/FreeGameFindings is based around finding free games all over the place! Be it Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic, GOG, Xbox 360/One, Playstation 3/4/Vita, or Wii U/3DS/Switch, we will find every last free Game and DLC we can, and get it to you!

Note: I am mostly summarizing the aggregate of explanations currently floating around about the 1/29/21 option expiry date. I don't claim any knowledge. This is not investment advice. Do your own research, don't invest what you can't afford to lose, and if something feels wrong it probably is.
TL;DR: This isn't about options (yet), it's about shares, and Institutional Investors are playing a dangerous game by convincing us (some of y'all have bought in without realizing it) that a magical short squeeze has some 3-day time limit, that Friday is somehow the end game, and are hoping that when investors don't see a $5,000 short squeeze by next week they will fold and take their gains at a "reasonable" double-digit stock price. Don't believe them. They can survive through mid-late February before the true short squeeze smashes upward. And I'll be ready. I like this stock and believe in it's long term potential, and I think it's undervalued.
THESIS: If institutional investors can (1) convince retail investors to sell stock at low prices and (2) convince their lenders to wait, then the 0.01% get richer.
JUSTIFICATION: There is so much public sentiment (passion, enthusiasm, excitement, anger, whatever) surrounding short (~1 day) price movements*, and Friday's expiring options (these are also end of month contracts), that it seems like big clever money may be trying to artificially create a sort of bear trap for shareholders.
Whatever happens in the next week or so (crest to $700? crash to $60?) almost means nothing in the long term, but could fool investors into giving these guys CHEAP ways out of their 140% float short interest positions. Remember, these are people who have been dumping tons of money for a long time, shorting the stock when it was in the single digits. They've been hoping for a GameStop bankruptcy, and manufacturing one as best they can.
IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME: Remember the VW infinite squeeze, where we saw weeks of crazy price movement before the actual peak. And that is a mild case, as most of the shares were held by an entity with legal, competitive, and strategic reasons and obligations forcing them to hold shares and artificially reducing the float, or available shares for trading. This reduced supply caused the short squeeze.
However, this time around we've got a huge short interest, much much larger by comparison than that from VW's 2008 peak, to the tune of 140% of shares available for trading (float). They've massively overreached, and are going to pay the price for that. But they haven't yet.
SO YOU'RE SAYING THERE'S A CHANCE: This time, however, if the big dogs can shake shareholders hard enough, weak links break and paper hands fold and a fantastic long term play starts to seem out of reach. The market manipulation wins.
DARE TO BELIEVE: Unfortunately for the shorts, GME has real long term prospects to revolutionize the gaming industry for consumers, and now has the attention and potential equity momentum (if they play it smart, which I think the new leadership will) to make this a reality.
From that link above:

In GME's case the rise in the stock price itself will likely result in fundamental improvements to the underlying economic metrics of the company.

I believe.
However, if the shorts can fight, sneak, manipulate, and otherwise adjust the share price down this week then they start to see light at the end of the tunnel. They make 2-3 week plans for doing the same thing. For them, prices don't have to bottom back out, they just have to convince enough people to sell that they buy thrmselves a few weeks before a short squeeze really takes them all under.
*Some of this price movement is shorts covering, but much is actual legitimate investment between retail investors and other institutional investors who have seen the light. Remember, TSLA didn't get to where it is because one company made some bad short positions. But if GME shorts can convince everyone that a 3-day squeeze is all they get until GME crashes to some "normal" level, then they win.
Everyone getting hyped about Friday is playing into their hands. Yeah maybe some will need to take gains after a Friday pop, but a smart long-term hold position on GME is what they're really afraid of. And I want to be a shareholder in GME's future, as many wanted to be with TSLA. And sure, maybe if everyone else thinks that way too, there may be an incidental short squeeze that wrecks the uber wealthy in mid-late February along the way.
Again, I am not claiming to be knowledgeable or insightful, just commenting my best guesses. Nobody knows the future. This is not investing advice.
🚀

This is not a happy ending story.

The beginning

It all started back in 2014. I had a startup whose clients were advertisers. It was a platform for users to review video ads in exchange for online points that could be redeemed for money or coupons. Watch and ad; rate it; be rewarded. Simple.
After 100 campaigns I kept hearing it would be wonderful to connect their offline ads (e.g. TV ads, billboards, magazines, etc) with our platform. Advertisers wanted real insights and analytics from their offline advertising investment.
As dedicated founders we started working hard on this concept: “from offline to online with your phone”. Within 4 months we had our first version. I remember showing it to our friends and constantly hearing “Wow this is brilliant! It’s like Shazam but for videos”. I was ecstatic!

