Caught My Eye - A few stories about data, Roblox and the emotional rollercoaster that is releasing a game, that caught my attention
I read a lot of stories about games and gaming and reflect them back though my own experience and am now sharing them there as part on an ongoing conversation with the medium we all love
A quick update on some news items that have caught my eye of late. So I’ve written about Roblox, so you will know it is an area of big interest to me. My thesis here (which I’ll expand upon) is even if Roblox does not grow any bigger (which I think it will) how it works, how you make games for it and how its audience responds is going to create a cultural impact far beyond the platform itself. So a couple of updates on where it’s at. This one is key as the influence of the games from Roblox expands to UEFN and passes another notable milestone:
Roblox’s Steal a Brainrot becomes first game to surpass 25m concurrent players (Source: GIES)
Wow, that’s quite the number! Congratulations to the team there.
(Image - Steal a Brainrot on Roblox. Image via here)
There’s a bunch more Roblox stats over at GameDevReports, but it was this final quote of that article that interested me:'
Today, Roblox occupies a unique position between gaming and social media. It’s a vast ecosystem for brands aiming to build long-term relationships with future generations of players.
Speaking of data, there’s a good bit of introspection on the value of data and the ups and downs it can give you within the development cycle over at TheGameBusiness from an interview with Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund:
It is a good read as it gives you some insight into not only how they saw data within the journey they were on, but also the emotional roller-coaster of a big release:
“You can put up all the data in the world, and you can compare to other games, but at the end of the day, it’s a decision that comes from your gut,” Soderlund says.
…
But Soderlund says that data “can be your best friend and your worst enemy, because it’s what you do with the data that dictates the outcome.”
This is good imho -as while data is key - and I’ve said many times projects I wanted to be ‘data-led’ the hidden part/trap of that is that the data is always retrospective. So yes it can be predictive, but when there is a paradigm shift or when you are trying to do something different - you then need to kind-of ignore the data. Which can be scary - because it is the data!
The quote below also echoed some of my own experience too:
Soderlund became addicted to his phone over the Christmas break, obsessively keeping track of the player data. But then something happened. On January 7, the numbers started to decline, and rapidly.
Many moons ago, I was the designer of a Star Wars mobile game, The Battle for Hoth.
(Image - Star Wars: The Battle for Hoth, iPhone version screenshot showing a downed AT-AT as Rebel and Imperial infantry clash.)
We were the developers but not the publishers. However we did have a rev share and I was co-founder of the company that made it. So when it launched the only data I had access too was seeing where it was on the iPhone chart and I found myself obsessively keeping track of its chart position, giving me a small high when it when it up and a small low when it went down. Of course I knew that the position in the chart was relative; it could have gone up, not because it had sold more but because something above it stopped selling as well, so came down. Or it could have gone down in the chart without any sales number changes on our title but because another title started selling better.
Since then I’ve been involved in many releases where we’ve had much more granular data, but the compulsion to check it every spare moment (and the non-spare ones too!) remains.
Finally an interesting report on the US gaming market in September where Borderlands 4 had some very good news:
The main release of the month was Borderlands 4. It achieved the best launch in franchise history, generating nearly 30% more revenue than Borderlands 3. It’s also the first game in the series to debut at #1.
Good for them!
Thank you for reading.
P.S. This newsletter is a personal one and is done as a personal project and as such is not affiliated with any company that, in my day job, I work with or partner with. Nor do the views I express necessarily reflect any company that, in my day job, I work with or partner with. More on me here.