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How's it going, Outfit7? Learnings from 2025 to New Projects in 2026
Outfit7, the developer behind the Talking Tom franchise, navigated a challenging 2025 by shifting from a KPI-driven, siloed organizational structure back to its core creative roots.
- Outfit7’s Talking Tom IP remains the global leader in mobile game downloads, surpassing 27 billion lifetime downloads as of 2025.
- To combat declining organic reach and rising user acquisition costs, Outfit7 shifted its strategy back to its core roots by focusing on clear project goals, remastering original titles, and expanding into the kids' segment with new products like Talking Tom and Friends World.
- The company successfully launched the survival roguelike game 'Vampirio' by empowering a small, autonomous team with full trust and resources, demonstrating that focused, silo-free teams outperform larger, distracted groups.
Games and Immersive: Salary & Satisfaction 2026 Report
The "Games and Immersive: Salary & Satisfaction 2026 Report" provides a comprehensive analysis of compensation, job satisfaction, and industry trends within the global games and immersive sectors.
- Between 69% and 84% of industry professionals are actively considering new employment due to widespread job insecurity and inadequate compensation.
- The workforce is experiencing a significant mental health crisis, with 67% of employees reporting burnout and nearly 50% experiencing poor mental health over the past year.
- While over 50% of professionals have adopted AI tools, the industry remains deeply divided over concerns regarding creative authenticity, ethics, and job displacement.
Games & Interactive Salary & Satisfaction Survey: 2024/25
The "Games & Interactive Salary & Satisfaction Survey: 2024/25" provides a comprehensive analysis of compensation, job satisfaction, and industry trends within the global games and interactive sector, with particular focus on the UK, Europe, North America, and the MENA region.
- The industry faces high labor volatility, with 28% of professionals reporting recent redundancies and 68% to 83% of the workforce actively seeking new employment.
- While 62% of studios project at least 5% growth in 2025, 35% of current professionals are considering exiting the sector due to instability and financial concerns.
- The global average salary in the industry is £74,091, though significant pay disparities persist across gender, seniority, and geography.
Between Profit and Player: Behavioral Monetization and the Reconfiguration of Player Agency in Free-to-Play Economies
The document, "Between Profit and Player: Behavioral Monetization and the Reconfiguration of Player Agency in Free-to-Play Economies," examines the ethical implications of free-to-play (F2P) monetization models, arguing that they often exploit cognitive biases to create "managed autonomy" rather than genuine player choice.
- Monetization in free-to-play games has become a behavioral design system embedded in core gameplay, using loot boxes, battle passes, premium currencies, and temporal constraints to exploit cognitive biases, producing what the author calls "managed autonomy."
- The paper locates the ethical problem not in the F2P model itself but in specific design choices: opaque probabilities, artificial scarcity, and obstructed refusal to purchase.
- Loot box mechanics are linked to gambling-like neurobiological responses and problem gambling among adolescents, though the paper treats this as systemic association rather than proven causation.
Between Chaos and Story: How to Combine the Author's Idea and Algorithmic Randomness in Modern Narrative Design
This study proposes a systemic framework, the "Anchors and Ornaments" model, to integrate authorial narrative with algorithmic randomness in modern game design.
- The paper proposes the "Anchors and Ornaments" model, separating stable, author-defined elements (central characters, key plot twists, emotional climaxes, relational dynamics) from variable, system-generated content, and frames the designer's role as architecting rule systems and selection criteria rather than writing fixed stories.
- The paper treats the tension between authorial control and algorithmic randomness as a design tension to be balanced rather than a strict opposition, tying the approach to concepts such as procedural authorship and "story sifting."
- The analysis is qualitative and comparative, examining three games representing distinct approaches: Hades (modular system), Dwarf Fortress (emergent system), and No Man's Sky (hybrid), and organizing the field with a typology of narrative approaches.
Application of Causal Machine Learning to Compute the Effects of Video Game Intensity on Students' Academic Performance and Psychosocial Well-Being
This study investigates the causal effects of video game intensity on university students' academic performance and psychosocial well-being, specifically sleep quality and stress.
- The apparent negative link between gaming intensity and academic performance is largely explained by confounding and self-selection rather than a direct causal effect; after covariate adjustment, the Double/Debiased Machine Learning estimate of the average treatment effect on academic performance is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
- Gaming intensity has a consistent, statistically significant negative causal effect on sleep quality under Double/Debiased Machine Learning, and this pattern holds across heterogeneous treatment effect estimates, though the heterogeneity is modest in magnitude.
- The average causal effect of gaming intensity on stress is small and not statistically significant.
