Latest Post

Bad Policy Letters Hurt Us

Ilkka Paananen’s recent open letter opposing the EU's proposed game monetization regulations was meant to defend the games industry. Instead, it leaves me with more questions about what the "campaign" amounts to. As someone in the game industry, I very much care about the industry's bottom line and its ability to use every design tool at its behest. To effectively move the needle, you need to influence policymakers, and Ilkka Paananen has built up a local Finnish profile by touting Supercell's massive tax payments and commenting on topics like immigration policy. Instead of blasting the local papers, the Financial Times, or even his own Twitter (!!!), he chooses LinkedIn to deliver the message?

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Posts

Title Date Popularity (All‑time) Popularity (30‑day)
Bad Policy Letters Hurt Us 10/16/25
Laffer’s Roblox Platform Econ Take 9/11/25
Roblox & Now the Alarming Trojan Horse 9/9/25
Yes, Players May Find Out They’re in an Experiment – So What? 9/6/25
Among Gaming’s Biggest Recent Misses 9/4/25
Lies Gaming Execs Tell 8/30/25
Games Fail at Soft Power & the Moral Duty to Support Japanese Anime 8/26/25
New Game Ideas Are Getting Harder To Find 8/24/25
The Most Ingenious Game of the Last 5 Years & Juggling Monkeys 8/22/25
The System Designer’s Jawbreaker 8/21/25
Video Games Should Do Some Imperialism On Toys Already 8/20/25
Match3 is Slots But Better 8/7/25
This Month in Squad RPG (July 2025, US) 8/6/25
PC/Console/Console Sinuglarity 8/3/25
The Tiny Big Battlefield 6 Bet 8/1/25
Will Gaming Cultural Critics Level Up? 7/30/25
Scopely’s Chess Board, and Pareto Rule Reminder 7/29/25
Income Inequality In Mobile Games 7/28/25
Let Us Pray 7/24/25
Economy Flow Builder & Fortnite API 7/23/25
4x Content Innovation Never Died, Platform Economics Consumed It 7/18/25
Monopoly Go Rivals Any Tech Revenue Story 7/17/25
5 Things About Breakout Hit F2P Live Service Hit Mecha Break 7/16/25
The Curious Fall of Marvel Snap 7/14/25
Why No One Cares About App Store & the EU Anymore 7/9/25
The Best Web3 Arguments (w/Yat Siu, Cofounder of Animoca Brands) 6/16/25
Three Things from 2025 Play Ventures Summit 6/9/25
Economy Diagramming Using Figma & AI 5/19/25
7 Things Squad Busters Needs to Experiment with NOW 5/17/25
Squad Busters 2.0 & SpaceX’s Raptor 3 Engine 5/16/25
Overwatch Uses This One Content Productivity Hack 5/15/25
Law & Economic Order, A Game Economist Investigation 5/12/25
Forget the 30% — Bring Back IDFA for Real Mobile Innovation 5/5/25
Effective Immediately: Epic Achieves Mobile Webstore Liberation 5/1/25
In Search of the Casual Habby & Meta SDK 4/29/25
Why Loot Boxes Exist 4/28/25
Two Troubling Signs for Gaming 4/26/25
SCOPLEY’s NEXT BILLION DOLLAR HIT: THE GAME OF LIFE 4/25/25
Jason Citron’s Discord Exit and the Needed Game Mythos 4/24/25
How to Model Extraction Economies (in Google Sheets) 4/21/25
The Strange Game Agglomeration Effects 4/19/25
Will Monetization Actually Trump Engagement? 4/18/25
Sometimes the Butt of F2P Liveops will consume my thoughts for a day. Today is that day. 4/17/25
The Economics of Cannibalization & Royal Kingdom 4/16/25
Experiment With Seeds, Damn It 4/15/25
Marathon, Extraction Shooters, & The Big Shooter Mistake 4/14/25
How to Create the Monopoly Go Effect (in Google Sheets) 4/11/25
INZOI: THE SIMS HAVE A NEIGHBOR 4/8/25
GEC BONUS EP: What’s up at GDC 2025? (w/Charlie Hsu) 4/7/25
Anti-Ai Artists Need Better Arguments; They’re Losing the AI Debate 4/3/25
Netflix Games Needs to Acquire the Jack(box)-of-All-Trades 3/31/25
Four Things from GDC 3/24/25
Mobile Gaming’s Survival is Married to the U.S. Economy; It Should Ask for A Divorce 3/19/25
Digest or Die: Tripledot’s Big Gamble 3/13/25
The Economics of Match Events 2/24/25
Fisharian Game Economy Tradition 2/17/25
AI In Gaming Has Flopped 2/3/25
The Game is Outside the Game 1/30/25
Playing For Keeps: Steam’s Q5 Releases 1/4/25
On Riot’s Arcane and It’s Cost 11/24/24
Why Great Games Ignore Their Players 11/24/24
WTF Are These Three Battle Pass Things 11/17/24
All Content Is Born Equal and With Unequal Impact 11/11/24
Call of Duty’s End Game Revealed & Bobby Kotick’s Oil Well 10/29/24
Three Things from the Play Ventures Summit 8/16/24
It’s Time for Games to Embrace Aggregation Theory 8/5/24
Three Ways to Improve Taylor Swift’s ARPPU 7/16/24
Squad Busters: Supercell Hits the Apex or Spins Off-Track? 5/20/24
Fallout is the Final Nail in the Transmedia Coffin 4/30/24
