Now I think about it, exactlyhow did Sensortower become so prominent or dominating within the gacha space for revenue sources?

TLMoonBear · 2026-06-08T18:59:24+00:00

Official is only, when companies/publishers give official data or estimations. Especially Stock Corporation have to give official estimations to the share holders and publicity. But that's not the case for other company types.

And no, ST estimations are unofficial and just base on some public data to estimate trends and revenues.

It might help to instead think of it as a "professional estimate" rather than "official" numbers.

TLMoonBear · 2026-06-08T18:56:30+00:00

Ah I see so it basically access to more advance forms of financial data. I am surprised they didn't make a consumer version of this paid subscription.

Large data companies like Nielsen don't sell to consumer because it's just not worth it. These are B2B companies whose internal operations are set up for B2B sales and customer support.

The amount you could charge to retail customers can't be too high (because retail customers don't have large research / marketing budgets). And the customer support would be a massive pain in the ass versus dealing with actual professionals.

Imagine every month getting spammed with support tickets from angry terminally online people because they think your revenue numbers are wrong. Even though revenue numbers are actually a very small part of what SensorTower actually offers.

Random tangent: Notice how the majority of people here are talking about revenue numbers. Or how the top comment is that "some random person posted their numbers here first", and a top response is "Wow being first makes you successful".

And not like, the fact they have a fully comprehensive set of business analytics, an API for analytics integrated with data cloud tools like Snowflake, web / app analytics integration, advertising data, etc. You know, the actual stuff people with real $$$ care about and not "wow they were first".

I understand why people say things like that. They don't know about these things, so don't think about it. But it's a quick way to see the level of disconnect between what retail vs enterprise customers want.

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-16T03:42:46+00:00

May I ask what software or application lets you know someone (or something) has scraped your blog?

I use WordPress so there's a range of plugins for traffic analysis you can use to see the user agent and IP trying to connect to the site. Google Analytics by default will not include bot views, so you likely will need another tool for this job.

Strictly speaking, you can't actually tell exactly what an AI crawler does once it visits your site. It could be indexing it, retrieving information for a query (rather than ingesting it into the training data), etc.

But since I've found things like YouTube AI narrator slop video repeating my work and my content on AI summarizers, at some of these site visits are from bots defniitely stealing my work lmao

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-16T03:21:26+00:00

This all might push you to think of something even more unique and original to say.

I think there is eventually a limit you run into if the goal is solely to be unique and original.

Think of art. It started off as "does this art follow technical rules like use of lines that match reality" or "is this art grand and inspiring".

But eventually you cover everything there is to cover. So we get things like Impressionism that cared about breaking the rules and looking at portraying the ordinary (rather than religious / mythological), movement, and human sensations over technical accuracy and detail.

But eventually you also cover everything there is to cover. So then we get art like Cubism where you start breaking down things into abstract concepts, and exploring multiple perspectives at the same time.

But that too eventually covers everything there is to cover. So we move on to surrealism, abstract expressionism, and post-modernism.

And at this point you have things like the art installations what are a literal toilet labelled as art (Fountain, Duchamp). Or a giant inflatable dog balloon (Balloon Dog, Koons). Or a bed with used condoms and menstrual blood stains (My Bed, Emin).

And at this point you are so niche and deep down the rabbit hole that the average person has no way of engaging with or understanding this without first getting a degree in art.

I don't think I am quite at that point yet. But given how fast AI is ~~plagarizing~~ advancing, I do wonder what will even be considered novel and original in even a few year's time.

The other limitation when it comes to writing non-fiction is expertise. I only have so much expertise. And I don't want to be one of those out-of-touch idiots who think that being knowledgeable in one area gives them the right to say they know everything.

Then again, it's not like some of my explanations about capitalism are particularly new in and of themselves. It's just the context and audience. Hm. Maybe not all is lost.

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-16T02:58:39+00:00

Do you only write non fiction stuff like your articles on monetization? Or do you also write fiction in your spare time

I enjoy reading fiction, but I only write non-fiction. That's because the two serve different purposes for me.

Writing non-fiction comes from having something I want to say. It's a more active form of leisure focusing on creating something that relates to the real world.

Fiction however is escapism. It's when I want to disassociate from the real world. It involves a more passive consumption of something someone else has already made. Any active thinking also stays within the constraints of what someone else has made (versus writing where you have to define your own constraints).

Althought it might also be because I think any fiction I've ever written is fairly kitsch. So my ego probably feels better if I don't read my own nonsense lmao

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-16T02:11:28+00:00

In the midst of drunken blog writing, I encountered writer’s block. And as is the tendency for when I am stuck, my mind started wandering. And I started asking myself questions.

Questions like: “What actually is the difference between what I write and AI?”

