Ozempic, AI Copilots, Gambling Apps, and the Future of Engines
If the majority of mobile casuals' target audience takes Ozempic, what effect does that have on games? No one asks these questions, so welcome to the Game Economist Cast.
In this episode, Phillip Black, Christopher Kaczmarczyk-Smith, and Eric Guan unpack what this signal means for interactive entertainment, from Riot's 2XKO downsizing to Google's Genie 3 and the future of engines.
We discuss:
- The 2XKO reset and the economics of niche-within-niche genres
- Team size, burn rate, and why a 160-person fighting game team changes the break-even math
- Free-to-play cosmetics versus box-price DLC in a capped DAU genre
- Why betting apps can out-monetize most games on ARPDAU
- How appetite suppression might reallocate time, spending, and loop sensitivity
- Genie 3 and the cost curve of game production
- Engines as rule-governance layers in a probabilistic content world
- Cosmetic economies as foundational theory
- Scarcity, signaling, and equilibrium pricing in digital status markets
- Price discovery, private information, and turning trade into tabletop play
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