Imsominaic leaks reveal Playstation lost 3M MAU over the last three years. At a time when gaming is at its grandest heights, consoles have failed to seize the moment. Sony and Microsoft have forgotten their role as platforms, purchasing dead-end franchises instead of fostering third-party innovation. Meanwhile, Steam gained over 90M users, a ~35% increase over the same period, with Valve founder Gabe Newell downing New Zealand pies as third-party development rakes in billions as Valve barely lifts a finger.
MMOs and most web3 titles suffer from a fundamental design flaw: capital depreciation (or lack thereof). The result is a Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation economy so prevalent Redditors plead to find an MMO that hasn’t suffered. Even EVE Online, with its own Head Economist 1. suffered inflation bouts. It’s a looming threat to the web3 space, only mitigated by the fact that web3 games haven’t survived long enough to grapple with it. Luckily, there’s an answer that combines the best solutions from MMOs with the “permanence” soul of web3: a staircase tax.
At 350 million monthly active users (MAU), Roblox boasts a user base rivaling the combined size of Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network. However, this impressive engagement comes hand in hand with an exorbitant 70-80% platform tax. In any case, Roblox is too big to ignore. Its bigness forces Roblox and non-Roblox developers to grapple with a pivotal choice: to depart from or align with the platform. Roblox departers jeopardize the very audience responsible for their success, while Roblox-joiners scoff at the prospect of surrendering nearly 80% of their revenue to the platform. But there’s a third door, a Micheal Scott win-win-win, where players, Roblox, and developers win. It’s time for Roblox SKUs.
The free-to-play (F2P) revolution will not be televised, but it will be downloaded. Naraka: Bladepoint, a consistent top-10 Steam performer, transitions free-to-play this week. The new tally counts seven of the top ten Steam games as F2P, with four starting life as a premium before switching to F2P. Major Western publishers composed free-to-play holdouts, but that’s crumbled in the last five years as Halo, Overwatch, Rocket League, and Destiny switched to free-to-play. The question for live-service franchises is now not if but when.
Apple’s VisionPro rejects gaming, but gaming doesn’t have to care. The game’s industry position has grown so extensive and favorable that it can survive and thrive on any platform, even when initially overlooked.
As web3 VCs are jolly to remind everyone, gaming typically serves as the initial use-case for novel technologies. This was undoubtedly Meta’s conclusion leading to purchases of 17 VR developers, including the developer of Beat Saber, the most popular VR game to date. But a first-use case or not, gaming envelopes most platforms it touches to the point “Will it run Doom?” became a meme. We’ll see the same adaptation if VisionPro succeeds or fails.
Hypercasual solved a novel problem for *all* mobile titles: marketing. Like web3, hypercasual always seems to be caught in its drama with recurring reports of death or life on top of wash trading driving genre GDP. But beneath all the bullshit, hypercasual discovered something profound: how to get BILLIONS of players to download games at sub $1 CPIs. In 2022, hypercasual accounted for 29% of ALL app store downloads and cleared over 1 BILLION monthly downloads. The numbers represent real player action – they see something in hypercasual ads they don’t see in others. On a rough click-through basis, players might be 5 to 10 times more likely to tap on hypercasual ads then midcore ads.
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