a16z Partner Talks About Japanese Otaku Culture [Andreessen Horowitz]
Hello, this is Incompetent.
An interesting topic came up, so I'll leave it as a personal memo.
Robin Guo - Gaming Investment Partner at a16z
Waifus are eating the world. miHoYo made $3.8 billion in revenue last year (PocketGamer). This is almost half of Activision Blizzard's revenue. Here's why anime games and culture are on the rise.
1/ The Rise of Anime 69% of Gen Z watches anime, up from 57% of millennials and 23% of baby boomers. What was once a niche genre is now mainstream! It's no wonder miHoYo's motto is 'Tech Otakus Save the World'. Streaming is growing. Over half of Netflix subscribers watch anime on the platform, and Crunchyroll has grown its subscriber base 50x in the last decade to over 5 million. No longer do you have to wait for your favorite anime's neon fansubs to appear. And there's a very passionate fanbase here. There are many ways for fans to express their enthusiasm, and players and fans are loyal to the IP. The average Japanese otaku spends over $700 a year on anime-related merchandise.
2/ Gacha Games Anime fandom has transitioned into highly successful hero collector RPG games called gacha games. F/GO and Genshin Impact have sold billions of dollars, and Honkai: Star Rail, which debuted earlier this year, has already generated over $500 million in revenue. The core game is a fun combat/progression/collection loop, where the goal is to collect 5-star waifus/husbandos. Not only do they look the coolest, but they also provide the best stats for your team's abilities. You pull gacha to get your team and progress through the story. The general public might ask: why care so much about 2D sprites? The answer is for romance! Gacha games are inspired by JRPGs like Fire Emblem and visual novels. These are rich stories with appealing characters. Imagine being able to date Tony Stark, Batman, or Black Widow! Most importantly, it's the quality of the game and the IP itself. F/GO succeeded as a collectible RPG, offering decent depth and excellent IP on a new mobile platform. Meanwhile, miHoYo created a Zelda BotW that is fully cross-platform and live-operated. Some games overly monetize and introduce monetization elements with very low drop rates (<1%). Fortunately, miHoYo introduced a pity system and high acquisition rates as player-friendly elements.
3/ VTubing VTubing, a relatively niche genre that started with Hatsune Miku, has gone mainstream with affordable rigs, streaming platforms, and the creator economy. It's growing 500% year-over-year on Twitch! VTubers create face-tracking rigs, overlay anime characters, and sing, game, and chat as their characters. Several companies are involved in this emerging space, including VShojo, VStream, Hololive, and Nijisanji, with many streamers gaining prominence like Code Miko and Pekora.
I'm excited about the growth of this industry and look forward to increasing our investments. Several of our portfolio companies also operate in this space. If you want to make your anime dreams a reality, you should apply to SPEEDRUN.
The above content should not be considered investment advice. For more details, please see https://lnkd.in/gXunEWtw for details.
a16z, which people who like cryptocurrency may often see since 2020.
With the significant movement of its early 2010s investments, I believe it is an investment company currently on a roll.
Reprinted from Wikipedia below. Andreessen Horowitz
2009
In 2009, Andreessen Horowitz made two initial investments in business management SaaS developer Apptio[15] and Skype[16]. According to Horowitz, these investments were seen as risky by other industry experts who believed the companies would be hampered by ongoing intellectual property litigation and direct competitive attacks from Google and Apple. The firm's founders viewed the investments as successful after Skype was sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in May 2011.
2010-2011
In 2010, it led the Series A round for cloud company Okta, investing $10 million [17]. In 2011, Andreessen Horowitz invested $80 million in Twitter [4], becoming the first venture firm to hold all four of the most valuable private social media companies at the time (Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, and Zynga) [2]. Andreessen Horowitz has also invested in Airbnb, Lytro, Jawbone, Belly, Foursquare, Stripe, and other tech companies [18][19].
In past blog posts, I also touched upon anime and similar industries as promising growth sectors in Japan.
By the way, although the blog title is filled with greed, it's the same as an article by Jim Rogers of Global Macro Research. The content itself, contrary to the title, was relatively romantic, so it was an article I quite liked.
In a way, it satirizes those who work solely for money, and it feels like it guides you to do what you truly love to enrich your life.
How to Choose a Profession to Become Rich
>As for the remaining Japanese companies, Sony's camera business is strong due to its image sensors being used in the majority of smartphones in the world, and the gaming industry also has uniquely developed manga and anime industries.
Industries that have uniquely evolved are indeed very strong.
Recently, seeing things like parents being arrested in the US if their children are truant, South Korea being a complete academic meritocracy, and China being unknown, I was reminded that Japan is a country where truancy is possible, and it's strong in subcultures rather than growing primarily through the necessity of study.
I suppose the skills of those who studied for these subcultures are being utilized, so the balance between the two must not be broken.
This reminds me again of the words of Peter Thiel, the don of the PayPal Mafia.
>About Japan
Thiel made the following comments about Japan at the Roundtable 2020 by the Japan Association of Corporate Executives:
"Japan was perhaps the best-functioning society in the 20th century. Japan functioned so well that I believe it would be the only developed country that could continue to function even if all computers disappeared. However, if there had been an IT revolution at that time, it could have reached an even higher dimension."
"Around 2005, Japan was called a "frontrunner in challenges," but these issues are not unique to Japan; declining birthrates, aging populations, and fiscal problems are common to developed countries. Europe and the United States also have a deep-seated sense of stagnation. Compared to the US and Germany, Japan is handling these challenges well. Japan has many unique things, it protects its own culture, and it is preserved in a good way. I've come to think this is a valuable thing."
"Western societies have become too homogenized, and while homogenization increases efficiency, it decreases creativity. Japan has creativity."
Comments from a lecture at Roosevelt University (American Dream Reconsidered 2016) in 2016
"Japan has stopped imitating Western countries."
Since it's the place where you were born and raised, let's not just look for faults, but seek out the good things and live happily.
That's all for now.