Deconstructor of Fun

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 the founding of the company and the birth of Mr. Autofire. Most importantly, Miikka reveals the 5 Key Questions the Lightheart team used when assessing the concept behind the game and deciding whether this was or was not the right first game for Lightheart to bring to market.

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.

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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:

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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 the Deconstructor of Fun podcast.

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 to Game Engineering. He blows Ethan's mind talking about why it's not the hard skills like math and language proficiency as much as the soft skills - Empathy, Listening & Communication - which are the necessary ingredients of a truly great game engineer. This is hands down Ethan's favorite interview of 2022 and is simply not to be missed!

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.

Eric sits down with Rachit Moti at Layer Licensing to discuss how to discover and manage licenses and how his technology works.

Sarah Fuchs's background and success in game development is formidable to say the least. With a career spanning James Bond, The Godfather, Spore, We Rule, serving as the Head of Production for The Sims Mobile and the GM for Covet Fashion, Sarah's experience leading top-grossing mobile games is hard to match. Now, she has red-pilled on Web3 and teamed up with Amber Bezahler to bring fashion gamers to Web3. With $5m in funding from Griffin Gaming Partners and an all-star team, Muus Collective is poised to take the world of Web3 gaming by storm. 

In this wide ranging interview, Ethan and Sarah go deep on Sarah's experience developing games, how you go about building team and company culture, the importance of building a people first game studio and how Muus Collective is going to bring Web3 gaming to fashion gamers.