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?
The “metaverse” discussion seems more about cultural “in-group” signaling then a thorough exploration of an idea. It’s frustrating. Rather than talking about “what the metaverse will look like” instead we should examine the forecast of a “metaverse” altogether.
Cyperpunk 2077 launched and it turns out the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game were riddled with bugs. This has lead to an avalanche of omniscient pundits declaring “I told ya so!”. My personally favorite roast in this Miyamoto meme. Rushing development feeds into narratives around greedy firms. “If only they didn’t want…
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…
Part IPart IIPart III A Quick Refresher Pricing is tough to get right. Ideally, we’d like to select a price that maximizes profit, holding all else constant. Let’s add consumer surplus to the story. In the example below, this is the shaded yellow area. Some readers value the book at $30 and thus are the…
Part IPart II So maybe game companies aren’t tech companies. As much as game companies seem to borrow from tech firms, tech firms run a bigger deficit in borrowing from games. If Netflix, a subscription service with over 10,000 movies and TV shows, has its biggest competitor in a single game, Fortnite, then perhaps there’s…
Part I Ran Mo retraces the incredible fast follow of the auto-chess genre. Before you could blink an eye, what was a mod in Dota 2 (which itself was a mod) had spun off into three incarnations. The first was from the mod maker, Drodo Studios’ plainly labeled Auto Chess, the second was Valve’s Underlords,…
Ran Mo and Joseph Kim (@jokim1) argue for looking at games from a Silicon Valley perspective. The usual three make an appearance: moats, networking effects, and platforms. Moreover, while I thought it had died out after the launch of Halo 3, there continues to exist an inferiority complex amongst game makers. Games never seem to get the mainstream or…
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 supply-side economics of subscriptions are fairly straightforward: get massive scale and distribute costs. Netflix has over 160M subscribers meaning a $100M production only costs each user $0.63. There’s zero marginal cost (unlike Spotify), so the more subscribers Netflix has the less a piece of content costs on a per user basis. At $11 per…