Match3 is Slots But Better

Where are the multi-armed bandits in games? I’ve asked myself this question repeatedly because the use cases are vast, and other tech companies have done most of the analytical and product-heavy lifting. While they exist in certain quadrants, they’ve certainly failed to scale. If we consider, for instance, the proportion of active mobile gaming users in a multi-armed bandit, it’d be hard to imagine that it has grown to any significant portion over the last five to ten years.

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PC/Console/Console Sinuglarity

I have been waiting for the worlds of HD and mobile to collide, and to some degree, over the past decade, there has been convergence. Blue Archive and Umamusume Pretty Derby do well on Steam, while titles like Star Trek: Fleet Command and Raid: Shadow Legends appear to be building a stable audience around a PC client.

Of course, there’s the true reflection of this trend in dual-SKU products like Genshin Impact or, for a brief period, Call of Duty: Warzone. It’s also worth noting that dual-SKU titles like Fortnite and Roblox are impressive data points, even though both have a single-platform dominant share.

To the extent that they’ve unified, it has been a result of the model shift, where long-term monetization via service-based mechanics maximizes revenue. Internally, we’ve also seen this reflected in labor profiles. It’s very common for PC and console developers to hire now Directors of Product: roles that didn’t exist 10-15 years ago. Specific monetization and progression designers are also now essential, even for single-player titles.

Mobile also started to become friendlier to strong creatives. If you don’t know the founding force behind Monopoly Go, he falls under this category, so certainly would Second Dinner founder Ben Brode.

All of these cases still seem more like proof of concepts than actual paradigm shifts, though, or any evidence of a convergence moment between the two platforms. The big wedge, the divide that doesn’t seem to be crossed, is user acquisition. The most compelling evidence for this is the difference in the budget shares between the two projects dedicated to acquiring users.

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The Tiny Big Battlefield 6 Bet

Battlefield 6 (BF6) is rumbling, and suddenly, all of EA’s hopes & dreams seem to rest on returning the franchise to its former glory (Apex’s story is for another day).

Its share price is trading at near all-time highs despite flat quarterly earnings. And now, Call of Duty (CoD) looks weakest: not so much as a whisper for an annual franchise built on top of a marketing war machine. While heated early 2000s debates emerged between CoD and BF fans, CoD ultimately emerged victorious, for whatever that means. However, the one time BF won was when CoD was at its weakest (Advanced Warfare) and BF was at its strongest (Battlefield One). There’s a very real possibility that history will repeat itself here.

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Will Gaming Cultural Critics Level Up?

Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel is out with a predictably bad take on gaming’s supposed corrosive effect on the youth. But honestly, it’s the sort of cultural conservative warrior voice that seems to have been missing in the discourse over the last ten years. Outside of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s attempt to regulate Candy Crush before actual sugary candy, games have been largely absent from the political arena recently. Ironically, the After Babel piece provides the blueprint for why this has been the case.

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Scopely’s Chess Board, and Pareto Rule Reminder

The rise of Monopoly Go! was unperceived not only in games, but also in all of entertainment and nearly the tech industry. However, its stagnation is hindering its teenage years, and regression is looming. Broadly, all of Scopely is in the red, with Monopoly Go grasping onto revenue as downloads decline.

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