One of Roblox’s most curious decisions has been to increase dev share payout rates. Now developers who go to cash out Roblox’s currency (which players pay in for USD) will be able to do so at a higher exchange rate, effectively increasing their take-home pay per dollar spent and their experiences. Interestingly, Roblox won’t have…
Roblox’s continued growth and retention of aging players will start to represent a serious threat to the game industry. It’s something we need to start coming to grips with.
In nearly every tech domain, from Amazon to airline pricing to Uber, users are in a variant. In fact, on LinkedIn, you may be in one right now. Experimentation isn’t just prevalent, it’s expected! Games seem to fall under a peculiar domain where experimentation is deemed “unfair.” As a result, the whole population suffers because we’re…
There’s still no game for this. We’re missing out on one of the biggest cultural phenomena of all time, especially one that originated in the East and should have a Cookie Run Kingdom spinoff within months. In case anyone is not familiar, the CEO who made these dolls is now worth more than Peter Thiel…
Two of the biggest hypocrisies from gaming execs are:1. Titles don’t matter2. Juniors spend too much time wedded to specific ideas rather than outcomes, like Seniors Of course titles matter! Of course they mean something! This hasn’t changed since Aristotle described man as a political animal.
While both China and the United States use each other’s cultural imports with great suspicion, the one pop media category where this doesn’t seem to arouse the same suspicion is games. Yet, for all the concern that companies like TikTok bring in the United States, no one seems to be sweating the infiltration of 5-star…
Billions of annual dollars for a mechanic so simple you hate that you missed it. When Royal Match introduced the additional win streak tier in 2023, @Harshal Karvande wrote a year later that it “increased revenue baseline by more than 1.5 times.” On a net present value basis, the invention of Super Light Ball will…
Clawee is the most ingenious game/app/experience I’ve played in the last five years. Players control a real claw machine, with the app streaming the video as players make claw moves in real-time. Everything outside of that execution is dogshit, and you know what? That’s actually okay. Not only is it okay, it’s exactly how it…
The system designer’s core responsibility is to find and maximize the area under the curve for any piece of content. How do we generate the maximum amount of revenue for a given amount of content under a particular distribution system? The introduction and evolution of live ops event design is a function of this model.
Every time I’m in the mall, I wander into a toy shop hoping that video game imperialism will have finally conquered a domain that should be a layup. Yet, despite nearly 80% of U.S. kids playing games, and almost 50% on Roblox, games occupy 5-10% of the kids’ toy shelves. It’s worse, too, as we…