Hi, my name is Kenny Liu, and I work in Revenue Strategy at Riot Games. Each week I compile a gaming industry insights newsletter that I share with other Rioters, including Riot’s senior leadership. This edition is the public version that I publish broadly every week as well. Opinions are mine.
See more or subscribe at: https://tinyletter.com/kliuless
Kliu's Corner: Platform Wars
The First “First On Discord” Games
Valve's long held grip on PC gaming distribution is finally waning
Discord won't be the only challenger though; Amazon/Twitch and Epic could also make a strong play
Over the years, the value-add of Steam's once uniquely comprehensive suite of services has become fragmented
Beginning with voice chat, Discord quickly expanded to become gamers' preferred destination for most social and community features
The rise of streaming and influencers has shifted the power of product discoverability into the hands of platforms like Twitch
Epic, now with the biggest game in the West, should parlay its high user traffic, successful Android self-distribution, and of course its powerful Unreal engine into an all-too-sweet packaged deal developers
I disagree with opinions like this one arguing that "Steam's downfall would be a blow to the creative freedom of devs"
Yes, there will be more publisher-run platforms, but there will also be other better player-focused platforms too, like Discord
After the dust settles, I foresee an overall better ecosystem for both developers and players alike
Design
Mark Brown: How Overcooked’s Kitchens Force You to Communicate
How Destiny 2's Gambit invented a new game mode
How Odyssey is changing the face of Assassin's Creed
PC/Console
Extended Fortnite Cross-Play Beta Launches on PS4 [KL: better late than never]
Vivendi lays plan to relinquish the last of its Ubisoft stock by 2019
Nintendo tries out streaming on Switch in Japan
[KL: Lots of great insight here on current state of Japanese market]
"For all the misgivings that may exist about cloud streaming as the inevitable future of gaming as a whole, as a solution to this specific problem - the question of how to put a game built for PS4 onto a significantly lower-spec system without compromising the experience too badly - it makes perfect sense. If there's a market for this and the business model can be made to make sense (thus far it seems to make some sense for publishers but is pretty rubbish for consumers, so some tweaking is likely required), then it could be a pretty good answer to some of the questions over the position of Switch in the market overall"
"Rainbow Six: Siege proves that those ‘free weekends’ work"
“Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege climbed the chart from the ninth-ranked position in July to become the third best-selling game of August[.] Performance was driven by the free-play period that ran August 16-to-20 in conjunction with the Six Major Paris 2018 Esports tournament and associated retail and digital promotion"
