Battlefield 6 (BF6) is rumbling, and suddenly, all of EA’s hopes & dreams seem to rest on returning the franchise to its former glory (Apex’s story is for another day). Its share price is trading at near all-time highs despite flat quarterly earnings. And now, Call of Duty (CoD) looks weakest: not so much as…
Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel is out with a predictably bad take on gaming’s supposed corrosive effect on the youth. But honestly, it’s the sort of cultural conservative warrior voice that seems to have been missing in the discourse over the last ten years. Outside of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s attempt to regulate Candy Crush before…
The rise of Monopoly Go! was unperceived not only in games, but also in all of entertainment and nearly the tech industry. However, its stagnation is hindering its teenage years, and regression is looming. Broadly, all of Scopely is in the red, with Monopoly Go grasping onto revenue as downloads decline.
Tonight, I’m lighting my annual memorial candle to honor the 8th anniversary of the passing of the Mario Lopez one-season Candy Crush show on CBS. In nine glorious episodes, seemingly longer than most CMO tenures, contestants flailed at wall-sized smartphones in what Lopez dubbed “full contact Crush.” What many big mobile gaming brands, such as…
My new Figma plugin, Economy Flow Builder, is now publicly available on the Figma plugin store. This makes it easy to convert and order game economy flows via JSON, automatically converting them into charts. Finally, reproducibility and jumpstarting of economic flow diagrams. The kicker is that it also syncs back to JSON. If you make changes,…
Both Worldwide Global and Million Victories raised money this week, with the French Million Victories announcing a whopping $40M raise (in this economy!). Its title, Million Lords, was a highly innovative attempt at modernizing many 4x mechanics by removing base building entirely and centering the game around combat. It’s also a great exercise on how…
Gaming industry people often have an inferiority complex around “tech”, feeling never quite properly understood, and usually looked down upon. I understand the frustration! Replit hitting $100M ARR, over two explosive growth quarters, is hailed as a remarkable achievement. However, when we compare it against Monopoly Go (MoPoGo), which achieved multiples of Replit’s actual quarterly…
Like many, I believe Marvel Snap is a magnum opus in CCG design, creating the first true mobile CCG. But the ultimate reality is that revenue collapsed. Thirty-three months after launch, it’s nearly the worst-performing Marvel game by revenue. The hypothesis of a sticky core hasn’t materialized as Sensor Tower estimates that active users have…
Somehow the United States beat the EU at a solution for App Store stangleholds: unlock developer free speech to ease off-platform payment flows and messaging (apps can communicate with users from an email address collected inside the app, and directly link to web payments pre-filled out). The California court ruling has Apple continue to oversee…
