Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway State of Play: The Video Game Industry — with Joost van Dreunen About this episode In this special episode of The Prof G Pod’s Office Hours, we speak with Joost van Dreunen, a professor at NYU Stern, and the author of One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games.
Joost breaks down the state of play in the video game industry, including the major players and platforms, and the latest around Activision Blizzard and Microsoft. Follow Joost on Twitter, @joosterizer
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:56 Scott Galloway? Welcome to a special episode of the PropG Pod's Office Hours. In today's episode, we speak with Yoss Van Druin and my colleague at NYU Stern and the author of "One Up: Creativity Competition and the Global Business of Video Games." Yoss breaks down the state of play in the video game industry, including the major players and platforms, and the latest around Activision, Blizzard, and Microsoft. As always, if you'd like to submit a question to the pod, please send a voice recording to [email protected] . Again, that's [email protected] .
1:32 Scott Galloway? Yoss, where does this podcast find you?
1:34 Speaker 01 Finds me in Brooklyn.
1:36 Scott Galloway? Let's bust right into it. Give us the state of play in the gaming industry, a $300 billion industry. I didn't even realize it was that big. What has happened since we last spoke to you 12 or 18 months ago?
1:48 Speaker 01 It's a good question. The early pandemic got everybody excited about games, everybody eager to get out of their own mind and out of their, I guess, domestic situation, family. They went online, started playing. So all boats went up, to put it simply. But since then, it's kind of come down substantially. Simply in numeric terms, North American game makers, after initially going up about 35% in total market cap in the first year of the pandemic, have since then dropped to about half of what it was at the beginning of 2020 compared to the S and P 500, which has, of course, recovered mostly since then. So what was really like a big moment for gaming has kind of subsided and cooled. There's been this... You know, incredible momentum in terms of
2:32 Speaker 01 demand outstripping supply and publishers being unable to to catch up. But as a result, a lot of new companies have entered into the fray. So there's been a lot of consolidation. There's been a lot of investments. There's been a lot of expansion into different categories. And so while the industry overall is cooled a little bit, at the same time, I think it's now a mainstream form of entertainment and has cemented its position in a sort of broader cultural sense.
2:57 Scott Galloway? So let's take a step back. That $300 billion number is staggering. I think total domestic box office is $10 billion and we are something around $10 billion and we obsess over that. And the video gaming industry is 30 times that, a third of a trillion dollars. Can you break down the components of that $300 billion? Who's making the money here? How does it how does it disarticulate?
3:19 Speaker 01 What's happened over the last decade or so has been this shift in power away from game makers towards the platform holders. Over the course of a decade, you see companies like Apple, Sony, Microsoft really gaining a lot of ground, historically relying on, you know, their own ability to, of course, convince publishers to put games in their platforms. They've now become so large that they set the tone in many ways. Of course, you couple that with like the abundance of cheap capital, the necessity for these game makers to reach audiences and it gives them incredible position. So most of the money still goes to game publishers,
4:02 Speaker 01 but the market power that's increasing is on the platform side. So that's that's really one major takeaway immediately.
4:09 Scott Galloway? And break down the platforms, the biggest ones, and sort of give a little color on each in terms of market momentum or lack thereof.
4:17 Speaker 01 When it comes to the platforms, you see mobile finally having a harder time than it did before. Uh, mobile gaming after this incredible run uh right around two thousand nine. But it started all the way to a few years ago, it started to level off a little bit. Mostly by its own flaws, uh because of its own greed, I would say, uh, you know. Apple making it harder for game publishers to target people and to, you know, acquire users. Has made things that much more expensive and so it starts to subside a little bit. The efficiency uh starts to evaporate a little bit out of the market model. Console at the beginning of the pandemic came out with a new generation, right? So we had the PlayStation five and we had new to Xbox Series X and S.
5:02 Speaker 01 That gave a huge push into, you know, this, this whole new ninth category, ninth generation of hardware. That subsided out a little bit too, like that, that moment's gone. We're, we're entering the second half of that hardware cycle, so that subsides a little bit. And then went on the PC side, while that's been going really well. You know, overall spending, you know, the time that we do in online worlds has become somewhat eclipsed with, you know, going back outside and, and, and, and just being in a normal, social, in-person setting.
