Amir Satvat’s Post

Lessons from losing 350 members. In the first month after the Skool games, our Digital Offer Builders Community shrank by 350 members… There was an insane dip exactly one month after the last 48 hours of the games. This was a humbling reminder that I can always improve. The big dropoff happened right around the day of my flight to Las Vegas and the mastermind with the other Skool game winners, Sam Ovens and Alex Hormozi. I tried not to let it show, but my confidence was crushed. But I knew this was an opportunity for improvement. So instead of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to get to work. Here is what I did: - I focused on reactivation - I focused on consistent growth - I focused on consistent engagement to reduce churn The good news? After just 3 days of starting to implement the changes, I see the numbers stabilizing. The community noticed the changes and the feedback is amazing. The takeaway? Often we greatly underestimate what it takes to make things work. It’s already hard to gain momentum initially. But the dip that follows after initial success is the hardest IMO. Because you’ve had a taste of what it can be like. But now you need to do all the nitty-gritty trial and error to figure out how to make things work beyond the launch. What you can learn here can take you to the next level. And I don’t know about you but I love to use my frustration and disappointment as fuel. Get creative and don’t be afraid to test things. You can always label changes as a test so your members are prepared that you might go back on things or switch them up again. As long as they know that you intend to find out how to serve them best - you’re good. I hope you found this helpful. Hugs Evelyn

I'm very saddened to hear that most staff at Cut to Bits must be let go, as announced by studio co-founder Masao Kobayashi (and including himself). If your role is affected by this news, please make use of the support available across our three platforms. Specifically, I recommend checking out the Games Org Support Posts in Home 1. These resources are highly effective, with ample data to back their success. Home 1 - 🔗 AMIRSATVAT.COM: Our main hub provides 17 resources to assist you in finding work, featuring a fully updated design. - 🔗 Games Org Support Posts: Find a template at AMIRSATVAT.COM (Category 4, Resource 10). If you can provide information from your team (with their consent), I’ll help edit and disseminate the final product, reaching 100,000+ people. These posts are highly effective in increasing visibility, and we've done 99 of them. Home 2 - 🔗 Discord: Join us at discord.gg/amirsatvat, our live extension of community resources. With over 4,000 members, we are currently in an open-join phase. Home 3 - 🔗 LinkedIn: Our community here includes over 90,000 members, with 1-3 daily posts offering support and career assistance in the games industry. How the Broader Community Can Help: - Spread the Word: Reshares and comments on this post amplify the visibility of these resources. - Offer Support: Utilize the 14 ways listed on AMIRSATVAT.COM under "How You Can Help" to assist, or simply lend an ear or advice on our Discord server. - Join Our Movement: Volunteer with us at AMIRSATVAT.COM to support our colleagues in the games industry. Our network has facilitated over 2,100 jobs and 39,000 coaching conversations to date, the largest impact of any games organization on earth, and has been visited by millions of gamers lifetime.

ICYMI, here's an update covering what I've been up to lately 😎 Finally figured out how to connect my RSS feed to MailChimp, so feel free to subscribe at the bottom of the post if that's your thing. You'll get an email whenever I write something new on my blog, which is... less than once per month? Free, no strings attached, no data shared. Just raw thoughts about design, games, technology at large, and life. https://lnkd.in/eqy8t8Bq

Stop starting and start finishing

In 2013 I was paying for a hot desk at a co-working space in Hong Kong called Cocoon. Cocoon was more interested in incubating start-up companies than selling office space. Because of this, they offered free ‘business analysis’ meetings. Someone asked me if I wanted to take one so I said yes. I talked with a woman called Joyce who I think was an executive at a diamond company. I told her about the games I had been making. 🤷♀️ “How do you know how well a game will sell when you’re making it?” 💁♂️ “I have no idea, you just make it and see” 🙋♀️ “I see, well then I think you should try to increase the speed you make games. Now it takes you three months to make a game, but if you can get it down to one week you’ll be able to have more chances at success” This was an interesting idea, and I wandered around thinking “How can I make a game in a week?”. The problem is I needed to get a lot of art assets made. Things like music, voice acting, animation, concept art, background art and writing. Could I make ten games at once? Probably not, I didn’t have the money or the project management skill to do that. Around that time Tinder was a really popular app and I was thinking: “Could this app be turned into a game? What about a game that’s basically a Tinder simulation?” 👇 Check out the "Journey in Coding" of Angus Cheng and discover insights about app development and entrepreneurship!

