I have a lot to say about Marvel Snap; it’s a breath of fresh air in a mobile market that’s smelt stale for too long. Snap dedicates itself to taking advantage of mobile rather than treating it as a tax. However, for all its innovations and wins, I wonder if the Snap team outsmarted itself…
Previously confined to PC turn-based play, mobile free-to-play transformed 4x into sprawling persistent world MMOs. The combination was and continues to be electric; what other genre can admit to $1M LTVs? Each X, EXplore, EXpand, EXploit, and EXterminate invites an unparalleled level of feature width and depth. Its LTVs are not driven only by spend…
Past core loop, three Cs, and KPI breakdowns lie currency animation breakdowns. It’s an animation that may well play hundreds of thousands of times during a player’s lifecycle; benefits compound. And yes, I really think the animation is just satisfying. Economy design maintains a UX component. It’s vital for the designer to draw the cause…
Currency plays a peculiar role in economic activity. Classical economists are fond of claiming “money is a veil”; it abstracts away the underlying economic activity it helps coordinate. However, we know all too well that money is only a veil until it’s not. Monetary economics is justifiably a subdiscipline, so it makes sense for “tokenomics”…
A truly fun part about being a Game Economist is that 3-4 times a year, you’ll get the odd Linkedin message from students wanting to do the same. It’s incredibly gratifying to help set people on the right track, given I was asking for the same help years ago. There’s so little on game economics…
Netflix is seriously ramping its games division. As of February 2022, I scrapped ~25 game or game-related titles on Linkedin. Excluding Night School (+15) or Next Game (+125), Netflix Games probably approaches an internal headcount of ~50-60. With both studios, ~150-200 Netflix Game or Games related employees. At 14 titles, we’ve seen of things like…
In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay asking if we’ve reached The End of History? Often mischaracterized, the essay argues democracy and free markets represent the last evolution of political-economic systems. Fukuyama writes: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular…
There’s been recent enthusiasm about the need for “Game Economists.” I guess good things come in packages!
Take a stroll through a blockchain game website – they are all lovely; remember that’s their UA funnel! – and a standard set of phrases appear: “ownership,” “true ownership,” “truly owning.” But blockchain warps the traditional meaning of ownership into a ship of Theseus problem; each blockchain-based game can define ownership in its context. Suddenly,…
Sorry readers, I caught the blockchain bug. When 30-person firms get $4.5B valuations, it’s time to pay attention, regardless of one’s priors. Everyone seems to have a Blockchain hot-take, but I’ve found most to fall short of ruthlessly integrating the implications and design space of the technology. Blockchain players (who are also, by definition, investors)…