Raphael van Lierop’s Post

"Success should not create an ever rising bar of new growth expectations" - this is so refreshing to hear from any CEO, especially the one that did experience a huge success recently. It's so good to see that there are still people who don't focus solely on growing numbers exponentially, because oftentimes it's what's around them that can be far more important. I definitely recommend giving this a read, whether you are into game dev or not, there is a lesson to be learned from Tim.

Such an unnecessary overreaction and complete dearth of nuance / context. If this were some live ops obsessed finance bro yelling about how everything must be maximally monetized fine. If this were a Kotick or a Ricitiello or a Web3 guy the context would possibly color the reading to that point. But Raphael van Lierop's bonafides in advocating for devs, against exploitative biz practices and not pursuing profit at all costs have been solid for years. And his text doesn't support this reading straight up. The critique was not that. The paragraph about systems-driven games and how their structure creates compelling long term fun and loyalty makes it very clear. From a person with loads of experience in not just shipping games but designing them. There is a lot there about design choices (like procedural generation which does not require crunch to produce extra content) that this post straight up ignores / misrepresents. It's not about line goes up or the content treadmill. It's about craft and creating evergreen games. Chess or Heroes 3 or Dwarf Fortress isn't still played today because of content or live ops (and neither requires people to crunch for extra content). Also deleting comments is a bad look.

In cooperative game theory, understanding how coalitions form in competitive situations is of utmost importance. When discussing solutions to characteristic function games, the payoff vector λ must be taken into account, which divides the value of the grand coalition between the players. In order to find a "fair" distribution of the grand coalition, four desirable properties should be taken into consideration: efficiency, null player, symmetry, and additivity. Check out this article on cooperative game theory to learn more about how coalitions form and how to define a "fair" distribution: https://lnkd.in/dhsmVn5A via Vincent Knight's site.

I'll wave my nerd flag (as if I haven't don that enough already). I enjoyed a great weekend away at PAX Unplugged, a tabletop gaming convention in Philadelphia, to help my good friends at Restoration Games, LLC run some demos (and of course, to get some quality gaming in, too). So: board game recommendation! Blob Party is a great party game for 4-8 players. You draw a category and a word, and then everyone secretly writes down a related word or phrase. For instance, category: technology and word: cat came up when I played. A lot of us wrote down "mouse" - which was great, because the goal is to write down the same thing as everyone else and o create a "blob mind." Everyone who writes the same word forms a group and collaborates in the next round to choose a word, and you keep playing rounds until everyone becomes a single blob 😁. Of course, there's tie-in for us #analysts: this is all about knowing your audience. If the cards are "space" and "movies," don't say "Forbidden Planet" to show off your knowledge of sci-fi films (unless you're playing with a bunch 50's sci-fi buffs). Write "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" because that's probably what everyone else knows. In a work context, that means that you need to read the room - don't fling around technical jargon to show off what you know. Talk about what matters to your audience, using jargon-free language that makes sense to everyone. Bonus recommendation: My job for Restoration Games was to demo Thunder Road: Vendetta. It's a Mad Max style race to oblivion - light on strategy, heavy on mayhem. Lots of collisions, running your friends off the road, explosions and chaos. People loved it. No analytics tie-in - just fun, silly chaos with your friends. #analytics #data https://lnkd.in/dVmb9FPh

Friday MARCH 15th MARKS Wordle number 1000. This simple but addicting game was prototyped by Josh Wardle ABOUT a decade ago, but was shelved. During the COVID pandemic Josh brought that prototype back to life as he wanted to make a new word game for his partner. A thousand days ago he launched it and shared with family members, and a few months later he made it public. The game quickly became VIRAL, leading to the NY Times acquiring it in January 2022. Wordle, ALONG with a few other NY Times games, is responsible for a significant portion of the digital subscription revenue for the Times. Many things make Wordle such a successful game, I'd like to POINT out a few: 1. You can play Wordle only once a day. This prevents the game from getting boring quickly, but also creates a feeling of scarcity. 2. Some days the solution is easy, or MAYBE you get LUCKY with your opening GUESS. But THERE are also days of cold SWEAT when you are on your SIXTH try with more than one possible solution left. This variability in difficulty MAKES things more interesting and HELPS bringing players back. 3. Wordle counts your streak of correct answers, but this streak resets not only if you failed to SOLVE within 6 attempts, but also if you did not play on a certain day. As someone with a really long streak (see FIRST comment), I'm coming back DAILY so I won't lose it. 4. Wordle makes it easy to SHARE your performance with others. I'm part of a SLACK channel with a few of my colleagues WHERE we SHARE our results. This adds a fun factor of competition. Outperforming each OTHER is a type of reward that brings us back. To THOSE who want to LEARN more ABOUT why so many people keep coming back to Wordle (and OTHER products) EVERY day, I recommend reading the excellent book "Hooked" by Nir Eyal.

