@Blake Robbins and @Mitch Lasky argue in Gamecraft Ep.18, “The Mobile Gaming Duopoly,” that Apple and Google have squeezed innovation out of mobile gaming. Mobile innovation hasn’t vanished; instead, it has splintered. And while it didn’t vanish, it has slowed, but the culprit isn’t IAP or a top-grossing chart—it’s ATT.
Developers: you should ship updates to your in-app webstore UX TODAY: side-by-side pricing, knocking down scare screens, and an all-out webstore offensive the likes of which Stash and Xsolla have never seen.
Habby (Happy + Hobby) rewrote mobile’s growth playbook when Archero exploded in 2019, and the studio has remained a case study in scaling hybridcasual hits ever since. The game coined “hybridcasual,” surpassed $500M in revenue, and, more importantly, created a meta sturdy enough to be recycled in every project that followed. Despite a surge in…
Nothing is as misunderstood as loot boxes in gaming (virtual currency is a close second). Critics decry them as a normalization of gambling that preys on weak impulse control. Strip away the moral panic, and a sanguine explanation emerges: loot boxes solve two vexing economic problems.
Two troubling signs for gaming: First, Danielle Tran from Konvoy reports that AI accounts for only 10% of gaming investments, compared with 71% across all venture activity. Do VCs believe AI will transform every industry except gaming? AI is a growth mechanic, and the idea that gaming won’t benefit as much is a tough pill…
Monopoly Go (MoPoGo) spent truckloads of capital quickly, but UA is simply maxed out. There’s no better evidence than the game’s shift to celebrity-driven TV advertising following a nearly linear decline in downloads since its August 2023 highs, dropping from 13m a month to 3m. Stocked in the F2P dev/pub medicine cabinet is F2P’s natural…
Discord represented gaming’s best chance to be recognized among tech’s elite. A recognition that increasingly means political influence rather than only the validation the games industry always seeks. Jason Citron, founder and longtime Discord CEO, is stepping down at a pivotal moment, as the company gears up for an IPO. It’s a significant blow to…
The answer to extraction shooters lies in system design. By creating a model, we can derive implications that help guide key design decisions and frame challenges in a quantifiable way. A model also lays plain some of the variables that shape the experience of extractions. There’s a reason Marathon’s design director mentioned a target survival…
This (the games industry is deprofessionalizing”) is an interesting line of thought by Ryan K. Ringey, and Simon Carless, especially when you consider how Roblox studios form – very much “de‑professionalised,” virtual, and less “sticky.” Sometimes, these Roblox studios look more like a Discord server than a company. It echoes Coase’s famous argument in The…
Marvel Rivals numbers are in free-fall. The engagement bump from the latest season won’t reverse its decline toward equilibrium: potentially matching but not exceeding Overwatch’s audience size, which has since recovered from Rivals’ launch. Is that a “successful outcome”? It feels like a blow to the arms race hypothesis. Chinese developers are releasing AAA content…