Inflation, Ads, and Webstores Change Everything We Know 4/7/24
The Call of Duty Puzzle No One Has Solved 4/1/24
Four Things from GDC 3/25/24
Five things from Think Games Istanbul Google X Deconstructor of Fun Event in Turkey 3/12/24
Gaming’s Best Days Are Behind It 2/12/24
Blizzard is Dead, and Its Murders Are Still Loose 2/6/24
Web3’s Biggest Problem is Solved; Time to Unleash the Uh, Product? 1/29/24
Palworld Achieves Highest Player Count of Any Paid Steam Game Since 2018; It’ll Mean Little 1/10/24
Insomniac Leaks Paint a Bleak Console Landscape; Sony and Microsoft Adrift at Sea 1/8/24
How to Solve “THE” web3 Problem: A Staircase Tax 11/19/23
Roblox’s Battlebit Failure & Adopt Me Ripoff 7/18/23
The Very Slow, Not So Fast, F2P Revolution 7/14/23
Apple Ignores Gaming, and Gaming Ignores Apple 6/8/23
Revenge of the Meta and Marketing Wars 6/7/23
Supply Chains In Everything 6/7/23
The Reverse-Blizzard Thesis 6/7/23
Made in China: The Rise of AAA Chinese Games in the West 6/7/23
Clash of Visions 6/7/23
Why Is Snap Struggling to Scale? It’s the Vertical Progression, Stupid. 1/17/23
PVP Bots are Unethical and It’s Time We Talk About it 11/28/22
Marvel Snap Has Secured Success, but Has It Also Sowed Its Demise? 11/8/22
Immigration Policy Is Coming for the 10-Year Game 8/22/22
The Best Currency Animations of All-Time 8/1/22
Sense & Nonsense in Blockchain Gaming: Three Problems With Tokens 5/30/22
Questions From a Student 4/18/22
Netflix Finds Its Game Nest With Single-Player, Not Live Service 3/7/22
Sense & Nonsense in Blockchain Gaming: Autarky No More! 1/26/22
What Is a Game Economist and Why Now? 12/20/21
Sense & Nonsense in Blockchain Gaming: Is “True Ownership” Actually True? 12/6/21
Sense & Non-sense in Blockchain Gaming: A Series 10/24/21
The Church of FOMO: Can It Stand? 9/27/21
In-Round Progression Is the Biggest Game Design Innovation in a Decade 8/23/21
On Trials & the “Drug-Dealer” Model of Hard Currency 8/8/21
Why I’m a Supply-Side Game Economist 6/27/21
“Community” Leads Us Astray 6/25/21
Why Virtual Currency Exists 6/5/21
The Creator Economy Is for Anyone but Not Everyone 5/31/21
There’s More Money in Blockchain Games Than Blockchain Platforms 5/23/21
Battle Pass Who? We’ve Got Direct Stores 5/16/21
More on the Economics of Battle Pass: Resting Prices, Forecasted Level and Complete Pass 5/9/21
The Environmental Economics Approach to Liveops Content Management 4/25/21
Ultimate Team, Fantasy Sports and the Sorare Thesis 4/19/21
A Simple Model of Cosmetics and Why They’re Hard to Sustain 4/17/21
The Economics of Battle Pass Are Broken. Let’s Fix It. 4/11/21
Why Do Game Genres Evolve? A Kuhnian Explanation 4/4/21
Some Questions for Metaverse(rs) 4/3/21
Is PS+ a Good Idea? I Analyzed 200+ Games to Find Out 3/28/21
Is There An Actual Case for Cyberpunk’s Delay? 1/1/21
Why Do Only Product Managers Write About Games? 12/23/20
Why Do FPS Players Like Small Maps? 12/12/20
Game Companies Are Not Tech Companies Part IV: MB = MC 12/5/20
Game Companies Are Not Tech Companies Part III: The Content Problem 11/6/20
Game Companies Are Not Tech Companies Part II: Platform Power (Or Lack Thereof) 10/31/20
Game Companies Are Not Tech Companies Part I: Every Game Has Networking Effects, They Just Don’t Amount To Much 10/23/20
Can We Get Players to Tell Us Their LTV? 10/21/20
Kantian Ethics for Game Ads and Beyond Is Probably a Good Idea 10/20/20
The Collective-Action Problem of F2P Clans Remains Unsolved 10/19/20
The Economics of Game Pass Demand a Playstation Launch 10/10/20
The Intellectual Poverty of Game Streaming & Subscriptions 9/27/20
The LTV-UA Rebate from Platform Fees 9/20/20
It’s Not Data-Driven or Informed You Want, It’s Science 8/8/20
I Got a Twitter 7/18/20
Why Aren’t You Doing Analysis on Your Impact? 5/24/20
Why does Epic need $1B in new funding? Is this all about Roblox? 5/2/20
Why do contestents break the rules in Netflix’s Too Hot To Handle? 4/26/20
The Economics of Reality TV 4/25/20
1950’s Peruvian Coke and Gacha 10/3/17
Players Go to Their Highest Valued LTV: Ads Are Beautiful Pareto Exchanges 1/16/17
Re-Rewriting Economic History 10/22/16
F2P Demand Curves Are Weird, Just Ask Levitt 9/18/16
Eric Seufert’s Best F2P Blog Post Isn’t About F2P 9/17/16
How to Measure Whales 5/21/16
The Content Problem and the Death of Level Designers 3/14/16
Get More Life Out of Your Lifetime Value Model! A Discussion of Methods. 1/17/16
Optimal Area Currency With Milton 1/5/16
There’s More to A/B Testing Then A & B: I 12/19/15