What the fuck is this newsletter?

Metagame is a weekly newsletter about how studios market games and what players actually have to say about that shit. Written by a guy who used to sit in the meeting where the apology got strategized.

That guy is me. Hi, I'm Tone. I ran global publishing for VALORANT at Riot and worked in games marketing for more than 10 years. Which means I've seen a lot of fucking video game marketing.

I optimized the roadmap to make sure the monetization beat landed after the love letter and not before it. Managed the team where "authentic" dev comms get written by someone with "community" in their job title, given notes by a room of 20 people, and approved by an SVP before it could go live. Watched the apology get a date on the calendar before anyone knew what the apology said or why we were sorry. Oh yeah, and I got to make some really dope shit too. It wasn't all bad.
I'm not confessing anything. That's just what the job is, and every studio has one of those meetings (actually, many of those meetings) and most of the people in it are smart and mean well, but also very stretched and very, very tired.

Times have changed. Players can smell bullshit instantly. And there's a lot of fucking bullshit. Because working at big corporations is really hard. There's a lot of people to align. There's tight schedules. There's politics. Is something worth fighting for? There's no time to do something risky, so you end up doing the safe thing to meet your deadlines.

But players don't care about your politics or deadlines. They notice when the price changes slowly over time. When a feature doesn't get delivered. When a game is broken for a month, someone posts "shut the servers down" on Twitter and gets 43k likes. A creator who only posts positive content about your game is now saying he can't bring himself to log in to the game he loves. Hypothetically speaking of course.

I used to read and watch all of that on Monday morning and then walk into a room and pretend the plan was still the plan. And people weren't pulling that sentiment for me. I did it. I programmed my algorithm, built my habits, to drown myself in player sentiment at all times. I used to send out my learnings once a week to the entire studio.

So that's the newsletter. But now, instead of inside Riot and just for VALORANT, using those muscles to write about gaming as a whole. I can tell you what the studio was going for, because I've either done it or managed the people who did it. I can tell you exactly what players are thinking because I live off verbatims, numbers, screenshots - it's all about the fucking receipts. That's what tells you if you won the argument. Who cares what I think.

Nobody writes this perspective from the inside, because the people inside can't. They aren't allowed to or get asked not to. I can.

So here's what you get from me: one email, Sunday morning. Think the Sunday paper. Grab a cup of coffee. This is not gaming news as fast as you can get it (there are other people who do that better than me - why would I ever try to compete with Jason Schreier). Oh, and it will probably be a little unhinged.

It's free. I don't want your money. I want your thoughts and conversation. That's worth more to me than a paid subscription.

Hit reply. I read every one, and if I'm wrong about your game or something you did, put me on blast. I'm wrong a lot. It wouldn't be the first time. I promise I'll correct it.

See you Sunday.

(If you came here wanting to learn more about Tone Hoeft, the human, and his background, you can check my LinkedIn for that shit).