Sam Barberie’s Post

The saga continues in Epic vs Google With implications for players and developers 👇 https://lnkd.in/gRsMhmbM This is an interesting update since it's coming from the US, while the EU has largely moved toward forcing the app stores to open up more to third party stores and platforms. The move, if it can be acted on with the appeal, will give developers more options in how they sell to players, and players more options in where they buy and with what methods. Of course, this opens up a range of possibilities for web3, but also traditional developers who look to provide storefronts that are beyond the reach of the app stores' high fees. It's not just better margins and new surface area for buying things: this kind of decision also opens up possibilities for new kinds of experiences and player journeys. While most games reasonably want to keep players inside the app as long as possible, in a cross-play world where gamers do often play different games on different devices, this decision gives developers the potential to create net new experiences that reward players for hopping out of the game and over to another platform or site. Most devs won't leverage this opportunity since it works for only certain games and players, but it's interesting to think beyond the baseline commercial implications of these rulings and to where it can benefit players through how they enjoy their games. It'll be a long time before the dust settles on all of these fragmented app store rulings, but the trend is toward openness, and with it new hopes for distribution and revenue models.

The power of understanding your audience and representation Especially in massive countries 👇 Obviously many games want to go global and reach all 3.2B players we've got on the planet, but that just won't happen because of device, genre, language, payment and other preferences. Not a lot of games eye a specific country and go all-in, but that's what FAU-G is doing with this title. As a country of 450M gamers, India has more surface area for a game to carve out a niche and find a massive audience, but Dot9 is going even further in localizing its game to a giant market by bringing representation and identity into it. There aren't many games with Indian representation as a standard, and this nod to the intended player base has already earned the game 1M pre-registrations, something any indie game with global aspirations would die to have. This case illustrates how important understanding different geographies is; not simply in the artwork, genre, game specs, language, and payment options that can make or break a game in different territories, but down to the clothing worn by avatars. It's a small detail, though clearly one that, when played right, makes a massive impact on the potential for the game. https://lnkd.in/gk7JrYcS

Forever games: How to solve for the shutdown spiral What if our games could go on forever? 👇 Full read: https://lnkd.in/g256yEma As with everything in the cyclical nature of gaming, the industry is back to discussing a concept that was a foregone conclusion for games just a handful of years ago. In the same way that we’re contemplating what ownership in gaming means (when two decades ago players loved owning—and possibly reselling at GameStop—their game disks), we are again considering the lifetime of a game and what it means to play a game forever. As gamers get fed up (and regulators start to side-eye) the fact that purchased games and game assets can be taken away willy nilly by developers, the industry is facing a challenge to find a logistically sound and financially feasible way to keep games running longer. There’s a real cost to developers in closing a game, including loss of trust and low sentiment. How heavily do you want to invest in a game as a player knowing that it could be over at any point? Would you be likely to buy into a new version of a game given that the developer pulled the rug out from under the old, perfectly-fine version? Does the feeling that a game’s community is waning mean you’re more likely to stop purchasing and leave the game earlier than you otherwise would because you know what’s coming? All of these feelings hurt developers at their bottom line, and late-in-life games can still earn developers millions of dollars a month, sums that no dev would brush away as long as there was a return and it didn’t cannibalize future game launches (more on that later). There is a way to do this, but solutions need to solve for: 1️⃣ The financial upside  2️⃣ The tech burden 3️⃣ Handling improvements/fixes/new content Fortunately, a cadre of technologies and new modalities of game maintenance and ongoing support are offering developers and players the opportunities to enjoy and earn from their games forever. Here’s a subset of what is going to help unlock this: 🗄 Distributed or decentralized servers 🖼 Item ownership 👨👩👧👦 Community ownership 🏗 User generated content/modding  🤑 Shared upside between devs and community Hit the link above where I dive into each of these specifically. If we assume all the above criteria are met—the game is hosted in a cost-efficient and decentralized way, the players own their items as long as (and beyond) the lifetime of the game, the community is in a seat of authority over the direction of the game, there are regular refreshes of content, and the incentives make creators and developers happy—then we’ve satisfied the 3 upfront challenges that a game needs to address in order to maintain itself for eternity. If done correctly, a no-risk, win-win scenario arises: players are happy with their favorite game and developers get a steady stream of incremental revenue. This is a long one, so grab coffee and settle in.

Headed to Gamesbeat in SF in a few weeks If you'll be there, hit me up!

