Seeds are one of the most powerful variables in game design, and one of the least acknowledged. EA’s Data Science team published a paper showing a 5x difference in win rate—from 15% to 75%—based only on the seed used to initialize a board. The level design and other match parameters remained the same!
Extraction shooters were supposed to be the next big leap, and Escape from Tarkov was the movement’s exemplar. Titles like Jager’s The Cycle: Frontier and Call of Duty’s DMZ failed to generate meaningful traction. Many mistakes stem from a misunderstanding of Royale’s place in shooter evolution, creating an inability to conceptualize what’s next. Bungie’s Marathon…
Game economy designers have inadvertently revived the economic traditions of famed economist Irving Fisher. In Fisher’s world, the economy is a hydraulic machine, with refinement or “productive process” occurring as resources flow. The impact of major institutions takes on a literal effect, where a tariff might slow the flow of liquid or capital from one…
MMOs and most web3 titles suffer from a fundamental design flaw: capital depreciation (or lack thereof). The result is a Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation economy so prevalent Redditors plead to find an MMO that hasn’t suffered. Even EVE Online, with its own Head Economist . suffered inflation bouts. It’s a looming threat to the web3 space, only mitigated by…
Snap is doing…ok! It peaked at 10K Steam PSU and 14M mobile downloads. But for all the innovation and press hullabaloo, shouldn’t Snap have higher expectations? After all, Vampire Survivors, from a team of one, wrapped up the year moving 2.5m copies at $5 a pop, with zero budget. And lest we not forget, Snap’s…
I have a lot to say about Marvel Snap; it’s a breath of fresh air in a mobile market that’s smelt stale for too long. Snap dedicates itself to taking advantage of mobile rather than treating it as a tax. However, for all its innovations and wins, I wonder if the Snap team outsmarted itself…
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…
Battle Royale and Roguelike are remaking game progression before our eyes. Popularized in earnest during the rise (and eventual pruning) of the MOBA genre, in-round progression mandates players accrue vertical power in the context of a single round. MOBA sessions start with players farming in-round currency to spend on items that persist until the round…
One revelation of the Apple v. Epic case is that 67% of revenue is from the Item Shop.
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…