Player Relationship types in Hades’ Star

Social games have an interesting property: The exact same feature can lead to significantly different experiences, depending on the relationship between the participating players.

Why we will never show ads in our mobile games

In the challenging business around mobile games, ads have emerged as a popular way of making money, especially for smaller independent developers. It’s easy to see why. They pay well, partly thanks to the success of other service-based games (many of which are not themselves ad-supported). They offer a well understood and relatively predictable revenue stream that is very easy to integrate in any game, often with minimal or no design changes. In an era where everyone is talking about confusing metrics and reworking designs so they’re more suitable with the free to play model, showing ads can be a convenient fallback that gives piece of mind from all that.

The attempts to bring "AAA quality" games to mobile - and why they are failing

Last year, I wrote about my experiences in what I saw as a tech arms race in AAA PC/console games. To recap: I've gone from playing games because of their impressive use of technology to playing games because they're fun. I've slowly come to discover the obvious: The two are not corellated. I have grown increasingly frustrated by AAA's insistence on maximizing hardware use regardless of game's actual needs - an insistence that's largely responsible for out of control complexity and costs.

Announcing Hades' Star

Today, my partner and I are excited to announce Hades’ Star, an original, social, persistent online strategy game designed for mobile devices. The game’s newly launched web site has some initial information, and will be updated with more information over the next several months as development continues.

With this announcement post, I wanted to focus on two things. First, some personal background on why create this particular kind of game. Second, some thoughts on the current business environment on mobile platforms, including a promise of sharing any resources we can with other small studios making service-based games.

My recent friction-full experiences with non-mobile games

Approaching the mobile games market as a small team in 2016

Subterfuge was my favorite game of 2015, but I never want to play it again