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I've spent the last 15 years at the intersection of games, technology, and growth…
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Hiring a UA Manager - Rocking Horse?
Hiring a UA Manager - Rocking Horse?
EDIT: We are Hiring @ N3twork We have a phrase in the UK that perfectly sums up 'World Class' User Acquisition managers…
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The Rise of Video - Explained..
The Rise of Video - Explained..
Original post was on http://www.kijo.
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Daniel B. posted thisEvery November I fly to Helsinki to buy the world’s most expensive hoodie. The startup conference comes free with it. A decade running, and I’m not breaking the streak now. (Also, I post on LinkedIn roughly once a year, so naturally it’s about Slush.) The plan, roughly: → Löyly for 32F. Sauna, Baltic Sea, questionable decisions about the Baltic Sea → A quick cocktail at Liberty or Death (it’s never quick) → Wrap with a Finnish rap song at Karaokebar Erottaja. I don’t speak Finnish. That has never stopped me. Would love to catch up with as many of you as possible. If you’re going, drop a comment or DM me. And genuine question: who’s organising 32F this year? Asking for a friend. The friend is me. See you at Slush 🇫🇮
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Daniel B. shared thisIf your board meeting turns into an argument, it’s usually not a data problem. It’s a scoreboard or communication problem. A board-ready scoreboard has key rules to enforce a single shared reality: one definition, one owner, one source of truth — plus red, yellow, and green thresholds that actually force action. And by using leading vs lagging indicators, you can make timely decisions while keeping an eye on the bigger picture. If you’re a venture-backed team under board pressure, this is the simplest way to get back to making decisions during meetings, instead of having discussions. DM me with “GIVE ME THE SCOREBOARD” and I’ll send you my template!Daniel B. shared thisWe’ve learned the hard way that growth arguments aren’t strictly about charts. They’re about risk, time, and trust. So we use a simple fix to get everyone on the same page: a one-page, 12-metric, board-ready scoreboard designed for decisions, not debate. Before your next board meeting, grab our template, assign owners to each metric, set thresholds, and send the scoreboard as part of the pre-read. Just hit the link in the comments to get everything you need!
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Daniel B. shared thisJust read a pretty innocent seeming Reddit thread about a painting someone found in their new house. If you read on though, the Reddit community discovered they could manipulate Google’s AI search results in real time by coordinating fabricated details in the thread, then watching those fabrications appear in Google’s AI-generated summaries within minutes. https://lnkd.in/etTwzNgG This isn’t a bug. This is the system working exactly as designed. Google paid Reddit $60 million for API access to train their AI models. Reddit content now appears in 97.5% of product review queries. The platform surfaces in 12.6% of all SearchGPT responses, making it the most cited domain across major AI search tools. That partnership bought a direct pipeline from anonymous internet comments to authoritative-seeming AI answers, with no meaningful verification layer in between. The Reddit community just proved they understand the exploit better than the companies deploying it. Post coordinated misinformation → wait for AI to crawl and index → watch your fabrication appear as “truth” → repeat. The feedback loop operates faster than any human fact-checking process could intercept. The entire AI search paradigm rests on a fiction: that aggregating large volumes of text produces reliable information. What we’re actually building is a system where coordinated voices can manufacture consensus, and that manufactured consensus gets elevated to reference material. Reddit’s own data exposes the fragility: 80% of cited posts have fewer than 20 upvotes, 70% have fewer than 20 comments. These aren’t vetted discussions, they’re random internet comments being treated as authoritative sources because they matched a search query. We’ve already seen the downstream effects: entire subreddits infiltrated by affiliate spammers, moderator accounts bought and sold, AI-generated product reviews with zero engagement ranking at the top of results, and studies showing 45% of AI-generated news contains factual errors. The whatisit thread just made the exploit explicit. But the vulnerability was always there, baked into systems optimized for speed and volume rather than accuracy and verification. If you’re a parent, this should be the year you start asking: where are the critical thinking classes for my kids? Because we’ve built an information infrastructure that structurally rewards fabrication over verification, and the companies operating these systems have no economic incentive to fix it when the broken version generates billions in revenue. AI results replacing Google search while being fueled by Reddit is a timeline nobody saw coming. It’s also an extension of the “Everything is an ad network” timeline where truth becomes whatever someone rich or coordinated enough wants it to be.From the whatisit community on Reddit: Does anyone know this artist - found in house I just moved intoFrom the whatisit community on Reddit: Does anyone know this artist - found in house I just moved into
