Eric Cohen-Peckham

Key data points from its S-1 filing help explain Unity’s ability to stay ahead of the curve.

Throughout this series on the rise of multiverse virtual worlds, I have outlined the collision of gaming and social media into a new multiverse era of social media within virtual worlds due to technological and cultural changes. The result will be a healthier ecosystem of social media than what currently…

Fictional portrayals of virtual worlds such as “Ready Player One” and “The Matrix” typically portray the physical and virtual worlds as distinct realms siloed from each other. Characters escape a dystopian, impoverished physical realm and enter a separate, utopian virtual realm in which they are wealthy and important. Our non-fictional…

The basis of the classic James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies” is an evil media mogul who instigates war between the U.K. and China because it will be great for TV ratings. There’s been a wake-up call recently that our most popular social networks have been indirectly designed to divide…

Thus far in this series we’ve outlined “multiverse” virtual worlds — a concept different from the metaverse — as the next stage of social media and what this future will look like. It begs the question though: if video games have been massively popular for many years, why hasn’t this…

Gaming and social media are on a collision course, the result of which will be mainstream popularity of virtual worlds primarily driven by user-generated content (UGC) and anchored in small groups and one-to-one interactions. Games targeting core gamers will remain a thriving market, and social apps centered on broadcasting content…

Even if you don’t play games, you have spent years of your life in one or more virtual worlds. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WeChat are lightweight versions of virtual worlds. They don’t offer terrain for avatars to explore, but they are neighborhoods within cyberspace where we…

Video games are only getting more popular. Roughly 2.5 billion people around the world played games last year, double the number of players in 2013. Gaming is a $149 billion industry, growing 7% year over year, with the U.S. as its largest market. In America, the average gamer is 33…

Following web forums, web platforms and mobile apps, we are entering a new stage of social media — the multiverse era — where the virtual worlds of games expand to become mainstream hubs for social interaction and entertainment. In a seven-part Extra Crunch series, we will explore why that is…

The deregulation of major U.S. industries like telecom and energy in the 1970s and 80s sparked competition that lowered consumer prices and drove product innovation between competitors. Europe, on the other hand, lagged behind with more expensive internet, phone plans, airline tickets, and more until around 2000 when a major…

What do BMW, Tencent, Pokémon Go creator Niantic, movie director Jon Favreau and construction giant Skanska have in common? They’re all using the same platform to create their products. Founded in a small Copenhagen apartment in 2004, Unity Technologies’ makes a game engine — a software platform for building video…

Kobalt Music Group is driving the music industry to provide more transparency and faster royalty payments to musicians and challenging the traditional record labels and publishers with its own alternative service offerings that don’t take ownership of copyrights. Competition and market size are headwinds in its future growth, however, and…

Streaming services have made music ubiquitous, driving more exploration by consumers who don’t have to pay for each song or album individually. Musicians are correspondingly able to find their own niche of fans scattered around the world. (This is the third installment of our EC-1 series on Kobalt Music Group…

Backed by over $200 million in VC funding, Kobalt is changing the way the music industry does business and putting more money into musicians’ pockets in the process. In Part I of this series, I walked through the company’s founding story and its overall structure. There are two core theses…

Music is the lifeblood for many of our lives, but that mellifluous sound emanating from our radios and AirPods belies an immense and intricate web of collection societies, labels, copyright holders, and investors who need to connect the cash that consumers pay for music to the artists and songwriters who…

You may not have heard of Kobalt before, but you probably engage with the music it oversees every day, if not almost every hour. Combining a technology platform to better track ownership rights and royalties of songs with a new approach to representing musicians in their careers, Kobalt has risen…

Through the Extra Crunch EC-1 on Patreon, I dove into Patreon’s founding story, product roadmap, business model and metrics, underlying thesis, and competitive threats. The six-year-old company last valued around $450 million (and, based on the points I made in the business model article, likely to soon hit $1 billion)…

TechCrunch is launching a new format for Extra Crunch members, called the EC-1. Modeled after the Form S-1 filing that late-stage startups submit to the SEC as part of the IPO process, EC-1s are authoritative, deep analyses into growth-stage startups. Through extensive interviews and research, an EC-1 acts as a…

It’s May 7, 2013 and Jack Conte is, in his own words, “totally exhausted, slash, totally wired, in that really weird in-between zone.” He has spent 18 hours per day for the last 50 days building a replica of the Millennium Falcon set from “Star Wars” and shooting a music…

Patreon is aggressively pursuing a new three-year product vision that is, in the words of SVP of Product Wyatt Jenkins, to build “the world’s best membership SaaS product for creators.” With about 90 engineers and product managers, the company sees an opportunity to own a particular niche that’s not well…

Patreon provides business infrastructure to independent content creators: people making videos, music, podcasts, paintings, comics, games, magazines and other forms of media for fans online. It helps them turn the small subset of superfans within their broader fan base into paying monthly patrons and manage relationships with those patrons across…

Can Patreon become a powerful, multi-billion-dollar company at the heart of the global media and entertainment industry? It’s founders and investors certainly believe so. In this Extra Crunch EC-1, I dove into Patreon’s founding story, product, business model, and competition. Now I want to dissect the foundational thesis of where…

In December, Patreon CEO Jack Conte shared a list on Twitter predicting what being an independent content creator will be like in 10 years. One of his predictions was that there will be fierce competition between distribution platforms to get creators paid. That competition has already begun, which is good…

At nearly six years old, Patreon has gone from startup to king of membership. Now an established leader in an industry that’s been flipped on its head, Patreon’s path has been anything but predictable — peppered with its share of milestones, mishaps, pivots, champions, and critics — and offers invaluable…