Brawl Stars Dev Tracker

No huge surprises from @Reply_Totem, as one of the first teams their new (and old) roster. Will @Role_BS be able to push the team to new heights?

We'll see in February. 😏

#brawlstars #esports

My Top 10 Brawlers right now:

✅ Gene
✅ Brock
✅ Spike
✅ Crow
✅ Mandy (new)
✅ Penny
✅ Belle
✅ Barley
✅ Squeak
✅ Sprout

Runner-up was Piper. I clearly have a thing for long-ranged and control Brawlers. Worst Brawler? Jacky.

#brawlstars

Home office today. 🏠

Downscaled the 48" to 42" LG OLED (2022 model), which has 120 Hz and Nvidia G-SYNC when we moved to the new place, the other screen was just too big for desk work.

Wallpaper by the one and only, extremely talented @JY_kokoro. ♥️

#homeoffice

👀

#brawlesports

The #Mandy change feels good.

Generally speaking I love how she rewards good positioning and planning. Getting a team takedown with her Super also must be one of the most satisfying things in-game ever... so rewarding. 🥰

Have you unlocked her? What do you think?

#BrawlStars

Hope this gives you a small insight how game companies operate. That might also explain why companies take games off-line, stop updating or stop their esports efforts (in regions where it's not profitable).

Managing our in-game economy is a fine balance. Too F2P friendly? Unsustainable. Too harsh economy? Also unsustainable - it's harder to find players who want to stick around (low retention) which leads to higher cost for user acquisition.

So we need to find the sweet spot, and the only way doing this is to look at a ton of data and keep an eye out on how the community feels. This process NEVER ends.

We try to strike a good balance between making the game F2P friendly while making it worth our while as a company to keep developing it actively for you.

So when me or people from other games companies talk about the economy of games, that's what we're talking about. Above isn't our specific reality, but the basic assumptions are the same.

To be fair, it's rather unlikely that in above scenario anyone would sign off on esports in the first place, given the unclear return of investment.

Esports would likely be something like 1% of revenue or $80,000/month in our example - I'd be surprised if more than $20,000/month could be made available for price pools - that's $240,000/year including finals, etc.

In all of this there's not even talk or growing the company or creating other games...

You might also run out of cash before you turn a profit = company dies if you can't find further investors/a buyer. Depending from where that money comes from in the first place, there might be angry board meetings pushing you to do things you don't like.

In all of this: bonuses are often based on profit sharing. So as long as you don't generate a profit, employees will likely be stuck with their base compensation, company shares aren't worth much if you don't get dividends and you can't sell them.

Good luck trying to retain the best industry talent under these circumstances in a hyper competitive market.

There's a gazillion other micro things going on ofc. How long to players stick around (retention)? Can you improve spending? Does it simply take 24 months to get the payback from the User Acquisition?

Depending on your cash from initial investments you burn through that until you start to turn a profit once the payback happens or you improve any of the other factors.

None of these guarantee success. In above example, if we'd invest a fixed 20% of topline revenue, that'd be $1,600,000/month which means we'd operate at a loss of $144,000/month or $1,728,000/year.

Some companies spend more than they make (and generate a deficit), others re-invest everything they have left and others invest a % of topline revenue.