Battle Royale and Roguelike are remaking game progression before our eyes. Popularized in earnest during the rise (and eventual pruning) of the MOBA genre, in-round progression mandates players accrue vertical power in the context of a single round. MOBA sessions start with players farming in-round currency to spend on items that persist until the round…
One of my favorite folk-lore design positions is the notion of giving away free hard currency. Without hesitation, every product manager I’ve worked with will off-handily assert the “drug-dealer” model. Supposedly, after experiencing the wonders of hard currency, players will be more likely to spend real money on hard currency rather than just enjoying the…
Game monetization discussions tend to focus on what to monetize broadly (gameplay or cosmetics) as well as how to price it. As someone might imagine, these are crucial and foundational discussions to have. So naturally, therefore, it makes sense to invest a lot of human capital into optimizing them. Increasingly, however, I’ve become convinced that…
A few months back, a member of Biden’s campaign team appeared on CNN. The team member describes how the campaign managed to stay politically center: staying off social media. I tweeted at the time this was great advice for game devs. The vocal members of any community tend to dominate the feedback. And as we…
A recent Twitter thread highlighted a popular Gamer™ belief: Nope, they are mostly used to obfuscate real prices and can’t store value — Nicola Visonà (@VisonaNicola) May 25, 2021 Even within gaming studios, I encounter a similar sentiment. Proponents of this position claim “firms use virtual currency pricing as a behavioral trick!” With virtual currency,…
UGC platforms have hailed the rise of the Creator Economy™. Roblox, TikTok, and Youtube have democratized the creation of content, abstracting the costs of getting content to market. But we’ve assumed UGC cuts out content gatekeepers in favor of entrepreneurs. Everyone gets a warm glow when “the little guy wins”. And by all means, this…
Blockchain gaming companies like Immutable and Mythical use games to “prove out the tech”. This strategy places games as a means rather than an end. But what exactly is the technology to prove and what are the gains to proving it?
One revelation of the Apple v. Epic case is that 67% of revenue is from the Item Shop.
The previous model of battle pass (BP) focused on average daily monetization cap (ADMC) as the key lever in driving more monetization from BP. Special attention was paid to the role of tiers and we’ll continue to do so here. One of the more interesting shortcomings of BP is the inner temporal nature of the…
In 1931, American economist Harold Hotelling published the seminal paper The Economics of Exhaustible Resources. Harold described a problem many firms face: how much of a non-renewable resource should they sell at any given time? This problem is more apparent when thinking about managing an oil supply but just as relevant when considering how to…