -- not just to the global mobile games business, but to the nation of Türkiye itself, as a source of foreign currency and tax revenue.

In order to interrogate how Istanbul rose to dominate this genre, the hosts discuss the creation of Peak Games and the importance of Sidar Sahin and Rina Onur, two of Peak's founders and two important figures in the development of the Instanbul scene. They trace Peak's development through its sale to Zynga in 2020 for $1.8 billion. They discuss how Peak alumni were directly responsible for the formation of 65 new game studios, including Dream Games, which ultimately eclipses Peak as the most valuable game company in Istanbul.

The hosts turn to the four factors that contributed to the success of the Istanbul scene: dollar/euro currency leverage; local government subsidies; local talent -- both a source of talent specifically adept at the Match 3 genre as well as a magnet for Turkish tech talent broadly; and the distribution advantages that flowed from the choice to work in the globally-relevant Match 3 genre.

They conclude the episode with a look at the Dream Games transaction that cashed out investors and injected $1.25 billion of debt financing into the company. They then discuss some potential challenges to Istanbul's position in the future, and the overall durability of its current competitive advantages.

Blake and Mitch discuss the thesis that the games business is losing share of attention to non-game interactive applications. They discuss whether there is actually a defined market for interactive entertainment, and whether applications like TikTok should be considered "interactive."

They discuss and try to quantify the impact of game-like retention and engagement mechanics being adopted by such disparate applications as Snap, Duolingo, Strava, Fan Duel, Polymarket, Tinder, and OnlyFans. They conclude that it is not only a problem of "share of day" -- the hours that are being devoted to these addictive, interactive apps -- but also "share of wallet" -- the disposable income they are harvesting.

They discuss the structural change that they noticed coming out of the pandemic: that children in the pre-teen and teenage cohorts sought a different kind of pleasure in gaming during lockdown -- the pleasure of sociality. Mitch and Blake both feel that this change is endemic, and as this cohort has now aged into the key 18-34 demographic, that change is being reflected in gamer taste. They riff on some of the games and games-adjacent companies that anticipated or reacted quickly to this audience change, and reaped rewards for doing so.

They conclude by discussing how these new non-game interactive competitors are tapping into ancient human interaction patterns around things like gambling, social competition, and sex that have been part of human culture -- and important categories of human spending -- for millenia. They warn that the games business needs to react to this current attention drain as an on-going competitive threat, and learn back some of the lessons these new competitors learned from games.

Mitch & Blake discuss one of their favorite companies in games, Roblox.

They start by outlining Roblox's core competitive advantages, and how they are unique in providing creation, consumption, aggregation, and monetization in a single platform. They also discuss how unusual it is for a company to get to Roblox's scale with a pure platform strategy and no first-party games.

They then discuss the history of the company, and what it was doing for the decade before it appeared on the radar screens of most game industry observers. Mitch talks about hearing the pitch from CEO Dave Baszucki back in 2007. They discuss the period of inflection when they simulatenously launched on mobile platforms and significantly invested in upgrading graphics and the overall experience.

After reviewing Roblox's enduring advantages, they turn to the "bear" case for the company as a public stock and address some of the company's perceived shortcomings.

Blake and Mitch return! They begin with a discussion of the "Great Inflection" in software in the last several months. They then do some follow-up to last season, particularly their "deadpool" episode that turned out to be way too kind to the companies they profiled.

The hosts then "draft" six trends that were visible in 2025 that they think will continue and define 2026, alternating picks. Remarkably, they don't pick overlapping trends despite choosing blind and not disclosing pre-show.

Finally, they each offer three specific predictions for 2026.

In this Special Edition of the GameCraft podcast, Mitch and Blake discuss the $55 billion leveraged buy-out of Electronic Arts by the Private Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, Siliver Lake Partners, and Affinity Partners -- the largest LBO in US history, and the second largest transaction in the history of the video game business after Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision.

They discuss the deal itself (and how to properly characterize it), some of its immediate implications, and why Mitch's take on the possibilities created by EA going private went from excitement to disappointment in the two weeks following the deal's announcement.