How Games Make Money – Details, episodes & analysis

Adam Lieb sits down with me to talk about GameSight, which is a performance marketing company for the rest of us. While performance marketing has dominated mobile gaming, it’s coming late to the traditional console and PC space. GameSight tries to connect data from various resources to determine how spending money can make developers and publishers even more money – but it brings in that data from places like television ads and other traditional avenues for marketing.

I talk with Z and Kevin Zhang of Serenity Forge, which is here in Colorado. I met these fellas back at a Denver Comic Con a few years ago, and now they have found themselves in the business of publishing physical games. Most recently, they distributed Doki Doki Literature Club+ into Targets and Walmarts around the world. And they have plans for more projects like that in the future.

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On this episode of How Games Make Money, host Jeff Grubb talks to PopCap Vancouver producer Melvin Teo. The team at PopCap is porting Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville to the Nintendo Switch, and Teo explains what that process was like. That includes the challenges of bringing the Frostbite Engine that powers PVZ to the Switch for the first time. Teo also talks about working with a porting studio and about hopes of reaching a new audience on Switch. 

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David Whatley is the founder and chief executive officer of game developer Simutronics, which he founded out of his parents home in 1987. He built games back then that are still in active development today. Now, however, his team is working on a new mech shooter called Galahad 3093 that is getting an open test on Steam this Saturday, February 6. 

On this episode of How Games Make Money, host Jeff Grubb talks to the new creative director on PUBG, Dave Curd. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is at a stage where it's continuing to build content for a loyal audience who have returned to the battle royale shooter for thousands of hours. But it also needs to appeal to any newcomers. Curd, however, doesn't view that as a two different goals. Instead, he thinks the answer is to make the game fun, and then listen to player feedback. He talks about that and more and you can listen to it now. 

On this week's episode, host Jeff Grubb talks to Evil Empire chief executive officer Steve Filby about starting Evil Empire to take over development of Dead Cells. He also speaks about the advantages of the cooperative model and why Evil Empire is not using it. 

On this week's episode of How Games Make Money, host Jeff Grubb talks to Highlight Reel host Chris Person about taking his show solo after Kotaku's owners nuked its video staff. Highlight Reel is now a YouTube channel that collects the most interesting and entertaining clips from the world of gaming and then presents them in a slick, Sportscenter-style package. It's great. Chris explains how he started the show and how he was able to take it with him when he left Kotaku. 

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On this week's episode, host Jeffrey Grubb talks to Andrey “Reynad” Yanyuk, who is the chief executive officer of the esports organization Tempo Storm. He started out as a pro gamer, but he also equally embraced life as a content creator. Eventually, he started Tempo Storm and stepped into the CEO role to focus on creating a multimedia company that leverages the popularity of its talent both as competitors and as influencers. And now, after years of promoting other people’s games, Tempo Storm is working on a game of its own. And Andrey sees this as his opportunity to turn his business into the Bloomberg of esports.

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Thank you for listening

You can get more from me at GamesBeat.com

Email me about the podcast at jeff.grubb@gmail.com with the subject line: How Games Make Money

Or reach out on Twitter:

I’m @JeffGrubb

The podcast is @HGMMshow

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Quadpay CEO Brad Lindenberg joins me to talk about hooking up with GameStop to help people pay off their purchases over time. As the name suggests, Quadpay enables customers to buy something online or in a store and then break up paying for those goods into four installments over a six week period. Quadpay is one of the new options that GameStop added recently to make it easier for people to pay for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. And I had a lot of questions about how something like this works, and Brad was kind enough to walk us through it. I guess I’ll say that the quick takeaway is that it seems like a fair service that isn’t really equivalent to financing.

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Joey Chiu joins the podcast as a guest this week. He is my friend and a gamer. He was also the first person to buy a PlayStation 4. If you go back to November 2013 and look for news stories from the launch of that console, you’ll find plenty about Joey waiting in line to get the first PS4 in New York City. I actually hung out with Joey that week. I was in town for the PS4 launch event where Sony enabled journalists to get hands-on time with the machine and face-to-face time with the developers. And at night, we would mingle -- remember that? Mingling? -- and Joey was there and I knew him from our time in the 1UP community. So we talked and hung out and then a few days later, his photo was everywhere as the first person to buy a PS4.

Well, I realized that I hadn’t had a gamer’s perspective on this show before, so I wanted to do that. And who could possibly be better than the first PS4 owner? This will give me a chance to take his temperature on the PS5. We recorded this before Sony announced its Wednesday PS5 Showcase. But we went over each possible price point and tried to figure out if Joey was going to be among the first to buy a PS5.