About The Side Quest
I write The Side Quest on the financial accounts and corporate strategy of listed video games companies.
Most writing on games companies is product-led. Release cycles, studio acquisitions, review scores, the hype cycle. The Side Quest starts somewhere else: with the documents these companies file. 10-Ks. Proxies. Earnings transcripts. Court filings. Each week, I publish one piece arguing a specific thesis about how the business actually runs.
What you’ll find
Competitor intelligence. Reconstructed models of listed peers built up from primary disclosures: segment revenue, real margin structure, capex profiles. What competitors are actually spending on and what it’s returning.
M&A and structural moves. Take-privates, spin-outs, reincorporations, capital returns. What’s on the table, what boards are optimising for, and what a serious buyer would pay.
Private-company valuation. Epic Games, mobile studios, tournament organisers. What they’re worth when triangulated from public disclosures, court filings, and platform economics.
Value chain and revenue attribution. Where the money actually goes inside a franchise. Player-commander revenue in Guild Wars 2, mobile ad-tech economics, the cost of platform generosity.
Voices from senior operators. Interviews with current and former industry leaders on capital allocation, hit-driven economics, and how they actually make product decisions.
New pieces publish every Sunday.
What you won’t find
Product reviews, release coverage, or hype-cycle takes
News aggregation
The approach
I start from the documents. SEC filings, proxy statements, court orders, earnings transcripts, supplemental disclosures. Read end-to-end, before any secondary reporting. Each piece advances one thesis, grounded in those sources, with citations included so you can verify the underlying material yourself.
Read these first
Microsoft and Xbox: Too small to sell, too strategic to spin — Xbox at roughly $48bn is a rounding error to Microsoft’s balance sheet, which rules out a clean divestment. The likelier outcome is a keep-and-fix or a data-rights spin, not a sale.
NCsoft: The importance of Commanders in Guild Wars 2 — the player-commander layer inside Guild Wars 2 is worth roughly 2.5 to 6.5 percent of the game’s revenue. Built from five interviews with commanders themselves, not analyst extrapolation.
Roblox: A great company lost on valuation — bookings run ahead of GAAP revenue, cash is really deferred-obligation float, and on an owner-FCF lens the intrinsic value comes out around $28 against a $48 share price.
Epic Games: what is it worth, and what did the generosity cost? — a private-company valuation of Epic, working from what can be inferred from public disclosures, court filings, and the economics of its platform generosity. The Epic Games Store cut, the UEFN creator share, and what those subsidies actually cost.
Jen MacLean (CEO, Dragon Snacks Games): “You cannot allocate your way to a hit” — an interview with a veteran industry CEO on capital allocation, hit-driven economics, and why bigger budgets don’t fix underlying product problems.
AppLovin vs Unity: are two of the market’s favourite ad engines worth it? — two mobile ad-tech companies with sharply divergent trajectories. What the market is actually paying for, and whether the love story holds up when the underlying economics get taken apart.
Who this is for
C-suite executives, equity research analysts, institutional investors, and corporate development teams in listed video games. Anyone who wants primary-source analysis of what their peers and competitors are actually doing.
