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…
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…
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…
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…
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”…
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…