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The video game industry is by no means new to LA. Industry leaders like Activision and Riot Games have dominated the landscape for years, but a new movement around video game culture is reshaping LA’s tech landscape.
The easiest way to view a rising trend is to watch where investors put their money. Startups like Mobcrush, Seriously, Reload Studios, Nth Games, and Little Labs were all relatively unknown a year ago, but have collectively raised almost $50 million since May. Meanwhile, SGN raised $130 million from Netmarble and Machinima raised another $24 million.
Perhaps the most interesting factor of this recent funding surge is that many companies, including Mobcrush and Machinima, aren’t even producing games, but instead, creating platforms that feed off of gaming culture.
The success of Twitch over the past five years proved that people legitimately want to watch, follow, and interact with other gamers. That revelation has led to Mobcrush’s recently funded mobile viewing platform, AlphaDraft’s gaming fantasy platform, and even live events like Super League’s MineCraft National Championship in LA.
We sat down with SGN president Josh Yguado and MobCrush CEO Royce Disini to discuss the impact of the mobile gaming culture and why LA’s history of storytelling has created a thriving gaming ecosystem in Silicon Beach.
The mobile and social revolution
[ibimage==40103==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-left]“Gaming, as content, is moving towards mobile,” explained MobCrush CEO Royce Disini. “That means you’re democratizing access to gaming as entertainment in everyone’s pocket and it spans the demographics. By doing that you see growth and opportunities from a market perspective and that's probably why you're seeing these companies getting funded.”
While Disini believes online gaming's escape from its niche status allowed it to enter a more lucrative, all-inclusive market, Yguado argued that the players' ability to share and connect is the driving force behind the expanding industry.
“Social is a huge component of video games these days on all platforms, whether you’re playing on XBox, or iPhone, or on Facebook,” SGN President Josh Yguado said. “My cofounders Chris [DeWolfe] and Aber [Whitcomb] were the cofounders of MySpace and there are many other platforms like Snapchat in the history of LA tech where social is at the forefront. If you bring entertainment together with social, that’s a big part of what makes modern mobile games great.”
The role of LA storytelling
[ibimage==40104==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-left]“If you think about LA historically, we’re very strong in entertainment,” said Yguado, who spent time working at Fox, Viacom and Univision. “And video games, historically, were all about pushing the envelope with tech to make a game look more realistic with better graphics, but that has evolved into being about characters that are relatable and having a storytelling hook that pulls people in and gets them interested in coming back to the game multiple times a day. So the story telling, the animation, the art are things Los Angeles has always been known for so it's very easy for us to find writers and artists.”Both Yguado and Disini agreed that Los Angeles’ perfect storm of social, storytelling, and technological innovation has made it an important link to the nerve center of global gaming. While Asia and Scandinavia play a large role in the creation and usage of games, Los Angeles is clearly at the forefront of developing an industry around its blossoming culture.
“At the end of the day, media, when consumed, is actually about storytelling,” said Disini. “If you were to look at a venn diagram [for gaming], one side is the technology but the other side is entertainment and content creation.”
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