Two of the biggest hypocrisies from gaming execs are: 1. Titles don’t matter 2. Juniors spend too much time wedded to specific ideas rather than outcomes, like Seniors
Of course titles matter! Of course they mean something! This hasn’t changed since Aristotle described man as a political animal.
While both China and the United States use each other’s cultural imports with great suspicion, the one pop media category where this doesn’t seem to arouse the same suspicion is games. Yet, for all the concern that companies like TikTok bring in the United States, no one seems to be sweating the infiltration of 5-star Genshin characters in the States. The only ticket items to have even raised an eyebrow, far worse than TikTok’s data scandal, are kernel-level anti-cheat common in nearly every Chinese game and even in American-based subsidiaries like Riot. The reason for gaming’s limp soft power is that it fails to effectively communicate social norms in the same way that film and TV do.
Billions of annual dollars for a mechanic so simple you hate that you missed it. When Royal Match introduced the additional win streak tier in 2023, @Harshal Karvandewrote a year later that it “increased revenue baseline by more than 1.5 times.” On a net present value basis, the invention of Super Light Ball will return tens of billions in recurring casual puzzle GDP increases. Pretty good for a feels-so-obvious mechanic. And yet, it took over 31 years since match3’s debut in Shariki and at least eight years since the win streaks first appeared in Candy Crush for match games to discover the obvious. Its discovery, though, makes clear that industry stagflation is a choice, not a destiny.
Clawee is the most ingenious game/app/experience I’ve played in the last five years. Players control a real claw machine, with the app streaming the video as players make claw moves in real-time. Everything outside of that execution is dogshit, and you know what? That’s actually okay. Not only is it okay, it’s exactly how it should be.
The system designer’s core responsibility is to find and maximize the area under the curve for any piece of content. How do we generate the maximum amount of revenue for a given amount of content under a particular distribution system? The introduction and evolution of live ops event design is a function of this model.
Every time I’m in the mall, I wander into a toy shop hoping that video game imperialism will have finally conquered a domain that should be a layup. Yet, despite nearly 80% of U.S. kids playing games, and almost 50% on Roblox, games occupy 5-10% of the kids’ toy shelves.
It’s worse, too, as we look at the Roblox shelf, perhaps the weakest of any game IP, holding almost no original value (they’re trying to fix this with their first live ops event), and it’s instead filled with Stumble Guy toys on deep discount. Instead, games have become a vessel for other IPs, with nearly all of the IPs on the shelf having integrations back in the games, including a notable one between NERF and Stumble Guys. In the same way that Netflix rewrote the rules for Hollywood by aggregating demand and then using that to control the supply chain, games need to do the same when it comes to toys.
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