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Each week I compile a gaming industry insights newsletter that I share with other Rioters, including Riot’s senior leadership. This edition marks the inaugural public version that I will publish broadly every week going forward too. Opinions are mine.
Hi, my name is Kenny, and I work in Revenue Strategy at Riot Games. Each week I compile a gaming industry insights newsletter that I share with other Rioters, including Riot’s senior leadership. This edition marks the inaugural public version that I will publish broadly every week going forward as well. Opinions are mine.
See more or subscribe at: https://tinyletter.com/kliuless
Kliu's Corner: Fortnite the Platform
Though Fortnite has not yet completely transitioned to becoming a platform, Epic has taken a couple steps towards that direction already
For example, they added a sandbox-like Playground Mode, and have incrementally added improvements to it over time
“Toys” (e.g., golf balls, basketballs, volleyballs) were also added to the game even though they serve no functional purpose in Battle Royale
As this Medium post suggests, Fortnite is "much more than just a game":
"For my sons and a lot of kids their age, Fortnite is not a game they play, it’s a place they go—and, importantly, it’s a place they go with friends and not with Mom and Dad. It’s fulfilling the same development role as those illicit teen spaces from the 1970s and ’80s—those dodgy youth clubs, arcades, and video stores that we discovered unchaperoned.
Teenagers are caught in a crappy sociocultural Catch-22: Adults are worried their kids are spending too much time on smartphones and consoles, but at the same time they’re constantly policing and restricting access to physical environments"
Each incremental piece of content Epic adds into Fortnite widens their competitive moat in the battle royale genre
Every improvement continually raises players' baseline expectations by which all other competitors would be judged
Sound familiar? It should, because this is one of the ways League established MOBA market dominance with each new champion pool addition
Business Strategy
HBR: Design Thinking Comes of Age
The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain
Revenue Strategy
"Why Fortnite Makes Billions"
NPD: U.S. game spending up 40% in first half of 2018
What is an ad attribution conversion window and how does it work?
European ratings board PEGI adding in-game purchase label to boxed game
Blizzard removes paid loot boxes and loot chests for players in Belgium
PC/Console(/Mobile)
Epic's first Fortnite Installer allowed hackers to download and install anything on your Android phone silently [KL: TL;DR Tweet thread here]
Related: Man-in-the-Disk: A New Attack Surface for Android Apps
Square Enix to create AAA original IP with Tencent
Xbox Game Pass heads say player feedback shows they prefer a service with a smaller number of quality titles to one with thousands of games
Arena of Valor Nintendo Switch to Have Upgraded Graphics, Different Stats from Mobile Version [KL: no cross-platform either]
EEDAR: Analyzing player preferences from the US games market
Newzoo: Hardware & Esports at the Core of the Mobile Gaming Opportunity
XR: AR/MR/VR
Oculus Co-Founder Developing Universal VR Sickness Solution
Palmer Luckey: "Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap"
TimefireVR launches Hypatia, a virtual city and social playground in VR
China
China's government issued a notice that they will control the number of new online games to be approved, and explore implementing an appropriate age-restriction system for games to help limit and prevent myopia in minors
Tencent's Investment Strategies Revealed
>80% of netizens in lower tier Chinese cities described the mobile phone as their favourite pastime and said they were happy to spend almost all their leisure on it
How big data helped ‘China’s Netflix’ iQiyi decide to back The Story of Yanxi Palace, a summer blockbuster about back-stabbing concubines
"After all, his algorithms have concluded that the show, set in the court of Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799), would likely be a winner, based on big data analysis of past viewership patterns of similarly themed shows.
Both man and machine proved right as Yanxi Palace concluded its run on China’s biggest online video streaming platform, garnering more than 13 billion views so far and smashing the one-day viewership record earlier this month. Big data analysis was again employed to determine the optimal time and pace of releasing new episodes to build up viewer anticipation."
Tech/Entertainment
Overtime
How World of Warcraft Was Made: The Definitive Inside Story of Nearly 20 Years of Development
An Oral History of ‘GoldenEye 007’ on the N64
"Researchers gave AI curiosity and it played video games all day"
6 blockchain games band together on Ready Player One-style gaming multiverse
The game changers: meet the creatives shaking up the gaming world
Podcast: Deconstructing Sexism in Games Industry
Newzoo’s Esports Business Predictions for 2021: Esports Will Propel Gaming into a Bigger Industry than Traditional Professional Sports
How big is 802 million? China's massive internet population in seven graphics
Twitch downloads skyrocket in China thanks to esports at the Asian Games
How China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance
Google just gave control over data center cooling to an AI
The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People
See more or subscribe at: https://tinyletter.com/kliuless
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