Fabian from CD Project Red is our guest on this episode of slashjoin: he shares some of his best warstories from evolving Gwent from a mini-game in the Witcher series to a standalone free-to-play multiplayer game. Together, we discuss the curse and blessing of working towards the expectations of an existing enthusiastic game community.

Live at GDC, slashjoin sat down with Daniel and Jan from Megagon to talk about the latest developments insiders for the Kickstarter success Lonely Mountains Downhill, how to play it competitively,  the challenges of finding the right balancing and integrating community features early on. And they reveal why they don’t go multiplayer with their game.

We welcome a special guest, who came all the way from Tokyo to debut on the slashjoin podcast and join our conversation on the history of multiplayer games and how its idea and environment have changed in recent years.

Two EA multiplayer games, two completely different strategies! In this episode we look at learnings from the AAA releases Apex Legends and Anthem for smaller gamedev teams when launching a premium game and monetizing a F2P title. And you’ll get to hear how Hauke almost dies from a heart attack. Hit play!

In this episode we’re not roasting marshmallows but have a bonfire chat about the Marshmello concert in Fortnite sparking the all-time peak in CCU for the Battle Royale smash hit. And Patrick drills down in the KPIs of Rainbow Six’s free weekend with a surprise result.

The Jumpmasters of Respawn said: let’s stir up the Battle Royale Genre! So we gladly jump on a talk around the rocket launch of Apex Legends and the impact it had on Twitch and the player community.

Debuting the slashjoin podcast, we’re diving right into analysing the biggies of multiplayer games on Steam. Crunching KPIs we discuss the successes of Dota 2, PUBG, Counterstrike and the patterns behind it. While the content updates and games-as-a-service become a central point of the discussion, we also look at the model of survival game Rust in comparison.