Vghs shotbot season 2 full#

If you're not disrupting incentive structures, you're not really Disrupting anything. And these incentive structures are the exact levers that disruptors like to pull. They’re not called “prestige” drama for nothing.īut what is good for individual producers and execs is not necessarily good for their companies’ long-term health. You can harvest more social capital from your proximity to big, expensive projects.

That might still be a great place to live if you are an individual working within the studio system. As incumbents retreat ever further upmarket, they eventually balkanize themselves in high-end luxury pigeonholes. This Northwest Migration is, in effect, what Matthew Ball has dubbed the Death Star Strategy. But I also enjoy watching competently-produced content with innovative premises, interesting characters, compelling storylines, and-something most prestige shows keep forgetting about-genuine humor. And it can’t capture 100x of my personal attention.ĭon’t get me wrong: I enjoy watching lavish, expensive television dramas. I am not 100x more likely to select the expensive show from my program guide. But that increased sticker price did not, and cannot, deliver 100x the value. In our example, the incumbent product Marco Polo spent at least 100x (my napkin math) per minute of screen time compared to the challenger, VGHS. He calls this the “Great Northeast Migration.” Up, and to the right. That is where they are able to compete most effectively. The Great Northeast MigrationĬlayton Christensen, godfather of classic disruption theory, devotes a lot of ink to this phenomenon in a chapter entitled “What goes up, cannot come down.”Ĭhristensen shows how the internal incentive structures at BigCos tend to bias all decision-making in one direction: bigger, faster, more expensive. And in many cases, the thing that they do best is just cost a whole lot of money. When this type of disruption shows up, it forces the incumbents to double and triple down on what they already do best. A disruptive piece of content can go head-to-head with a behemoth like Marco Polo with just 1% or 2% of the production budget. That question does not have a simple answer. In one of this publication’s anchor posts, I closed with the question, “What does a disruptive piece of content look like?” Seriously: if you skipped this show, you are missing out.) (Elevator pitch: Harry Potter, with video games instead of magic.)Īnd while Marco Polo has some standout performances, it simply cannot compete with my affection for characters like Jenny Matrix, Ki Swan, Ted Wong, and Brian D.

More importantly, the show manages to infuse a surprising amount of heart and emotion into its absurd premise. But on a technical level, it meets the baseline of production quality necessary to be a viable viewing option. You might even see a slipped roto mask here or there. VHGS is occasionally rough around the edges. But here, this little “web series” (I hate the term and don’t think it has any meaningful definition) was going head-to-head with one of the most expensive productions in the world.ĭisruptive products are “ inferior,” but they compete along different vectors. Media competes for attention, and attention is both finite and zero-sum. It was a watershed moment for me to realize that on any given evening, watching either Marco Polo or VGHS was a roughly fifty-fifty proposition. For the sake of argument, let’s say it was Marco Polo.

Vghs shotbot season 2 full#

At the time, we were watching two series: VGHS, and a big-budget prestige drama full of blood and swords and horses. On any given evening, we would find ourselves on the couch, remote in hand, deciding what to play that night. And have been fans ever since.īut something struck me on our first VGHS watch-through. I stumbled across VGHS when showrunner Freddie Wong tweeted at my startup: Specifically, it illustrates the dynamic of the upmarket retreat, which is a telltale sign of accelerating disruption in an established market. But not only is VGHS surprisingly good, it is also a critical case study in a shifting film and media landscape. That may seem odd as neither of us exactly look like the show’s target demographic. My wife and I just started re-watching Video Game High School.