On Gaming
- F2P - Free to play.
- Question to ponder: Design a feature that costs a million dollars to complete - people will struggle to answer.
- Succeeding at gaming is a two-sided coin: The gaming side & the business side. Make something fun, and make money. Most game designers are bad at 2.
- Qualities of a game:
- Variable outcome
- Frequency
- Sense of control
- If you put people in an environment that has those three things, your brain will invent solutions and patterns. The best examples of that are 100-hands video poker.
- "The addition stuff works but it's kind of boring to me."
- "Set up a scenario where crazy things can happen, then let people fill in the blanks"
- "People need environments to excel in"
- "Heroic spending" - if you go to a dinner and the bill is 20k, you feel bad. But if it's for 20 other people you feel great. The ideal scenario for spending money is where you get benefit, but also there's a group benefit too.
- The key to video game economics design is embracing that it's all fake. There are only 3 or so people in the world who are really great at it. It's an imagination problem. Figure out where your imagination breaks down.
- "What can I make that gives all parties everything they want? It's all fake anyway"
- "Money is economic manipulation - it's designed to get people to work"
- "Cosmetic" revenue (for non-utility items) is a US phenomenon.
- History of styles: US: Skill based, Japanese: Story based, Korean: Coined Free to play, Chinese adapted Korean style and amped it up.
- "Players like the game more than you. Most people who make the game don't like the game they're making. Gamer energy is rarely matched in the dev studio. It's a cognitive dissonance but you have to accept that and lean into it."
- "Free to play and performance marketing have a lot of overlap"
- "My personal obsession has been trying to create the most amount of human interaction at one time"
- "I'm really excited about NFTs - I see a clear trajectory from in-app purchases to NFTs"
- "We were the first app with in-app purchases. The removal of friction was insane. Our revenue went up 700% overnight."
- "Literally everyone on Earth now has the same monetization ability that a video game developer used to have, and you're seeing that play out"
- "If you can get an audience together and create demand, the chain is your security model"
- "Game NFTs give the addition of being tradable and speculative, on top of providing in-game utility. I think that 10xes the trade volume"
- I think everyone will be running a live ops team soon. I think it's inevitable that people start selling more digital goods.
- "NFTs that connect centralized services, will be where a lot of money is"

Other Takes
- "When things are innovative, no-one really cares what they look like" - design-centric & gamification culture is a signal of decreasing innovation. That's how I felt while I was working on gaming. But recently it's felt like it's getting exciting again now."
- "The economy is becoming more psychological"

• Honus Wagner baseball cards - fewer than 200 - sell for $3m
• "There’s a three-thousand-year cultural history of owning priceless works of art. Most people understand that an original Rothko is a high-status luxury good."
• "Almost all paintings are worthless"
• "The NBA has sold $200m in video clip highlight NFTs"
• "It’s recently become super easy to ‘mint’ an NFT. I could, for example, turn each of the 8,500 posts on this blog into a token and sell them on the open market."
• "In the case of baseball cards, there are only so many rookies a year. In the case of art, there’s a limited number of famous paintings and a limited amount of shelf space at Sotheby’s".