There are so many stats bandied around for F2P games, it can sometimes be difficult to choose which ones to track. We don’t currently use ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User) in the GAMESbrief spreadsheet, but...

An evergreen game never reaches the point where the play can’t carry on if they wanted to. A game that is predominantly driven by narrative or by the experience will always be harder to turn into a...

Is Facebook overvalued? That's a question bothering a lot of people as they try to work out whether to invest in the stock or not, whether social networking is a fad, and what the next disruptive technology...

The most successful free-to-play games don’t punish their players. Everyone makes progress, just by turning up. But a dedicated player, who keeps trying to learn and improve, is rewarded with increased complexity. Make sure you build complexity in...

I'm delighted to announce a new feature on GAMESBrief: the GAMESbriefers. Every week, we all ask our august panel of 25 (and growing) luminaries a burning question in the world of free-to-play and paymium game design. Or...

I recently provided some analysis to the Guardian on the demise and rebirth of OnLive. They didn't use all of the comments, so I thought I would post them here. OnLive’s problem was that it failed to find...

You need to make players feel that they can “just pop in for a quick go”. Then you need to lock them in for much longer. As game designers have been doing with traditional games for years.