Creating and Evaluating "Making Beshbarmak": Games on Traditional Cuisine of Central Asia
This research explores the development and evaluation of "Making Beshbarmak," a computer-based video game designed to teach players about Central Asian food rituals, specifically the preparation and serving of beshbarmak, a traditional meat dish from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
- The game "Making Beshbarmak" guides players through preparing and serving beshbarmak, a traditional Kazakh and Kyrgyz dish, while introducing traditional design patterns, historical context, and Kazakh food terminology.
- An exploratory playtest with ten English-speaking North American participants (20–30 minutes of play each) found that participants showed increased interest in Central Asian culture and cuisine after playing, measured through mixed-methods pre- and post-play surveys.
- Participants praised the game's interactive preparation process, flashcards, imagery of items such as yurts and patterned textiles, and its calming, immersive audiovisual atmosphere.
Commodifying the Survival: The Crisis-Driven Transaction (CDT) as a Framework for Mobile Free-to-Play Monetization
The document introduces the Crisis-Driven Transaction (CDT) as a new framework for understanding mobile free-to-play (F2P) monetization, contrasting it with traditional friction-based models.
- Whiteout Survival generated roughly 12.6 times the monthly revenue of Rise of Kingdoms in September 2025, despite Rise of Kingdoms maintaining higher Day-1 and Day-7 retention across the period studied.
- Whiteout Survival's monthly revenue grew from about 0.04 million in January 2023 to a peak of 132 million in March 2025, while Rise of Kingdoms declined roughly 70 percent over the same period.
- Playtests found Whiteout Survival's first monetization prompt appearing at roughly 16 to 28 minutes into play, about three times earlier than Rise of Kingdoms, whose primary conversion event follows a player-versus-environment defeat near the 75-minute mark.
Integrating Telemetry with Player Motivation Models
This paper proposes a theoretical framework to integrate game telemetry with player motivation models, aiming to make game analytics more interpretable for designers.
- Game analytics SDKs such as GameAnalytics, Unity Analytics, PlayFab, and Firebase capture player actions at scale but rarely explain why those actions occur, creating an asymmetry between measurement and interpretation.
- The paper proposes linking telemetry to motivational frameworks such as HEXAD, RAMP, and 4 Keys 2 Fun, operationalized from raw event streams, to supply the missing layer of player motivation.
- The proposed architecture has four linked layers: instrumentation, sequence-aware preprocessing, motivational interpretation, and application in designer dashboards or adaptive systems like dynamic difficulty adjustment.
Comparative Analysis of the Perception of the Game World in Narrative Games through Interaction in Virtual Reality and on a Flat Screen
This document presents a comparative analysis framework for understanding how players perceive narrative game worlds in virtual reality (VR) versus flat-screen environments.
- The paper argues immersion is multidimensional, so VR's effect on narrative engagement may extend beyond simply increasing perceptual intensity compared with flat-screen play.
- Prior comparative studies generally report that VR increases presence, flow, sensory immersion, and affective arousal relative to desktop play, though outcomes vary across implementations and some competence and challenge measures show little modality effect.
- The analysis centers on modality-specific affordances, including embodied interaction, diegetic interface integration, feedback coherence, and world reactivity, as drivers of representational coherence, meaning construction, and emotional challenge.
Radiance Cascades Compared to Unity's Standard Global Illumination Methods
This study empirically evaluates real-time global illumination (GI) methods within the Unity Universal Render Pipeline (URP), comparing Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI), built-in Realtime Lightmaps (RTLM), and Radiance Cascades (RC).
- Radiance Cascades and Realtime Lightmaps ran at roughly 220 FPS in the isometric test scene, while Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI) held near 105 FPS, and Radiance Cascades outperformed Realtime Lightmaps by about 5 to 10 FPS on average.
- SSGI's apparent efficiency in the realistic FPS-style exterior is misleading, because much of the indirectly lit geometry fell outside the camera view frustum and was never computed.
- Radiance Cascades handled dynamic emissive and moving light sources convincingly, but produced bloom-like overamplification under daylight and noise at close range.
Achievement Surfers: A Gamified Runner-Based Learning Tool for Supporting Revision and Reinforcement of Learning Outcomes
"Achievement Surfers" is presented as a gamified 3D runner application designed to support revision and reinforce learning outcomes for university students.
- Achievement Surfers is a Unity-based 3D runner game that turns instructor-supplied spreadsheet question sets into revision levels, with questions answered after gameplay, aiming to boost engagement and short-term reinforcement rather than long-term motivation.
- A validation study with 45 undergraduate students and five instructors reported an engagement rate of 0.756, with 75.6% of students saying the game reinforced their material and mean usability scores between 3.7 and 4.2 on a five-point scale.
- The authors interpret these favorable responses cautiously as evidence of technical feasibility and user acceptance, not as demonstrated learning gains.