Liquid Link Interactive
Games, studios, and the IP underneath them.
Interactive is the area of Liquid Link scoped to games and the businesses and rights that produce them. Nothing is owned and no studio is backed.
What sits in scope
Interactive is written as a specialised area rather than as a subset of Ventures, because a game is not only a software company. It carries an audience, a catalogue of rights, and an economy inside it, and those three things are valued and structured differently from a conventional software business.
The scope below is what Build Capital has set for the area. It says what Interactive would look at, and it makes no claim about anything held.
Scope
- Video games and mobile games
- Game studios
- Game IP and publishing
- Game engines and creator tools
- Virtual economies
Why the scope separates studios from titles
A studio is a team and a pipeline. A title is a product with a release date. Game IP is a right that can outlast both. The scope names all three because an investment in one is not an investment in the others, and the most common way to get an interactive business wrong is to buy one while believing you have bought another.
Virtual economies sit in the scope for a related reason. Where a game runs an economy inside itself, that economy is part of the asset: it shapes how long an audience stays and how the business earns, and it has to be understood on its own terms rather than read as a feature list.
Game engines and creator tools are the layer underneath. They are software businesses that happen to sell to games, which is why the boundary between this area and Ventures is drawn by who the buyer is rather than by what the code does.
Three different assets
A studio, a title and the IP underneath them are bought for different reasons and carry different risks. The scope names them separately so they are not confused for one another.
Why the rights matter more than the release
The durable part of an interactive business is usually the intellectual property rather than any single release. A title has a launch and a tail; the characters, worlds and engines behind it can outlive both, be licensed into other formats, and be rebuilt for the next platform.
That is the lens Interactive is written around, and it is also why this area sits next to Media: the two share a question about who owns a right and what that right earns over time.
The lens
Look at the rights and the audience underneath a title, not only at the title.
What is held today
Nothing. Interactive owns no game, no studio and no game IP, and it backs no studio. There is no benchmark to publish, because there is nothing to benchmark, and a page that implied otherwise would be describing an operation that does not exist.
The neighbouring areas: Ventures covers private companies more broadly, Labs covers what is built rather than bought, and Liquid Link sets out how the five areas fit together.