RPG reports and market data
149 documents·22 writers·385 charts and tables
Documents
Deconstructor of Fun11 min
Is This the End of Old School Blizzard?
The departure of Rod Ferguson, the general manager of the Diablo franchise, marks a significant transition for Blizzard Entertainment, signaling the final exit of the company’s original creative leadership.
- The departure of Rod Fergusson marks the final exit of original creative leadership at Blizzard Entertainment, signaling a complete transition away from the studio's legacy culture.
- Blizzard currently faces significant internal instability and a lack of clear strategic direction following its integration into Microsoft, despite moderate stabilization in World of Warcraft and Diablo.
- The commercial struggle of Stormgate, developed by former Blizzard staff at Frost Giant Studios, demonstrates that historical pedigree is no longer a guarantee of success in the modern gaming market.
Deconstructor of FunAug 2025
Extra Credits108 min
Pokemon BDSP: Play Like A Designer Episode 1
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl serve as a masterclass in balancing accessibility with deep, underlying complexity.
- Game designers use initial environments to teach players that interacting with all objects is essential for discovering gear, story clues, and progression items.
- Developers employ environmental gating, such as impassable water or trees, to control player movement and create the illusion of a larger, explorable world beyond the starting area.
- Camera movement in modern Pokemon titles is designed to be dynamic during combat, shifting perspectives to enhance the visual impact of move selection and battle sequences.
Extra CreditsAug 2025
Extra Credits65 min
Pokemon BDSP: Play Like A Designer Episode 0
The Pokémon franchise relies on a sophisticated architecture of stats, economies, and combat mechanics that have sustained its popularity across decades.
- Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl serve as a controlled environment to analyze core franchise mechanics, such as stat systems and battle complexity, without the technical bloat of more recent titles.
- The franchise maintains long-term engagement by balancing accessibility for casual players with the deep, turn-based strategic systems required for competitive play.
- There is a fundamental design distinction between the real-time, augmented reality mechanics of Pokémon GO and the contained, math-heavy battle systems found in console entries.
Extra CreditsAug 2025
Extra Credits85 min
Philosophy of Video Game Combat Design | Design Club
Effective combat design functions as the primary bridge between a game’s mechanical systems and its intended player experience.
- Combat design must fundamentally choose between skill-based mastery, where damage is avoidable through precision, and progression-based systems that rely on mathematical scaling.
- Effective combat relies on managing the action economy by balancing the frequency and impact of player actions against those of opponents.
- Modern combat design is shifting away from linear kill-to-win models toward multifaceted systems that incorporate environmental interaction, elemental weaknesses, and status effects like poise.
Extra CreditsJul 2025
Thomas Brush35 min
What A Custom Game Engine (NOT UNITY) Looks Like Behind The Curtain (w/ Jeff Vogel)
Maintaining a bespoke, 30-year-old game engine written in simple C++ offers a viable alternative to industry-standard tools like Unity.
- Maintaining a custom C++ engine with a compact codebase of 50,000 to 70,000 lines provides a viable, efficient alternative to complex industry-standard tools like Unity.
- Bespoke engines can bypass the need for extensive external documentation or software by utilizing manual scripting and global variables for data management.
- A grid-based coordinate system and script-driven object management allow solo developers to efficiently build and iterate on isometric, open-world environments.
Thomas BrushJun 2025
The Game Business23 min
Most Diablo Immortal players are new to Diablo and Blizzard
Diablo Immortal has achieved significant global success three years post-launch, effectively serving as an entry point for a new demographic of players.
- Over 50% of Diablo Immortal’s user base consists of players who had no prior experience with the Diablo franchise or Blizzard’s ecosystem.
- The game maintains a consistent live-service cadence featuring major content updates every quarter and smaller releases every two weeks.
- Diablo Immortal has achieved global success three years post-launch by successfully bridging the gap between traditional PC-based Diablo fans and mobile-first players.
The Game BusinessJun 2025
The Game Business51 min
Expedition 33 publisher: “Oblivion didn’t seem to harm us at all”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has emerged as a significant success for Kepler Interactive and Sandfall Interactive, selling over one million units within its first three days and reaching 1.7 million players during its opening week.
