Income Inequality In Mobile Games
When making a completely unfair comparison between income inequality in developed nations and the top mobile puzzle and RPGs in the U.S., we find a couple of interesting things.
Overwatch Uses This One Content Productivity Hack
Overwatch’s new Stadium mode officially marks the launch* of Overwatch 2, building on the previous release’s perk system. Inside Stadium, there’s one content productivity hack, known previously only to the savviest Steam roguelike indie developers: conditional passives.
Why Loot Boxes Exist
Nothing is as misunderstood as loot boxes in gaming (virtual currency is a close second). Critics decry them as a normalization of gambling that preys on weak impulse control. Strip away the moral panic, and a sanguine explanation emerges: loot boxes solve two vexing economic problems.
Inflation, Ads, and Webstores Change Everything We Know
Inflation, ads, and webstores reverse nearly every trend in gaming—and then reverse it again. These aren’t rounding errors either—they’re GDP-level phenomena (literally), and the inability to account for them is warping our perception of reality in the gaming industry.
Roblox’s Battlebit Failure & Adopt Me Ripoff
At 350 million monthly active users (MAU), Roblox boasts a user base rivaling the combined size of Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network. However, this impressive engagement comes hand in hand with an exorbitant 70-80% platform tax. In any case, Roblox is too big to ignore. Its bigness forces Roblox and non-Roblox developers to grapple…
Immigration Policy Is Coming for the 10-Year Game
Previously confined to PC turn-based play, mobile free-to-play transformed 4x into sprawling persistent world MMOs. The combination was and continues to be electric; what other genre can admit to $1M LTVs? Each X, EXplore, EXpand, EXploit, and EXterminate invites an unparalleled level of feature width and depth. Its LTVs are not driven only by spend…
The Church of FOMO: Can It Stand?
A good deal of odd and folk-lore design priors float around gaming; my two favorites are free hard currency and time-limited cosmetics predicated on FOMO or fear of missing out. The FOMO model suggests developers ought to stuff their game with time-limited content, once the timer is expired the content is gone forever (or for…
Why Virtual Currency Exists
A recent Twitter thread highlighted a popular Gamer™ belief: Nope, they are mostly used to obfuscate real prices and can’t store value — Nicola Visonà (@VisonaNicola) May 25, 2021 Even within gaming studios, I encounter a similar sentiment. Proponents of this position claim “firms use virtual currency pricing as a behavioral trick!” With virtual currency,…
Battle Pass Who? We’ve Got Direct Stores
One revelation of the Apple v. Epic case is that 67% of revenue is from the Item Shop.
More on the Economics of Battle Pass: Resting Prices, Forecasted Level and Complete Pass
The previous model of battle pass (BP) focused on average daily monetization cap (ADMC) as the key lever in driving more monetization from BP. Special attention was paid to the role of tiers and we’ll continue to do so here. One of the more interesting shortcomings of BP is the inner temporal nature of the…