The investment

The revenue was coming in but it wasn’t recurrent. It was difficult to enter the yearly advertising budget. Advertisers assumed our platform as an experiment (mainly to get feedback) and not as a serious distribution channel — despite the fact we picked at 100,000 registered users.
We needed investment to grow and build the new technology’s infrastructure. It wasn’t cheap to maintain a technology that recognized millions of videos within 4s. More on this latter.
In 2015 we raised $0.5M from angels and led by a VC. This allowed us to grow our team to 7 members and accelerate product development.
We were ready to storm the world!

The pivot

In retrospect, our product decisions after the investment killed our startup. We shifted our focus from the local videos ads review platform — where we had 100k users and 60 clients — to a global video recognition consumer product.
We created an App — like Shazam — that recognized millions of videos. Our goal was to have advertisers make their offline assets interactive and invite their audience to download our App and use it to unlock “something”. The practical end was the same as the QR code. How cool is that? Scan a video and “magically” show related content on your screen? Exciting, right?
Wrong. Very few people downloaded the App. It turns out the barrier of downloading the App was too much for the reward (whatever the brand wanted to offer). Don’t get me wrong, we did some cool campaigns with Kia, Unilever, or Volkswagen. But again these were one-shot campaigns. Basically an investment in innovation from the brands.
After long days discussing our future, we thought of something. What if our technology was embedded in native apps like Snapchat, Facebook, IMDB, or even in the Operating Systems of mobile devices — Android and iOS? This would mean everyone could easily interact with their offline environment and get something in return. Brilliant!

Interactive The Walking Dead

This is now 2016 and we had a new strategy. White-label our technology and allow anyone to embed it in their platforms. We built SDKs for Web, Android and iOS and off we went searching for customers. One of our main goals was to have TV shows interactive. Allow viewers to point their phone to the TV and delight them with a new experience.
In this quest, I scrapped all my network, cold reach on Linkedin, went to conferences, traveled between London, New York and San Francisco. I ended up talking to all major TV networks — Comcast, BBC, FOX, PRISA, Viacom, CNN — and closed a contract with FOX. This was a pilot experiment where FOX would use Portugal as an assessment market. It took us 9 months (!) to close the contract.
Even so, we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The worst part was over, we could take our learnings from our local pilot and catapult it to the world. We will change how people consume TV and will take our place in the TV innovation history.
We were ready to build a $1B company.
After several negotiations with FOX we were able to add our technology to three shows: The Walking Dead, MacGyver and Prison Break. What a victory! All the major shows were interactive. FOX will advertise the shows are interactive, people will scan the TV and have an amazing, memorable experience. Win-win-win.
When the first results started to come in… well let’s take a detour first and come back to the results later.

Entering Facebook

During 2016 I was mainly traveling demoing our technology to as many people as I could.
Besides TV networks I’ve met with Google, Amazon, Snapchat, Verizon, Blippar and Facebook. Our goal was to integrate the technology in their existing apps and make their users interact with the world connecting the offline and the online seamlessly.
The main feedback was something like: “amazing technology, great demo! But (there’s always a but) something like this isn’t on our product roadmap”. Except for Facebook… It was late 2016 and I’ve met with a Business Developer Director.
Here’s how it went:

(After I’ve demoed the technology)
Director: Wait, can I try it?
Me: Sure, here’s my phone.
(Director takes the phone and scans the video. The phone showed information about the actor from the exact second Director scanned. Director stays hesitant for a couple of seconds…).
Director: I need this.
Me: Uhh… Ok!(My mind was like: Errr, what, how, can I ask… Wait, what?)
Director: Here’s the deal. We have a huge problem right now. We launched Facebook Watch recently and are having a lot of copyright infringements on the platform. We need to build something like YouTube’s ContentID. More info here.
Me: Ok, we can definitely help.
Director: I’ll put you in contact with the product team responsible for this and they’ll take it from there. We are evaluating acquisitions in this space to speed up our go-to-market.

After exiting the meeting I vividly remember the next five minutes. As I went through the lobby I decided to seat on a couch to recover from the excitement. There I was, all alone, in one of the most incredible buildings in Menlo Park after a meeting in one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I found myself looking at the ceiling and smiling for no apparent reason.

