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Hi everyone - my podcast episodes this week looked at different frontiers in gaming...the economy of digital-only designer clothing for online avatars and social gaming startup Artie's push to create a new wave of social-native instant games.
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Selling Digital Fashion for Avatars
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The fashion industry is moving into the virtual world, with a growing economy of digital clothing to be bought and worn by our avatars on social platforms, in games, in VR, and more. Adriana Hoppenbrouwer is at the forefront of this as a Co-Founder & Commercial Director at The Fabricant, an Amsterdam-based digital fashion house.
The Fabricant sells digital-only clothing designed both in-house and in partnership with brands like Adidas, Off White, Rag & Bone and more. She spoke about what it means to own and wear digital clothing, the 4 different segments of customers, partnerships with gaming companies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Listen: Apple | Spotify
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Enabling the Next Wave of Social Games
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Artie founder & CEO Ryan Horrigan talked about his company's platform for creating multiplayer games that can be shared and played with just a link on social media, without having to download an app.
By bypassing the app stores and platform-specific restrictions and supporting games developed in Unity instead of HTML5, Artie aims unlock a new wave of gaming with friends on social media and more profitability for game developers (lower platform fees, lower CAC).
Listen: Apple | Spotify
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Other things that caught my interest...
The quest toward AR headsets for consumers got a boost with Niantic's entry into building its own AR headsets, plus reports of Snap's new Spectacles to be revealed in May and Apple's initial promo materials for WWDC all featuring people wearing glasses, suggesting a big update on AR hardware development.
The US Supreme Court cleared the way today for the FCC to lift longstanding media ownership regulations that restrict how many TV stations, radio stations, and/or newspapers any one entity can control in the same local market. (link)
The Athletic and Axios were revealed to be in merger talks, with the aim of creating a new publishing group that goes public via SPAC and acquires other premium brands. (link)
TechCrunch published a 4-part deep dive on the interactive fitness startup Tonal, which matches a subscription to video workouts with an at-home, wall-mounted workout device than feeds data to personalize the workouts in real-time. Tonal announced $250M in new funding this week at a $1.6B valuation. (link)
Spotify joined the list of big tech companies launching social audio apps to compete with Clubhouse (as expected). (link)
The latest big SPAC in entertainment is by Daniel Leff and Edgar Bronfman Jr. (co-founders of Waverly Capital), raising $300M. (link)
Congrats to Mikael Cho @ Unsplash, the leading free stock image site, which announced their acquisition by Getty Images. Mikael talked about their path to discovering an alternative business model for stock imagery back in July on the Monetizing Media podcast.
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