5:32 Scott Galloway? You, you said in the Wall Street Journal that, open quote, "We'll see more blockbuster releases, but innovation and novel experiences are likely, are not likely to come from the legacy publishers. Everyone's becoming risk averse." Say more about this.
5:46 Speaker 01 The response of the industry to the pandemic uh was very self-serving, but they were also uh on the back foot, right? Demand vastly outstripped their ability to supply. And as a result, they started to beef up their, their production pipes. Because this glut of content that's now hitting the market, what you see is this return to just uh consolidation and holding on to IP-based strategies. As a result, you know, uh, you just see companies that want to buy other companies and just eliminate any of the risk out of it, because uh that's not the business they're in. They're seeing the increasing cost of marketing, they're seeing the challenges with distribution. And just discovery on each of these different categories of platforms. And as a result, I just want to go with what works.
6:31 Speaker 01 And so you see sequels across the board, right? So the success of Activision Blizzard during its earnings last quarter was really attributed to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. You know, that's a title that's been going on for a long time. You see IP that works really well for a lot of players. Harry Potter Hogwarts Legacy, 15 million copies sold, a billion dollars in sales. So that's all very tried and true intellectual property. And those are all very risk averse strategies and we're going to see more of those.
7:04 Scott Galloway? With respect to Microsoft and Activision, you wrote a post called "Activision's Death by 418 Cuts." Walk us through what you meant by that.
7:12 Speaker 01 The arguments by the CMA and by the FTC against the acquisition of Activision Blizzard has long centered on this notion that Activision Blizzard publishes Call of Duty. Call of Duty is this shooter title that is the most popular shooter titled in the console space. And giving one console manufacturer, Microsoft, ownership completely over this franchise would have a huge disadvantage in the space, particularly for Sony. And that's true, right? If Microsoft owns that franchise and if they want to, they can totally make life hard for Sony. That's not the point I would argue. What I would argue is that that became sort of the one thing that everybody focused on, right?
7:56 Speaker 01 And so the regulators, they looked at this and say, okay, well, should we do this? And over time, then they start to change their opinion, right? The FTC did the same thing, but the increasingly opaque policy environment in which large mergers take place. And this is something that's coming both from the people in favor of mergers and the people not in favor of mergers. The FTC, for instance, has been, under the leadership of Lina Khan, have been making a lot of progress in terms of cutting through the deadwood. And so, you know, you see these different ways that regulators are responding to large transactions and saying, "We need to make this simpler, more transparent." Because we need to get a handle on these things.
8:38 Speaker 01 What happened in the UK with the competition of markets authority is that they released this impenetrable document explaining how they think they see the market, clearly displaying a lack of understanding of its fundamentals, and then issuing a decision accordingly. So in my mind, what needs to happen for all these large mergers, whether they have merit or not, to be evaluated properly is also a simplification of the policymaking process around it.
9:09 Scott Galloway? Also, it appears that aren't the biggest players or a real formidable competitor, Chinese-owned companies, it seems as if you're sort of, I don't want to say, it feels like we're shooting ourselves a bit in the foot in the West, no?
9:23 Speaker 01 Agreed. The absence in these conversations of a discussion around, say, Tencent or NetEase, I think, speaks volumes with regards to the, let's call it the width of the horizon that we're using here. Tencent is by far the largest game company in the world, $33 billion globally per year. It is, of course, deeply rooted in China and as a consequence has deep relationships with the Chinese government. And the Chinese government has been both an accelerant or an expediter of its ambitions as well as a great limiter. In the last few years, we have these instances where Tencent is constantly curtailed by the Chinese government because of all these rules and regulations.
10:06 Speaker 01 You cannot in China as a miner play more than a few hours a week of video games because they consider it a gateway to gambling. And so it's heavily regulated. And so that is a very prosperous market that Tencent now can't access because of the government there. Naturally, they look to developing a global strategy. They've been buying up bits and pieces of Ubisoft. They have a bunch of different positions in a wide range of companies like Epic Games and so on, these mega companies that are really transformative. And they're looking to move into the European and the North America market in a big way. They can do a lot in Europe and North America what the, let's say, domestic platform holders
10:51 Speaker 01 are not allowed to do, right? Satya Nadella says it perhaps in a slightly different version thereof. It's very interesting to see that Sony gets such a prevalent role. In the conversation about what Microsoft can and cannot own, yet somehow Microsoft has very little market share in Japan, where Sony is from, of course. So you start to see this sort of large global dynamic between these platform holders and these companies. And perhaps maybe shooting yourself in the foot is a little stronger, but it's like you are discouraging and disincentivizing these companies from really moving into a competitive space.
