Hey Everyone,
Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best content from the internet and beyond, designed to expand your mind and get you thinking. Let’s dive into it.
Quick Bite
State of Play: Six Trends Revolutionizing Games: “Games are the next social network. Fortnite looks more like Facebook than it does a traditional shooter game: millions of players socialize in squads and custom games, often with no goal to win. For many, the battle royale has become secondary to the party. And that party can get pretty big—11 million people attended Fortnite’s live, in-game Marshmello concert earlier this year.” (6 Min)
On the entertainment frontier, the (20)20’s will belong to gaming. As Millenials and Gen Z settle in as the cultural vanguard, video games will lose the lingering taboos still associated with them. What has long been considered a hobby for teenage boys will become a dominant force in the entertainment industry. This shift is happening in real-time and will only accelerate going forward. Last year, the release of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 grossed $725M in its opening weekend. This easily eclipsed Hollywood’s weekend box office record of $640M for Avengers Infinity War.
At Andreeson Horowitz, Andrew Chen and Jonathan Lai are leading a team solely focused on gaming investments. In this recent market report, they outline six key trends they see revolutionizing the sector. They hit the nail on the head with their explanations of how games will become the next social network. You no longer need to be actively playing a game to be involved in the ecosystem. Through the evolution of streaming and user chats, actually playing the game is only one piece of the gaming puzzle. With Fortnite as the best example, games are becoming a platform where you go to hangout with friends. Playing the game itself often becomes secondary.
Games are also rapidly evolving in the way they’re designed to be played. In the past, you would purchase a game for $60, play everything it had to offer, and be done with it. We’re seeing a shift away from this model with games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Call of Duty: Warzone. These games are free to play and evolve over time. Every few months a new ‘season’ or update is released to keep the gameplay fresh. Monetization occurs through in-game purchases, most of which have no actual impact on how you actually play the game. For example, in Fortnite, you can purchase new ‘skins’, which are outfits for your character. These strictly serve as a status symbol and don’t offer any advantages in how the game is played.
Gaming as a whole is going through a monumental shift, and what’s most exciting is that we’re still in the early innings. Aside from the aforementioned trends, there are a number of additional catalysts revolutionizing the space. Give Jonathan and Andrew’s report a look to explore them in more detail.
Deeper Dive
The TikTok War: “The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference.” (18 Min)
Over the course of the past year, TikTok has become one of the most popular apps in the world. The wildly addictive video app has been downloaded over two billion times and has consistently ranked as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store. Alongside this rise in popularity, there has been a steady stream of controversy surrounding the app due to its parent company, ByteDance, being located in China. Much of this controversy revolves around personal data that TikTok captures and whether it’s ultimately being shared with the Chinese government.
The debate over TikTok has reached a boiling point in recent weeks following the outright ban of the app in India, Trump’s threats to ban it in the U.S., and a leaked email from Amazon sent to all employees demanding them to delete the app on any devices with access to company email (which Amazon later walked back). Sentiment around a ban on TikTok in the U.S. has quickly shifted from more or less a fringe idea towards an inevitability. Those supporting a ban and those opposed to it have both put forth arguments that hold merit. Yet, as Ben Thompson points out in this fantastic new essay, those on both sides of the aisle appear to be talking past each other. And while differing views always lead to a disconnect in the tech world—and culture more broadly—the situation we’re seeing with TikTok is unique.
According to Ben, the disconnect on TikTok is the culmination of two trends: one about humans and the Internet, and the other about China and ideology. In order to fully understand this, it helps to understand how and why TikTok has had so much success. TikTok has been able to capitalize on the human preference for video over photos and text by making it incredibly easy for anyone to create and share a video. This, in turn, ensures there is a massive supply of user-generated content. TikTok then leverages an algorithm (originally developed by ByteDance for its TouTiao news app) to push compelling content to your feed. What’s unique about TikTok, and what differentiates it from Facebook and Snapchat, is that this feed isn’t constrained by your social network. This, as Ben notes in the essay, is also why the U.S. should be concerned about TikTok.
Without ties to your social network, TikTok’s algorithm is free to promote or suppress any videos it likes. This might not sound too concerning at face value, but when you factor in China’s willingness to censor speech, along with the Communist Party of China’s commitment to ideological dominance, it becomes an issue worth taking seriously.
To that end, Ben argues that ByteDance's continued control of TikTok is unacceptable. I completely agree with him. TikTok needs to be sold to either non-Chinese investors or a non-Chinese company (besides Facebook). Despite bringing on an American CEO, and repeated claims that no user data is ever stored in China, TikTok will never escape the guilt of Chinese association without a clean break. Under new control, and outside of China’s purview, TikTok can wipe its hands of any national security related controversy.
Should a sale occur, TikTok can avoid what is looking like an increasingly inevitable ban in the United States. Focus can shift back towards competing with Facebook in the fight for consumer attention. At the end of the day, stiff competition for Facebook is a net positive for everyone.
Tweet of the Week
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Books
Currently Reading
![Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III by [Robert A. Caro]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcea5b62d-58f5-4e63-85bd-a8adaf4315da_331x500.jpeg "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III by [Robert A. Caro]")
Recently Read
![The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by [Ross Gregory Douthat]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F487d9c25-23bd-4391-ac74-ba02f0d7e127_331x500.jpeg "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by [Ross Gregory Douthat]")
In The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat drills deep into a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and commenting on over the past year. He pulls back the curtain on the current state of our society, which in many regards has hit a plateau. Due to a combination of wealth and technological proficiency, tied with political stalemates and economic stagnation, our pace of advancement has slowed to a trickle. Douthat offers an excellent diagnosis of how we got here and why we’re stuck at a standstill. While he doesn’t offer a perfect solution for leaving our age decadence behind, he does offer a range of explanations for how it might end. This is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the driving forces behind societal change. (4/5)
Parting Thoughts
This Week in History
On July 15, 2006, Twitter launched to the world. Officially released as Twttr, it started as a side project that allowed users to share short status updates with groups of friends by sending one text message to a single number “40404”. (Source)
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”
— Unknown
If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.
-CM