One law at a time.
Short pieces on free-to-play economies, live operations, and the difference between a number and a fact.
It's out
I Teut You So is on Amazon today in Kindle, paperback and hardcover. Twenty years of free-to-play, written down before the mistake instead of after it.
I lost the keys to my own blog
This domain pointed at a blog I could no longer edit. Rather than argue with it, I moved everything here — the book, the writing, and a poster you can take without paying for it.
The $1.32 game
In 2013 the biggest game in the Western world earned about $1.32 per user per month. Decompose that number and it stops looking like a failure.
The missing Undo
There is one product missing from Candy Crush's shop, and its absence is the sharpest diagnostic in the whole shop.
The tank they took back
Wargaming gave me a Type 59 as a consulting fee. Years later they took it back from every account — with compensation, for defensible reasons — and were still paying for it years afterwards.
Two pizzerias, one lesson about discounting
One ran half-price days. The other gave away a Coke. During the promotion the discount shop won — and after it, the discount shop collapsed.
The guilds that nearly got deleted
Guild members paid less per month than everyone else. The data was unambiguous. The recommendation that followed was catastrophic.