To be top 1% or to be top 10% (skill ceiling in games, music and startups)

A big complaint of Call of Duty : Black ops 6 was that the skill ceiling was very low, making winning not a true test of skill. Skill ceiling (which is how many degrees of freedom a game has that allows a certain player to grow and develop) tells you how hard or easy it is to master a game. For Call of Duty : Black ops 6, with the a very high aim-assist (makes it easier to lock your aim onto enemies), boots-on-the-ground gameplay and other changes meant that beginners who picked up the game could easily take against the veterans as it levels the playing field.

The recent release of CoD : Black ops 7, Treyarch did something about this. By introducing wall-jumping, where players can bounce of walls, they increased the skill gap as it adds another button or 2 master while playing the game, giving more degrees of freedom in which players can move and finesse their enemies. They also reduced aim-assist, requiring more human skill rather than the AI just doing for them.

As I saw these changes, it made me think how this concept applies to technical moat in startups and hiphop music as well. But first, lets understand what exactly skill ceiling is and its two components. Understanding these two components is pretty imporant to the essay as one component consistently outweighs the other in all 3 disciplines that we are going to discuss.

The Two Components of Skill Ceiling

Video games have two important components : Game-Sense and Mechanical Skill. Often times, Skill ceiling is determined by both of these factors. But mechanical skill outweighs game sense. If a game is purely based on your game-sense (how well you understand the inner-workings of the game) that is relatively easier to master as all that there is to it is knowledge, but mechanics involve how well things like your hand-eye coordination, reaction-time, sequence of movements, etc. are.

Game-Sense vs. Mechanical Skill

For example, a game like Clash Royale has a low skill ceiling relative to other esports, due to the game being just 1) the cards you pick 2) the timing you deploy the cards. It is all game sense, nothing mechanical. On the other hand, if you take Rocket League for example, the skill ceiling is known to be one of the highest in all games. Because you are 1) essentially playing soccer but driving cars (already increases difficulty) and 2) the game engine is very physics-rooted and realistic in terms of how the cars move and the ball interacts with the environment. So the amount you boost your car, the amount you conserve your boost, where you jump with the car as you speed up, certain part of the car hitting certain part of the ball, how hard you are hitting the ball and a bunch of other factors determine the high skill ceiling of the game. This introduces the need to have a high mechanical skill as well.

This in turn affects the how hard is to master the game. Clash Royale becomes relatively fast to master, as a beginner can pick up and dedicate themselves to becoming a pro at the game much faster than they would at Rocket League. This is in-fact why Rocket league athletes are so celebrated, as it take years of mastery, game sense AND mechanical ability to get to that stage. I myself have spent hours trying to hit a flip-reset in free play. All it means is, you have to be top 1% at game-sense in Clash Royale to go pro, or be top 10% in mechanical skill in Rocket League to do the same.

Startups and Skill Ceiling

The same concept of Skill ceiling, along with its two components can also be seen in startups. We can start from the very lowest moat products : single-purpose consumer apps. For example, all that something like a meeting notetaker app does it repackage ChatGPT into an interface with a simple system prompt that says “convert the transcript to the meeting notes”. In such sub-industries, all the moat you have is your distribution (game-sense) : how you can standout as the #1 meeting notetaker app among others. There is no technical moat here (mechanical skill). This is why Cluely’s initial ARR was so impressive given that they were just transcribing meetings. Same applies to the success of Cal AI.

Let’s take it a step further. Especially in late 2025, if you are building an application layer B2B software startup in a world with coding agents that are the smartest they have been, you have some kind of technical moat now (mechanical skill) with some custom workflows but your distribution (game-sense) still has to be top-notch. If you are building a dev-tools agent monitoring startup for example, your product is getting replicated overnight by 10 other competitors the next day. However, if you are rather building data centres in space, yes it is going to take you years for your company to come to fruition as you figure out the tech, but there is much less competition around for you to worry about. And you don’t even have to worry about distribution as you are one of the only players in the space. So you are either top 1% at distribution, or top 10% at deep-technical knowledge to get to pretty much the same spot.

Origins of YC

Note : This is pretty much the argument behind why PG even started Y Combinator, as he believes that a technical person can learn sales relatively faster than a sales person is at becoming technical. However this gap is being reduced with how coding agents are getting better so far (aim-assist).

Hip Hop Music Production and Skill Gaps

This parallel can be also seen in hip hop music production. But again, lets start from the very lowest moat variants : people that post covers of hip hop songs. All you are doing is rap someone else’s song on their beat, but you are atleast being rewarded for how well you do it : your vocals, delivery, resemblance, etc. (game-sense). There is no technical moat you have (mechanical skill) as you are not worrying about composing the beat or writing the lyrics.

Lets take it a step further. You have artists like The Alchemist, Westside Gunn who embrace sample-heavy beats that strongly resemble the original sample. They are still able to sell their music, however not as popular as the biggest artists of the world. They have some kind of technical moat this time (how well they flip the sample and how well their original lyrics are written). And then you have the highest level ones, artists like Travis Scott or Eminem that either flip their samples to sound very distinct, have complex lyrical patterns and delivery or make their own complex synths patterns that are hard to replicate. This is why making a Westside Gunn type beat is much easier than making a Travis Scott type beat, however both being relatively harder than covering someone else’s song. Again, either top 1% at how well you work with existing music records, or top 10% at how well you can compose your own music and write your own lyrics.

Ultimately, do you want to be top 1% or top 10%

All that is to say is, you have 2 routes. You either choose to tackle a system that requires low mechanical skill and be the top 1% at game-sense (where more people try to take this route), or you tackle a system that requires more mechanical skill to start with and rather be top 10% at it. You are in turn rewarded more in the long term as less people willing to take this route, the route just happens to be more difficult. Not that one route is inherently “bad” than the other, but rather a choice for you to make and accept what each route brings to the table.