10 Game Design Rules You Must Know

10 Game Design Rules You Must Know:: 1. 🔍 Reward curiosity ↳ If players wander off the main path, make it worth their time. • Hidden treasures, story snippets, or rare items keep exploration exciting and rewarding.2. 🏆 Make victory and defeat crystal clear ↳ Avoid confusing win/lose conditions. • Players need to understand how they can succeed, and why they failed. • Visual cues like progress bars or danger symbols (e.g., red or sharp objects) help a lot.3. 🔄 Be consistent ↳ Patterns build trust. • If the “exit” button is always top-right, keep it there. • Never break the rules you’ve taught players.4. 🌟 Guide, don’t lecture ↳ Nobody likes a dull tutorial. • Help players learn through subtle hints, not drawn-out lessons. • Let them discover solutions on their own.5. ⚖️ Keep it fair ↳ Unfair moments […]

Anton Slashcev January 27

Journal

Sensor Tower: State of Mobile

Super cool to see my name and quote on the front page of the gaming section on the new Sensor Tower State of Mobile report. If you haven't read it already you're seriously missing out as it's one of, if not the, most comprehensive report on mobile in the business.There's even a massive section on AI for all the hype boys and girls.Download directly from the link here.

John Wright January 27

Journal

Social Group Monetization: High-Level Theory and Applications

Social group monetization is a powerful and nuanced approach to player engagement, which leverages the dynamics of group behavior and interaction to create monetization opportunities that feel rewarding and intrinsic. This strategy goes beyond individual spending to focus on how collective engagement can drive revenue while fostering community satisfaction. I explore the underlying principles in this article and provide actionable examples for various genres, from RPGs to casual games. Note: The topics and pointers here I’m introducing are something that I’ve learned also by studying economists and their writings on the field, and some of the credits should go to them on putting my head towards rightly tuned channels around these things on top of my existing understanding and know-how. You can find some of these directly from my Recommendations section here: https://gamesalchemy.substack.com/recommendations — from where I would suggest you checking […]

Antti Kananen January 27

Highlights

Jobs in Mobile Gaming: 29

🎨 970 Jobs in Mobile Gaming » 24 Jan Week 📆 👉🏻 Data from Gamigion.com/jobs 🕺🏻 Dev 💻 Art 🎨 Product 📱 Marketing 🎯 Business 💰 Data 📈 QA ⚒️ 💻 Dev Technical Director Scopely 🇪🇸 Sr. Director, Engineering Scopely 🇺🇸 Technical Lead of Analytics Engineering Scopely 🇪🇸 Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Scopely 🇮🇪 Senior Game Programmer, London Supercell 🇬🇧 Software Engineer - Ad Monetization Zynga 🇨🇦 Mobile Game Engineer Zynga 🇹🇷 Principal Software Engineer - Developer Services, ZMGT Zynga 🇺🇸 Product Manager - Marketing (Ad Tech) Playtika 🇮🇱 Technical Account Manager Playtika 🇵🇱 Unity Developer Playtika 🇵🇱 Mobile/C# Developer Playtika 🇷🇴 Senior C# Developer Playtika 🇷🇴 Software Architect Playtika 🇮🇱 Game Development Team Lead Moon Active 🇵🇱 Unity Team Lead Moon Active 🇮🇱 Software Engineer (Part-time) Dream Games 🇹🇷 Software Engineer Dream Games 🇹🇷 Game Developer Dream Games […]

Gamigion January 24

Journal

Gaming vs. Tech: Where Are Investors Heading in 2025?

Gaming vs. Tech: Where Are Investors Heading in 2025? This is my favorite slide from InvestGame's Gaming Deals Report 2024! It highlights how VCs are gradually shifting their focus from game publishers and developers to infrastructure and tech solutions around gaming. 📊We can see this trend in the Top-30 gaming-focused VC funds too, with more capital now going to Platform & Tech startups than to content creators.For me, this is one of the most fascinating changes to watch in 2025: — Will investments and M&As in Platform & Tech accelerate? 📈— Could AI become the key factor here? 🤖— And will we see a web3 comeback? 🌐While I can’t predict for sure, I know where to find the data to back up any forecast. 👇Get your copy of InvestGame’s report in the comments below!P.S. Infinite Reality raising $3B at the […]

Andrei Zubov January 24

Journal

Shorter Payback Period: Sustained profit growth

Optimizing the LTV curve and conducting iterative testing are essential for ensuring sustainable growth in games. Even before achieving the desired profitability on this curve, the payback period plays a pivotal role. Payback analysis acts as an early validation tool for the LTV model, highlighting potential discrepancies between projected and actual user behavior. Moreover, a shorter payback period enables quicker recovery of marketing investments, paving the way for scaling efforts and sustained profit growth. Dynamics of LTV, CAC, as you all know: It’s a fundamental financial principle to aim LTV that is higher than Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to ensure profitability in the long term. While this equation seems straightforward, it hides critical questions about its underlying components. Games thrive on concurrent users—players who return frequently and are incentivized to spend. However, relying on extended user lifetimes carries inherent risks in marketing. When working with […]

Deniz Kekec January 24

Journal

Don’t Use Seasonality Adjustments in Google Ads to Spend More!