The M&A process

After the Facebook meeting, we discovered we had a potential new market to unveil: copyright infringements detection. Users uploaded copyrighted content with small changes (e.g. by tempering with the audio pitch, by slightly rotating the video and by changing the original video with many different techniques) to bypass Facebook’s algorithms.
Because our technology was designed from scratch to recognize videos from low-resolution images, we were pretty effective in recognizing tempered videos. We recognized videos that were rotated, mirrored or cropped. Our algorithm didn’t use audio. We even recognized a bunch of different videos inside one. Here’s a demo with a) 10 trailers in the same video and b) a rotating video.
We arrived in 2017 with our FOX partnership generating mediocre results. No relevant revenue was coming in and the user interaction data wasn’t exciting. We learned that people need a huge reward expectation to take the effort of scanning the TV. Without undisputed usage from viewers, FOX was gradually losing interest in pushing the technology and the opportunity faded during the rest of 2017.
In February we started talking with the Facebook team. They wanted to test our technology at scale. We thought it was a fair request and agreed to be tested without any compensation. We signed NDA’s and were comfortable enough discussing the internals of how our technology works.
After a couple of meetings to discuss the technology, Facebook started to test us with hundreds of hours at a scale we were never able to test before. It was scary as hell! We were all extremely nervous to see if the servers’ architecture wouldn’t crash.
When the first results started to come in we were shocked… 95% accuracy and 0.13% false positives. This was incredible for us! This was paired with the audio industry leader: Shazam. My eyes started to tear up.
We were tremendously proud and happy about this achievement.
Facebook wasn’t…

Thanks for following up with us. It was a great experience working with your team and we think there is a great potential for your company and service.
We want to provide an update about the evaluation result. From the result, overall we see a good coverage and recall, and your team solved the problems real fast. However, due to low precision and high false positive rate, we decided not to moving forward to the next stage of the evaluation.
Thanks for your time and effort. I am sure our career will get crossed in the future

Caption: Facebook’s engineer email rejecting us

Did you feel that punch in the stomach? I surely felt it. It was so unfair to have amazing results on our side and receive this email. When we asked about the differences — to understand what went wrong on our side — we got this:

Facebook has our own metrics and process to evaluate the product value of the algorithm. But due to the policy, we are not allowed to share with you. My colleague’s point is the final result. Look forward to getting chance to work with you guys in the future.

Caption: Facebook’s lead engineer email really rejecting us
We felt kind of used and disrespected to be honest. Remember this was a two months process with several emails and calls between us. It was one of the most difficult moments of my professional life mainly because of the expectations I’ve built.
We were devastated. I was immature enough and almost took it personally. At the end of the day, it was business as usual for a big company like Facebook — they ended up acquiring Source3 to help them solve the problem. For us, it was a Technical Knock Out.
If someone from a big company is reading this and it sounds familiar, please take a moment to rethink the way you say no to a startup. Especially if you’ve been interacting daily or weekly for the past months. Invite them for a meeting or call and explain them the general decision process. It will take you half an hour and it will make a huge difference for the startup. Believe me on this…
Unfortunately, after this, we weren’t having solid revenue from our FOX partnership. After discussing with our lead investor we decided to close our doors in an unfortunate ending to what could have been a tremendous success.

Lessons Learned

So many lessons learned! We could have done so much differently. It was a rollercoaster ride with so much emotional commitment. It’s a challenging exercise but I’ll try to generally sum up the main learnings from the whole journey.
Here’s what I learned:

The line that defines success and failure is extremely thin.
If you are being evaluated (by customers, partners or possible acquirers) define success KPIs beforehand. That way everyone will have the same common ground.
Don’t put all your eggs (expectations) into one basket.
Stick to what is working, i.e., work on what people want and measure it with data; not words nor promises.
Be kind to everyone. If you feel disrespected or hurt, take a step back. Take some time to breathe and don’t reply right away. Time heals everything and gives your perspective.
Don’t take life too seriously. Be patient but persistent.

Despite all learnings, the cold reality is that this was a failed startup… but I’m trying it again. This time I’m doing things differently.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) Let me know if you have any questions.

EDIT: I'm overwhelmed by your feedback, support and love. Thank you so much! I've been getting a lot of questions about my next step / startup. Follow me at Twitter as I continue to share my learnings and document my journey as a founder.

Here are the main questions many have. Post will be updated with more answers and questions from the comments. This will help a lot of people!

Q1) The short float % seems to be going down from a number of sources. Why are these not correct?