How long is a piece of string? What is the right length of a game? 20 years ago, the equation was $50=40 hours. I'm amazed about all of the heat that Raphael van Lierop is getting regarding his well-balanced critique of Manor Lords and its decline on the Steam charts. Content (or the lack thereof) is the death of many games. To paraphrase what a wise colleague told me yesterday: "Sometimes I can play a game for three hours and it's a completely satisfying experience." "Sometimes it's 10 hours, and that's enough." Instead, the existential question to be asked is: "If a game is in Early Access, is that a promise to gamers that the game will have more content thereafter?" That's a value equation for every individual consumer to contemplate. In these days of live ops and F2P, there is no exact answer. Again, how long is a piece of string? It is what the market will bear. #videogaming #value #steam #earlyaccess #F2P #liveops

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Saw this post from James Clear - and wanted to repost my comment here… I like this differentiation James Clear makes between setting goals and “True long-term thinking” i.e. developing and refining our ability to keep learning and growing. See “Finite and Infinite Games” (1986) by James P. Carse for an earlier source: Finite vs. infinite games… Carse summarizes his argument, "There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength. Finite games are theatrical, necessitating an audience; infinite ones are dramatic, involving participants..." https://lnkd.in/ghSP5jGX

The always excellent GamesIndustry.biz was kind enough to revisit a part of my past today. Ten years ago I spoke with them, as we were shutting down Age of Empires Online, about the need for developers to recognize that every online game will end someday, and that developers need to plan for that inevitable demise gracefully. It's been ten years, and now almost every game has some element of online community and the pressures that entails. I think I was mostly right then (https://lnkd.in/gd2b35QC), and mostly right now looking back. (https://lnkd.in/ggiC7Pwq). From today's piece: Perry concedes that might not be a more common approach because it requires resources, and it's not the kind of thing you can make an easy financial argument in favor of. "But understand this: gamers have a long collective memory," Perry says. "We remember which developers and publishers took care of us, and which ones didn't. If the moral argument doesn't carry the day, the reputation one should. We live in an environment where there are more games than time to play them, so we all will spend that time and that money with people that we trust." Thanks to Brendan Sinclair (https://lnkd.in/giyWMCie), then and now.

Root is one of my favourite boardgames, though I wouldn't play it with everyone. Because it's unsettling when you first discover it. Because it can be scary to start playing a game only to realise that every player (faction) plays totally differently. You see, in this game, the only things that all factions share are the board, some cards and items that could be crafted using said cards. And given that this game is a race for points (the first player to get to 30 points is the winner), it may be tempting to lay out the perfect strategy. In Root, some factions (e.g. Marquise de Cat) start with a strong presence on the map and need to build stuff to make points. Others (Eyrie Dynasty) start in one corner of the map and need to expand to their former glory. Yet another faction (Woodland Alliance) doesn't even start with pieces on the map, but will use Sympathy tokens to force other players to give them cards so they become more powerful... while the fourth faction we played with the other day (Riverfolk Company, see picture below) just sells their services to the other players. Some people - when they play a game - love to design their strategy based on their understanding of the rules, and expect their fellow players to follow similar rules. And so, even when they play a game for the first time, they may be on the lookout for the best possible strategy to win. In Root, I usually recommend first-time players to try and understand how their own faction works and makes points before bothering with the others. And for that, one needs a couple of turns... It may be frustrating, but understanding one's own system can later help adjust to player strategies. In the game below, we were nearing the end of the game. I was playing the Riverfolk (teal otters), leading with 22 points. The Marquise was getting closer to me with 16, followed by the Eyrie (14) and Alliance (12). Looking at the map, we could imagine that the Alliance (green pieces in the corner) weren't in a strong position to win. And this is where the game is really brilliant in my mind. Because appearances can be deceiving. Because everyone plays differently (not only strategy-wise, but also due to the rules being different for every faction). We didn't realise that the Alliance was quietly brewing a plan to overthrow us all. We were all so focused on looking at board presence, and battling in some fox clearings that we forgot that the Alliance is a faction that schemes and plays most of their game outside of the board... which led to a surprise race and victory by the Alliance, using a special powered card that they bought from me early in the game. Root is a very elegant game that rewards experimentation and letting go of full control. And this can be hard. We need to understand our own system first before we can discover the flow of the game. Perhaps there's a bit of systems thinking in there?