Ignition Facility

About to head to #GDC and tbh I don't really know what to expect. Here's hoping for good vibes -- or at least ???????????? ??????????. ?? We're certainly living interesting times, as yesterday Mountaintop Studios was the latest in a line of VC-backed studios to shut its doors after struggling to find an sustained audience for Spectre Divide. There's a lot of uncertainty, which is scary and frustrating, but change also brings opportunity, so here are the 3 questions I'm planning to ask folks I see at the show: 1. ?? What's your prediction for the industry? When does it bounce back? What are the new waves to ride? 2. ?? How do games overcome the discovery challenge in such a saturated market? 3. ?? How are YOU planning to adapt and win? You know, just some easy, straightforward questions. Feel free to drop your burning hot takes in the comments, or let's grab a coffee or beer in SF and discuss. Safe travels everyone. #gamedev #gamepublishing

Over the last several years, there’s been a parade of venture-backed studios founded largely by talented ex-Riot folks trying to make the next big MOBA (...MOBA but battle royale, MOBA but extraction, MOBA but PvE, etc.). They’ve all faced significant challenges finding an audience. I don’t think the oversaturated market and generic live service exhaustion is a sufficient explanation here — I think there are some specific genre challenges and business themes that are unique: ??MOBAs are HARD. A shooter’s a shooter: you click on heads. The main point of interaction in a MOBA is the hero, which has a much higher executional burden just to learn to play (on top of the strategic nuance). ??MOBAs aren’t that popular. Sure, League’s huge, but it’s especially huge in China. The addressable audience for existing MOBA players in the West is small in contrast to other genres — and if one likely scenario is “the #2 MOBA”, power laws aren’t on your side and that’s unlikely to be a sustainable f2p business. ??Switching costs are enormously high for MOBAs. On top of the time and money players have spent on content, MOBAs are uniquely compelling because they have all these aspects of skill expression, and players have spent years learning a bunch of heroes, matchups, builds, teamplay, keeping up with the meta — it’s exhausting to contemplate starting from scratch. ??????MOBAs are team games, and they’re miserable without friends. You don’t just need to convince one player to bounce from the game they’ve spent years of their life getting good at — you need to convince them and 3 or 4 friends!! ??League of Legends was an aberration with several tailwinds: DOTA already existed and had an underserved audience. They aqui-hired Dota Allstars and brought that existing community (already trained on the genre, with plenty of existing social connections) along for the ride. On top of that, League was free-to-play when that was a distribution superpower. Those factors are simply not the case in the 2020s — League of Legends is a cultural establishment, not a blue ocean to fish in. ??All of these games kind of look…like League of Legends. Don’t get me wrong — they’re beautiful and polished. But you have at best a few seconds to communicate your hook, and if the game isn’t jumping off the screen as something new and unique, you’re gonna have a tough time breaking through. So — what can you possibly do to build a successful MOBA in 2025? Look, I don’t know. I think there are incredible challenges here (see above). But here’s what I’d urge teams to think about (see comments - LinkedIn is suppressing my 1st amendment rights with their dastardly character limit ??). #gamedev #gamepublishing #gamemarketing #MOBA