Would you rather be the company behind Call of Duty or Sniper Elite? On first blush, most would choose the household name hands down. But for Rebellion Co-Founder Jason Kingsley, OBE, when you fully understand the balance sheet behind these two franchises, Sniper is the clear winner. As a franchise with north of 70m units sold in its lifetime, the success of Sniper, as well as Nazi Zombie Army, have brought Rebellion to the place where they fully fund projects of their choosing and completely control their destiny…
Cliff Blezinski on Being a Control Freak
You know Clifford “CliffyB” Blezinski as the Lead Designer and face of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament. But in his life after Epic Games he has been a CEO, an angel investor, a restauranteur, a Tony-winning Broadway investor and producer, a memoirist and now, a comic book author. He is so much more than just the dude wielding the life-sized chainsaw gun…
Can AI Replace Your Art Team?
AI-generated art has exploded all over Twitter, LinkedIn and wherever you get your games industry news. With its ability to quickly and cheaply create polished content, social media is filled with bold statements and striking imagery that make the case for AI generative art replacing your art team. Yet, as amazing as these individual pieces of content from Chat GPT, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and others are, the present reality is not as clear as a viral social media post may lead you to believe…
The Problem With Cosmetics-Forward Monetization
It’s tempting to run a gamer friendly, cosmetics-forward strategy for your live service game. But you can’t have a League of Legends sized outcome without a League of Legends sized audience. This is the lesson learned by Velan games as it shuts down Knockout City after one year as a free-to-play title…
Fantasy Fulfillment & Hogwarts Legacy
Why was Hogwarts Legacy such a massive success when other Harry Potter games have faltered? It fulfills the core fantasy of the IP…
Phoenix Labs CEO Jesse Houston on Building a Forever Company
If you need a little inspiration in your life, you should look to Phoenix Labs Co-Founder and CEO Jesse Houston. After stints on some of the biggest games in the world at Riot, Bioware and Ubisoft, Jesse set out to build a Forever Company with the Dauntless maker…
Why have game industry SPACs been such a disaster?
I wanted to make it spicy on my return episode of This Week in Games, so I asked the indomitable Eric Kress a simple question: why have gaming SPACs performed so poorly? In 2021 & 2022, I caught SPAC fever, putting small bets into Playstudios, Nexsters, Skillz and IronSource. My performance has ranged from -65% to a complete delisting. Here’s what Eric had to say…
The 5 Key Questions Behind Mr Autofire’s $40m Success
With over $40m in lifetime revenue and still going strong, Mr Autofire is an understated and indisputable hit. And it’s journey began with five simple questions the team at Lightheart Entertainment asked themselves before deciding if this was the right first game for their fledgling studio.
Empathy is the Secret Superpower of Great Game Engineers
Empathy is the secret superpower of great game engineers. This was one of the most insightful takeaways from my interview with veteran Technical Director James Marr about the difference between merely Good and truly Great when it comes to game engineering. In his illustrious career in game development, James has held leadership positions at companies including Zynga, DeNA and N3TWORK Studios. He has been a technical lead on games including Eliminate – the first 3D, […]
6 Months In, Diablo Immortal is Crushing It
Diablo Immortal has earned $284 million in mobile revenue in the 6 months since launching worldwide, according to data.ai estimates.
With 75% organic downloads, growing revenue per download, and additional significant revenue from the PC release of the game, Diablo Immortal is clearly a monster hit for Blizzard and NetEase…