

Who's exhibiting at huge PAX East gaming expo -- and who isn't - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/03/25/the-games-begin-at-pax-east-a-seattle-transplant-uniting-gamers-and-developers/

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johnyzee
Penny Arcade is an awesome example of somebody succeeding just by doing what
they enjoy and giving a damn about "monetization" and "business models". They
really make you wonder if traditional business has it all backwards.

Jerry Holkins (Tycho) is also quite possibly the most entertaining writer on
the internet. I can't even read his stuff at work for fear of causing a scene.

~~~
njl
Penny Arcade is a fascinating example of what I think of as a common pattern
in creative industries... You get a creative who is amazingly talented and
makes stuff that people just want; this person has no or rudimentary business
skills. The creative partners with somebody else who understands the business
and deeply believes in the creative. The parter provides the structure to make
that creative successful.

The obvious example is Walt and Roy Disney. Walt would have been next to
nothing if it wasn't for his brother. Roy was brilliant at figuring out how to
pay for his brother's ideas. There are a few examples in the world of fashion,
genius designers who are paired with a merchandising expert. With Penny
Arcade, Jerry and Mike accidentally sold off the rights to their work for
short money, and were generally stumbling along. Robert Khoo was just
graduating from an MBA program. As I understand it, he walked in and said, "I
love you guys. Now I'll handle the money." It's worked out amazingly, to
everyone's enormous benefit.

In my head, there's some sort of way to scale all this. I wrote a semi-
coherent post back in January on my blog, trying to explain it to myself.
<http://www.njl.us/2010/01/new-old-business-model.html>

Basically, I think there is room for a media conglomerate that's about playing
the Robert Khoo/Roy Disney roll for all sorts of talented creatives. Scale up
a support system that lets folks develop their own little independent brand on
the Internet, but then provides them with pipelines for merchandising,
advertising sales, and all the administrative crap involved in actually
running a real business.

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windsurfer
Is anyone at HN going to PAX?

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sdevlin
I'm going with a group of old friends. Unfortunately, I couldn't get tomorrow
off, so I'm going to miss most/all of Friday's stuff.

Still, I'm really excited. This is my first time going, but one of my friends
has been before, and he speaks really highly of the experience.