11:27 Scott Galloway? So let's speak specifically about Sony. In another newsletter you wrote, "Different from Microsoft, which develops operating and application software, and Nintendo, which considers itself a toy maker, Sony has long focused on building high-quality media devices." What did you mean by that?
11:42 Speaker 01 So the DNA of a company like Sony historically comes from consumer electronics. They make boxes, headphones, microphones, TV sets, audio equipment. And in addition to that, they have developed over the years this incredible content library across music, across film and video games, so that you will have something to do and something to see and something to listen to when you buy their equipment. So it's a, those are all complementary business units for them. Over time, of course, the industry has shifted a little bit. They too are now realizing that the value of services and the value of intellectual property far exceeds their ability to manufacture new cool devices, right?
12:25 Speaker 01 That never-ending hunt for the new Walkman that made them famous in the early days, you know, eventually is going to run out of steam and they have to, they've started to focus more on becoming a media empire of sorts. But that's a very different proposition than, say, Microsoft, which is building data centers around the world with its Azure technology and trying to figure out how to pipe, you know, its Game Pass offering effectively to all these different countries. So it's a very different approach where, you know, a consumer electronics company like Sony or like Apple, for that matter, they love this idea of walled gardens, whereas perhaps a software platform is more in the business of breaking some of those walls down and making things accessible and available to everybody out there that wants to play.
13:08 Speaker 01 The final thought on that is, very simply put, and just to give you the sense of it, when Fortnite really reached its pinnacle, right at the start of the pandemic. Large platforms were all collaborating so that anybody on any platform could play against anybody else in the Fortnite universe. Sony was one of the last holdouts. Sony is also one of the companies that has the least developed multiplayer components. They acquired Bungie recently, really, you know, the subsidiary to develop their multiplayer components and capabilities. So they're really sort of in an isolated walled garden mindset still because they're a consumer electronics firm as opposed to an operating system developer or software company at large.
13:50 Scott Galloway? So I wanted some exposure to the space, so I bought some secondary shares in Epic, just as a means of disclosure, but give us your thoughts on Epic.
14:00 Speaker 01 Good for you, by the way. That's a good, that's a good investment. Epic is a privately held company that makes both games as well as the software that makes games called the Unreal Engine. And then they have the Epic Game Store. So the most popular and most well-known is of course Fortnite. This massive universe makes $5 billion a year, has all these different users. And that is, I think in many ways, the shape of things to come. Playing so often, particularly playing online as we learned during the pandemic, is mostly an excuse to hang out with other people. You don't really go for the informational value and it's not really a ritual so much as just a socialization, right? It's a playground
14:44 Speaker 01 that's just in the cloud or somewhere online that you can visit and that's where your friends are. And that's slowly developed over the years. And I think Fortnite is really that, that sort of forum, that, that online environment where we can hang out and just do goofy stuff and have a good time. Its ability then to sell its Unreal Engine, and it's now in its fifth iteration, its fifth version, that's really the big play for them. They're trying to get their software technology into not just gaming, but also in the film industry where you see the Mandalorian being shot against the background of, you know, landscapes rendered by the Unreal Engine. And that's for Epic, a really good way to get into that broader universe of saying, you know, what we can do today with this software creation engine
15:28 Speaker 01 that they have with the Unreal Engine, that's a really important part of their strategy because then they can be that middleware engine, that middleware supplier. And then finally, the Epic Game Store, you know, they, and I know you know this well. They've been fighting tooth and nail against Apple because of the Apple tax, because of the App Store costs involved, and they argue that that's not fair. They've done that not just with Apple. Previously, they did it with a company called Valve, which is a digital PC distributor, very famous, very well-known, also very private. And they had to come down with their percentages because Epic started making a lot of noise. So that was really the pretext to the lawsuit with Apple, as I see it.
