Billions of annual dollars for a mechanic so simple you hate that you missed it. When Royal Match introduced the additional win streak tier in 2023, @Harshal Karvande wrote a year later that it “increased revenue baseline by more than 1.5 times.” On a net present value basis, the invention of Super Light Ball will return tens of billions in recurring casual puzzle GDP increases. Pretty good for a feels-so-obvious mechanic. And yet, it took over 31 years since match3’s debut in Shariki and at least eight years since the win streaks first appeared in Candy Crush for match games to discover the obvious. Its discovery, though, makes clear that industry stagflation is a choice, not a destiny.
The most remarkable thing about the discovery of Super Light Ball is that nothing about it is a new ingredient. It’s simply introducing and doubling down on mechanics that have been in match games for years upon years. And despite the fact that UA has been ferociously bid up with paybacks pushing two years, the discovery of the mechanic was still out of reach — even for corporations like King that spend millions of dollars a year on research.
Broadly, science has been grappling with existential questions about its own growth, not unlike those that gaming has been facing. At New Things Under the Sun, @Matthew Clancy has been documenting the empirical evidence, ultimately showing, in diverse and clever ways, that yes, new ideas are becoming harder to find.
Gaming mirrors many of the findings that he observes in science. For example, gaming is becoming increasingly specialized and more narrow. Not only are PC/Console hires skeptical of mobile and vice versa, but genre specificity is becoming increasingly important. Working on Counter-Strike, applying to a job at DICE is simply more persuasive than an application from Voodoo.
However, Clancy also recognizes that harder idea spotting doesn’t necessarily mean stagflation. Counteracting declines in productivity can be achieved by increasing investment in research tools (i.e., technology). One of the things we often forget, however, is that game design is also a technology, something Nobel Prize Winner Paul Romer would likely be supportive of.
Like Romer’s technology description, design is non-rivalrous, particularly in mobile free-to-play. Romer discusses the most valuable ideas being “recipes,” which help them scale. Super Light Ball is a near-perfect demonstration of this! Only three months later, it was copied in Toon Blast as Disco Ball.
While A.I. is a topic for another discussion, game design is not a new technology; it’s one of our oldest. However, when I examine the R&D budgets of these firms, it’s almost as if they refuse to double down. King’s Experimentation Group was disbanded despite well over $100M in annual value (hard leveling labeling!), while I search for the fourth win streak.