This (the games industry is deprofessionalizing”) is an interesting line of thought by Ryan K. Ringey, and Simon Carless, especially when you consider how Roblox studios form – very much “de‑professionalised,” virtual, and less “sticky.” Sometimes, these Roblox studios look more like a Discord server than a company.

It echoes Coase’s famous argument in The Nature of the Firm: the only reason people don’t contract out rather than join a firm full-time is transaction costs. It’s expensive to search for new roles and manage old ones! (I have personal experience with the matter.)

The Games Industry would surely be the first to utilize technology to manage these costs and implement this way of working. But there’s a deeper way we’ve organized for decades, which may set us up for success.

Economists are fond of agglomeration effects, or productivity spillovers that occur when talent clusters. Learnings spread fast, and the whole industry accelerates. Games have a curious, global version of that: Stockholm, San Francisco, Istanbul, Leamington Spa, Barcelona…  If you want to travel and live globally, there’s no better industry than games. While there is a deeper economic phenomenon that warrants investigation into why this occurs in games, it has led to the development of globalized production supply chains, where 10 or more remote “outsourcers” might be utilized. Work is delegated and organized digitally, and there’s no physical stock to move; the biggest barrier is usually timezone.

AI looms, too, which I’ve seen seep in on so many development fronts.

This is all in stark contrast to mobile, ironically enough. Mobile was meant to be the  “people’s platform,” preaching “small teams, big reach.” The entire concept of the “Supercell” was built around a small team with minimal overhead! Now, even Brawl Stars is what, 80, 100 people? Many Western mobile teams approach 200+ headcount, with a substantial piggy bank to fund UA.

With the “blackhole” game notion of larger games growing larger, it creates an industry barbell effect with a “missing middle.” It’s been most acutely felt with the evaporation of true third-party publishing, where publishers fund developers for extended periods in the pursuit of future sales splits.

Marvel Rivals numbers are in free-fall. The engagement bump from the latest season won’t reverse its decline toward equilibrium: potentially matching but not exceeding Overwatch’s audience size, which has since recovered from Rivals’ launch. Is that a “successful outcome”? It feels like a blow to the arms race hypothesis.

Chinese developers are releasing AAA content at a historically high pace and quality, yet the outcomes remain…complicated. Genhsin, Honkai, and Zenless Zone Zero (ZZZ) are massive capital endeavors with limping revenue tails. Genshin Impact’s mobile revenue alone dropped from over $100m monthly last year to around $30m this March. Genshin’s annual budget is reported to be ~$200m on 700+ headcount, so while the game remains a profit powerhouse, its margins are significantly shrinking, a trend consistent across the entire portfolio. Honkai and ZZZ are following a similar but quicker decline from their launches, and it’s unclear if those projects remain in the red.

In the talk, @Teut Weidemann documents the rhythms of F2P engagement and monetization curves like an archaeologist uncovering a secret code. He illustrates what happens when you zoom in. Like, really in. For instance, concurrent users during football matches (the boring European kind) dip during game time and spike during halftime. Yes, that creates a butt shape (wait until you see his next shape). This kind of minute observation makes Ultra Local Live Ops™ compelling, finally providing a meaningful avenue for the “personalization” agenda.

Dream Games is opening the UA floodgates for Royal Kingdom, deploying significant marketing spend and celebrity-driven creative. This move reflects a familiar pattern: Royal Match itself required about two years to scale effectively. But now, the Dream Games UA team faces a new paradigm: how to optimally scale spending across two titles and manage new franchise-level LTV dynamics.