A Simple Model of Cosmetics and Why They’re Hard to Sustain
In Six common mistakes when moving to live-service games and free-to-play, Ben Cousins argues that cosmetic-only monetization is a mistake:
The Economics of Battle Pass Are Broken. Let’s Fix It.
Monetization’s modern paradigm is defined by a direct store and battle pass (BP). After years (and ongoing) criticism of loot boxes, Fortnite re-wrote the rulebook in a way that seems to make both developers and players happy. However, it’s important to consider that at sufficient scale any monetization scheme looks like a winner. It’s unclear…
Is PS+ a Good Idea? I Analyzed 200+ Games to Find Out
Psyonix credits PS+ with vaulting Rocket League to success. Mediatonic decided to follow suit with Fall Guys. And after its success, Destruction All-Stars delayed their launch to be included in the program. Does PS+ deserve all credit it’s been given? There are some stark trade-offs worth examining.
Game Companies Are Not Tech Companies Part III: The Content Problem
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…
Can We Get Players to Tell Us Their LTV?
Eric Suffert acutely describes the dangers of extending payback windows. At every t+1 the accuracy of LTV declines while the variance in cohort profitability increases. LTV, however, is not an exogenous variable and clever design can incentivize players into revealing their long-run time horizons within a game. Consider the design of a many subscriptions: you…
How to Measure Whales
You’ve soft launched your game, done a UA push, and a string of hope appears. Against all odds, a dominant cohorted ARPU curve emerges! Is this this an anomaly or have you caught a whale? The first way to examine this is to perform cointegration tests between the cohorted ARPU curves, testing for stastistical significance.…
Get More Life Out of Your Lifetime Value Model! A Discussion of Methods.
Predicting the average cumulative spending behavior or Lifetime Value (LTV) for players is incredibly valuable. Being able to do so helps figure out what to spend on User Acquisition (UA). If a cohort of players has an LTV of $1.90 and took $1 to acquire then we’ve made money! This helps evaluate how effective particular…