Disney has organically grown over the better part of a century. VC funding is predicated on way higher growth rates.

Look at any movie studio, Disney, HBO, etc and you'll find this same story repeated time and time again. Every one of them grew at much slower growth rates. There was no 10x'ing of revenue in a few years (when in the billions).

Even outliers like Pixar existed for 20 years before becoming a significcant component of Disney.

Book publishing? Same deal.

No original content business has followed a VC growth trajectory like tech companies have. Not one. You might be tempted to argue Netflix has but Netflix has taken on a ton of debt and raised a ton of VC funding and used their profits to throw money at this problem with mixed results.

But you're just mapping the funders/producers/etc in a way that happens to support your narrative. Disney and HBO aren't startups or even young companies and lots of things in the 'content business' are funded and developed in ways that's quite similar to the way VC funding works.

It's a relevant mapping for a comparison to Niantic. It's not just a convenient one. "Turn Niantic into Disney (or even EA, if you prefer) in the span of 10 years" is a bad bet for a VC. The argument here is that you can't simply scale the effort to the next hit(s).

"Turn this handful of people into the next Niantic" is a far better bet, but it's not relevant since Niantic was already there! That's the similarity to Hollywood - "let's make a bunch of movies or a bunch of pilots and see which one is the moneymaker." But not many of the production companies behind those shows or movies have gotten 10x more profitable in the future by scaling horizontally.

Niantic is too afraid to move fast and break things, as a famous robot once put it. They started with an interactive game that included location based chat and ultimately even made way for the ability to track players actions on an intel map. They then immediately became afraid of the implications of their own creation and have spent the last 10 years backtracking. Pokemon Go never had a chat. They imposed all manner of restrictions to try to stop people from playing while driving, and, in doing so, also basically hobbled players who use bicycles (because of speed constraints). Harry Potter...well, they handed far too much control to WB, who didn't know the first thing about this sort of game design, and got left with a mess nobody wanted to play. And then there's Pikmin, which I frankly was excited for when I heard it announced, as the console games were a pretty neat concept that I didn't think got nearly the attention they deserved. There's almost no game whatsoever. Next to ZERO interaction with other players (fine...you can see flowers they plant). It's a glorified pedometer app.

I'm not sure if it's an overly cautious legal team they're dealing with or what, but someone should remind John Hanke that start ups don't break through by playing it safe. And to boot, casual players aren't the ones that dump money into games. Maybe they need to add age verification in to satisfy the lawyers before making a game that's actually fun to play, but this backing away from doing what they're in the business of doing is sad to watch and frankly pretty pathetic.

The argument is more general than that, though, from the topcomment - "The VC funding model just isn't appropriate for game studios. I'll go even further and extend that to any content business."

That seems obviously not right? If anything, the model in 'content' predates the technology VC business.