Gabe Leydon; back to the Iron Throne

F2P mobile gaming pioneer is back with blockchain

I’ve got prior on this topic but I’m extremely excited to see the return of Gabe Leydon to gaming, especially as he really gets NFTs.

Although I only meet Gabe once (I also had a phone interview), I think he’s one of the most underestimated game visionaries.

Significantly, this isn’t because the games he designed - Game of War and Mobile Strike - weren’t massively successful. They were two of the first mobile F2P games to break one billion dollars of revenue.

But most gamers didn’t play them, and most of those that did, didn’t like them, let alone understand them. That was my own position until monetization experts started to unpick exactly how these games worked.

After all, at the elite end of the player base, these were strongly social games in which you could spend more than $100,000 and still not have bought everything available. In comparison (until Supercell changed it), at the time you couldn’t spend more than $10,000 in Clash of Clans without maxing out every stat.

Of course, this resulted in plenty of fruity headlines, but as we’re already seeing with blockchain games, what’s interesting isn’t that someone did spend $1 million in Game of War, rather that someone could.

And that - for me - was the key. It wasn’t about whether I liked or understood these games. It was about understanding other people liked and understood these games and were prepared to spend all their disposal income (and then some) playing them.

Not coincidentally, Gabe was also the first person in mobile gaming to really understand the value of marketing. On the macro scale, Game of War was one of the first mobile game to do SuperBowl advertising. On the micro, his company had the best understanding of how performance marketing fed into in-game economics and player behavior.

Famously, for these reasons, in 2015 he was described as the man on “gaming’s Iron Throne”; a meme that certainly reflects something of his determination and drive.

Listen now!

All this was reinforced (and more) when I listened to Gabe talking about his career in gaming in this podcast (it’s long but really worth it; I’m going to listen to it again).

What struck me was how Gabe covers a lot of ground - from basic psychology and game design to post-war societal changes, the impact of globalization etc - in a fairly non-judgemental way. And it’s all within the proviso they’re are just happening.

Of course, I enjoy arguing about this stuff more than most, but we confuse the importance of our views about change (minimal) with the inevitability of that change. Too often, we fool ourselves that we understand the basics of what’s happening.

And I think that’s probably the key takeaway for those in the games industry.

Whether you like it or fully understand it, blockchain is coming to gaming.

That’s exactly what happened ten years ago when F2P combined with mobile gaming to create what’s now a $120 billion annual sector; bigger than console and PC gaming combined.

Gabe was at the vanguard of that disruption and it’s great to see him back.