Intellectual property

Lucasfilm sold to Disney yesterday for $4.05 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Zynga is valued at about $1.76 billion dollars as of close of the market today, or below their book value.

Zynga's thesis for its valuation was always that it had unlocked ways to attract and retain players for any game using its gamification strategies. That story held the promise of vaulting it to trading multiples above those of other gaming companies who had to depend on the usual gaming business model, a hit-driven model more akin to that of a Hollywood studio. In a hit-driven business, you're only as good as your next hit. Past performance is not weighted much in predicting future prospects.

But Lucasfilm's sale, at a price one could argue was a bargain for Disney, is a sign of one thing that Hollywood and other gaming companies have done that Zynga failed to do, and that is to build intellectual property value in the form of franchises and characters. I can't think of any Zynga game characters or narratives that offer any other potential revenue streams. Even Rovio has the characters from Angry Birds, and last I checked, their latest game Bad Piggies, centered around characters from their flagship Angry Birds franchise, was the top paid app in the iTunes App Store. Game franchises like Call of Duty or Madden Football can count on a loyal fan base for each new release, much like movie franchises like James Bond.

Lucasfilm hasn't put out a live action Star Wars film in years (a period that could be longer if you consider Episodes I-III to be more digital cartoons than live action), but the rights to license the Star Wars trademarks and characters continues to spin off cash. Those rights might be termed intangible assets, but the cash they generate is very real.

Sorry for the broken links

I just realized that for the past week or so, the Squarespace blog post editor has not been saving the hyperlinks I've inserted into my posts. Apologies for any clicks that just didn't lead anywhere. I submitted a ticket to Squarespace a few days ago and haven't heard back yet. In the meantime I've fixed all the broken links I've found.

Squarespace 6 has some positives, but it's not perfect. Among the issues that really bother me is the editor which you're forced to use to type and submit posts. It's buggy, has a bunch of layout issues, and for creating posts with a bunch of mixed media, forces you to build it in content blocks that feel way more complicated than just allowing users to submit an HTML post. Squarespace 6 doesn't allow posting via XML-RPC, so I can no longer use more user-friendly third-party blog editors to post.

User expectations are higher when we're paying.

I was Ayn Rand's Lover

It wasn’t easy being the lover of such an intellectual powerhouse. Sometimes I’d come in from a sock-hop or cross-country meet and she’d have that look in her eyes, that look that said she was about to give me a two-hour lecture on the power-grabbers and then throw me down on the couch and rape me until it became consensual. And I’d be like, “Ayn, look, I’d love to but I have Algebra—” at which time, because I’d rebuffed her, she’d correct my pronunciation of her name. She was always changing the way it was pronounced. Sometimes it rhymed with “line,” sometimes it was plain old “Ann,” sometimes it was “Ion,” and once, during a confusing period, she briefly became “Randy.” (That I didn’t get. But I knew better than to challenge her. You could get de-Objectified very quickly in those days.) Then she would rip the Algebra book from my hands and throw me across some Frank Lloyd Wright-looking piece of furniture, and we would take from each other the pleasure that is a human being’s right, the unapologetic gratification of one’s selfish, noble urges, a pleasure second only to the pleasure of recognizing that all your life you’d been fed a steady diet of lies from the wreckers who would reduce man to a mere beast sucking at the teat, thereby robbing him of the power of the work of his hands.

George Saunders in the New Yorker.  I don't usually read the fiction or humor pieces in each week's New Yorker, but when I do I read George Saunders.

I just assume everyone who reads my blog reads everything by Saunders, but if you haven't picked up any of his stuff, start with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. It's in my top 5 most life-changing short story collections.