A few months back, a member of Biden’s campaign team appeared on CNN. The team member describes how the campaign managed to stay politically center: staying off social media. I tweeted at the time this was great advice for game devs. The vocal members of any community tend to dominate the feedback. And as we…
A recent Twitter thread highlighted a popular Gamer™ belief: Nope, they are mostly used to obfuscate real prices and can’t store value — Nicola Visonà (@VisonaNicola) May 25, 2021 Even within gaming studios, I encounter a similar sentiment. Proponents of this position claim “firms use virtual currency pricing as a behavioral trick!” With virtual currency,…
UGC platforms have hailed the rise of the Creator Economy™. Roblox, TikTok, and Youtube have democratized the creation of content, abstracting the costs of getting content to market. But we’ve assumed UGC cuts out content gatekeepers in favor of entrepreneurs. Everyone gets a warm glow when “the little guy wins”. And by all means, this…
Blockchain gaming companies like Immutable and Mythical use games to “prove out the tech”. This strategy places games as a means rather than an end. But what exactly is the technology to prove and what are the gains to proving it?
One revelation of the Apple v. Epic case is that 67% of revenue is from the Item Shop.
The previous model of battle pass (BP) focused on average daily monetization cap (ADMC) as the key lever in driving more monetization from BP. Special attention was paid to the role of tiers and we’ll continue to do so here. One of the more interesting shortcomings of BP is the inner temporal nature of the…
In 1931, American economist Harold Hotelling published the seminal paper The Economics of Exhaustible Resources. Harold described a problem many firms face: how much of a non-renewable resource should they sell at any given time? This problem is more apparent when thinking about managing an oil supply but just as relevant when considering how to…
Professional sports give us something to aspire too. Players are celebrated as heroes and children grow up wanting to become them. It’s no secret that the internet, and games in particular, have found even more ways to engross us in the world of sports. But the terms of that engrossment are not incidental, they’re crucial.…
In Six common mistakes when moving to live-service games and free-to-play, Ben Cousins argues that cosmetic-only monetization is a mistake:
Monetization’s modern paradigm is defined by a direct store and battle pass (BP). After years (and ongoing) criticism of loot boxes, Fortnite re-wrote the rulebook in a way that seems to make both developers and players happy. However, it’s important to consider that at sufficient scale any monetization scheme looks like a winner. It’s unclear…