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…
One of my favorite folk-lore design positions is the notion of giving away free hard currency. Without hesitation, every product manager I’ve worked with will off-handily assert the “drug-dealer” model. Supposedly, after experiencing the wonders of hard currency, players will be more likely to spend real money on hard currency rather than just enjoying the…
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…
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.…
Previously, I wrote about ads as a way to monetize non-payers, but there’s more to the ad exchange and what I’ll coin as ‘portfolio pumping’. It’s like portfolio theory, but not really. These terms reference two growing phenomenon in F2P games. King is at the forefront of portfolio pumping, in which a given firm pushes…
Everyone’s favorite former Rovio employee is a prolific writer on F2P games; the closest we have to a Fukuyama. Seufert has covered a range of topics, but none more important than internal organization. Seufert argues for a number of institutional policies to surround analysts with within an organization. Frequently, analytics and data are as much about…
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…