Matthew Ball’s excellent piece, The Tremendous Yet Troubled State of Gaming in 2024, unpacks a paradox: gaming seems prosperous yet is marred by unprecedented industry layoffs. Ball’s findings reveal a simple reality: playtime is down over 20% (3.5 hours per week) from its COVID peak. This decline, further seen in declining inflation-adjusted spending, cements gaming…
Phil Spencer, Microsoft Gaming CEO, named Johanna Faries the new president of Blizzard, closing a pivotal moment in the ATVI-Microsoft merger. Faries faces the challenge of revitalizing Blizzard amidst declining revenue and engagement across its franchises. The situation is dire enough that Faries inherits a needed rebirth of Blizzard. The Blizzard of old is dead, and several…
Ah, web3: a past marked by rug pulls, North Korean heists, and prices more volatile than Gamestop shares. However, for all its misgivings, audiences still capitalize web3, with prices far from zero. Parallel, a new web3 CCG hit a half-billion market cap considering token and NFT prices, and yes, it’s pre-launch. Despite flaws, Parallel looks…
After four days, Palworld, an early-access survivor game described as “Pokemon with guns,” grossed ~$108M over three days en route to the 2nd highest concurrent player count for a paid title on Steam. It’s an outstanding success for Pocket Pair, a 50-person Japanese team with $7m raised. But like early access hits Valhiem, Battlebit, and…
Imsominaic leaks reveal Playstation lost 3M MAU over the last three years. At a time when gaming is at its grandest heights, consoles have failed to seize the moment. Sony and Microsoft have forgotten their role as platforms, purchasing dead-end franchises instead of fostering third-party innovation. Meanwhile, Steam gained over 90M users, a ~35% increase…
MMOs and most web3 titles suffer from a fundamental design flaw: capital depreciation (or lack thereof). The result is a Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation economy so prevalent Redditors plead to find an MMO that hasn’t suffered. Even EVE Online, with its own Head Economist . suffered inflation bouts. It’s a looming threat to the web3 space, only mitigated by…
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…