Apple is increasingly under fire what’s claimed to be unfair practices in the App Store. The criticism takes three forms: (a) Apple’s 30% fee is much too high relative to cost (b) the rules are arbitrary and stifle competition and (c) the App Store as the exclusive avenue to install apps on iOS is unjust.…
“We want to be more data driven” or “We want to create a stronger data culture” are common organizational refrains. Supposedly, having more data or data playing a larger role in the decision making process is profitable. It’s weird because I haven’t seen any research to suggest this is the case. In firms like Facebook,…
Performance based marketing makes intuitive sense; of course you want to optimize ROI on spend that compose 30% or more of a your firm’s expenditures. But here’s the kicker: if it makes sense for firms why not individuals? Shouldn’t we be tracking the impact of our output? Are co-workers actually reading your analysis, concept art…
Bloomberg is reporting that Epic is seeking to raise $500M to $1B in new funding. Tim Sweeney, Epic CEO and provocateur extraordinaire, owns 60% while Tencent owns the other 40%. Why would Epic need more funding as it continues to rake in Fortnite money? Tim has bigger ambitions, let’s figure out what they are. As…
Economists like Tyler Cowen or Brad DeLong are too self-respecting to study reality shows. Fret not, this economist has no such self-respect. Previously, we examined the economics of the reality show genre but just as interesting are the economics of the a particular reality show’s design. To Hot Too Handle introduces of the most interesting…
In case you haven’t been paying attention, Netflix just re-discovered the reality/reality-doc genre. In 2 weeks: Tiger King To Hot Too Handle (international cast) The Circle (4 international versions already released) Love is Blind I chuckled a bit when when Netflix remarked that they saw Fortnite as their biggest threat, but after 6 weeks in…
In the 1950’s, Peruvian inflation forced Coca-Cola to charge more per bottle of Coke. Unfortunately, their vending machines required physical updating to accept a new and larger domination. Instead, Coke devised a probabilistic system: the machine would charge the same amount as before, but randomly refuse to give a bottle. This raises the expected price…
Previously, I wrote about ads as a way to monetize non-payers, but there’s more to the ad exchange and what I’ll coin as ‘portfolio pumping’. It’s like portfolio theory, but not really. These terms reference two growing phenomenon in F2P games. King is at the forefront of portfolio pumping, in which a given firm pushes…
Will Luton argues on the dangers and solutions to F2P inflation over at gameindustry.biz. While there are some missteps in the opening of the article, Will makes a powerful and elegant point: …a sale can only be considered profitable if the net revenue from the start of the sale until resource equilibrium, and so demand, is…