16:10 Speaker 01 They're offering their titles and the developers on their platform much lower percentages. And that's going rather well. It's unclear if that's going to be the ultimate king of the hill, but it certainly gives these incumbent distribution platforms a run for their money. So they're disruptive, they have really popular content, and they have the tools and the bandwidth or the financial runway to see this through. So I think your investment is well worth it in that one.
16:38 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
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18:00 Scott Galloway? So virtual reality, I know that's a pretty broad term, but it strikes me, and I have some confirmation bias here because I predicted that VR was going to be this enormous thud. But it feels like headsets, as it relates to VR, have been a disappointment. What are your thoughts?
18:17 Speaker 01 So when it comes to the devices that we use to access virtual reality, I think the last 30, 40 years have been a lot of borrowing from the future, but under-delivering in the present. By which I really mean, you know, there's an extensive history going all the way back to the Nintendo Virtual Boy where the device itself is wildly underwhelming. The content library that we find or the usefulness and applications are also widely underwhelming. And as a result, people sort of see this as a nice to have and were always expected and asked to believe in this future that's clearly not coming anytime soon.
18:57 Speaker 01 So when it comes to devices, a validation, of course, that everybody's been waiting for is Apple's announcement around the Vision Pro. Now that we see, you know, what Team Tim Cook has cooked up for us, we end up with this glass shell with lots of expensive cameras in it, you know, allowing for the small price of $15,000 of family four to watch a movie together in VR. And so in many ways, you know, it seems like that is a little disconnected of what would be, in my mind, a more practical use case. I have a two-year-old and a 10-year-old at home. They would break this within minutes of me strapping it to any of their, either of their foreheads or cover it at least with peanut butter.
19:40 Speaker 01 And so it just seems kind of designed out of touch with what an average person would use these things for. In the absence of a clear user solution. While I'm excited about the virtualization of media and content where we can build more immersive experiences, the way that a lot of these tech companies tend to think about it is in line with their own interests. Their corporate interests are such that they must have a device where they can dominate. Facebook at the time got into this by buying Oculus for $2 billion because they did not want to miss out on another platform transition. They had missed out on mobile and now they really want to be into the VR space. And so Mark Zuckerberg whips out a big checkbook and off he goes.
20:23 Speaker 01 I think Tim Cook might be similarly motivated, at least in part, to not be the last one left behind when Apple doesn't really have a clear strategy around this budding new technology. And so when it comes to this promise of virtual reality, I'm all in it for I want to live in that future, but so far they've delivered on none of it. That's exciting. And so that's, I think, an ongoing skepticism that's hard to get rid of.
20:50 Scott Galloway? Any thoughts on the intersection, or is there any, between Web 3 and the gaming industry?
20:55 Speaker 01 Oh, many. A decade ago, people were very afraid of free-to-play economics, giving your game away for free, only to then become successful financially and in other ways. That was out of reach for everybody, right? That didn't exist. And now that's by far the most dominant revenue model. When it comes to things like cryptocurrency, I do think that there has been a lot of mistakes in that space. I think a lot of game companies have made what they call the financialization of fun. They've committed that and it's terrible and a lot of the gameplay is awful. The idea that you would have some sub-layer of super fans that don't just want to play the game, but they want to have easier access, they want to have a digital wallet that connects them to multiple things.
21:40 Speaker 01 And as they leave a game, they can take everything they've accumulated inside the game with them. I think that there is a case to be made for that. But so far, most of the intentions behind it seems to have been funded by people in finance as opposed to game makers. Never mind that the blockchain technology is still very rudimentary and innovative. Efficient. My hope and some of the hopeful things that I see in the horizon is game makers like NEXON, which is a big deal in Korea, a $10 billion company in Korea that makes MapleStory and other games. They are now transitioning some of their IP onto the blockchain CCP, the maker of Eve Online, one of the longest standing subscription based sci fi games out there, sort of a cooler version of World of Warcraft,
22:26 Speaker 01 if you will. They just raised $40 billion to build a blockchain based game. Sony applied for a patent to accommodate NFTs and digital collectibles in its ecosystem. And so I start to see these larger companies and these companies with some some miles on their on their meter that could possibly push this into a better space. So I continue to be optimistic about it, but there's been a lot of mistakes around this, right? Gaming and crypto, they have a natural intersection, I think. But, you know, we need better captains on these boats.
