Epic Games vs. Apple: The story so far On the 13th of August 2020, Apple bans Epic from the App Store. Epic games infringed upon the App Store terms of service and Fortnite was banned. This is the short story of a much bigger narrative. Immediately after the ban, a …
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 …
Being able to think and reason about the impact of features on monetization is a useful skill that can help prioritize the backlogs and optimize resources. Previously, we have touched upon data-driven product development in articles like How reasoning about LTV, ARPDAU, and CPIs can help your product development strategy …
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 …
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 …
Steve Balmer doesn’t need a lot of introductions. Former CEO of Microsoft, Balmer is known for his monkey-energy public image and for wearing his heart on his sleeve (for the good and for the bad). I think that by analyzing and embracing some of his behaviors we can learn a …
All the fancy algorithms in the world won’t save a bad premise.
When we have an open world MMO, it’s crucial to be on top of its virtual game economy. It’s human nature to try to exploit the system, and your players will test the limits that you build for your world. The sigmoid (also known as the logistic function) is an …
Making good games is hard. Making games that yield a profit is even harder.
We all know that inflation in a game economy can cause a lot of problems. Among which: Decreased need to spend money on in-app purchases to obtain game items/currency Increased difficulty for new players to be able to compete with older players Lack of feeling of meaningful progression Overall spender …