Responses:

From u/kevinjing11: Short float % is what's publicly reported. Many ways that MMs and hedge funds can essentially fake this number through unreported phantom shares
From u/Candle-Sticks: The short float % numbers we've been seeing are all estimates. The official reports don't come out until 2/9.
From u/JesusHimself69: There's no way the hedges could have paid out their shorts that fast without the stocks rocketing up. Some on Thursday/Friday? Sure. But not over the weekend. It's just a scare tactic.
From u/ whateverathrowaway00: http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html and https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-08-09/s70809-407a.pdf The documents listed here show that the DTC ( central clearing house for stock trading ) has allowed counterfeit stock trading to occur for a long time. It is this environment that allows naked shorting to occur. The SEC article above is from 2008 basically laying out how the restrictions put in place could be side stepped and it lines up. With this explanation, no one needed to call the DTC. There are no more shares of GME... period. That’s why even though short interest is being manipulated exactly as spelled out in the SEC paper above, there are no available shares to short in most brokers. The DTC raised deposit prices. They didn’t need a phone call. They’re not doing it to help any brokerages or hedge funds. They’re doing it to save their own ass. This is an opaque company that has the ability to shrug off congressional subpoenas. Independant actors all acting for their own gain is a much more likely explanation then widespread collusion. This is what makes sense to me. DTC raised deposits, allowing the shorts to unwind over time. The media will vilify the brokerages and hedge funds and no-one will ever ask where all the shares are. If that tactic does not work they will crash the economy in response.

Q2) Can't the hedge funds just keep doing more short ladder attacks and drive the price down?

Responses:

From u/FudgieThaWhale: No, because they're losing money doing ladders in an attempt to acquire additional shares. If investors don't sell a dip then they just flat lose the money. They won't keep doing it because they can't.
From u/Candle-Sticks: The ladder attacks rely on the HF holding shares, they can keep selling and laddering until they run out of shares. Of course they can easily buy more at the dips they artificially create.
From u/storyhungry: Interactive Brokers currently says that the borrow rate is 16.97% for HFs

Q3) All these hedge funds are saying they're out of their short positions to align with question #1, we obviously don't believe them and they're probably racking up a ton of fees. How long can they really last?

Responses:

From u/FudgieThaWhale: It can last as long as they want to pay margin fees. I imagine that won't be for very long.
From u/autodrafter2020: There is a massive amount of Failure to Deliver, and short sellers have to pay the clearing houses soon, it could be just days: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lak773/why_were_still_winning_and_why_were_still_going/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Q4) When the short squeeze happens, what period of time are we talking about? Does it last 10 mins, 2 days, etc?

Q5) How do I know if it's a short ladder attack?

Responses:

Click and read through this comment: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/la7bhj/gme_mms_have_until_tomorrow_22_to_buy_shares_it/glmatag?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

Q6) What % of the float do we need to own before this starts to squeeze (and is this publicly available)?

Responses:

From u/thejewsdidnothing :It is possible (and likely imo) that we already hold over 100% of GME’s float. Why haven’t we squeezed? Because the shorts are able to dilute the float with fake shares as much as they want. The real question that should be asked then is “at what point does the government step in to stop them, or when do the shorts accrue such heavy losses that they have to cover?” The answer is that we don’t know, but it’s only a matter of time.

Q7) Why can't I buy more on Vanguard (relevant to other brokers too)

Responses:

From u/Tainthairtwizzler : Vanguard no longer allowing you to use money transferred immediately. Just got off the phone with support and the funds need to be cleared through the 7 Day Hold before you can spend them. Must have been set over the weekend/today because I was able to buy BB from the same account but wasn't allowed to buy GME all during this morning.

Q8) Isn’t it plausible that HF have been shorting at 300- 400$ level and are now taking in big time on their own ladder attacks to around the 250$ level?

Responses:

From u/Thefsm93: It is possible that they have been shorting at 300-400, except that the volume of shares being traded doesn't match the volume of shares needed for the short. If the question is more geared at them buying in at 300-400 and trying to short at 250, that would just make this situation worse because they would still then need to BUY. Plus, why would they be artificially driving the price down with ladder attacks?

Q9) How does the short % of the float matter if there are approximately 10M shares to cover with?

Q10) (from others) I’m trying to get into the gme/amc craze but public / webull apps is taking anywhere between 1-7 days to confirm deposits before i can use the funds in my bank account. is this new? is there a way to expedite the process?

