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…
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…
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…
You’ve soft launched your game, done a UA push, and a string of hope appears. Against all odds, a dominant cohorted ARPU curve emerges! Is this this an anomaly or have you caught a whale? The first way to examine this is to perform cointegration tests between the cohorted ARPU curves, testing for stastistical significance.…
F2P is as much of a design choice as it is a business choice. Given this, F2P has its own set of design challenges among which is the content problem. Developers will only continue making additional content until the benefits are greater then the costs. This is specified when expected marginal revenue from content…
Predicting the average cumulative spending behavior or Lifetime Value (LTV) for players is incredibly valuable. Being able to do so helps figure out what to spend on User Acquisition (UA). If a cohort of players has an LTV of $1.90 and took $1 to acquire then we’ve made money! This helps evaluate how effective particular…
In hindsight, one of Friedman’s great predictions is the Eurozone crisis. Despite being a massive champion for flexible exchange rates, Friedman never advocated for a common European currency. Europe exemplifies a situation unfavourable to a common currency. It is composed of separate nations, speaking different languages, with different customs, and having citizens feeling far greater…
One of the most powerful features of mobile games is the ability to run simultaneous randomized experiments at no cost. Academics swoon at such a possibility, and it’s very real and very spectacular in F2P games. Decades of running experiments in academic research can lend insight to developer scientists. An example is an insight from…