One of Roblox’s most curious decisions has been to increase dev share payout rates. Now developers who go to cash out Roblox’s currency (which players pay in for USD) will be able to do so at a higher exchange rate, effectively increasing their take-home pay per dollar spent and their experiences. Interestingly, Roblox won’t have…
Roblox’s continued growth and retention of aging players will start to represent a serious threat to the game industry. It’s something we need to start coming to grips with.
There’s been recent enthusiasm about the need for “Game Economists.” I guess good things come in packages!
Sorry readers, I caught the blockchain bug. When 30-person firms get $4.5B valuations, it’s time to pay attention, regardless of one’s priors. Everyone seems to have a Blockchain hot-take, but I’ve found most to fall short of ruthlessly integrating the implications and design space of the technology. Blockchain players (who are also, by definition, investors)…
Battle Royale and Roguelike are remaking game progression before our eyes. Popularized in earnest during the rise (and eventual pruning) of the MOBA genre, in-round progression mandates players accrue vertical power in the context of a single round. MOBA sessions start with players farming in-round currency to spend on items that persist until the round…
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…
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. The vocal members of any community tend to dominate the feedback. And as we…
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…
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?
One revelation of the Apple v. Epic case is that 67% of revenue is from the Item Shop.