Do you ever ask yourself "What if?"... Welcome to the game ODDS. A psychological horror adventure game that follows the epiphanic journey of Ellie Elidora, where the probabilities of 'What if's' are reduced to 'when'. Become Ellie's inner thoughts and guide her through 2 mundane days in her life where seemingly trifling choices alter her fate for the 3rd—and possibly final—day. Overthink every action. Overanalyze every response. Oversee the consequences of every ending. Underestimate the impacts of how you cope. Underplay the dangers that lurk within the shadows and in the light. Understand the fear of uncontrollable anxiety. Replay and discover all possible endings and secrets to piece together who, and what, Ellie truly is. Welcome to ODDS. - I just wanted to thank Dr. Kris Alexander and the wonderful class of RTA 928: Intro to Game Design, for allowing my personal project come to life. What started as a dream concept and organized chaos on a piece of paper, has now slowly come together with proper illustrations, concepts, narratives, videos and future goals. This concept tool was created for our last assignment! I can, with full confidence, say that I have never experienced a class like this one. Every class introduced me to new ideas and further pushed me one step closer to achieving my goals for this project. That 'classroom' came together every week to cheer on whoever was brave enough to show their gaming skills to the rest of the class. A type of supportive and engaging community that I would love to continue to be a part of!

Nolan Bushnell knew he had a hit when he heard about the trouble at Andy Capp’s Tavern. Atari's founder had created only one prototype of its first video game, Pong, and it had stopped working after just two weeks – the can for collecting coins kept getting overstuffed. These are the kinds of problems we all should have. In 1972, Bushnell’s Pong became the first commercially viable video game, and it churned out money. Atari’s Pong overcame earlier entrants’ shortcomings. It was simple. The arcade setting allowed for new users to easily observe others’ play and to try the system out for just a few cents. Arcades were motivated to get people to try the game. By overcoming barriers to trial and adoption, it created a runaway success. The company’s home version of Pong sold 150,000 units, but Bushnell had his sights on building a system that could play a range of games through inserting cartridges into a machine. By the early 1980s, Atari’s revenues were over $2 billion. It had become the fastest-growing company in U.S. history. Atari had a market share of 75% and seemed utterly dominant. Then it collapsed. Atari’s revenue halved in just one year. The company was sold off in 1984 and, despite a few comeback attempts, it never recovered. Why? Three big reasons: 1. STRATEGY -- Atari made most of its money from selling game cartridges, not the console, but it did not control the supply of games. Competitors emerged from nowhere, often with low-quality games that degraded the overall experience. 2. PEOPLE -- The company became a magnet for talented developers, but it couldn’t hold on to them as computing became more accessible for the general population. Its losses included one disillusioned junior employee with bright prospects: Steve Jobs. 3. OPTIONS -- Today, Nolan Bushnell says his worst business decision at Atari saved all of two cents. That would have been the additional cost of making its game cartridges capable of read-write, rather than just read. They could have been upgradable, and system obsolescence would have come more slowly. But the company eliminated that critical option, to save all of two cents. Plan your strategy, hold onto your great people, and develop options. If Atari can fail, so can any company. 

