The Calculus of Fun (Ep. 3)

Mitch and Blake discuss perhaps the most important developments in the video games business since the 1990s: the explosion of casual and mobile gaming. Mitch explains how the casual business was catalyzed by the most unlikely of heroes. He talks about his time as the CEO of the first public mobile game company in the US (JAMDAT) leading up to the launch of the iPhone. They look at the rise of so-called "social gaming" on Facebook and how it was enabled by new advances in analytics and data science. They do a deep dive on the iOS App Store and Mitch talks about how Apple's desire to curate its end-user experience inadvertently led to the rise of Facebook as a customer acquisition gatekeeper. They end with a discussion of why SuperCell succeeded in building a multi-billion dollar mobile game business while Rovio did not.

Links & Show Notes:

Robert Westmoreland 

EA's “We See Farther” Ad 

Ion Storm 

Taneli Armanto / Nokia Snake 

JAMDAT Mobile S-1

Steve Jobs Announces the iPhone 

Mobile Games Dominate User-Acquisition Spending (2021) 

SuperCell