Deconstructor of Fun

EA's sports franchises, such as Madden, FIFA, NBA and NHL are unrivaled cash cows. Every single year a new version of the game comes and we the fans dish $60 just to get our hands on the slightly improved graphics and gameplay. 

In addition to getting us pay upfront, EA Sports has methodically upped up their in-game-purchase strategy where the company makes most of its cash from microtransactions for items like card packs in the Ultimate Team modes in FIFA, Madden, and NHL.

While on the console side EA Sports is outperforming year over year, the scorecard looks less peachy on the mobile side. While Madden mobile has been a smash hit, but NBA live has struggled and FIFA, the crown jewel of the franchises, has been a giant disappointment on mobile. 

In this podcast, we discuss why Madden is a hit, why FIFA failed on mobile and how EA Sports can get their home run streak on mobile going.

In this episode, I discuss mobile publishing with Anil Das-Gupta who is a Product Lead at Wargaming and a frequent blogger on Deconstructor of Fun.

Podcast with Adam Telfer (co-founder of Chatterbox Games) deconstructing

the success of Playrix, the maker of Gardenscape.

Podcast with Alex Collins (Designer/Engineer at Fun Plus) discussing the

recent faltering of Hearthstone

Podcast with Anil Das-Gupta (Product Lead at Wargaming) deconstructing the

reasons why Netmarble's Transformers: Forged to Fight flopped

Podcast with Florian Ziegler (Lead Designer, EA) exploring the roles of

designers and product managers

The role and responsibilities of a product manager are different almost in every game company. In some companies, product managers are pure business managers while at other companies product managers may take a strong role in driving the design. 

In the latest podcast, I discuss the role of a product manager and the role of a designer together with my friend, Florian Ziegler. Florian is a designer who has worked at companies like Ubisoft, Creative Assembly, Rovio, King and EA. Needless to say, we both have our strong opinions regarding the roles of game designers and product managers.

Playrix soft launched Gardenscape, a hidden object game that didn't look like it would succeed on mobile. Instead of killing the game, the company decided to pivot the core gameplay. This decision paid off - to say the least. Less than a year later, Gardenscapes is one of the top grossing games in the world.

In this post, Alex Collins and Michail Katkoff explore in details the reasons behind the decline of Hearthstone and what it takes for the game to recover.

For a long period of time, Hearthstone simply could do no wrong. Even between releases, they continued to have a strong showing in top grossing and download charts on mobile, while simultaneously being a consistent top-5 streaming game on Twitch.

However, Hearthstone eventually hit a point where the mechanics and metagame were becoming stale, and Blizzard found itself unable to keep things fresh without introducing a major shakeup. Since then, Hearthstone has been on the uneven ground, hemorrhaging players and ceding ground in the charts.

In February 2017, Korean publisher Netmarble made a significant acquisition, purchasing Kabam’s Vancouver studio and some other minor assets for a cool $750M. After all, this studio had created Marvel: Contest of Champions, one of the biggest games in the history.

Yet despite riding one one of the biggest IPs in the entertainment industry, Forged to Fight has mustered only a fraction of the success that Contest of Champions had.

In this podcast Michail Katkoff and Anil Das-Gupta deconstruct why Forged to Fight isn't the success it was destined to be.