They Put a Beloved Name on Its Own Opposite.
Dungeon Keeper promised hands-on control. The mobile version sold waiting. Here's what that inversion cost.
Videogame Positioning
A newsletter for game founders. Fix category, promise and proof to grow your revenues.
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Artifact Pulled 60,000 Players on Day One. The Name Did That, Not the Game.
Valve borrowed Dota's audience, then removed every complaint and still couldn't keep them. Recognition isn't position.
Zynga Paid Players To Leave One Of Its Games For Another
How a name that owned a category got spent shuffling the same players between identical games... until the SEC filing.
July 2026 Deep Dive: The Word You Can Win
The Attribute Ladder Test: a diagnostic for the rung your studio has actually earned in the player's mind
The Word That Built a Genre (and Why Yours Probably Won't)
Factorio earned the verb "automation" so completely that 1,901 games are filed under it on Steam. Here's the test that tells you if you're next.
The Feeling Your Competitors Cannot Clone
Tarkov spent nine years in beta and outlasted every formally-launched competitor. The reason isn't the mechanics.
Eighteen Words That Funded Superhot in Twenty-Three Hours
What happens when your mechanic and your tagline are the same sentence, and the discipline cost most studios refuse to pay.
The Game That Forgot Its Own Name
Bleeding Edge had eleven differentiators, four years of dev, and Game Pass distribution. Ten months later it was over. Here's why.
June 2026 Deep Dive: The Opposite Engine
Most studios that fail at opposite positioning don't pick the wrong leader. They pick the wrong type of opposite.
How Forza Horizon split the racing category in two
Gran Turismo wasn’t beaten. It was made smaller. Here’s the diagnostic to run on your own positioning.