𝐃𝐎𝐍’𝐓 𝐔𝐒𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘 𝐀𝐃𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐆𝐎𝐎𝐆𝐋𝐄 𝐀𝐃𝐒 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐃 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐄! ❌❌❌ According to Google's documentation:"Seasonality adjustments are an advanced tool that can be used to inform Smart Bidding of expected changes in conversion rates for future events like promotions or sales"On paper, this sounds like a great solution to test when you’re struggling to increase spend (as was my case).But in practice?Using seasonality adjustments essentially tells the algorithm: "Hey Google, my conversion rate is gonna be higher so send me the WORST quality users ever because my creatives will convert them anyway!"As mentioned above, we wanted to scale the spend during Christmas and here’s what happened when we aggressively adjusted conversion rates (claiming our Christmas creatives would convert 100% better):✅We could scale (+41% spend)❌But CPA was the worst of the year (+62% compared to the previous period)❌The worst CPI of […]

David Vargas January 24

Journal

Project R.I.S.E. by Supercell

Project R.I.S.E. by Supercell had its 3rd Alpha test last weekend and we couldn't miss it 😎. This time also on Android, the dev team finally showed us some Metagame features and iterated a lot on the previous feature set. Get the latest update on this cooperative roguelite ARPG ⚔️ here: Tower upgrades 🗼 were introduced, which are powering the feature unlock progression. You still get pass points for chests, but recycling the perks points (basically discarding skills during your run) gives you a permanent upgrade to your account through these. These include stuff such as more consumable slots for revives, more perk rerolls, feature unlocks etc. Another Metagame feature added is Tower Forge 🔨 (bottom Image). This basically unlocks the skill pool of core gameplay skills on semi-random pacing as you sink soft currency into it and a random […]

Jakub Remiar January 23

Highlights

Brutally Honest #148

Hey, FAM! What’s up? 🥃 Drink talk I'm on my way to the Maldives for the annual retreat. It can’t be called a vacation when Katarina is running around, but I'm still going to enjoy it. Hope PGC is cold and dark.. Jokes aside, have fun. See you next year! 🦩Tip of the week Expanding your UA efforts across multiple channels is essential for comprehensively understanding your game's KPIs. Especially when you are early in development, while this approach may require a higher budget, it provides valuable data for benchmarking and optimization. Why Multi-Channel UA Matters? Running campaigns across various platforms allows for comparative analysis, helping identify which channels yield the best results and where improvements are needed. Relying on a single channel can be risky due to algorithm changes or policy shifts. A multi-channel strategy mitigates this risk by […]

Matej Lancaric January 23

Journal

Level Mechanics of Royal Kingdom

I’ve saved your time by deconstructing and categorizing ALL 50(!) Level Mechanics from Royal Kingdom 👑 This article is a MUST-Read for both Game Designers and Level Designers.You'll find:↳ Journey from PvP to PvE↳ Royal Kingdom’s key mechanics↳ Retention vs Monetization↳ Level Design & Curve Complexity (the most insightful part)Find the Article Here

Olha Semykina January 23

Journal

Analyze 1000 Games in 5 min with AI

How to analyze 1000 mobile games in 5 minutes with AI: 𝟭. 𝗚𝗼 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗠𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗰: https://lnkd.in/gAtFSbiA • Use this link for temporary access to its pro features.𝟮. 𝗦𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗮 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗿𝗲 • Tap “TAGS.” • Choose the subgenre you’re interested in (e.g., Merge). 𝟯. 𝗦𝗲𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 • Select “YEAR” for the time period. • Set the number of results to 1000. 𝟰. 𝗦𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 • Download the CSV file by clicking “Download CSV.” 𝟱. 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘇𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝘁𝗚𝗣𝗧 • Go to: https://chatgpt.com/ • Open the GPT-4 model. • Attach the CSV file. • Use this prompt: https://lnkd.in/gEUyZkwr • Enter "continue" several times. 𝟲. 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 • Discover trends, revenue changes, common mechanics, popular settings, styles, and even helpful graphs. Enjoy!

Anton Slashcev January 23

Journal

Top Grossing Mobile Casual Games

Success in mobile games isn’t a result of just a new idea.It’s about data driven creative decisions over time. By looking at top Casual games of 2024,You can see 5 things:1- Market is growing rapidly,2- Live ops matter more than ever,3- Long term retention drives revenue,4- Puzzles are still leading the casual games,5- Player segmentation boosts profits significantly.Data: AppMagic#gamedevelopment #videogames #tech #mobilegames

Gökhan Üzmez January 23

Journal

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