Balancing Live Service Games

Balancing live service games is the constant act of making trade-offs. From aiming to increase player satisfaction, innovating and pushing the boundaries of the game to maintaining a sustainable workflow for development teams, with a promise of regular releases there’s an underlying desire for improvement. However, improvements made to a …

Forecasting for mere mortals

I’ve noticed that often the thing preventing someone from forecasting, estimating, or developing a model, has more to do with a gap in knowledge/access to a framework or terminology as opposed to the actual analytical/quantitative skills required. What is forecasting? Forecasting is attempting to predict the future.  We can end …

Tips to Calculate Total Addressable Market for Apps and Games

Whether you are developing an app or a game, calculating Total Addressable Market (TAM, also known as Total Available Market) is necessary to understand how big the opportunity is. The Total Addressable market is the expected size of your audience for your product, and calculating it is more of an …

Where to soft launch a mobile game on a budget

Soft launching (also known as SL, soft-launch), is an important step of product validation. We launch a product for a restricted audience so that we can evaluate the potential of the game or product and improve it. On the one hand, soft-launch is an opportunity to gather metrics on common …

Crafting better Games/Products with the ancient lessons from Epic Poems

Going through school in Portugal means spending some time studying the epic poem Os Lusiadas, similar to the time-tested Odyssey or Aeneid. A few days ago it struck me that this ancient art form held many good ideas to help create better games and products. The main areas where Epic …

Optimizing Organic Reach in F2P Mobile game

2020 started with a novel corona virus outbreak in China and a direct consequence of the overall awareness about this topic has increased the organic reach for F2P mobile games like Plague Inc. like this Verge article reports (https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/27/21083737/plague-inc-developer-coronavirus-outbreak-game-popularity-china). In our highly connected world, the impact of news and trends …

How reasoning about LTV, ARPDAU, and CPIs can help product development strategy (Part 2)

This article is a good place for anyone interested in product design in this area to understand how monetization, retention, cost of acquisition are interdependent when we set our business goals.

How reasoning about LTV, ARPDAU, and CPIs can help your product development strategy (Part 1)

Working on mobile F2P games comes with a myriad of KPIs (key performance indicators). And often the relationships between these factors are more important than the values per se. Being active in this industry will give most people a feeling of these KPI relationships. But for people that, love to …

Back to Top