Zach Gilson

@serkantoto @thegamebusiness Couldn't help but scoff when he said it. Easy to say after earning success, but naive in the face of reality.

This reminds me of Vampire Saviors developer Poncle telling @thegamebusiness last week "At the moment, profit is not a priority." Guys, you make great games. But if profit is not THE priority for you, it should at the very least (always) be A priority - especially nowadays.

@jasonrohrer Not a native and never learned on traditional, but it's legible for me (maybe partly from menu familiarity). Might be tougher in dialogue.

Traditional Chinese speakers: Is this menu screen at all legible with this 8px pixel font?

No one wants defensive stocks: Global defensive stocks are now just 17% of world market cap, near the lowest since the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble burst. This percentage has fallen -7 points since the end of the 2022 bear market. To put this differently, consumer staples, health care, and utilities have materially underperformed the broader market over the last few years. This has been fueled by the outsized gains in the US technology sector. A similar pattern occurred during the 1990s, while the opposite took place during the 2008 Financial Crisis, when global defensive stocks outperformed. Defensive sectors are lagging.

@Oliver_S_Curry Dawg that isn't what it says at all lol

A large randomised control trial (n = 17,000) finds that smartphone bans in schools have a negligible effect on grades (d = 0.086) and "no significant changes in overall student well-being, academic motivation, digital usage, or experiences of online harassment" #smma

Found in Hangzhou, a toilet paper dispenser that requires you to scan and watch ads to get plies of TP @Shitty_Future

@1ceStream Did they loot anything? Hope your gear is still safe

My garden got broken into by thieves last night Found out today, checked my house and found their bag of tools 😂😂😂😂 Mfs carry ninja caltrops for police chase wtfffff

@pretentiouswhat Waaaay too many people are quick to boil it down to the latter, but thankfully fewer people truly believe it

I have respect for people who are in the good habit of frequently asking: "what am I missing?" It's refreshing to encounter people who assume things are the way they are in the world for some good reason they don't know...and not that everyone else is stupid or incompetent.

From @techbuzzchina/note/c-124203711?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=5cijps" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@techbuzzchina…

I'm sure this isn't unique to Chinese big tech, but we all know that feeling of being 工具人 tool man (or, just a tool for somebody else to use)

@TrungTPhan vinegar > soy sauce in the ratio or you're fucking up

Din Tai Fung makes $27m per restaurant in America, the top average unit volume (AUV) in the industry: ▫️Mastro's Steakhouse ($14.5m) ▫️Cheesecake Factory ($12.4m) ▫️Nobu ($10.1m) ▫️Chick-fil-A ($9.3m) ▫️Benihana ($6.5m) ▫️McD ($3.9m) To make soup dumplings, new chefs train 6 months going through thousands of xiao long baos (aka "little basket buns"). Each dumpling is weighed to 5 grams and has 18 folds. “To generate unit volumes of [Din Tai Fung’s] magnitude, a restaurant generally has to do three things: It has to be big, customers have to spend a decent amount, and it has to be busy,” explains Restaurant Business. “Din Tai Fung checks all three of those boxes.” When I go to Din Tai Fung, I check two boxes: 1) destroy a basket of 10 dumplings in 3 minutes; and 2) get that glorious dip sauce (1 part soy sauce, 3 parts vinegar) all down my white t-shirt.   *** Restaurant Business: restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/soup… Tasty: youtu.be/rY7HawoU-Cw?si…

@TheClubXbox @Wynnsanity Bingo - this is my conclusion too. Mobile games must be designed with low-complexity players in mind

@Wynnsanity This might be just me, but it seems like these high speed Battle Royale shooters just don't transfer well over to mobile and touch screens. PUBG Mobile is doing great for a long time, but it's much slower and more easily played on a touch screen. So that could be a reason 🤔?

Does anyone truly know why Apex Mobile failed? It was a Tencent game and optimized so I’m confused. Was it EA who ran it too poorly? I remember it took months to fix bugs like b-hopping, but Tencent usually can deploy bug fixes in hours/days in their other games. Personally I think the skins/bundles completely sucked so it just made no money. I don’t remember a single skin I bought or seeing anything I really wanted to buy.

@Wynnsanity Root cause was probably how the co-dev was structured, leading to poor cooperation, slow decision-making, and bad ops Other than the many obvious reasons being pointed out, I also think there's a skill ceiling issue. Complex controls on mobile create an audience-limiting factor

@Wynnsanity 1. Incumbents (PUBGM, CODM) captured player share - clawing them away requires a new experience, very hard when mobile thrives off event-driven gameplay variation 2. Optimization (bigger playerbase) 3. Control complexity (friendly to thumb players) 4. Onboarding (bot matches!)

4 of the biggest billion dollar franchises in the world couldn’t make it on mobile… Why is it so hard to make a successful mobile shooting game?

@eshear Just like the Deepseek moment, the power of algorithmic advances is going to show just how much juice we can get out of our existing chips

Jaw dropping

Pretty sure this article is Tencent prop, but made me realize: Baidu's abysmal search experience is going to drive 100x faster adoption of AI search in China, and Tencent knows this substack.com/home/post/p-15…

@torr_jade @Arena__Breakout Tons of free draws and other swag

@Arena__Breakout Hoping some free spins though

Get ready to charge into the fray with the T-Dolls by your side! 1. Limited Gun Skins & Avatars 2. Draw Events 3. Special Missions Stay tuned for the grand update on Dec 19th! #ArenaBreakout #S7Dec19 #GirlsFrontline

Nailed it! General Chaos, what a classic.

Had no idea there was an Illini esports team but proud of them!

@GameOverThirty Does The Finals continue, or are they next in 2025? Is the current playerbase big enough to justify a GaaS, especially considering they are not growing?

The difference between #Xdefiant and #TheFinals is the "something extra" that The Finals brings to the table. Look, TF didn't set the world on fire either, but after the typical F2P fallout, it found a steady base of players willing to return every month. It offered something different that other games weren't doing in mass: Environment destruction. A competitive shooter in this market MUST do something "extra" and do it very well if it wants to stand a chance to holding onto ANY segment of the market. #Xdefiant is a competently built shooter with some hero abilities...and that's it. I played it. I had friends who played it. You know what happened after a few hours with the game? Right back to #CallofDuty. None of this is directed at the developers who the people who built it. They did a perfectly fine job. This is more a lesson in product management, and trying to find footing in this market.