Responses:

From u/waqas961: If you have a cash account linked to your bank on webull and you transfer an amount it will be available same day if did in morning or available next day as provisional funds to trade with until your actual deposit goes through which can take upto 5 days. I bought on 27th and 28th Jan but my actual deposits still show pending. Wire transfer however is different and for that you need to actually wait the whole time till it gets processed.
From u/sutsusame: If you want to invest money right away, see if the brokerage will let you do a wire transfer. I use E*TRADE and incoming wire transfers usually clear within minutes, with no hold period. You will probably need to pay a fee to your bank.

Q11) What are some in depth posts that people believe should be read?

Responses:

An insane amount of deception has been in the works for a long time: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l97ykd/the_real_reason_wall_street_is_terrified_of_the/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Shit's about to get crazy: https://www.reddit.com/usebcRIPstecomments/labq6u/follow_the_crumbs_gme_exposed_the_meta/
Why the squeeze hasn't happened: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/ladv7v/gme_will_squeeze_and_heres_the_10_reasons_why_i/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Shorts covering: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lae73m/psa_remember_shorts_have_two_days_to_deliver_this/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Q12) I've read a couple of posts that casually mention the possibility that GameStop could issue more shares, pulling in a bunch of money and essentially letting the shorts off the hook. Can GameStop do that? If so, why the hell wouldn’t they?

Q13) What happens if HFs have artificially created the counterfeit shares to the amount we hold which they exactly need and then when the short squeeze takes place, restrict all of us 🦍 and basically resell it to themselves and make our shares burn to the ground?

Q14) What happens if the short squeeze takes place and all of the brokerage houses crash, as we have seen they have restricted us from buying? Wouldn’t be surprised of seeing them not allowing us to sell at the most important moment. Btw, as we see that there is an insane amount of counterfeit shares, does that mean that this is hope they will save their asses by restricting the fake shares to be sold?

I really want this to be helpful for everyone. If you are an expert or have other questions for me to ask, please comment and I will update this post.
Holding 10 GME shares from $90/share. Got another one on Friday at $320 a share. I can't buy anymore but wish i could!
UPDATE: Keep the responses coming please, and note: we are not financial advisors, just awesome retards!

This article was written with the feedback of ~300 highly engaged players from the different autochess reddit communities (TFT, DOTA Underlords, Chess Rush...), which participated in interviews and on a poll whose results are available here. They’re especially thanked by name at the end of the article.
In January 2019, Drodo Studio’s Dota Auto Chess mod became insanely popular. Many companies (including household names like Valve, Riot, Ubisoft and Blizzard) rushed to release their own versions.
It seemed like the beginning of something big like MOBA or Battle Royale. But it has been more than a year now and the hype seems to have vanished completely. As quickly as it rose, it went away…
This is the first on a series of articles where we will analyze the autochess genre. Here we will be exploring the genre’s history, its current market situation and its audience. And also, what are the core design issues that autochess suffers and that no one has been able to solve yet.
https://preview.redd.it/tc2c19k4ipg61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=487539f51e104ee7d1aae1a6ded7447b1dee11ca
It really helps me if you check this article (or similar content) at my blog https://jb-dev.net/

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

This wasn’t the first time that a mod got the spotlight and ended up becoming the foundation of a genre. It happened in several major, industry-defining cases before (some of which are Team Shooters, MOBAs, Battle Royale…). But on some of these cases events unfolded differently. So we identify 3 distinctive eras related to the evolution of the industry:

1st Era (2000s): Assimilation

The company whose original software had been modded (or had a close enough game, like Valve) moved quickly to absorb the successful mods and turn them into even more successful products.
Since at that point creating a major game release was very complex (required an expensive development, publishing deals and an infrastructure to distribute the product), the deal was profitable for both sides. But it meant the dissolution of the identity of the original creator team, which became embedded in the bigger company culture.
https://preview.redd.it/abyi6d2jipg61.png?width=461&format=png&auto=webp&s=d4171bf9344a162e695a75a91d18eec8206b9123

Team Fortress (1999) was originally a Quake mod. And Counter-Strike (2000) started out as a fan-made mod on the Half Life engine. Both games (and creators) were quickly absorbed by Valve.