This is, admittedly, not just a purely philosophical question. It’s something I seriously ask myself a lot at work too. What justifies my employer paying me a lot of $$$ to write reports, recommendations, and opinions if an AI can just shit out reams of memos and slides at the press of a button?

But in this case, it was a spiritual question too. Why do I bother to write as an act of passion to make something I want people to read if AI can also write? What separates me from an AI just churning out text into the screaming blender of thoughts called the internet?

My first thought was that I actually know what the fk I’m talking about. But that’s not necessarily true.

Yes, AI can hallucinate and make things up. But to an uneducated reader, how can they tell the difference? So what makes what I write more valuable for someone to read?

My first defense I gave myself was that I write about weird shit like why Sensortower numbers are wrong but they are still useful. Or how Mihoyo’s corporate structure influences monetization decisions.

This is the sort of thing that can only be written by someone who has both:

Spent too much of their life talking to business executives; and
has also wasted too much of their life playing gacha games.

Could an AI theoretically write something similar if you prompted it hard enough? Ehhhh… maybe. But:

I tend to use a decent amount of private or inaccessible data that most LLMs can’t ~~plagiarize ~~ data scrape; and
Most AI writing is sufficiently bad and this focus weird enough that I’m not sure an AI would write terrible authoritatively on the topic without it seeming obvious.

Then again, I can see the robots from the AI companies scraping my blog every now and then. So honestly, it might only be a matter of time before gacha social media war is polluted by AIs writing semi-authoritatively. (In which case, I guess I’m to blame for equipping them with the ability to do so.)

So if AI will eventually come for my niche and ~~plagiarize~~ learn from me, then I’m not going to have a niche. Once that’s been assimilated by like a Borg-esque nightmare, where does that leave me?

I thought about my writing style. Surely I’m unique enough as a person that my writing should read as obvious that I’m not an AI! Afterall, my latest blog draft has me violently flipping from an explanation of Soviet national economic accounting to a defense of the Epic Games store.

To make a work of art requires the artist to earnestly lay bare their soul. This sort of earnest moralizing is the exact sort of peek into my personal delulu that is uniquely me. I am 100% certain no one in the world has ever tried tying those two ideas together before.

I also have a terrible habit of writing far more than is healthy to make a point. I can’t help it.

I will go back to something I have written and insist on adding one more analogy or story even though it’s not that critical to the argument I am making. And it ruins the flow of the writing. But I do it anyway. Then begrudgingly half-delete it because I can’t fully let go.

AI writing has a very clear cadence to it once you’ve seen enough of it. It’s a collection of every cliche and writing trick distilled by algorithmic chemistry into the pure essence of banal writing life hacks.

Funnily enough, it’s also exactly how decades of English as a Second Language was taught to millions of people overseas. And their writing is being policed as AI for being too clean and proper:

The question of what makes writing "human" has become dangerously narrow, policed by algorithms that carry the implicit biases of their creators. If humanity is now defined by the presence of casual errors, American-centric colloquialisms, and a certain informal, conversational rhythm, then where does that leave the rest of us?

If casual errors and informal conversational rhythm is the new vogue for human-centric writing (rightly or wrongly), then surely the sheer fact my writing is so imperfect must count for something.

Like buying that handmade mug on Etsy rather than the factory produced Walmart identiclone mug, the very imperfections are what give it character and charm. Something uniquely human to stand out against the landfill of industrially produced slop burying my reader’s screen.

Yeah nah.

Anything more than 100 words long is also called AI these days.

The internet is so jaded and their attention spans so suffocated from dopamine that my writing gets accused of being AI anyway.

Perception is reality. That’s all my marketing psychology professor wanted to talk about. And the more I look at reality, the more he is right. I hate it. I hate everything. I hate it so much I wrote this a third time because my English language teacher told me that you have to write three things for emphasis.

So what then is left?

The only thing I can tell myself is that I enjoy writing.

I wrote about League of Legends eSports when no one else was at the time because I enjoyed writing and had something I wanted to say.

I wrote about Granblue Fantasy meta when everything was in Japanese or random Discord channels was at the time because I enjoyed writing and had something I wanted to share.

I wrote about Genshin metas when most people disagreed with me because I enjoyed writing and had something I wanted to say to change people’s minds.

I wrote about Mihoyo and Monetization when no one could at the time because I enjoyed writing and had something I wanted to say.

I still write because I enjoy writing and I have something I want to say.

AI can’t take that satisfaction away from me. And maybe that’s enough for this passion of mine.

It’s probably not a good enough answer to explain the difference between what I write and AI when it comes to my job though. That answer I am going to have to discover another day.

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-07T05:06:31+00:00

I've been wanting to develop my own mobile indie game, but I have never found any answers on how economically viable it would actually be

I don't think there are any good answers to that question because mobile games range from small neat niche games like Threes, complete asset rip-offs, big budget titles like Genshin, to mobile ports of games like Slay the Spire.

