Wireframe magazine recently approached me and asked if I’d be interested in writing their third page column for an upcoming issue. Yes, of course I would! The below is the result of just that. It was an absolute pleasure to write about something so close to my heart: Preserving games to be playable as originally…

Towards the end of last year me and a small team started work on a new kind of event for 2019: The Videogames Nonference. I’m super excited to announce more on that in the next few months, but for now I can reveal our first partnership. The Videogames Nonference has teamed up with one of…

We slip into cognitive biases when making games, the easiest of which is to design and build for ourselves. This is generally dangerous, but especially so when it comes to monetisation design. The majority of your game’s income will come from a very small and specific demographic: You can expect to see around 3% of…

Gazeus Games’ CMO, who has a psychology background, talks about building games based on the underlying emotional needs of subsets of players, often called psychographics. I used this tool for setting vision early on in a project and it can equally be applied later to help ideate features and prioritise a backlog. The foundation for Paula’s…

This is an excerpt from my upcoming article Mathematics of Balance: Part 1 in the new print game development magazine Wireframe. Issue 1 is out 8th November. What Is It? Probability is the mathematical definition of how likely something is to happen. For example, how often a dice will land on a six. Why Is…

Like almost everyone else on the planet, I’ve been playing a lot of battle royale games and asking: Why are these so good? I think there are a few unique things happening in the genre: The games push skill and are willing to punish players for making mistakes, which goes against the trend in game…

In recent years I’ve come to realise that being good at your job isn’t just about being good at your particular skillset. Much of work performances is about how your mind behaves and reacts to certain situations. Do you become angry when people disagree with you? Do you work yourself too hard and risk your…

I recently appeared on episode 74 of Checkpoints podcast to talk about my life in gaming: From my first taste of Pong to treating anxiety with competitive Magic. Thanks to Declan Dineen for having me on. The entire Checkpoints series is available on iTunes and there are lots of great episodes. It was a real honour…

Note: Much of the thinking in this article has evolved from my practice of the thoughts and theories described by Simon Sinek in his excellent book Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. When talking about our projects we often start with “what” we are making: What the gameplay is, what…

When I interviewed at A Thinking Ape I remember saying “I am a designer” a lot. Often accompanied by “I’m not an analyst” and “I’m not in marketing”. Fortunately for me the interview panel felt I had a decent enough grasp of what I claimed I didn’t know to offer me the Product Lead position.…

In the polite society of games addiction is so loaded a term we like to use synonyms such as “sticky”. Semantics aside, I designed Pixel Miner, like any of my games, to be addictive. I wanted to have players entranced not for any mean-spirited reason, but to prove that the games I make are effective…

Over the last five years card games have been salvaged from obscurity with deck builders and Living Card Games in the board game space, card battlers on mobile and Magic’s own revival. Card games are hip. Also hip is esports. Insanely so. Investor money is pouring in to startup Twitch and meanwhile the Korean eSports…

Too often the free-to-play model is seen as cynical. That businesses are at war with “users” for their wallets. That users are like cattle to be herded in to the pen of your game and their teats hooked up to the IAP machine and *slurp-slurp-slurp*. If the cattle disobey then you prod them, whip them,…

With Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away out a little while I wanted to round up and reflect the critical reception, which has been overwhelmingly positive. The first professional review came PocketGamer.biz‘s Jon Jordan who said: Those already well-experienced in the field will enjoy Luton’s logic, if not learning much new. Everyone else…

Last Sunday at Loading Bar (Soho, London) I held a small party to celebrate the launch of my book. There was a great turn out of friends and family who enjoyed games, food and cocktails with me. Luckily we had Will Edgecombe on hand to take some photos and they came out great. Thank you…

The first thing those with penchant for smugness like to ask of my book (Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away) is, “why isn’t it free?” Their lips curl and their eyes shine. The book hasn’t even shipped yet and already I’ve had this asked of me by at least a dozen people, each…

I finally got my author copies of Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away and, despite being hit with a import bill of £143.60, I’m very happy. Check out this unboxing video: And this gallery:

Following a Twitter discussion between me and Rami on his use of the term “evil” in regards to F2P we agreed to have a Skype chat. Here it is:

I’ve written about how the design process should be filled with quickly testing theories. Videogames are complex and their constituent parts rarely interact in the ways you expect, so getting something working (or not working) quickly let’s you test your design and fix it. Prototyping, therefor, is one of the greatest tricks in a game…

There have been a lot of books over the years that have refined my thinking on games for the better. Forcing me to question and reevaluate what I believe to be true. Oddly these book are often not written about games at all, but on a whole range of topics. Here are some of my…

I’ve previously tried to avoid talking about the ethics of F2P because, whilst I believe the vulnerable need to be protected, I don’t think it’s a serious issue and mostly the reaction and anger it invokes is somewhat silly and overblown. However, I did just write a piece for GamesIndustry International (nee GamesIndustry.biz), which is…

In the UK the topic of children and IAPs has become a mainstream news topic in the last month. Now the Office of Fair Trading (the governmental UK consumer protection organisation) has said it will investigate if some F2P games targeting children are “misleading, commercially aggressive or otherwise unfair” or in other words “unlawful”. Well…

Special Effect is a charity that allows disabled people to enjoy videogames through adapted equipment, a loan library and a website packed with information. Check out the below video to see how they got Charlotte back in to gaming and visit the site to donate. [Update] Special Effect just posted this moving video of Arlo…

Freetard (noun). A freetard is a unyielding proponent of free Source: Urban Dictionary I like to think that I am not a freetard, despite being such a champion of the F2P model that I wrote a book about it. I believe that F2P is the best business proposition for most games: It grants access to…

I’m something of a card game fanatic: I play and write about Magic: The Gathering a great deal and have worked and advised on a number of card battlers. Whilst the genre is insanely popular in Japan, where Puzzle & Dragons makes $25 million per month, few have managed to crack the West. The standout…

In my final column for Develop (I’ll be writing for GamesIndustry International from April), I talk about times when you shouldn’t hire a consultant. Consultants are of best use when you’re blind on a subject. When you have a specific problem that needs their unique knowledge to help you gain deeper understanding and reach a…

My buddy Alistair “The A-Dogg” Aitcheson’s two-player-single-iPad title Slamjet Stadium just hit the App Store. It is one of the most fun titles I’ve played in a long while – jostling friends over control of slamjets is as hectic as it gets. It’s impossible to describe how much chaos can be involved and how competitive…