At 350 million monthly active users (MAU), Roblox boasts a user base rivaling the combined size of Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network. However, this impressive engagement comes hand in hand with an exorbitant 70-80% platform tax. In any case, Roblox is too big to ignore. Its bigness forces Roblox and non-Roblox developers to grapple…
The free-to-play (F2P) revolution will not be televised, but it will be downloaded. Naraka: Bladepoint, a consistent top-10 Steam performer, transitions free-to-play this week. The new tally counts seven of the top ten Steam games as F2P, with four starting life as a premium before switching to F2P. Major Western publishers composed free-to-play holdouts, but…
Apple’s VisionPro rejects gaming, but gaming doesn’t have to care. The game’s industry position has grown so extensive and favorable that it can survive and thrive on any platform, even when initially overlooked. As web3 VCs are jolly to remind everyone, gaming typically serves as the initial use-case for novel technologies. This was undoubtedly Meta’s…
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.
Snap is doing…ok! It peaked at 10K Steam PSU and 14M mobile downloads. But for all the innovation and press hullabaloo, shouldn’t Snap have higher expectations? After all, Vampire Survivors, from a team of one, wrapped up the year moving 2.5m copies at $5 a pop, with zero budget. And lest we not forget, Snap’s…
Industry rumor has it that Clash Royale had a furiously high reactivation rate. The brutality of an average 50% win rate ensures churn is high. But a computer doesn’t have feelings, so why not have the player beat the computer instead of other players? And so Supercell did the obvious thing, and around three years…