Recent Posts

Will Monetization Actually Trump Engagement?

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.

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Sometimes the Butt of F2P Liveops will consume my thoughts for a day. Today is that day.

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.

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The Economics of Cannibalization & Royal Kingdom

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.

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Experiment With Seeds, Damn It

Seeds are one of the most powerful variables in game design, and one of the least acknowledged. EA’s Data Science team published a paper showing a 5x difference in win rate—from 15% to 75%—based only on the seed used to initialize a board. The level design and other match parameters remained the same!

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Marathon, Extraction Shooters, & The Big Shooter Mistake

Extraction shooters were supposed to be the next big leap, and Escape from Tarkov was the movement’s exemplar. Titles like Jager’s The Cycle: Frontier and Call of Duty’s DMZ failed to generate meaningful traction. Many mistakes stem from a misunderstanding of Royale’s place in shooter evolution, creating an inability to conceptualize what’s next. Bungie’s Marathon is the genre’s last great hope.

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How to Create the Monopoly Go Effect (in Google Sheets)

Monopoly Go’s economy design makes social casino accessible. The roll-move-resolve loop is more approachable on a board than on a slots reel, so the game can create a real sense of tension (the board piece will sometimes enter bullet time before landing on a tile). Another achievement is the game’s events, which cut to the core of the design.

Recurring events are a key source of how the game creates “runs” by stringing together level climbing in different, interconnected progression centres. While Monopoly Go certainly wasn’t the first to invent “move around board, trigger events”, it’s undoubtedly popularized it. It’s starting to appear as its own genre, and even morphing into Archero 2 mini-games.

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