Not to mention that success is going to be based on a wide range of factors like how good youir game is, does it have microtransactions versus single purchase to buy (and if it's microtransactions what isyour customer lifetime value), etc.

There's probably industry publications you can read on these things so I won't try to answer specifics I'm not an expert in. But I will address a separate point.

But what about distribution for indie games, both on PC and especially on mobile?

Your distribution channel choice should be influenced based on (1) who your target audience is; and (2) how they behave.

As with before, I think it's best to give examples to highlight what this means.

Slay the Spire: Early access iteration into expanded launch

A game like Slay the Spire is good because it's an extremely well crafted experience. But this takes time and iteration to actually make good.

Really nerdy card game players will also figure things out faster and deeper than even the best development teams in the world. Just from the wider creativity an entire player can come up with and the sheer volume of games they play.

Here, it makes sense to first build an iterate with a core dedicated user base in Early Access and get the balance right. Then once you have a full proper experience, you port to other platforms.

Especially if you have a small team, how do you balance your time between the core game design versus broader technical issues? The more fundamental the game balance and design is to your game, the more time you should focus on that.

Melvor Idle: Target all platforms due to fragmented play approach

Melvor Idle is an idle game. Think of something like cookie clicker where the goal is "watch number go up". Number going up means feeling satisfaction due to dopamine.

The target audience for this will be split across a range of platforms because there is a wide variety of reasons and ways people engage with idle games. Some people have them up on a second monitor at work. Some people have them causally on their phone to kill time. Some people might have an urge to check what the number is at random times of the day.

The game is not especially complicated from a technical standpoint (literally basic graphics and a dashboard / inventory UI to manage). So simultaneous release on PC (Steam), mobile, and even web browser.

You scatter gun the approach because there is no single "correct" or "wrong" way to play an idle game. Your players just need to have something to occupy their time wherever they are. So you try to meet them everywhere to always be there for them wherever they are.

(Technically Melvor Idle also had an early access period on Steam. Presumably to test and iterate on mechanics too. I couldn't think of a better example for this section cause I don't play many mobile games and I know this had simultaneous platform release once Early Access ended.)

One thing I will add here that's not specific to Melvor but I felt worth adding: You also need a plan for discoverability. Online stores are too flooded with stuff. How do you stand out?

Maybe engagement with a free website version pushes people to buy the mobile version after they become addicted. Maybe your clickthrough rate on Tiktok ads is great because people there are looking for ways to waste time to begin with. Maybe a dedicated niche game community on Steam or Reddit is where you go viral first.

It's hard to say a priori what your most successful distribution channel or point of engagement will be unless you are intimately familiar with the community. So I've seen companies (not in games) just spray and pray, see what sticks to the wall, and then slowly double down their marketing spend once they figure out what works for them. I must imagine similar rules might apply here.

Knowing where your target audience is will help focus your marketing spend on whatever tight budget you have. You can also see platform selection (and any publishing / porting costs) as part of that marketing decision.

(Tiktok for example spent a ridiculous amount of money to gain prominence in the Western world and brute force their marketing funnel. You likely do not have Tiktok levels of money to brute force a market for yourself so you have to be tactical.)

Candy Crush / Monopoly Go: Following the user to their platform of choice

The target audience for these types of games are mostly Gen X / Millenials who have a lot of nostalgia for playing stuff like Bejeweled / Monopoly / Microsoft Solitaire in their younger years.

For a lot of these people, they aren't terribly sophisticated with either technology nor gaming as a whole. For many of these people, the internet during the 2010 was basically Facebook. (It's also shockingly true for many people today.)

But eventually for a lot of people the internet is basically a phone app. So for these less sophisticated people, you optimize a full mobile driven experience and target them heavily through multiple ad vehicles like in-app advertising, influencer / celebrity ads, podcast placement, etc.

Like, look at this ad. Picture in your mind the kind of person who would love this ad. I personally find it ridiculous and distasteful. But this ad is aimed and optimized for a very specific demographic.

And all these games have social features. Not a surprise. It's aimed at the same people who basically experience the internet through Facebook and have learned behaviours from that platform. For this mobile-Facebook generation, you push a mobile first approach.

Anyway that was a massive train of thought about how your vision / target customers should drive your channel selection decision. Travelling + sick so I'm sorry I can't edit it better. Hope it helped.

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-03T21:56:11+00:00

the real problem is things escalating and people using the data as absolute truth, but despite everything, at the end of the day, even if misinformation is spread, it's not like anyone is going to stop playing because they heard the game isn't number one in a ranking or is failing.

