Mark Pincus argues that mature, declining industries can be goldmines for innovation. In 2007, casual gaming looked dead until Facebook opened its platform, making games social and accessible to adults. He compares it to search before Google: the market existed, but needed reframing.
Chapters
It gets to something that has become kind of an entrepreneuring strategy for me that I encourage you all to think about, which is really looking for something I started to call the mature market phenomena. Mature markets that everyone. It's already big and it's over are actually amazing places for all of us to go and innovate and think about new ideas. There's already revenue, there's already customers, there's already buying behavior, and maybe there hasn't been innovation in a long time. And I looked at gaming and I think this will. You'll have to suspend your disbelief to go there with me. But in 2007, gaming was a crappy business. It was declining. Casual gaming was the worst. I mean, web games were like Crazy Taxi with crappy ads around it. It wasn't even a top 10 Internet consumer activity, so no one was doing it on the web. And then all of these big console gaming companies were in decline and it was very mature. But I looked at this and thought, this is a lot like search. When Google showed up, Google was the 55th search engine, not the first. Search was over. Like, what are you doing here? This is Excite Lycos and Yahoo. And Google showed us that there was a level of innovation in search that would make search something different in our lives. Similarly, games is not yet as big as search. I think it may one day get there as an industry. But the thing I believed in was that adults, actually we all had a latent interest in playing games, but that the industry had just taken a left turn and never made games that were accessible to us fit into our lives and actually gave us anything valuable for the time we gave to games. It asked too much of us and didn't give anything back. And so my belief was that if we made games accessible to people, social and useful, that it could be one of the top adult pastimes. Which now sounds really obvious. But that was the big belief. And the only way I was able to prove that was Facebook opening up. Because at the time, to get to a large audience, you had to get shelf space at Walmart or something. And so really this was. It couldn't have been proven without Facebook. Yeah. Fascinating to think about the upshot of going after mature industries and believing that a trend can be turned around. Contrarian. And right.
