Most gaming studios fail because they run out of cash while making a successful one. Believe it or not, money is VERY important in making a game hit. Yash Gandhi, an expert on finance and treasury, shares how studios can manage their money to extend runway and make smarter financial decisions. Building a Great Game […]
Attention is Becoming Gaming’s Most Valuable Currency [with Mohammed Dayoub]
Read this interview in Arabic language here. Getting players to see an ad is only step one. Getting them to care is becoming much harder. After spending more than a decade building and scaling games that have reached over 250 million downloads, Mohammed Dayoub has watched a major shift happen across mobile gaming. The industry […]
How LiveOps Create Player Emotions, Not Just Engagement [with Deepanjali Sarna]
“Players remember how your game made them feel far longer than they’ll remember its economy or progression system,” says Deepanjali Sarna, Senior Game Designer at Gameloft and former designer at Hitwicket, Zynga, and Liquidnitro Games. We went deep into this discussion with Deepanjali to understand more about player emotions and drafted our learning in this […]
11 Revelations: The Secret to Winning In-App Game Events with Lucas Nogueira
In-app game events are time-limited, in-game activities (such as live competitions, seasonal campaigns, or exclusive challenges) designed to boost player engagement, retention, and monetization. These events are discoverable both within the game and on external platforms like the Apple App Store or Google Play. Lucas Nogueira is the Monetization and LiveOps Manager at Ritz Deli […]
The Studio That Builds Calm: Linh Nguyễn on Crafting Cozy Experiences
Games are all about the adrenaline hits, the competitive ranking, the loop that makes your heart race. Linh Nguyễn chose the opposite (in this article, we will unpack all that). Linh is the founder of HappieSprout Studio, a mobile gaming studio building cozy, casual, and deeply emotional games. Before starting her own studio, she spent […]
Paid is for Validation, Not Scale: Kübra Taşlıtepe Bıyık on Acquiring the First 10k Game App Installs
Kübra Taşlıtepe Bıyık is a Digital Marketing and Growth Specialist at Moralabs. We asked her how studios should approach paid acquisition for a new game, where most of them go wrong before hitting their first 10,000 installs, and how she would allocate budgets of different sizes. Her answers are below, lightly edited for flow. This […]
How Player Emotion Shapes Monetization in Games (A Conversation with Ferdi Bakirezer)
Why do players really open their wallets? According to Ferdi Bakirezer, Lead Game Designer at Mage Games, we will have to understand a lot about player emotion for the answer. So we decided to interview him to get into the details of these emotions behind game economies and the most common mistakes studios make. Designing […]
The Game is Shifting: From Filling Ad Slots to Owning Your Impressions
“The game is slowly shifting from ‘how do I fill my ad slots?’ to ‘how do I intelligently route and price my own impressions?’” That’s how Tracy Phan sees where ad monetization is heading. And if you’ve spent any time working with gaming studios on their ad stack, you’ll know exactly what she means. About […]
User Acquisition Lessons from Batu Oğultürk of Perk Game Studio
UA isn’t broken. Your approach probably is. User acquisition isn’t complicated, but it’s often made so. The hype, the metrics, the jargon, the endless abbreviations. Somewhere along the way, clarity got buried under dashboards. To cut through that noise, we spoke with Batu Oğultürk, co-founder of Perk Game Studio and a veteran of studios ranging […]
“Stop falling in love with prototypes and trust the data,” said Mehmet Fatih Yıldız, Efsun Games
In mobile gaming, momentum is fragile. UA costs spike overnight, retention drops without warning, and yesterday’s hit mechanic becomes today’s scroll-past. For Istanbul-based Efsun Games, navigating that volatility has meant making some unglamorous, but decisive calls early and often. Mehmet Fatih Yıldız, co-founder and CEO of the studio, has built Efsun around a simple philosophy: […]