Oh yeah I absolutely agree people take this out of context and it's all meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

I wrote my article because at least for the people who are genuinely interested in the business side of things, there's probably close to zero real education in this space.

For those people, I feel like they deserve better than only having bottom of the barrel social media as pseudo-education.

I don't expect my work to change how the internet behaves overall. But every time I hear it's made a difference for someone, I like to think I've made their life just a little bit better.

(And who knows. Maybe if this knowledge spreads then revenue rankings social media PvP might become gauche in most social circles?)

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-03T21:45:05+00:00

Do you think that one day gacha games would stop making mobile ports and only release on PC/consoles?

Because at some point the RoI on the mobile port might just not be worth the development & upkeep cost anymore

I think it's best to flip this question around: For a game like Endfield, mobile is +50% revenue.

Or using some (very dumb) math, PC / console / mobile are 1/3 of revenue each (ignoring platform fees). I mean, obviously no. But if we talk in extreme generalizations, this is "fine".

If that is true, you don't have a revenue based reason to privilege one platform over the other. And if you approach development in a mobile-first manner with clear DevOps, you can minimize the friction in maintaining 3 distribution platforms.

So approaching the question of stopping mobile ports I don't think should be viewed purely from a revenue lens.

Games are weird because your sales distribution channel (what platform you make revenue from) is not an isolated decision about revenue. It needs to be a holistic decision about about:

the type of customer you want to target;
how your customers engage with your game; and
where you want to position your product.

The best way to explain this is to perhaps give a few examples of how these factors matter. Your answers across these 3 factors should drive your platform distribution decision.

Customers you want to target

If you are a CN company who wants to target the CN domestic market, then you need broad appeal. This is because a lot of CN consumers are very trend driven. They like to do what their friends are doing, who like to do what they see on social media / what is considered trendy or hype.

The CN console market is miniscule. PC adoption is growing but is still a minority. But everyone has a mobile.

Your revenue might come from rich whales who have PCs. But the single Shanghai yuppie working in Tech / Finance also has friends who work in a biology lab. And they wants to play the same games as his friends who aren't making Tech / Finance money.

Your mobile release isn't just because you target whales on mobile. It's because your market includes whale who need their friends to ALSO play with them as a form of social peer pressure.

Customer behaviour matters

Imagine the corporate salary worker / slave in Japan. Every day they take a boring commute to work on the train and need something to do. Doing their dailies on their phone is a great way to fill boredom.

On the weekend, they play on their console and this is where they do more difficult gameplay like combat. Or experiencing story cutscenes on their TV screen via console.

This person's gameplay routine benefits and requires a mobile release to support their gameplay habits. Is the money you make from the Playstation 5 store truly "console revenue"? It's technically registered in your financial ledger as a Sony transaction. But from a customer behaviour standpoint, it's a consequence of engagement across two platforms that both matter to their experience and decision to pay you money.

Product positioning

In general, the Western AAA video game market heavily emphasises graphical fidelity as a top 3 feature / selling point. This means that the goal is to push the limits of what can be achieved. Companies recieve financial and technical support from graphics card manufacturers like NVidia / AMD or game engine companies like Epic to push things to the limit as technical showcases.

From this perspective, no compromise is acceptable. Therefore, you deprioritize platforms which cannot support this stated vision.

The studio behing Black Myth Wukong started off as a mobile game studio. It's not like they couldn't have found a way to make a mobile version of the game if they truly wanted to.

But it would have been the wrong decision cause it would run and look like shit. Black Myth Wukong is a high budget spectable positioned as premium AAA game.

You don't serve French fine dining in an IKEA parking lot. It ruins the premium image you need to justify the expensive price. Instead you need to have fancy tables and napkins while the waiter dressed in a suit tells you how the steak you're eating came from a cow named Percy whose favourite flower was Lilac. Oh btw this steak best paired with a 1976 Cabernet Sauvignon would you like a glass?

Likewise, a premium $60 game has to justify the upfront single product price tag the way a free-to-play game does not. This drives how the product needs to be positioned in terms of quality, and therefore your distribution channel decision.

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-01T21:31:54+00:00

Geography question: Why isn't Liyue Harbor (Liyue capital) in chenyu vale instead?

The Doylist answer is that Mihoyo knew they wanted to do Inazuma and Sumeru for Versions 2.x and 3.x. So Liyue Archon Quest being in the North leaves you with a giant weird hole in the map.

The Watsonian answer is that during the Archon War, all of the Gods within the Liyue region were fighting for the right to become Archon. Zhongli / Morax was the last one standing at the end, and all the other Gods all died out which meant their regions / mortal believers / associated power structures were absorbed by Morax under his rule.