New Post: ‘Borderlands’ developer Gearbox may be up for sale soon - https://lnkd.in/gXPBFVAu - A new report has alleged that Embracer Group is in the process of selling Borderlands developer Gearbox to a third party. READ MORE: ‘Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’ review: this first-class remake will put you on cloud nine According to a Kotaku report, Gearbox CEO and co-founder Randy Pitchford told staff earlier this week that a decision had been made about the future of the developer, though more information won’t be shared until next month. Sources close to Gearbox told Kotaku that Pitchford has been telling developers that three scenarios were possible. These scenarios were either staying with Embracer Group, selling to another company or buying out their contract and becoming intendent. New Tales From The Borderlands. Credit: Gearbox. In a statement to Kotaku, Pitchford had the following to say: “I’m delighted that what we might be up to is interesting enough to people that you want t make a story about us for your readers. I’m honored and humbled that our company is a topic of rumor, speculation, and discussion. As always, we will be thrilled to share whenever we have projects to announce or news to share as we work hard towards our mission to entertain the world.” Earlier this week, Knights Of The Old Republic remake developer Saber Interactive was reported by Bloomberg as being in the process of a sale to a group of private investors in a deal worth up to $500million. The news of both a potential Gearbox sale and a Saber Interactive sale comes after several layoffs from Embracer Group themselves. A restructuring programme began in the company last June, and since then over 1,400 people have been laid off by the video game holding group. In other gaming news, Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered are getting new bug fixes in the coming month after the Epic Games Store version was discovered to have different assets to the Steam version. The post ‘Borderlands’ developer Gearbox may be up for sale soon appeared first on NME. - #news #business #world -------------------------------------------------- Download: Stupid Simple CMS - https://lnkd.in/g4y9XFgR -------------------------------------------------- or download at SourceForge - https://lnkd.in/gNqB7dnp

Joel John of Decentralised.co has published “Reputation Cookies,” an essay exploring the emergence of digital collaboration on the web, and how guilds fit within it. His piece takes a broad look at how communities and digital collaboration have evolved on the web and ties it to why guilds are a modern phenomenon with potential to stay. TLDR: Joel writes about the state of web3 gaming after a brutal two-year bear market, as well as his observations and learnings drawn from his many conversations with our portfolio company Yield Guild Games, having spent more than three months studying the Guild Protocol as well as the games and guilds building on it. Key takeaways: -#Web3gaming is early and VCs value infrastructure -#Web3 needs gamers, and guilds can bring them -#ReputationCookies: the portability of reputation, not assets -Guilds enabled by #YGG are aggregations of skilled users coordinating for mutual gain -“Come for the speculation, stay for the community": community is the moat -The LinkedIn of the future could have onchain queries for wallets that have Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) to credential them For more, check out the article linked below 👇

Connections is the latest New York Times word game that’s captured the public’s attention. The game is all about finding the “common threads between words.” And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we’ve served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle. If you just want to be told today’s puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for April 21’s Connections solution. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you. What is Connections? The NYT‘s latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications’ Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common. Tweet may have been deleted Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there’s only one correct answer. If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends. Tweet may have been deleted Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media. Here’s a hint for today’s Connections categories Want a hit about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try: Yellow: The blueprint Green: Train-adjacent Blue: Alliteration Purple: Types of ears Featured Video For You Connections: How to play and how to win Here are today’s Connections categories Need a little extra help? Today’s connections fall into the following categories: Looking for Wordle today? Here’s the answer to today’s Wordle. Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today’s puzzle before we reveal the solutions. Drumroll, please! The solution to Connections #315 is… What is the answer to Connections today Embodiment: EXAMPLE, IDEAL, MODEL, SYMBOL Related to Trains: CAR, CONDUCTOR, STATION, TRACK Starting with the Same Sound: CYMBAL, SCIMITAR, SIMMER, SYMPHONY Ear___: DRUM, MARK, WAX, WIG Don’t feel down if you didn’t manage to guess it this time. There will be new Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we’ll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints. Is this not the Connections game you were looking for? Here are the hints and answers to yesterday’s Connections. var