monetization

I have a pretty laid back approach to monetization in online games. Bar mandatory subscriptions and a few egregious outliers, I am generally fine...

Would you pay your kids' allowance in virtual currency? That's the frame for a piece today on The Wall Street Journal, which offers an...

When I first started playing MMO’s back in 2012, the hot debate of the time was subscription vs. free-to-play business models. Over the last...

The monetization model for mobile ARPG Diablo Immortal made plenty of headlines leading up to and during its launch. The costs of capping out...

Pokemon Go's yearly Go Fest was fairly rocky this year - so rocky that some of us old trainers had to remind people that we've...

When Diablo Immortal launched, pretty much everyone was united in calling the game out for its absolutely atrocious and exploitative monetization model, which led...

Not since Square-Enix president Yosuke Matsuda's notorious letter about pursuing NFTs has someone in the games industry so spectacularly lost the plot that we're...

When Lost Ark launched in the west earlier this year, it didn't actually launch in all of the west, as European servers formally excluded...

Normally around these parts we would be cheering on the resurrection of an MMORPG. But in the case of Kritika Online, which has returned...

Welp, Riders of Icarus had a nice run. Readers will recall that the taming-centric MMO soft-launched almost six years ago under Nexon's banner with over...

It probably hasn't escaped anyone who has been reading my writing over the past several years that I have something of a vendetta against...

For the longest time, we always thought of Roblox as "that kids game with ridiculous numbers of active users." Yet as we reported last...

Back in August of 2020, a dev blog from Marvel's Avengers developer Crystal Dynamics outlined what would be in its cash shop, writing in...

So Pokemon Unite is now mobile and cross-platform. Who'd have thought a traditionally Nintendo-only IP would do this? The update and dev team letter we mentioned is...

World of Warships has really not had the best run over the last couple of weeks. As our own WoWS expert Ben has been...

One of the longstanding criticisms of Lord of the Rings Online revolves around the game's antiquated and frankly expensive business model. We found out...

By now, you've probably seen several articles about the poor monetization in Pokemon Unite, often based on Reddit posts or streamer hot takes. Most talk...

While other gaming conventions do big game reveals, the beauty of GDC is that we hear about some of the cool tech and practices...

I have a problem: As much as I enjoy games, I can see that many online and multiplayer games are becoming designed more poorly...

So, Nintendo and Niantic will work together for more AR games based on Nintendo IPs. No great surprise from me, as I'd mentioned years...