2nd Era (2010s): Integration

By this time, the previous era model still was going on… but the gaming industry had significatively grown a lot and it was also possible for smaller or even new companies to lure the original developers, and use the mod as a proof for commercial success in order to secure funding and develop it as a full title.
The main characteristic of this era is that the original developers were able to keep a bigger share of control and relevance, rather than being integrated as just another gear on a bigger machine, because the companies they joined built their own identity around that key product.
This was the case of Riot Games: They were able to raise enough money for the creation of their company through family and angel investors, and then hire some of the original creators of DOTA, and then created League of Legends.
https://preview.redd.it/vl6h2l7lipg61.png?width=763&format=png&auto=webp&s=414abb3da2b169966b7bf757a6116f86ef3748d2

Defense of the Ancients (DotA), the foundational title for the MOBA genre, appeared in 2003 as a fan-made custom scenario of Warcraft 3. Foreseeing commercial potential on a full game based on the concept, Riot games and Valve both battled for the Dota IP and the original developers, eventually releasing rival titles League of Legends and Dota2. Interestingly, Blizzard (owners of Warcraft 3) tried to replicate the success without the mod creators in Heroes of the Storm (2015), which hasn’t been as successful as the other two.

A similar case happened with battle royale, which also started in 2013 as a successful DayZ mod created by the modder nicknamed PlayerUnknown. Later, it was transformed into a full product through the acquisition of the developer by a korean company (which would later be renamed as the PUBG Corporation, again showing how the company grew around the game rather than assimilating it).
This case hints what would later happen with Auto Chess, since Fortnite wasn’t involved in any way with the original creators. They just copied the concept. Fortnite was a product stuck in a kind of development hell (had been 6 years in the works). As the game was getting close to the release, the developers became impressed by PUBG’s success, so they created a quick Battle Royale spin-off which became insanely popular and eventually ate the rest of the game.
https://preview.redd.it/zkdv4jjqipg61.png?width=808&format=png&auto=webp&s=0e7ad39e5db4d83b6b927587b59bf1c81fe0ef85

Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (2017), foundational title of the modern battle royale genre, is the successor of PlayerUnknown’s DayZ: Battle Royale, a popular mod for DayZ (which on itself is a mod of ArmA3, making it a mod of a mod lol). The success of PUBG inspired Fortnite (a title on the later stages of a troubled development at the time) to spin towards that genre, becoming PUBG‘s main competitor.

3rd Era (2020s): Fragmentation

In all the cases presented previously, the newborn genre ended up in the release of one or two titles which accumulated most of the business. But this hasn’t been the case here.
In Autochess, the newborn genre has been quickly fragmented into a big list of competitors. Some are standalone games (like DOTA Underlords or Autochess: Origins), but there’s also several service-model games which released their autochess mode as well (like Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds or TeamFight Tactics, which at the end of the day is a side-game mode of League of Legends).
This creates an interesting precedent, which I believe will define future cases where an innovative new game concept appears: The hot idea will be cloned very fast because today the main bottleneck in the industry is having an innovative design that generates player interest and engagement.
By 2020, it’s way easier to create and distribute a game, there are way more developers hungry for a hit than ever before, and a lot of service-model games with short development cycles always looking for something juicy for their next update… so new ideas becoming red oceans fast will be the norm.
For sure, this won’t affect the ability of small developers and modders to innovate, but it will affect their ability to leverage that to become successful on an independant level, before they get cloned.
https://preview.redd.it/51jbq4jwipg61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=fdfcfeb82e73b48210c4d93386438268d6dcbe3b

Dota Auto Chess, was a Dota 2 mod which obtained massive popularity. After a failed acquisition from Valve (owners of Dota), the mod developers (Drodo Studios) went to create the mobile standalone Auto Chess: Origins, while still maintaining the PC version linked to Valve.
Meanwhile, Riot, Valve, Ubisoft and many other companies developed and released their own autobattlers at a record time, downgrading the genre creators to just another competitor.

On Autochess, the fragmentation and fast release pace came at the cost of innovation, though. These games feature few unique selling points compared to the original DOTA Autochess experience: TFT’s ‘anti-snowballing’ character selection rounds, Underlord’s bosses and fast-track mode….
And ultimately, they haven’t fixed the core issues of the original game, which separates it from a true hyper-successful product like MOBA.

MARKET STATUS

Because of the rain of clones, it’s hard to map all the autochess games on the market. It doesn’t help that some of them are available in both PC and Mobile (playable in PC, Mac, Android and iOS), and also they’re exclusive to different PC stores (Dota Underlords is only on Steam, TFT is on Riot’s LoL launcher, and Autochess Origins is only at the Epic Store…).
And if that wasn’t enough, the Auto Chess mod in DOTA2 is still very active and has no signs that it’s going to be dying soon. It’s still being regularly updated, and presumably still profitable: Some months ago they added a battle pass system, with its revenue shared between Valve and Drodo.
https://preview.redd.it/8w2lrid0jpg61.png?width=854&format=png&auto=webp&s=3697396edd8af2dff3f8e25cb2dd3829635506d0
What’s interesting is that none of the contenders has been able to become massively successful in terms of monetization, at least not in terms comparable to even a second or third tier MOBA. And while there are definitively different tiers of following among these titles (led by Riot Games’ TeamFight Tactics), it seems that none of them has been able to gather under its banner a significant amount of players, mobile downloads or Twitch Views…
Sources: AppAnnie (mobile metrics), TwitchMetrics (twitch)
So ultimately, we’re dividing the autochess market into 3 categories: Squires, Would-be Kings and Peasants.

