What Is a Game Economist and Why Now?
There’s been recent enthusiasm about the need for “Game Economists.” I guess good things come in packages!
The Creator Economy Is for Anyone but Not Everyone
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…
The Environmental Economics Approach to Liveops Content Management
In 1931, American economist Harold Hotelling published the seminal paper The Economics of Exhaustible Resources. Harold described a problem many firms face: how much of a non-renewable resource should they sell at any given time? This problem is more apparent when thinking about managing an oil supply but just as relevant when considering how to…
Why Do Game Genres Evolve? A Kuhnian Explanation
Modern live-service games have self-segmented in genres: match-3, 4x, collection RPG, battle royale, etc. We know these genres evolve and start to incorporate new mechanics. Over time, these mechanics become standard genre fare. For example, invest-n-express titles like Gardenscapes are an outgrowth of the match-3 genre, adding collection mechanics to the core match base. In…
Why Do Only Product Managers Write About Games?
I recently came across this Tweet: I love the way Ran writes https://t.co/3XUxfsXjDL — Growf (@pinchedforgrowf) December 22, 2020 The article’s writer, Ran Mo, is a Lead Product Manager at EA according to his Linkedin while the quote Tweeter is a fellow product manager. Dive a bit deeper and the retweets are all from fellow…
Game Companies Are Not Tech Companies Part I: Every Game Has Networking Effects, They Just Don’t Amount To Much
Ran Mo and Joseph Kim (@jokim1) argue that games should be viewed from a Silicon Valley perspective. The usual three appear: moats, networking effects, and platforms. Moreover, while I thought it had died out after the launch of Halo 3, an inferiority complex continues to exist amongst game makers. Games never seem to get the mainstream or broader tech…
Kantian Ethics for Game Ads and Beyond Is Probably a Good Idea
The ASA has banned misleading ads from Playrix’s Gardenscapes. Running the same creative in user acquisition hits diminishing returns fairly quickly as the creative “clears the market” for users attracted to that creative. To broaden appeal, why not simply advertise the game as existing in a entirely different genre? This opens up a whole new…
The Collective-Action Problem of F2P Clans Remains Unsolved
There’s a compelling aspect to achieving group oriented goals: being apart of something larger than yourself. Lots of F2P developers harp on the importance of social features. Yet the social experience in many games is abysmal. Lots of teammates or clanmates don’t seem interested in participating instead preferring to “free-ride”, putting forward little effort but…
It’s Not Data-Driven or Informed You Want, It’s Science
“We want to be more data driven” or “We want to create a stronger data culture” are common organizational refrains. Supposedly, having more data or data playing a larger role in the decision making process is profitable. It’s weird because I haven’t seen any research to suggest this is the case. In firms like Facebook,…
F2P Demand Curves Are Weird, Just Ask Levitt
Steve Levitt, the last price theory samurai, and John List, future nobel prize winner, have published a paper on free to play economics. In a textbook neoclassical experiment, Levitt alters the quantity of Candy Crush hard currency at a given price point. While economists generally think of price variation as the way of deriving demand…