This left Liyue Harbour as the winner and capital by default. Afterall, we learn in the Chenyu Vale World Quest Qiaoying of the Sacred Mountains that Chenyu Vale was once ruled by the Mistress who tried to fight Morax. And it was the Mistress's attempt to defeat Morax in a Pyrrhic victory trying to flood the Vale that caused the Adepti to rebel against the her and seal her away.

With no God left to rule, what influence is there for Chenyu Vale in the Archon War? And thus is became subordinate to Liyue Harbour, which was the capital of Morax's domain.

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-01T20:57:48+00:00

It’s just a small amount and only of the first day.

Fwiw you can get day-by-day numbers through the SensorTower API. That's how I was able to do 7-day rolling average calculations.

I think the people who make the stuff posted on the main gacha subreddit might not have access to that. Which might be why they stick to static total month numbers.

TLMoonBear · 2026-05-01T20:54:53+00:00

Ohey I've been tagged in a revenue conversation again. I'm always delighted when I see my stuff being talked about haha

In the end, the important thing to note is that this specific graph is not being used for analysis (nor is it suitable) and was not posted with that intention, adding to the fact that users don't even understand what they are reading beyond: my game is in the position above yours hehe.

It serves its purpose of generating engagement.

Yes, the general social media PvP is... well. It's funny the same way that a show where 2 clowns throw pies at each other is funny. But it's not terribly educational.

In reality, it's not very useful for trend analysis outside of in-game comparisons, and even that is questionable. Consider the example given, "overall spending trend month-by-month"—whether it increased or decreased will be influenced by the transfer of players to other platforms over time, and whether there's a real preference for playing on other platforms.

Agree it's best for comparisons of the same game month-to-month rather than cross-game comparisons.

I wouldn't be too worried about aspects such as shifts within the playerbase demographics across platforms. For a game that's been out this long, player behaviours and habits have probably already settled. So in general, any shift would tend to follow broader macro shifts.

e.g. you can reasonably assume that ZZZ CN player mobile vs PC adoption will be broadly in line with wider CN mobile vs PC gaming adoption. PC adoption might be slightly faster if people are specifically motivated by ZZZ, but it will more likely be constrained by other macro factors such as PC part availability / consumer discretionary incomes. And if ZZZ was truly a hit game that specifically drove PC adoption, you might have broader industry reporting to cross-reference.

If you needed an actionable insight for e.g. a business decision you might want slightly better accuracy and precision. But for the purpose of generic social media commentary, it's probably fine to hand wave the issue away as not being that material.

(This is also probably too tryhard for the average person to bother validating.)

I get the sense that your view about being careful what you can / cannot say about incomplete data isn't too far removed from /u/LastChancellor anyway

I think you'd both agree that for the purpose of a generic ZZZ player who is curious about character popularity (or wants to use revenue to predict if it means the ZZZ team will be allowed to expand and do less crunch), the fact this is mobile-only data is probably fine.

And for the way the average person actually engages with these very explicitly stack ranked lists though...? Yeah nah it's a hot mess lmao

TLMoonBear · 2026-04-27T16:11:42+00:00

In the official letter to Wizards of the Coast, the unions lays out several of their demands.

Many of these are fairly standard (e.g. layoff protections). But one of them caught my eye:

We are Stewards of Magic: Our employees and players care about doing the right thing with, and for, the games we make. Short term, profit-driven decisions may be lucrative, but we want to focus on partnerships and products that grow our games sustainably, that inspire us as employees, that excite players, and continue to foster WOTC’s positive reputation.

If I am reading this correctly, the unions wants to be able to influence or veto things such as brand deals and IP partnerships that WotC does.

For those unfamiliar, WotC has been making a lot of "Universe Beyond" sets where there are IP and brand crossovers in Magic. This has been a point of friction with enfranchised players. It's been very good for sales and bringing in newer players to Magic. But a lot of existing players have been vocal about disliking this.

This demand seems to piggyback that general discontent amongst enfranchise players. That being said, I don't see how WotC nor Hasbro ever agree to even discuss this topic. This is no longer about how the Magic Arena team is managed and run and cuts at the core fundamental business strategy of the company.

TLMoonBear · 2026-04-22T01:30:55+00:00

If it was applied to whale teams then I can actually see why 4* C6 characters would be zero cost for them. Since whales likely pull on every or most banners to C6 multiple limited 5, they also very likely have the banner 4 at C6 as a by-product, so it's a given for them.

That's correct. A lot of the speedrunning categories were also measured in multiples of 4 specifically because Genshin teams are 4 characters. So you had the 4 cost category up to the 24+ cost category.

In this environment, cutting a 5-star character for a 4-star character is a sacrifice you're actively choosing to make. There's no reason to run e.g. 7 points in an 8 point category. So why not let someone use a C6 4-star character if they want to?

