Deconstructor of Fun

Greetings, Twiggies! The crew is back to discuss all the latest and greatest in games industry news. Hot on the heels of the big Scopely acquisition, Laura gives us a deep look at all of Saudi Arabia's recent moves into the games industry. Phil talks Super Mario Bros. box office domination, Kress compliments New Zoo, and as always, Ethan is here for the quips. We also talk the impending LoTR g...

Kress gives his quick take on Savvy's $4.9B acquisition of Scopely.  He reviews the pros and cons on this first major acquisition by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

This week, one of the Erics says goodbye to TWiG, but which one? In the news, Kress mourns the end of E3 and regales us with a story of when PS4 was announced; Laura is already at the end of content of Dream Games’s new title Royal Kingdom and discusses their new social approach; an Economist article on “moviemaking and gamemaking are converging” triggers Phillip and Eric. Until next week, Twiggie...

Joining Ethan in conversation this week is long time games industry executive Chris Heatherly to discuss Chris's recent essay on LinkedIn about the death of the games-as-app era and the ascent of games-as-service. Chris argues that, fueled by "metaverse" hobbies such as Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft, we are entering an era of reduced content creation cost where the next land rush in...

Eric, Ethan, Laura and Phil are back from GDC and are eager to share all that they learned during the week long celebration of all things game development. They talk the biggest news of the show, including Unreal Engine for Fortnite + Creator Economy 2.0, the surprise announcement of Counterstrike 2, CCP's massive raise for a AAA Web3 game and more. And most surprisingly, vests! Kress hates ve...

The crew is back from Istanbul and what an event! Eric and Laura give Ethan and Phil major fomo about all the amazing people and sessions they missed at the gaming event of the year ! We preview all the amazing Deconstructor of Fun content coming next week to GDC then get into the news. We talk about the further democratization of the Epic Games Store, Redemption Games' spin out of AppLovin', the...

Kress sits down with Moritz Baier-Lentz to talk about if fundamentals matter in VC investing and whether we will return to the speculative investments that were made during the mania of the past few years.  And asked what exactly is investable in the gaming space for early stage investors?

Most of the team (and the audience) is off at the Istanbul Gaming Summit , leaving Ethan and Phil to hold down the fort. Today is LiveOps, LiveOps, LiveOps. We talk about the Apex Legends Mobile shutdown and the incredibly difficult challenge of feeding a live service content treadmill. We talk Knockout City's shutdown and the incredibly difficult challenge of profitably running a cosmetics forwar...

The crew discusses Neil Long's App Store exposé in The Guardian, Rovio pulling the classic Angry Birds from distribution, Playtika suspending new game development, Street Fighter: Duel's launch and the explosive success of Hogwarts Legacy. Join Laura , Eric , Eric and Ethan and help us settle which Eric is the grumpy one. 

Mr. Kress sits down with an executive coach and an investor Niklas Herriger to chat about what it takes for Founders, CEOs, and CTOs to grow their companies from 5 to 100 people. 
 Niklas Herriger is a former founder, whose company Gondola.io, was acquired by Tilting Point in 2019.  LINKS:  http://niklasherriger.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklasherriger/

The crew assembles to cover all the latest and greatest games industry news, including the latest annual letter from Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, Blizzard's return-to-office policy, the PSVR2 launch and more. Also, we've got a couple of exciting events coming up: Istanbul Gaming Summit on Thursday, March 9th: https://www.deconstructoroffun.com/istanbul Xsolla Game Night at GDC on Tuesday, March 2...

We got a spicy episode for you. Someone is either getting fired or assassinated as a result of this week's episode.

This week, Eric Kress updates us on the latest on Microsoft’s acquisition and Playtika’s bear hug of Rovio as well as a summary of earnings. Eric Seufert talks (rants?) about Alex Shea’s PCG talk on Hypercasual’s demise. Phillip discusses Knockout City’s sunsetting and joins Laura in covering Supercell’s beta game, Squad Busters. Türkiye was hit with magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 earthquakes. Our thoughts...

