David Friedberg

So Xbox, I think the day after the EA deal got announced, decided to hike prices

50% to their subscription service.

And what happened over the subsequent few days is that so many people tried to cancel that the site went down.

So what are you seeing happening?

You have distribution gatekeepers trying to raise prices and take share.

And then you have the original IP owners who have not had a well-funded way of fighting back in a category that is basically as important and frankly, more important than social media.

So I think if you take an asset like this private, it allows you to take your time to clean up the OpEx model, figure out who does what, be able to use the best of all these next-gen tools,

and then be able to find ways of finding distribution outside the scope of Xbox and PlayStation so that you can take more of your share.

If you do those things, this is a multi hundred billion dollar asset.

And in that, I think it could be just an enormous win.

So I think it's very smart.

What's the bear case?

I think the bear case is extending a theme that I've talked about here a few times, which is I think the value of patents and by extension, IP and copyrights are going to go away.

And in that, there's going to be a spectrum where certain content IP holders lose and other ones win.

I think gaming is on the winning side, to be honest.

And I think content studios in general, like traditional content, the Disney's, the Hulu's, the Netflix's are on the losing side.

But the bear case would be that these tool chains

allow the number of games to be built to increase by two, three, four orders of magnitude, and that they are distributed by other places like the social media sites.

I just think that that's a pretty low probability.

So on balance, I think that Jared and Egon did a killer deal.