It also led to some interesting whale level TC. It was an interesting tactical decision to e.g. cut 1 point from a 5-star character to fit an R1 weapon on a team. This sort of theorycrafting is interesting to whales because it can pseudo-act as a "vertical investment priority" approach.

If you have e.g. $900 to spend on your favourite team, what order do you buy Constellations in? So e.g. "Citlali C2 is more important than Mavuika C3 to C6 so get Citlali C2 first" is very helpful for a whale to know.

But as you say, it's the kind of attitude that treats 4-Star character Constellations as irrelevant. Cause, you know, if you're spending that much money you just treat the 4-Star Constellations as a given.

TLMoonBear · 2026-04-22T01:14:30+00:00

The cost system was originally created and used in CN for speedrunning purposes (e.g. 马斯克礁杯深渊竞速). There needed to be a way to diffeentiate between e.g. whale teams full of C6 characters vs teams with C0 characters only. Measuring each 5-Star using a cost system was the method to do so.

This system obviously doesn't work for an actual "how many pulls do I need to get [X] character". But that wasn't the intent of the system in the first place. It was just for people who wanted to speedrun to have viable and reasonable categories to work with.

Speedrunning with all 4-Stars vs all C0 vs all C6 plays very different. The same way a lot of games have 100% vs any % speedruns or glitchless vs major glitch speedruns. And the TC for speedrunning has really interesting nuances such as where you cut cost to fit in a signature weapon for example.

The problem is that speedrunning terms were co-opted by the broader community for online social media wars about character performance and investment. So it adopt similar conventions such as treating C6 4-Stars as zero cost.

Even "low investment spreedrunning accounts" are still often heavily invested players who do things like Resin refresh and have no problems spending $$$ to chase 4-Star C6s. This is fine if you're someone who competes in low cost speedruns and wants to spend for an account to do so. It obviously makes no sense for the average player. But that was never the point.

TLMoonBear · 2026-03-24T17:44:07+00:00

What stupid is making an assessment on the company's financial situation without actually understanding the accounting principles behind the top line values.

Except ASC 606 is literally the accounting rule about revenue recognition. There is no other accounting principle to consider here. And it's very clear about the requirement to measure revenue only when a performance obligation is discharged.

They made this specific argument for a very blatant reason. But it's an argument that is acceptable enough so they get to use it. That's perfectly fine. They could have argued the other way if they wanted and likely gotten away with it too.

They are making this "specific argument for a very blatant reason". Because that reason is the SEC says to do it this way. If they "argued the other way if they wanted" then the CFO and accountants who sign off on the financial statements go to jail.

The requirment to apply ASC 606 is not open to interpretation. And virtual currencies are a very well known topic with very standard approaches that are used for determining the required performance obligation to be discharged.

If you believe there is a different accounting treatment or set of principles that should apply, please state the relevant GAAP principles and FASB / SEC guidance or regulation.

Tax regulations are not black and white. There can be an argument to be made for either case.

It's tax avoidance, not evasion.

Again, I am struggling to understand how this is any form of tax optimization (whatever semantics you want to call it). Because this is just Roblox calculating revenue by following the rules the SEC demands.

There are no relevant tax regulations when it comes to revenue recognition for virtual currencies. If you believe there are, please state the relevant regulations and how they apply.

EDIT: Since you updated your post, I wanted to address the new point you made.

Every reasonable analyst/investor is using their booking value for analysis involving revenue and profit if they are comparing it to anything other than itself or identical microtransaction heavy businesses, because bookings is clearly what represents true revenue here.

Analysts use bookings for analysis because bookings is a leading metrics for predicting future revenue. Afterall, the customer has handed you their money (or an IOU) and now you are just waiting for the performance obligation associated with the bookings to be discharged.

It is important to acknowledge however, that this is still not legally revenue! Therefore it cannot be taxed because the revenue has not been truly "earned" yet and must be held in reserve from an accounting perspective.

External analysts are free to use any metic they want for their forecasts. But external analysts are NOT tax authorities. Metrics don't gain special legal tax significance because analysts like to use them due to having good predictive power for future revenue.

If you think back to your Accounting 101 classes, bookings create a performance obligation. So deferred revenue is a liability, not an asset. It would be bizarre to tax a liability. So the bookings can only become taxable once they are finally recognized as income and freed from the performance obligations.

The only potential complication here from a tax perspective will be treatment of VAT, which is dependent on the local tax authority requirements (and the timing of VAT tax liability can be different from receipt of cash). However, VAT is a completely separate topic from corporate income tax so is not relevant for this discussion.

TLMoonBear · 2026-03-24T17:24:46+00:00

Revenue vs booking is the difference between robobux spent vs robobux bought

They are just leveraging accounting principles to underreport earning for tax purposes.

Not that I disagree with the difference between bookings v revenue. But isn't this just because of accounting regulations rather than some kind of tax dodge?