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 achieved 1.7 million players in its opening week, including over one million units sold within the first three days.
- Data indicates that 55 percent of Xbox players engaged with both Expedition 33 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion simultaneously, suggesting that subscription services like Game Pass foster audience sampling rather than direct title cannibalization.
- The success of Expedition 33 validates the double-A market segment, proving that focused, high-quality new intellectual properties can achieve significant reach through strategic platform support.
The Game BusinessMay 2025
The Game Business27 min
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director hopes “AI revolution” will allow him to make games faster
The creative director and co-founder of Warhorse Studios, Daniel Vávra, discusses the successful launch of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which achieved 2 million units sold within its first two weeks.
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sold 2 million units within its first two weeks, meeting internal projections based on pre-order data.
- Warhorse Studios scaled its team to 250 employees over a six-year development cycle that included navigating the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The studio attributes its commercial success to maintaining creative autonomy under Embracer Group, avoiding the trend-focused 'corporate product' model common in modern AAA development.
The Game BusinessApr 2025
PocketGamer.biz43 min
Why Fateless Games Didn’t Follow the Rules—And How It Paid Off
Fateless Games has successfully disrupted traditional game development paradigms by pivoting from a high-traffic content platform, HH Gaming, into a specialized studio.
- Fateless Games leveraged an existing audience of 400,000 members and 11 million monthly page views from its former platform, HH Gaming, to bypass traditional game discovery hurdles.
- The studio secured $6 million in funding directly from its player base within a ten-week period, effectively validating the development of its flagship title, Godforge, prior to launch.
- The company prioritizes a creator-first model, providing partners with proprietary data tools and specialized support to drive organic growth and player retention.
PocketGamer.bizMar 2025
Report26 pages
Key Insights into Role-Playing Games (RPGs)
Role-Playing Games (RPGs) represent the highest-revenue genre in the global gaming market as of 2022.
- As of 2022, Role-Playing Games (RPGs) rank as the highest-revenue genre in the global gaming market.
- The player base is predominantly male (58%) and young, with 59% of users falling between the ages of 10 and 30.
- Monetization is heavily driven by pay-to-play models used by 97% of the player base, supplemented by in-app purchases at 90%.
NewzooJan 2025
Extra Credits10 min
The Man Who Made Ultima: Lord British | Extra Credits Gaming
Richard Garriott, widely known by his persona Lord British, stands as a foundational figure in the evolution of computer role-playing games (CRPGs) and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs).
- Richard Garriott, known as 'Lord British,' pioneered the RPG genre with the Ultima series, which introduced the concept of the 'avatar' and shifted industry standards toward complex morality systems with 1985's Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.
- Garriott founded Origin Systems, which was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1992 for $30 million in stock and later produced the groundbreaking 1997 title Ultima Online, one of the first successful graphical MMOs to utilize a recurring subscription model.
- The commercial success of Ultima Online led to internal conflict at EA, where the company's mandate to pivot toward multiple simultaneous MMO projects resulted in the cancellation of other titles and the eventual stagnation of Origin Systems.
Extra CreditsDec 2024
Two & a Half Gamers70 min
Capybara GO! Defining a new genre: Social Casino RPG! Another Mobile Sensation by Habby
Capybara GO! represents a strategic shift for Habby, establishing a new hybrid genre defined as a Social Casino RPG.
- Habby’s 'Capybara GO!' functions as a 'Social Casino RPG' that removes skill-based input, replacing active gameplay with passive, slot-machine-style mechanics that prioritize high-frequency monetization.
- The game demonstrates significant market potential, reaching 700,000 active users by November 1st following its August 30th soft launch, with expectations to outperform 'Survivor.io' after its official U.S. launch on November 22nd.
- The design strategy relies on 'gluing together' proven mechanics from other successful titles, such as the pet-building systems from 'Legend of Slime' and 'Legend of Mushroom,' while scaling them to increase depth and player retention.
Two & a Half GamersNov 2024