I Got a Twitter
I apologize in advance.
Games are cool. Economics is cool. Game Economics is just beginning.
Why Aren’t You Doing Analysis on Your Impact?
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…
Why does Epic need $1B in new funding? Is this all about Roblox?
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…
Why do contestents break the rules in Netflix’s Too Hot To Handle?
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…
The Economics of Reality TV
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…
1950’s Peruvian Coke and Gacha
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…
Players Go to Their Highest Valued LTV: Ads Are Beautiful Pareto Exchanges
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…
Re-Rewriting Economic History
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…
Eric Seufert’s Best F2P Blog Post Isn’t About F2P
Everyone’s favorite former Rovio employee is a prolific writer on F2P games; the closest we have to a Fukuyama. Seufert has covered a range of topics, but none more important than internal organization. Seufert argues for a number of institutional policies to surround analysts with within an organization. Frequently, analytics and data are as much about…
F2P Demand Curves Are Weird, Just Ask Levitt
Steve Levitt, the last price theory samurai, and John List, future nobel prize winner, have published a paper on free to play economics. In a textbook neoclassical experiment, Levitt alters the quantity of Candy Crush hard currency at a given price point. While economists generally think of price variation as the way of deriving demand…