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Daniel B. shared thisVCs are moving from equity investments in games to UA financing. Faster DPI, no more zombie companies. The problem? Portfolio ops teams are already stretched supporting equity deals. Now they need to validate LTV curves, attribution, and ROAS across dozens of campaigns? They're pivoting from a model they couldn't operationally support to one requiring even more sophistication they don't have. Meanwhile: who funds the 18-36 month creative development phase if VCs exit, publishers consolidate, and government funding goes elsewhere? Wrote about why this might be the death of VC for creative industries: https://lnkd.in/g4UAxG4vThe DPI Mirage: Why VCs Are Abandoning Games at the Worst Possible TimeThe DPI Mirage: Why VCs Are Abandoning Games at the Worst Possible Time
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Daniel B. posted thisI’ll be at #Slush next week, looking forward to catching up with everyone! Antti Paikkala I owe you for operation “return of the watch” last year ;)
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Daniel B. reposted thisDaniel B. reposted thisSo I need the help of the UK Games Companies....We have proposed to the UK Government a Games Growth Relief, to increase the tax credits, and therefore reduce the costs of smaller games, allowing UK Games companies to start more projects, develop more IP and hire more people, ultimately to create globally competitive businesses and drive our industry for generations to come. But what we have also been told is that other industries are much better at working together and showing Government what we want. So here is the ask - we are looking for UK Games companies to sign an open letter to the Secretary of State at DCMS, to show a range of support, that we can work together and how much this will benefit us. https://lnkd.in/eUtSgCYJ To make the call to arms more clear, can you email Nick at UKIE to say you wish to sign this open letter. Dont need to be a Ukie/ TIGA member. And please forward to 3 people that you think might benefit from this 😇 Also please retweet, comment, share and push this post so we can show that we can work as an industry and that this is important to us. With thanks to Nick Poole OBE and Dr Richard Wilson OBE for the work in putting this together, Ukie, TIGA, and the support of #ukvideogamescouncil, Funding Quest UK, The Games Angels, Saad C., Donna Orlowski, Emily Bailey, Bhavina Jennings, Tara Saunders, Dominic Murphy, Andrew Crawshaw, Charu Desodt, Tara M., Jamie Sefton 🔜 GR New Horizons, Cinzia Musio, Sally Blake, Chris van der Kuyl CBE, Timothy Richard Varney, David Gould, Kirsty Rigden, María Sayans, Nina Adams, and so many more.... #ukgamesindustry, #ukgamesPress start on growth - open letter to the Secretary of State for DCMS - UkiePress start on growth - open letter to the Secretary of State for DCMS - Ukie
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Daniel B. posted thisARR without RURR is a mirage. At Zynga we measured product health with three simple metrics: • CURR = Current User Return Rate (do existing users come back?) • NURR = New User Return Rate (do new users come back after their first try?) • RURR = Returning User Return Rate (do lapsed users ever come back?) This worked for DAU-based games because if players didn’t return there were no microtransactions and no business. ARR didn’t matter without RURR. Now when I look at AI, it feels like a large % of those companies ARR looks good on paper but much of it comes from zombie subscriptions that nobody is using. And once people stop they never return. So the real question isn’t “what’s the ARR?” It’s “what’s the RURR?”
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Daniel B. shared thisWe’ve been grinding away on The Consulting Detectives for a while now. Two episodes are live, over a thousand play sessions, really strong invite rates, and average sessions running 12+ minutes. The truth is TCD only shows a slice of what StoryEngine can do. We built an emergent multiplayer narrative engine and then put it on top of a very structured, deterministic game design. This week we asked ourselves: if we had a clean slate, what would be the best way to really show StoryEngine off? We don’t have the funding to build beyond TCD right now. Focus is golden. But we gave ourselves a couple of days to experiment. What came out of that was a romance-based game show where you interact with real humans and AI NPCs. And the wild part is not just that we came up with the idea. We actually built it. In 24 hours. It even reuses the café format and characters from one of our mysteries, repurposed into something completely new. We’re calling it Flirt Royale. Honestly it’s ridiculously fun, memeable content abounds, and it’s just a glimpse of what’s possible with StoryEngine. That’s the power of StoryEngine. You define the actors, items, and locations, and it generates the narration, dialogue, and the game universe around them. What used to take weeks or months now takes hours. It is a rapid prototyping engine for multiplayer worlds. And this is only the beginning. 👉 flirt-royale.comFlirt Royale — A Social Dating Sim You Play TogetherFlirt Royale — A Social Dating Sim You Play Together
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Daniel B. shared thisAt RIFT we’ve been obsessed with two things: building in public and rethinking how players discover games. On the first, The Consulting Detectives has been shaped entirely by feedback. Every update comes from putting the game in front of players, listening closely, and adjusting. The new version of https://play.tcd.game is the clearest example of that yet. On the second, we’re finally able to do something I’ve wanted for years. At previous companies we worked hard to make the funnel from first impression of an ad through click to gameplay feel seamless. On mobile it was never really possible — you always hit the app store wall. On web, it is. Now, when you see a character in an ad, you can click and instantly drop into the game, playing as that character in a live episode. (Try playing as James Ryder here: https://lnkd.in/eKrZ_A_M) This