Squires: Rather than standalone games, these are side-modes of already successful products. Under this category we would list the Battlegrounds mode in Hearthstone, or League of Legends’ TFT, and maybe even the original DOTA Autochess mod. While for sure they’ll have their own dedicated audience that only plays those modes, for most players it’s just a nice and fresh activity integrated within a broader game experience. The squires are the ones that have achieved the biggest success among the autochess genre because they don’t suffer as much backlash from the lack of gameplay depth inherent to the genre, which is harmful for the long term retention: Even if the mode eventually becomes a bit shallow, players have many other things to play, and thus are retained. As a consequence, these games can still monetize significatively by selling renewals of their Battle Passes every new season. Not enough to make them successful on the degree that was expected… but at least it’s something. Other than bringing an additional source of revenue, these modes were useful to their core games: They generated player interest by providing innovative gameplay. Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds was an amazing addition to the CCG genre, and made a lot of people come back to the game to discover the new mode and reengage.

https://preview.redd.it/1qhlvvd6jpg61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=c56f59cc22cf8e0d0207abc424dca9e976c5685c

SQUIRE: The gameplay of TeamFight Tactics (slow tempo, no team coordination, decreased attention requirement…) makes it a nice relief mode to play between LOL matches, which is its purpose in the foreseeable future. If there ever was an intention to make it a standalone game, it vanished together with the player interest on autochess…

Would-be Kings: These are the other two top dogs of the category. They were supposed to rule… but that looking at the numbers they don’t really seem to have ever lifted off. Under this category we would list Auto Chess: Origins and DOTA Underlords. The problem is that their standalone approach means that they suffer the most of the design issues of the genre that we’ve presented in the last section of this article (i.e. flat complexity, lack of mastery depth, lack of progression and rotative meta…). That means that they lost a lot of population over time, and therefore their Battle Pass renewal isn’t as effective at generating revenue : (

https://preview.redd.it/p2n125v9jpg61.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=59aa81130d41566a336413dafc3e2317d80d3d24

DOTA Underlords is an extremely polished product in terms of graphics, character design and UX, and yet another proof that Valve devs really know how to do great games. Too bad they aren’t as good at releasing third installments.

THE AUDIENCE

We are of the belief that you can’t talk about a game and not talk about who plays it, and that players say more about a game than analyzing all its features and mechanics. So with this in mind we collected answers from ~300 autochess players (check the raw data here). After examining their responses, we’ve identified 3 main player profiles (the comments on each profile are literal):
https://preview.redd.it/satixy6cjpg61.png?width=934&format=png&auto=webp&s=80623e39c57f1252b3fc5d04db1d2a20b06928e2

Patricks, gamers looking for a competitive-but-idle experience that doesn’t require full attention and it’s easily reconcilable with their functional adult life.
Grizzlies, competitive players that struggle with fast paced games that demand a high actions per minute ratio and quick reflexes (like MOBAs or competitive shooters).
Warmasters, highly competitive players that enjoy more the area of strategy (setting up goals and planning how to achieve them) rather than tactics (skillful execution of actions and micromanagement).

What these profiles have in common, other than being hardcore gamers and having a big interest in competitive games, is the fact that they enjoy the lack of micromanagement, and the demand of reflexes and dexterity of autochess.
This is quite interesting, considering that the genre foundation is so close to MOBAs, which are extremely demanding on those aspects. Overall it seems that they belong to audiences below the MOBA umbrella which are currently being alienated by the bulk of ‘younger and dexterity focused’ players.
And when it comes to platforms, it seems that even though the barrier between the classic gaming platforms and mobile is progressively disappearing, the genre is still mainly focused on PC: Out of the ~300 players that answered, 50% said that they play exclusively on PC, 25% played primarily on Mobile, and the remaining 25% played in both.
https://preview.redd.it/a25azxggjpg61.png?width=962&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc3677e4203abb44d5b60cc2b55e01f4fe839f74

Players said that they enjoy the focus of the game in planification, as opposed to the focus on execution and performance of MOBAs. And when asked about their main points of frustration, they pointed out 2 main topics: 1.- The strong luck factor that has a strong impact on making you win or lose regardless on how well you played. 2.- The fact that the game eventually becomes shallow and repetitive, fueled by the fact updates were unexciting and not rotating the meta.

