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…
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. 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, […]
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…
Marvel Snap is an undisputed hit with gamers and game journalists, but one month into an all out marketing blitz, achieving cohort paybacks looks like a challenge based on data.ai revenue estimates…
Animoca Brands. Crazy Defense Heroes was first released in 2018 and Crazy Kings in 2014. Sporting a similar art style, they are both classic styled tower defense games similar to familiar hero-based TD games like Kingdom Rush. In 2021, Animoca Brands launched $TOWER and is using it as a shared play-to-earn token across both games…
I was 9 hours into playing a mobile, free-to-play, build and battle game when I made the decision. I was going to pay to win. Not necessarily because I was loving the game so much as I thought it would be interesting to document. If I spent $100 on in-game currency, how far would my money go? Was it enough to ascend to the highest levels of that week’s PvP tournament leaderboard? The tournament was […]
This microtalk was originally presented at Unknown Worlds’ monthly Postmortem meetup in San Francisco. In the talk, I explain the 4 pleasures model, a mental framework I use to aid hesitant developers in better understanding F2P players. This model, presented by anthropologist Lionel Tiger in his book The Pursuit of Pleasure, explains 4 different types of pleasure: Physio – pleasures of the body and derived from the sensory organs. Socio – the enjoyment derived from relationships with others. Psycho […]
As more mobile game developers move into the F2P space or integrate IAP into their premium game, a common set of problems occur around process (or lack thereof) when it comes to designing for monetization. Many game teams I talk to or work with in my role as a monetization design consultant are working in F2P begrudgingly. They distrust the business model and this sentiment bleeds through to the game’s implementation, limiting their chance for success. In […]
This article originally appeared on GamesIndustry.biz When it comes to superheroes and intellectual properties in general, there is no name bigger than Batman. Thanks to Robert Downey Jr’s charisma and Jon Favreau’s directing, Iron Man is having an incredible resurgence over the past few years. But in terms of perennial, world-wide appeal Bruce Wayne is right up there with Michael Jordan and Star Wars in the pantheon of intellectual properties. The fact that NetherRealm’s free-to-play […]