isn’t just a better funnel. It means the story itself can be continuous across surfaces, with playable snippets that live outside the game and expand the world beyond its walls. That’s a fundamental shift in how games can be discovered. The early metrics are exciting. More importantly, it shows what’s possible when you combine StoryEngine with a willingness to build in public. Both are at the heart of how we operate. Check out the new build here: https://play.tcd.gameDaniel B. shared thisThe Consulting Detectives has been updated: https://play.tcd.game From the start, this project has had two goals: Prove StoryEngine as the platform for social, emergent storytelling Deliver a game that stands on its own: frictionless, personal, built to be played together This new version reflects everything we’ve learned from players. The flow is smoother, choices feel more meaningful, and the story opens up in ways that make it a true multiplayer experience. It also has new Art, onboarding and a second episode to play! For players, it’s a compelling detective game. For us, it’s proof that story can work as a system, not a script. StoryEngine is what makes that possible. If you’ve been waiting, now’s the time to jump in: play.tcd.game And for those following along, Rift has more to share in September.Play The Consulting Detectives NowPlay The Consulting Detectives Now
Daniel B. replied to a comment
1w
Nuno Leiria defintiely, will DM
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Daniel B. liked thisDaniel B. liked thisHaving Slack/Discord level ability to analyze and visualize BigQuery data directly is a game changer for product consulting. Over a decade ago, when I worked with clients as a monetization consultant, it was an extremely opinions and vibes based business. "I played your game, here's what I think is happening emotionally, here's what I recommend..." I stand behind much of the advice I gave then, but it's easy to dismiss a report you disagree with when it's just the word of a consultant. With my current crop of partners, I'm in their team slack or discord, and they've all built the ability to tag Claude with questions and empowered it to grab the data, make visuals and do the analysis. It's incredibly freeing, and allows not just me but also team members to deliver so much value. One of the best parts of my day is when iterating on a feature's design with a partner, we have a difference of opinion, and we get to settle it live, in the moment with data. I love it when the data proves me wrong! I'd rather make the right choice based on how players are actually behaving then make the wrong choice because I was the most stubborn person in the room. If you haven't yet integrated an AI analyst into your team's communication platform, I can't recommend it highly enough. Truly a game changer.
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Daniel B. reacted on thisDaniel B. reacted on thisI'm honored to be named a finalist for GamesBeat's inaugural Mobile Mogul Awards in the Mobile Innovator Award category! The awards recognize the visionaries, innovators and industry leaders shaping the future of mobile gaming across entertainment, technology, brands and culture. It's an honor to be recognized alongside so many leaders helping move the mobile ecosystem forward. Winners will be announced November 2 and recognized at GamesBeat NEXT, November 2–3 in San Francisco. Register: https://lnkd.in/gG2JrH9R Learn more about the awards: https://lnkd.in/gjbEdeM3 Read about this year's finalists: https://lnkd.in/g9-T4-Vq #GamesBeat #GBMAX #MobileMogulAwards
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Daniel B. liked thisDaniel B. liked thisI’m looking to speak to people who have built a mobile game from scratch - chose the concept, assembled the team, got it in front of players, and knew when to keep going and when to stop. The role is General Manager at LEGO Digital Play, based in our London HQ and reporting into our Head of Mobile Studio. You’d own the whole thing: the vision, the team you hire, the creative calls and the P&L. The LEGO® brand has been trusted for generations, and there is a lot still to build in digital play. If this sounds like you, or you know someone it sounds like, I’d love to hear from you. You can find out more about us here: https://lnkd.in/e53biyHN
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Daniel B. liked thisDaniel B. liked thisIt is with great joy and pride that I can announce the elite Michael Williams is joining me at Game Changer Talent Ltd ! Delighted to have my friend and twice (now thhhhrice) colleague on board as together we gather and place the real game changers for our clients. Expanding due to demand is a wonderful feeling, and Im so grateful to all my clients and friends in this industry for such a solid start to my business. With Mike now on board, we aim for the stars. If you're looking for that unique touch to your hiring, if you're looking for elite talent, for proven winners, for hires with experience, energy, for old skool grit and innovation addicts; Then get in touch! #gamejobs #hiring #techhiring #gamesindustry
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Daniel B. liked thisEveryone should 👋Daniel B. liked thisI canceled my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription this week. How about you? As a soloprenuer running a freelance business, I’m always looking for ways to reduce my burn rate. And thanks to this suite of GetCraft open source apps, I was able to cut one more subscription out of my life. Been very happy with these so far. I’ve signed a PFF contract, edited some stray pixels out of game art, and next I’ll edit a video for social media. Next I think l need to replace Figma for something open source. You can find the apps here: https://lnkd.in/evdgVWhA
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