Entertainment · Decision brief 01
Five decisions your executive team is making right now — and what the evidence says about each.
Written for the executive team at a games publisher, deciding about their own company. Each decision names the seat that owns it and the seat that contests it, carries sourced evidence, and states what would have to be true for the answer to flip.
8 pages · Evidence as of October 20, 2026 · PDF
Take-Two publishes Grand Theft Auto at 12.4% of net revenue and its top five franchises at 54.3%. Electronic Arts — larger, carrying the identical risk factor — publishes no franchise percentage at all.
An EDGAR full-text search of every 10-K filed since January 2025 returns six games companies that quantify franchise concentration. A disclosed percentage is the exception, which is why your board cannot benchmark you against your peers even if it wants to.
What is in it
- Live service, or premium releaseDomain 3 · CPO, contested with CEO on category entry and CFO on the investment case. EA's live-service line is 71% of revenue — and it shrank 1% in the year full-game revenue grew 7%.
- Premium, free-to-play, or subscriptionDomain 2 · CRO, contested with CFO on margin and CPO on packaging. $80 has held only where the publisher owns the platform or owns the event. The one large third-party AAA launch held at $70.
- Acquire studios, or build themDomain 11 · CEO, contested with CFO on valuation and financing. Eight acquired studios closed or divested in twenty-six months — four of them on a single day.
- Which storefront, and what take rate is tolerableDomain 4 · CRO, contested with CEO on sequencing and Legal on platform terms. Google's effective games take moved from 30% to 25%, and to 20% through an external link. Console rates are published by nobody.
- Franchise concentrationDomain 9 · Risk, contested with CFO on economics. The 12.4% is a trough figure, and reading it as a run-rate is the mistake this section exists to prevent.
It closes with the executive decision matrix — CEO, CFO, CRO, CPO, Legal and Risk — each with something specific to do in this category, not a generic lens.
What it is not
- Not a vendor ranking. It measures decisions and evidence, not which company is better.
- Not a forecast. Where something is an observation of one window, it says so.
- Not a market-size report. It will not tell you what any of this is worth to you in revenue.
- Not padded. 8 pages because that is what the evidence filled.
How the evidence is handled
Every figure is sourced. Where a number could not be sourced, the brief says so and gives none. Where two sources disagree on direction, it says that rather than picking the flattering one. Where a widely quoted statistic comes from a party with a commercial position, it is flagged — including where that flag weakens a point the brief is making.
The decision-maker and every decision were fixed before any source was read, and were not revised to fit what came back.
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Licensing. A brief is sold for use inside the buying organization — read it, quote it internally, build on it in your own planning. It may not be resold, published in full, or redistributed outside your organization. Quoting a figure externally is fine with attribution to CULT+MATH and the as-of date, which is the part that makes the figure meaningful.