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.
Supply-chain economics is as much a game design responsibility as it is production. Core design influences the production gap between Blizzard’s Overwatch heroes and, say, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege (R6:Siege) Operators. Ubisoft has shipped an average of .51 new Operators per month since launch compared to Blizzard’s .21 new heroes, more than double the pace. Blizzard will pack far more lore, cosmetics, and unique gameplay into each hero at the time of release – it’s part of the Blizzard “quality bar,” but maybe heroes should release faster and with fewer “features.” In faster character designs, weapons are sometimes disintermediated from character units – Apex and Valorent release weapons separately. Part of player empathy is servicing players’ content needs, with many legacy AAA studios refusing to tackle the challenge. But it’s at their peril; players ultimately choose the optimal mix of quality and quantity, not design directors.
The reverse-Blizzard thesis has arrived. Firms like Blizzard, Supercell, Valve, and even Apple thrived on popularizing but not inventing mechanics and genres. Blizzard’s next fresh franchise, a survival crafting game, draws heavily from predecessors like Ark: Survival Evolved and Rust. Those titles failed to scale to mainstream adoption; if players need a server browser for play, it’s not ready for the mainstream. But both Supercell and Blizzard have struggled to scale their studios to meet modern content demands, and that’s left them open for a sort of reverse thesis: drop production values and win on the supply side.
Chinese games have gone global. This week’s launch of Honkai: Star Rail and Starlight 84 marks China’s emergence as a AAA developer for Western audiences.
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