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…
Amazon has announced Luna, yet another stab at game streaming and subscriptions. It seems like the failures of Apple Arcade, Stadia, Gamefly, and our oft-forgotten OnLive have not been effective deterrents. Not to be outdone, Rovio’s Hatch continues to drain money every quarter. Perhaps this is what Bezos warned shareholders about when discussing new “multibillion-dollar…
Apple is increasingly under fire what’s claimed to be unfair practices in the App Store. The criticism takes three forms: (a) Apple’s 30% fee is much too high relative to cost (b) the rules are arbitrary and stifle competition and (c) the App Store as the exclusive avenue to install apps on iOS is unjust.…
Performance based marketing makes intuitive sense; of course you want to optimize ROI on spend that compose 30% or more of a your firm’s expenditures. But here’s the kicker: if it makes sense for firms why not individuals? Shouldn’t we be tracking the impact of our output? Are co-workers actually reading your analysis, concept art…
Bloomberg is reporting that Epic is seeking to raise $500M to $1B in new funding. Tim Sweeney, Epic CEO and provocateur extraordinaire, owns 60% while Tencent owns the other 40%. Why would Epic need more funding as it continues to rake in Fortnite money? Tim has bigger ambitions, let’s figure out what they are. As…
In case you haven’t been paying attention, Netflix just re-discovered the reality/reality-doc genre. In 2 weeks: Tiger King To Hot Too Handle (international cast) The Circle (4 international versions already released) Love is Blind I chuckled a bit when when Netflix remarked that they saw Fortnite as their biggest threat, but after 6 weeks in…