22:56 Scott Galloway? And if you had to make any predictions about the remainder of 2023 in the industry, what do you see happening?
23:01 Speaker 01 The prediction for 2023 will be continued consolidation. One of the big questions that has arisen from that is as companies like Embracer, which is now the largest by market cap European game publisher, worth about $11 billion. You know, this is basically amalgamation of like 250 different studios and subsidiaries, funded to no insignificant degree by Saudi investment money. You have to start thinking a little bit like, okay, all this consolidation is going to move the gravity point in the industry, right? Where historically you see Japan and North America are kind of competing, and then Europe being a distant third, and everything else is sort of out of reach.
23:46 Speaker 01 Now we start to see so much money coming into the ecosystem because gaming is an industry that doesn't really require a lot of big industry. You don't need to have a lot of factories to set it up. All you need is just a pipeline and a bunch of clever people making games. So if you want to set that up in Saudi Arabia, you can totally do that. It's going to change the politics a little bit though, right? In the same way that the Chinese companies Ten years ago, we're relatively insignificant and are now dominating the space. You know, you start to see this shift in geopolitical relevance. And I think consolidation will be a major topic for the remainder of the year. Who owns who and who gets to tell them where they set up their studios?
24:26 Speaker 01 And and do you really want to have your children play games that are made in a country where they shoot and execute journalists? You know, and is that a fair question to ask? So I think that larger conversation will kind of trickle down in the creative agendas. So that's one thing that I I'm excited to have that conversation because it's kind of puts games on a higher profile. And that's something that we should be talking about. And then, of course, it's business as usual, right? So we have, you know, Activision, we have Take-Two. And Electronic Arts, they are going through the next iterations of their existing franchises. Are they continuing to do well or we're going to start to see them slow down? The last two quarters have been a little like schlumpy, except for Activision.
25:10 Speaker 01 And so I suspect that for the remainder of the year, it will be soft. But the upside will be for those companies that by the end of this year and starting next year will have a solid online presence and and an active multiplayer community centered around them. So so those are two of the main trends, I think.
25:28 Scott Galloway? Do you see Saudi money the same way it's kind of come into large hotel brands or even football leagues? Do you see it? And are they about to become the biggest investors in gaming and then move headquarters to Riyadh?
25:43 Speaker 01 The is it the Public Investment Fund in Saudi Arabia is?
25:46 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
25:46 Speaker 01 PIF is already the largest non-domestic shareholder in Nintendo. Owns billions of dollars of Activision. I mean, there's a whole list on their portfolio. Some of it is through their subsidiary, Savvy, which is the more experimental group, of course. But they've taken both positions in and public equity as well as privately held companies. That's going to, I think, ultimately make people aware that this is now the new regime in charge, right? It that's where the money comes from. We we see, for instance, over the last 10 years, companies desperate to enter the Chinese market because it came online because it's so many people. You see Activision collaborating with its biggest competitor Tencent.
26:29 Speaker 01 For half of what it could make in China because it has to work with a local partner and it has to change a lot of aspects of its games. It can't have skeletons and like sort of like these weird regulatory aspects of it. But they do so because they don't want to miss out on that market. And so if the money's there, they'll follow. But they're going to have to compromise or make compromises along the way. And I'm very curious to see who's going to make what compromise to get there.
26:54 Scott Galloway? And last question, Yost, what two or three players have the most wind in their sails versus those with the most wind in their face? Who's got good or poor momentum right now? Players, platforms, game makers, specific companies?
27:08 Speaker 01 In my mind, the companies that are poised to do well are the ones that can rely on extensive intellectual property. And that have over the last years, used a lot of access to cheap capital to build out their assets. A company that immediately comes to mind is Nintendo, which coming off of its billion dollar box office success with the Super Mario movie. Has also been building theme parks. And so they are clearly in the space where they are looking how to take their existing business of making games and game consoles. Into a much broader ecosystem of activities and experiences. People want to go see this. People are excited to go do sort of a real life Mario Kart thing in the, you know, with their friends and family.
