Robert Mundell often remarked getting to tier 100 in the Battle Pass is harder than getting a Nobel Prize
Game monetization discussions tend to focus on what to monetize broadly (gameplay or cosmetics) as well as how to price it. As someone might imagine, these are crucial and foundational discussions to have. So naturally, therefore, it makes sense to invest a lot of human capital into optimizing them. Increasingly, however, I’ve become convinced that just making lots of stuff trumps all other optimizations. Instead of being an afterthought, supply-side considerations deserve to be front and center.
A few months back, a member of Biden’s campaign team appeared on CNN. The team member describes how the campaign managed to stay politically center: staying off social media. I tweeted at the time this was great advice for game devs.
— Mario, Markets, and Microtransactions (@econosopher) November 9, 2020
The vocal members of any community tend to dominate the feedback. And as we know, this minority is not representative of the whole. Most anyone I’ve talked to will freely admit this, but we commonly ignore it when referring to the “community” of a game. For example, job postings for Community Managers emphasize social media management.
Even within gaming studios, I encounter a similar sentiment. Proponents of this position claim “firms use virtual currency pricing as a behavioral trick!” With virtual currency, there’s a disconnect between the real-world price and the virtual currency (VC) price. While true, there’s no intentional trickery going on. Instead, the reasons for VC are quite straightforward:
UGC platforms have hailed the rise of the Creator Economy™. Roblox, TikTok, and Youtube have democratized the creation of content, abstracting the costs of getting content to market. But we’ve assumed UGC cuts out content gatekeepers in favor of entrepreneurs. Everyone gets a warm glow when “the little guy wins”. And by all means, this appears to be true! Creators can single handily craft and distribute TikTok videos in seconds, not days or months. The barriers to Roblox creation are higher, but it’s a far cry from the rigamarole of traditional game publishing. The effects of UGC are profound: despite easing requirements with Early Access, Steam hosts 50,000 games to Roblox’s 40 million. It’s such a gap I made this handy chart to underscore the difference:
Blockchain gaming companies like Immutable and Mythical use games to “prove out the tech”. This strategy places games as a means rather than an end. But what exactly is the technology to prove and what are the gains to proving it?
I couldn’t directly source the claim from a primary source (the specific page). If someone can link to the page number, please do so in the comments.(more…)
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