Great report from Bain & Company on the global gaming market Here are the top 3 trends: - Players want more interoperability in cross-play and across devices (with 70% playing on more than one device—higher than I would expect, but not far) - People do more in games than play. This trend has been around for a long time, esp. popularized by Fortnite and Roblox where people are socializing, going to concerts, and even shopping for other stuff in their games, increasing the time spent in games and the surface area for revenue opportunities. And—surprise—the more time you spend in-game, the more money you spend. - Mobile games fail at a rate more than 3x other verticals. Of course, gaming is a hits driven business and spending for UA is higher than many other verticals, and needs to be constant. https://lnkd.in/df_Rhd9q

Discord sees itself as unifying the cross-play world And its metrics are proving that to be a good move Community is a must for any game on the mid- to -hardcore side, and Discord has been the de facto platform driving that for a while. What's interesting is that Discord's strength, in large part, comes from being a platform and community agnostic tool: it's not only for console, not only for PC, not only for official game channels, not only for private friend groups. Full read: https://lnkd.in/gZEWu347 [ht to Dean Takahashi's article and interview that inspired this piece, link in my post] Instead, it unifies all of these cohorts and their respective needs, especially as cross-play (i.e. players on PC and console being able to play together in the same server) has become an expected standard for major multiplayer games. Discord solves the fragmentation that's inherent in the siloed game platforms, and crucially even down to a must-have feature for friends who want to play together: voice chat. While a lot of games (Fortnite, Apex, others) have enabled their own in-game cross-platform voice chat, it’s often wonky at best, and also doesn’t enable the kind of game-agnostic community that players also love to engage in, namely talking with your group of friends even when you’re not playing the same game. This strategy is a great one. Discord has 200M users playing 1.5B hours of games per month, which is 7.5 hours of gameplay per user. Discord knows that that is not likely all in one game, or even on one platform, and Discord’s goal is to bring everything together. In this way, Discord rises about the fracas of shifting game affinities, new releases, device swaps, and more. It’s not beholden to the limitations that games or platforms put around themselves. Beyond that, once players find their community and friends, Discord is the landscape for those conversations and engagement whether they’re playing a game or not. But there is a new entrant trying to take on Discord’s dominance: Telegram is increasing eyed by game devs desperate to leverage its existing audience for user acquisition. TG has none of the game-centric features or cross-play voice chat that Discord has, but user-starved game developers are feeling that TG can offer them routes to users. And more than that, developers see TG as an actual channel for distributing a game, not just rallying communities around a game. TG’s move into being a game platform should be something Discord closely watches, not because TG will soon host Call of Duty, but because the platform could become a key destination for UA and companion apps/”games” in a way that might cannibalize Discord’s gaming dominance.

No developer ever wants players to leave their game This tech improves retention and revenue more than 4x 👇 The idea of sending players out of your game to a third party marketplace or platform, if for any reason other than something that adds to the joy of the game, is anathema to best practices of: - monetization - retention - player safety Helping developers with monetization is a universal need in gaming, regardless of what underlying technology your game uses. And retention has to happen before monetization can truly scale. So how do you keep players in your game and then converting? In-game and custom marketplaces for game items have been a must since the beginning, and the Sequence marketplace tech has only intensified in features and robustness. That's why Ubisoft uses it, that's why Rough House Games (Champions Ascension) uses it, that's why every AAA game and indie developer uses it. Games using this tech earn at least 4x more in enforced royalties than those games that send players out of their games into ecosystems they don't own, control, or trust. Solving this problem is one of the biggest unlocks in web3 gaming, and a massive boost to the kinds of UX that can actually, possibly, bring in mass players.

Transmedia is really just getting started And this is why the Sims is getting a movie 24 years later 👇 - Mario Bros movie - Last of Us series - (maybe not Minecraft) Good films coming from serious games are generally well-accepted notions at this point, after decades of poor adaptations left most people with the foregone conclusion that any game-to-movie/TV shift would be disastrous. We don't have too many details on this movie, and the choice of director is a little suss (Kate Herron has a decent list of TV creds but no big-budget films to her name yet), but it's almost surprising that EA hasn't spent more time delving into adaptations of its 24-year-old franchise before. Rather, EA has been one of the largest adapters of other IP, whether Star Wars, FIFA, Madden, etc. This film also comes at a time where EA is shifting away from major new releases of the Sims and into a living game with more iterations and—obviously—tons of AI. With that shift comes less fanfare around brand new versions of the Sims, which means fewer natural marketing beats. What do publishers do when games move into live services mode? Some turn to esports (that won't work with the Sims), some turn to big multiplayer seasons (also won't work), and increasingly some are turning to film and TV as both a new revenue stream and a reinforcer of the IP (oh, hey, maybe this will work!). When done well, the results of this are massive for studios. The HBO Last of Us series boosted sales of the game so spectacularly that it was better for Sony than it was for HBO. While a massive commercial success, the Mario Bros movie is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall power and revenue of that franchise. Let's see what this new territory means for EA, and particularly how the execution goes, but this is shift in media that won't be dying down. https://lnkd.in/gdqswYZh