27:51 Speaker 01 So I think that that is a company that has, you know, never mind that it's been around for a hundred and twenty five years or so. They have an extensive legacy when it comes to building contemporary and acute experiences that are interesting to people. Another one that has some upside in front of it is Sony in spite of this turmoil around everything that's happening with Microsoft acquiring. Activision and it claiming that that's somehow detrimental to its position in the market. Sony has a vast library across multiple categories, not just games, but also of course, music and film. You can see how they can leverage this in a massive way and build this out on all these different platforms.
28:33 Speaker 01 So I believe that they are going to transition away a little bit from trying to reinvent the Walkman to becoming. Something that's a little bit more focused on, you know, that's more akin to a media empire, where they take their intellectual property and just spread it across different aspects of it. And don't forget also that they also are the leader when it comes to Japanese animation, like anime and manga, very strongly grown categories that are very popular with younger audiences. Sony plays a significant role in that market as well. So they have all the parts and pieces to really do well for themselves if they can let go of, you know, trying to tether themselves to the hardware too much. So those are sort of the two examples of media companies or entertainment companies with both a hardware and a software component.
29:18 Speaker 01 When it comes to platforms, I think, you know, the economics still apply where the winner takes most, right? Apple and Google, they're sitting on the top of the food chain. They're going to continue to grow, they're going to continue to expand because there's nowhere else to go for companies. The only thing that's really going to diminish their ability to do well is, you know, maybe a more competitive plugin by way of, say, Microsoft getting access to mobiles through the Activision acquisition. Maybe regulators in the EU can give a few of them a haircut by charging them maybe a little bit more, just a few billion, a few million dollars in fees and raise that to like three commerce and beyond, to really make them feel like, hey, look, you have to build these ecosystems less aggressively.
30:02 Speaker 01 And so the platforms will overall do well, but you can see a growing momentum towards people getting skeptical, where you have the academic literature just investigating very aggressively, like what's going on really? How does this impact labor? What does it mean when one platform holder controls most of the labor in a particular category, in a particular region, or even in a town, right? So those are some of the questions that are emerging and it's going to be incredibly difficult to write policy for those kinds of companies, purely because they operate as, you know, nation-states more than anything else. So platforms do well, and then it's, when it comes to the losers... Sad to report that that's going to be a lot of European publishers,
30:43 Speaker 01 particularly Embracer, which sits at the top of the food chain in Europe, quickly accumulated over 200 or so different projects by acquiring all these different studios. And now it's at this moment where its debt structure is starting to collapse on top of itself. It can no longer afford to not do really good deals. They missed out on a $2 billion arrangement right before earnings had to be reported. And so they're coming up short and their share price started to tank. They're going to start running out of runway because their acquisitive strategy is sort of coming to a natural conclusion. And now suddenly we have to start cutting back on resources and logistics and infrastructure. I think it's going to not just sour the sentiment around Embracer as a company.
31:27 Speaker 01 It's going to also have an impact on the European game development market, where all these people will now be let go. There's going to be a souring of investors. And so they're not going to invest in the startups. The VCs are going to be a lot more hesitant for this because there is not a natural path. And that's too bad because I really believe that what the European market has shown historically in games, but also in other cultural industries, that they have a unique voice, that they have something to show that we can't get anywhere else. And so even CD Projekt Red, there's a lot of upsides to be had, but they're having an increasingly difficult time. And that kind of is unfortunately a sad part of all this. I'm hoping they recover, but likely they're going to end up on the chopping block and get sold for parts and pieces here and there.
32:12 Speaker 01 So the Europeans will be the losers in this. The North American companies will do well. And particularly the Asian companies like Sony, Nintendo and the Tencent of the world, they'll continue to prosper as well.
32:25 Scott Galloway? Joost Sandrunen teaches at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the author of "One Up: Creativity Competition and the Global Business of Video Games." Previously, Joost was co-founder and CEO of Super Data Research, a games market research firm which was acquired by Nielsen in 2018. Joost also serves as a startup advisor and investor and publishes a weekly newsletter on gaming tech and entertainment called Super Joost Playlist. He joins us from Brooklyn. Joost, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. Appreciate your time.
32:55 Speaker 01 Thank you. Thank you so much.
33:06 Scott Galloway? This episode was produced by Caroline Shageran. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.
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