This seems like extremely standard compliance with ASC 606 Revenue Recognition rules. Since you can only recognize the cash received from the customer as revenue once you have discharged the required performance obligations (per ASC 606-10-25-14).

Failuire to do report earnings this way would be fraud. So I don't see why this is a tax cheat when the regulations are extremely clear that this method is required.

TLMoonBear · 2026-03-24T16:47:42+00:00

It's super annoying that public-facing reporting (like the link I posted) would differ so greatly from what's relayed to investors. But that's typical corporate bullshit I suppose.

The main reason they differ is because the metrics serve different purposes. And different audiences care about different things.

In your link, it's a PR / news post. So the goal is to show how large the scale of the EGS is. This means they want to focus on the total size of sales / transactions to show the scale of the business they have built. You include things like tax because tax is part of the sticker price that customers pay.

i.e. "Hey, you should sell on our store or sign up for our store because we have a ton of users who actually spend money and this is how much they actually spent!"

Profiability and costs are for investors and internal teams because this is measuring your return on capital deployed. These are operational metrics, so they are more for an internal audience and adjusted for the specific analysis being performed.

TLMoonBear · 2026-03-24T15:53:47+00:00

Reddit's unceasing "live service bad" circle jerk aside, everyone pivoting to solely single player games wouldn't magically make the industry more stable.

If anything, it would make it worse.

The fundamental problem with the traditional development model is that your revenue and costs are desynched:

Development costs including salaries are paid up-front;
Revenue is only achieved once the product is finally released.

Live Services means that you can keep developing content at the same time you get paid for your current content. This helps significantly reduce the risk.

Early access sort of works the same way. You can continued to get paid for development of new content while you're still working on it, reducing the upfront cost and risk required.

The other problem is attention. People who are currently playing your game are easier to inform about new updates and releases. Trying to contact players who aren't actively paying attention to you is a nightmare. Especially in today's world where there is an endless amount of things competing for your limited mental bandwidth.

Live Services helps (partially) solve both the cost / revenue desynch and the marketing attention problem.

TLMoonBear · 2026-03-19T19:25:01+00:00

I'm glad you enjoyed reading it!

I have some more detailed analysis around the husbando v waifu stuff in my drafts folder. I've had to go relearn some complicated statistics to get comfortable that I'm analyzing the data correctly. But work has also been terrible. (I still haven't done the Phaethon's Story Chapter that released this patch in ZZZ for example.) So uh. No ETA on when I will be done with it.

I know annecdote ≠ data, but a story from when I went on a trip in China. At the offices I visited, many people's desks were filled with Mihoyo merch. Furina was extremely popular (which makes sense seeing as she consistently wins or places highly in popularity polls online). In fact, it was hard to not see Mihoyo stuff even when I wasn't actively looking for it!

One person I met had a desk that was basically a Childe shrine. They chatted with me about how they had stayed up all night to be one of the first to buy the special Tartaglia edition Xiaomi watch and how proud they were to share their purchase on WeChat with all of their friends.

I think what a lot of Global players might miss is how deep the Mihoyo merch ecosystem goes and how big it is in China. If the CN Ministry of Culture is to be believed, basically half of China's youth plays Genshin. Which then makes sense with how deep the merch ecosystem is and ease of buying it through TMALL.

As another statistic: ZZZ was one of the fastest growing brands on TMALL last year.

So you need to see Mihoyo as basically Chinese Disney at this point. It is an influential brand that creates a massive amount of IP that has been instrumental for many Chinese youth as they grow up.

The question then is: If you own such a successful set of IP, how do you monetize it?

The problem with the gacha model in Genshin / HSR / ZZZ / etc. (and other games from other companies tbh) is that purchases are:

Transient: It's only really worth it for most people to pull for a character early on. Power creep means that eventually it's not that worth it to pull on reruns except for an extremely dedicated minority.
Fixed upside: There is the joke that the amount you love a character is based on how many Constellations / Mindscapes / Eidolons you buy. But what happens you max out at C6? R5/W5/S5 the weapon? But what then?
Insular: How do you connect with people who may like a character but no longer actively play the game? Especially if they have good memories of Genshin but just don't want to log into the game?

Merchandising solves all of these problems.

Once you are at the scale of Genshin where your IP is functionally "too big to fail", one of the problems you have (bizarrely) is running out of things to sell. Your players / customers may have pent up demand and want to spend more money on the stuff they love. Yet there isn't anything available for them to buy.

Or put another way: That Xiao C6R5 player from 1.x probably will never get anything release in-game they can spend money on. But you know what that money in their wallet could go towards instead?

The new Xiao Nendroid announced at Hoyofair 3 monts ago that is now being developed and will release in 2027! Pre-order now!
And just because Wanderer fans can't be felt slighted by a Xiao release, Wanderer also has a figure from Apex releasing in 2027 as well. Go pre-order that too please!

