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…
Is Marvel Snap’s Laid Back Monetization Working?
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…
Analyzing Diablo IV’s LiveOps Plans
Over on the Diablo IV blog, we’re getting substantial details about the game’s live service ambitions. They sound ambitious, familiar, and judging by Diablo Immortal’s $100m+ live service revenue to date, will surely be a massive success for Blizzard. It’s clear they’re working to differentiate D4 from Immortal and set the expectation that there is no pay-for-power / pay-for-progress in this game. It’s amazing to think how far the F2P and Live Services business model has come in terms of hardcore gaming acceptance over the past decade…
South Park’s Missed Monetization Optimization
After watching the South Park: Phone Destroyer announcement trailer at E3, I eagerly switched to the Canadian App Store to check out the game (as well as fellow E3 reveal Brawl Stars). From the trailer, I had assumed it was a Heroes’ Charge inspired game infused with South Park’s signature characters and irreverent humor. Within the first few minutes, it became clear that the gameplay was not another Heroes’ Charge clone, but instead a side-scrolling, […]
Paying to win – guild vs guild events
For those mobile games angling to dominate the top grossing charts, few features are more important than a limited time event system. For instance, in August of 2013, Gree released an infographic for hit game Modern War trumpeting a 600% increase in average daily revenue when events are running. Further, the infographic states that the game makes as much as $2.3 million during an event weekend and, at the time, the game was making its […]