Edited excerpts:
Breana Teubner, Venture Partner at Alante Capital
I started my career working in Washington, DC and politics with senators and CEOs. I restructured companies as a consultant in New York and then have been out in Silicon Valley working on building tech companies. Gaming for me was one of the harder places to be heard as a woman from an industry standpoint. So that's been a huge part of my own development.
We have to look at the facts and to me this is what's pretty exciting. The gaming industry, when you look at who plays in the market, about 30% of gamers play on consoles. So that's your joysticks and your console in your home. About 20% play on PC, but 50% play on mobile, and it's the fastest growing channel for gaming. They're really exciting. Part of that is that of that 50% of mobile, 51% are women playing games.
Benish Shah, VP Marketing at Stardust
A part of the issue in these industries is that a very vocal minority tends to be men, and when women do speak up or make their presence known, it can often be shut down in a very harsh way, in both the building the game side as well as the game playing side. When you have women historically in any industry that are good at what they do, when they're vocal and they have any form of opinion they become very visible targets and they often end up leaving those spaces because nobody wants to be targeted. I think we're seeing that to some degree in Web3 as well because you're going to have the same people who built legacy come in and build new. If we want to change that in this space, I think we need to start having conversations around helping people comprehend how to work with women rather than having conversations with women on how to speak better and communicate better.
Emily Wang, Managing Director LionTree and Griffin Gaming Partners
There is this common misconception that gamers skew heavily male versus when in actuality it's just about 50/50. So across platforms it's 52% male, 48% female. You can move the percentage point depending on what study you're looking at, but it's overwhelmingly at parity in terms of the percentage of consumers. I think it's a problem in gaming in terms of representation as well as consumption. Women oftentimes get bullied in games and often choose male screennames in order to not be targeted. We also all know the stats about venture in general, and gaming venture doesn't tend to be any better. Only 3% of all venture funding goes to companies with female founders, and that number gets a little bit better when you expand the scope to include female co-founders who have male co-founders. But if you think about it, being intentional about funding female founders isn't just the right thing to do in industries like gaming. Investors are really leaving money on the table to not have a significant stake in the ground when it comes to content that's geared toward half the market, which is women.
Breana Teubner, Venture Partner at Alante Capital
What clicked for me in a major way is that gaming is not a vertical industry, it's a horizontal industry. We're going to see tons of opportunities coming directly to consumers. I'm currently a venture partner at Alante Capital. We are very niche, which is exciting. We focus on fashion tech with an impact lens. I'm thinking everyday and talking to companies that are building around this immersive tech and gaming and blockchain and thinking how can this make the world a better place, whether that's from a social impact and a climate lens, and there's so much opportunity.
One of the key pieces of advice I give companies, or even those here listening is If you don't have somebody in your marketing department that understands and has worked in game mechanics and building game mechanics, you're already behind. And I'll say the same thing on the gaming side if you don't have people who have built for mass consumer audiences, whether that's IRL product or marketing campaigns, you're already behind. So I think we're at phase one right now, which is really a talent exchange and that's easy, right, that's an easy first step for anyone on this call to take and and I think that's what we're going to see over the next six months.
Emily Wang, Managing Director LionTree and Griffin Gaming Partners
The gaming market size is obviously huge, $200 billion. The film, radio and TV industry that's been around for much longer is at $400 billion. But the interesting thing when you put the industry side by side is that gaming sees 15 times the amount of private capital raise activity and three times the amount of M&A activity. And the reason is that on the investing side, games, if they succeed, have a great opportunity for near-term cash flow, long-term cash flow and they also lead innovation that can be applied across technologies.
Media and entertainment are now looking at gaming more broadly. Netflix for example, we sold a company called Next Games to them and Netflix is going into a foray into games in order to increase retention and engagement on their platform. They feel like maybe they've tapped out in certain areas in terms of retention through their subscribers and gaming is an excellent way to get people to be able to spend more time on the platform.
That's why I went into gaming and Web3 as a space and I also did just for the representation. As we were talking about, in order to have people understand the ways women communicate, it requires education and it also requires just representation. I, for example, have seen several games that are focused on emotional wellness that I take a strong interest in and my male counterparts more naturally have not yet. And so I'm glad to be able to be there to take these meetings with female founders and to know the stats like women are more likely to forecast their financials conservatively. I know there is bias, that's subconscious bias, when I'm approaching these conversations. I went into the space for the economic opportunity as an investor and also it's to better bolster the representation of the industry.
For more tips and insights, listen to the full conversation with Breana, Emiy and Benish here
This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
