It is well understood in the industry that a game developer is completely incapable of judging the difficulty of any game they make. Game teams are notoriously poor at understanding and predicting how new players will respond to their first experience of a game. No matter how smart a game maker is, it is simply impossible for them to blank out the intimate knowledge they already have of their game and see it through the eyes of a newbie. My predecessor at EA Montreal knew thi

One of the major decisions every mobile game maker faces is whether or not to include advertising as part of the gameplay experience. I remember back in the early days of mobile development, as we transitioned from feature phones to smart phones, in-game advertising started to emerge. Apple’s i-Ad system enticed us with the promise of a new source of revenue, quickly followed by a raft of other advertising plug-ins that allowed us to easily place adverts anywhere, anytime, in