Gamecraft

Bing Gordon -- legendary co-founder of EA and venture capitalist at Kleiner, Perkins -- stops by to talk to us about the new book he has written with his dauguter Chlöe: Everybody Wins. The book is a master class on gamification, with relevance to both a gaming and general business audience. Bing is our first-ever guest on the podcast, and it was an absolute delight to interview one of our game industry heroes.
Mitch and Blake have a wide-ranging, candid conversation with Bing about too many topics to list in these show notes. We talk about the big ideas in his book, and in the process discuss EA, Zynga, Duolingo, AI, the current state of the games business, and many, many other topics. Bing is a great raconteur, and he and Mitch have been colleagues, collaborators, and competitors across decades in both the games business and Silicon Valley venture capital, so they bring a unique context to the interview.
This one is a must-listen!

The "Second Tournament" begins with 4 tasty quarter-final matches. Mitch and Blake break down the Round of 32 and Round of 16, rate their recommendations from last episode, and then dive into the quarter-finals and trace the paths of the 8 teams competing for the Jules Rimet trophy. 
Then they look back at the trends they identified in the last episode, and talk about what changed in the knockout stage so far, particularly the officiating. They discuss the Balogan affair and what it says about FIFA, and briefly analyze the USMNT's embarrassing melt-down against Belgium.
They conclude with some overall thoughts about the tournament.

Mitch and Blake look back at the group stage and talk about the main themes from the tournament so far.
They review their picks for matches to watch from the last episode and what they got right and wrong.
Then they turn to the knockout stage and break down the road to the quarter-finals for each of the 8 mini-brackets, before walking through their picks for what to watch in the Round of 32.

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.