Hypercasual solved a novel problem for *all* mobile titles: marketing. Like web3, hypercasual always seems to be caught in its drama with recurring reports of death or life on top of wash trading driving genre GDP. But beneath all the bullshit, hypercasual discovered something profound: how to get BILLIONS of players to download games at…
Supply-chain economics is as much a game design responsibility as it is production. Core design influences the production gap between Blizzard’s Overwatch heroes and, say, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege (R6:Siege) Operators. Ubisoft has shipped an average of .51 new Operators per month since launch compared to Blizzard’s .21 new heroes, more than double the pace.…
The reverse-Blizzard thesis has arrived. Firms like Blizzard, Supercell, Valve, and even Apple thrived on popularizing but not inventing mechanics and genres. Blizzard’s next fresh franchise, a survival crafting game, draws heavily from predecessors like Ark: Survival Evolved and Rust. Those titles failed to scale to mainstream adoption; if players need a server browser for…
Chinese games have gone global. This week’s launch of Honkai: Star Rail and Starlight 84 marks China’s emergence as a AAA developer for Western audiences.
The world’s least powerful CEO won’t lead Supercell’s next chapter. Supercell is superscaling, and with it comes bureaucratization and hierarchy.