It's a newspacked and unfortunately negative news cycle this week for the games industry. This week opens (as always) with a non apology apology from Kress . Laura talks about the let down of the promising looking Forspoken. Phil reads Supercell's offloading of Everdale to Metacore as a bad portent and Ethan defends the strategy. We lament the death of E3, the death of Apex Mobile, the death of Ba...

Before he took the entrepreneurial leap to found Phoenix Labs , CEO Jesse Houston had an enviable collection of gamedev experiences across Ubisoft (Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six), BioWare (Mass Effect) and Riot (League of Legends). With such a depth of experience, the success of breakout hit Dauntless feels almost inevitable. In this week's spotlight interview, Jesse sits down with Ethan to talk abou...

In a week chock full of games industry news, we've got a full house as Ethan returns from paternity leave and new face Phillip Black makes his second appearance on the pod. We discuss Playtika's unsolicited offer to acquire Rovio and how we expect they'll respond. We discuss the many gaming SPACs of 2021 and 2022 and learn that Ethan bought into many of them and why they've been so disastrous for...

TWIG has a special guest: Phillip Black! Phillip joins the usual mötley crew of Eric Kress, Eric Seufert, and Laura Taranto, to cover: Marvel Snap’s performance, roughly 3 months post-launch; Ubisoft CEO’s email to employees; Voodoo’s $3m privacy slip-up; Apex Legend’s Matchmaking as well as a few other smaller updates. REMINDER: The Deconstructor of Fun x Google Istanbul conference is coming up o...

If you've triggered a rewarded video ad anytime in the past few years, you have most likely seen a captivating, easy to understand advertisement for Lightheart Entertainment's hit game Mr. Autofire. With over $40m in lifetime revenue and still growing, Mr. Autofire is an understated and indisputable success story. In today's interview, Ethan sits down with Lightheart Co-Founder Miikka Ahonen about...

TWIG’s 2023 Predictions. This week, the fearsome trio Eric K, Eric S, and Laura go through their 2023 Predictions: Eric K makes a call on the mobile & console markets, blockchain, China, and AppLovin; Eric S on content, M&A’s, brand advertising, and a few “too hot for TV” surprises; Laura on Apple & VR, monetization and innovation in mechanics. Until next week. thanks to our sponsors:...

In a recent episode, Yevgeny Peres, the EVP of Product Strategy at Appsflyer, returned to the podcast to reveal and cure Ethan of his ignorance of many critical parts of the user acquisition side of game development. One of the big takeaways from this interview was the importance of a measurement framework that provides a unified, single source of truth for your marketing team.

Happy New Year! Erik, Eric, and Laura kick off 2023 by reviewing the TWIG 2022 Awards. The team discusses how last year fared with respect to web3 games and investors, talks about a host of acquisitions, gives thoughts on big moves from the biggest players, and, of course, debates about the best and most disappointing games launched. Until next week! thanks to our sponsors: www.xsolla.com > www...

With privacy becoming more important to mobile players and the prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in-app advertising inventories, the quality of your creatives has never been more critical to the success of your games. This was one of the key takeaways from our recent discussion with Sandro Gelashvili , Head of Creative Works at Google, and Rau Dosymbetov , Creative Producer at Nexters, on...

This is the last TWIG of 2022! Closing out the year, Seufert, Kress, and Laura discuss the 2022 Game Awards and what game launches to look forward to in 2023, Apple’s concessions on outside the app store payments, a brief FTC vs MSFT update, Playtika’s layoffs and Brawl Stars removing Loot Boxes. Have a great end of the year and we look forward to delivering all your game-related news in January.

James Marr has been a Technical Director at studios including DeNA, Zynga and N3TWORK Studios . His work includes Eliminate, which was not only the first 3D, competitive shooter on the App Store, but its first free-to-play game as well, as well as top-grossing hit Legendary: Game of Heroes . In this wide ranging discussion, he goes deep on the qualities which separate Good vs Great when it comes t...

Eric Kress , Ethan and Laura gather this week to tackle Nintendo’s mobile strategy, the importance of taxonomy and game classification (part 2 to “Hybridcasual”), an Apple update on pricing and NFTs and Rovio’s newest character to their long successful Angry Birds franchise. Eric also shares his short but sweet second career as a basketball coach. Until next week.