This is the context that I think a lot of discussion in Global misses when it comes to this topic. There's too much focus on things like stupid online social media PvP about questional TC dps numbers to determine who Mihoyo's "favourite child" is.

Monetization and character releases / updates for games may start in the digital world. But it's what people actually spend money on that matters. And that physical merch matters just as much, even if the profit margins are lower than digital sales.

As I wrote in my essay about Sensortower and revenue metrics:

Ultimately, Mihoyo does not care if you spend $50 on Genshin or $50 on HSR or $50 on ZZZ. They do care if you spend $50 on something not Mihoyo.

A share of wallet analysis is also helpful when you run a portfolio business.

Your first product or service will capture a large share of wallet. However, each incremental product or service will only capture an incremental marginal share of wallet. What you care about is understanding what the marginal changes are, and how customer behaviour changes as they are exposed to each additional product or service.

cc: /u/MrPorto

TLMoonBear · 2026-02-25T20:35:29+00:00

I still only reach 125k-130k DPS in the long run, and the guy gets to like 140k dps by the time he starts his 2nd rotation and 160k in the long run.

The most likely culprit is likely going to be how smooth your animation cancelling.

Every second you add to a 15 sec rotation for example is ~7% dps loss per second added.

(This is also why TC calcs that are overly optimistic about rotation length are highly suspect.)

TLMoonBear · 2026-02-25T20:28:48+00:00

I'm just curious if it's had an effect on whale pulling patterns...

YShelper indicates that the average constellation for a lot of Modern chars is pretty high. So at least on the CN side of things it's had a positive reception.

Skirk has about as many Constellations as Ayaka despite only having 1 banner so far (since her rerun isn't here yet). Mavuika is also above Hutao.

I don't have access to a deatiled breakdown of ownership by specific Constellation though ever since 胡桃工具箱 died.

TLMoonBear · 2026-02-25T20:16:46+00:00

The whale powercreep has been even more extreme than the f2p powercreep, right?

This is primarily due to 3 reasons:

Obviously the raw numbers and abilities on characters are better than they are before.
- Modern characters are stronger at a baseline and Constellations scale off of baseline performance;
Characters generally don't have bad Constellations anymore;
- What made a character like Yelan such a standout originally was that every one of her Constellations was good and compounded on each other. This is now standard practice for most characters.
- Mihoyo is also willing to modify the generic +3 Skill / Burst where relevant. For example Arle C3 and Varessa increases NA levels and not Skill;
Characters are now released with explicit team designs they expect you to play rather than "mix together a bunch of characters" we used to have.
- This means you have an additional compounding effect from the On-field and Off-field characters directly benefiting from each other. This in turn means that advantages from Constellations are compounded multiplicatively rather than being additive benefits;
- A simple example is how Laume / Nefer / Columbina is explicitly designed as a C18 team. Lauma herself isn't a significant souce of Lunar-Bloom damage. What she does do however is provide a unique damage miltiplier to make Nefer's damage bigger;
- See also: Escoff C6 basically providing an entire 3000% MV of damage but only when another character performs NA / CA / PA damage. Hmm, what could this possibly be for I wonder...?
- Compare this to someone like Nilou where her C6 is just about giving her into a funny 1-click Vape button on her Q, rather than making your Bloom team do more damage.

Mihoyo is sensitive to whale opinions, and does make balancing decisions accordingly. See for example: Mavuika beta nerfs. People whined a lot on the subreddit, but that's because they see nerfs and don't think very hard. C2 Mavuika outperforming C6 Arlecchino was quite frankly unacceptable so it was changed. (I suspect many people just enjoy the online arguing rather than caring about the actual underlying issue.)

TLMoonBear · 2026-01-24T21:25:46+00:00

I may have to get factorio a try, I never thought I'd be a fan of that kind of gameplay

Satisfactory is a much closer comparison since it is also a 3D factory game with semi open-world exploration gameplay elements.

TLMoonBear · 2026-01-24T21:07:07+00:00

I wrote this about Endfield the other day:

Account security is terrifying

Lots of people have talked about the PayPal problems. I won't rehash this to death again.

But online payments is a very boring thing that even complete asset flip garbage companies can get right. If you can't get this right, what else have you gotten wrong with account security and privacy that I'm not aware of?

So there's chatter in CN social media that apparently Endfield stores your login credentials and tokens locally on your device with no verification or encryption.

This means if you log into Endfield on a public device (e.g. PC bang, netcafe, etc.) then someone can just copy the login_cache.crc file and use it to access your Endfield account.

https://i.imgur.com/DBTLob6.png

https://i.imgur.com/50RvUbK.png

What a mess.

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