Without games, Tencent might never have built WeChat. Without games, Nvidia would never have had CUDA. Games are an incubator: you wait for them to produce great technology.
The Nvidia line is the clearest. Gaming cards sold by the millions every year; CUDA shipped inside GeForce in 2006 — the gaming market amortized the R&D and the players built the installed base, while everyone waited for a workload that truly needed it. Jensen’s own bet back then was scientific computing, not deep learning. He did not foresee that day.
AlexNet was proven for him by academia: two gaming cards, in a bedroom, detonating the discovery that GPUs could do deep learning. The GPU was born for games — so why did this discovery arrive at an academic conference instead of Nvidia’s own lab? Chance, or necessity?
History works like this often: what hatches in the incubator is rarely delivered by the incubator’s owner. Tencent’s games raised a social platform; gamers’ money laid the foundation of the AI era. You thought you were paying for entertainment. You were paying taxes into the next era.
Someone will say that’s survivorship bias — most game companies incubate nothing. True. So read the incubator precisely: games don’t guarantee hatching. But the big moves in tech history were billed to games.
Never underestimate an “unrelated” cash flow. The person playing games today may be training your model tomorrow.
