Clash of Visions
The world’s least powerful CEO won’t lead Supercell’s next chapter. Supercell is superscaling, and with it comes bureaucratization and hierarchy.
Games are cool. Economics is cool. Game Economics is just beginning.
Why Is Snap Struggling to Scale? It’s the Vertical Progression, Stupid.
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…
PVP Bots are Unethical and It’s Time We Talk About it
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…
Marvel Snap Has Secured Success, but Has It Also Sowed Its Demise?
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…
Immigration Policy Is Coming for the 10-Year Game
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…
The Best Currency Animations of All-Time
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…
Sense & Nonsense in Blockchain Gaming: Three Problems With Tokens
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”…
Questions From a Student
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 Finds Its Game Nest With Single-Player, Not Live Service
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…
Sense & Nonsense in Blockchain Gaming: Autarky No More!
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…