Surprised by the fact that players mention randomness as a factor of both enjoyment and frustration? Don’t be! Competitive players tend to have a love-and-hate relationship with luck, because they tend to consider that external factors outside of skills (money spent, better draw…) stole their well deserved victory.
And it’s even more frustrating in autochess, because there’s a strong snowball effect: Players that obtain a big advantage early on in the game become hard to catch later on. Which means that a few bad or good draws early on can decide the rest of the match.
There hasn’t been a single feature more criticised in Magic: The Gathering than the randomness of drawing mana. And yet, luck it’s part of what makes MTG stand out compared to other CCGs: For experienced players, it introduces uncertainty and the need to take risks and gamble, like they’d do in poker. And for rookies, it allows beating someone that has better skills and has a better deck, if Lady Luck is on their side. Won’t happen often, but it will feel awesome when it does. Like a friend likes to say: The best feeling in MTG is to draw a mana when you really need it. And the worst? To draw it when you didn’t.
This goes to say that in autochess, perhaps the power of luck needs to be reviewed, but it would be a bad decision to completely remove luck from the equation.

DESIGN CHALLENGES

In this awesome DoF article, Giovanni Ducati already pointed out the two main problems that the games in this genre need to solve to achieve real success: Bad long term retention and low monetization.
To these issues we would add a third one, which is bad marketability: Contrary to their big brothers League of Legends and DOTA2, these games haven’t been able to achieve high organic downloads (at least not to be able to generate significant revenue through soft monetization mechanics). What’s even worse is that all these games, their themes and target audience are quite close to RPG and Strategy, which are genres with some of the highest CPIs on the market. So they need top-of-the-class retention and monetization to get a high enough LTV to scale up.
But why do these games fail at keeping players entertained for a long time? And why don’t they monetize enough? Here’s what we think:

Flat Complexity & Progression

You have some games out there which have a strong entry barrier due to being quite complicated to grasp. But for those that can deal with the numbers and stats, the depth will keep them entertained for months and years. This is the case in most RPGs and 4X strategy games. And then you have hypercasual games, which are simple and plug and play. So they generate a great early engagement, but are too shallow to keep users hooked for a long time.
As a genre, Autochess games are in the middle ground: they have a high entry barrier, but also lack the complexity to keep players engaged for a long time…
As a general rule, games with long retention tend to follow Bushnell’s Law of being easy to learn and difficult to master. They achieve that by having what we call an unfolding experience: They appear simpler at the beginning (not necessarily easy), but require thousands of hours of practice to master.
An example of this are games that level lock most of the game complexity, so the player understands and masters only a set starter mechanics. And then, progressively unlock new modes and demand more specialized builds and gameplay, repeating the cycle several times to keep the game always interesting while attempting to avoid being overwhelming.
https://preview.redd.it/e9f8s8tkjpg61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=825c85b7c479b3bf05fc43ac668cbd1eddf17c97

In World of Warcraft, character depth is huge. But this complexity is unfolded progressively, forcing the player to spend time mastering each skill and activity as they level up, before moving further.

Another approach to the same idea are competitive games focused on mechanical ability, dexterity or micromanagement. Like CS:GO or Rocket League. They may unlock all the mechanics from the beginning, but a newbie player will only be able to focus and manage some of them, and then progressively discover and master the rest in an organic way.
https://preview.redd.it/42cbth8njpg61.png?width=951&format=png&auto=webp&s=241cd59b4468cabf2d0d24e1a4e3a703b74ada51

Rocket League hides its complexity by matchmaking early players with others of a similar skill. This makes beginner players viable even if they grasp only the basic mechanics. But, as they climb further, they’ll face rivals that take those basic skills for granted and the player will need to master more challenging techniques to keep up.

League of Legends and Overwatch are actually a combination of both: The game first introduces the player to a small selection of heroes which progressively gets expanded, while at the same time having an insane mastery depth that requires a high APM and reflexes, team coordination and thousands of hours of practice.
Contrary to any of those examples, Autochess games throw everything at you from the beginning: Character Skills, Synergies, Unit Upgrade, Gold Management, Items… It’s a lot to swallow. And there’s not even enough time to read what each thing does before the timer runs out. This creates a complex, overwhelming first impression that drives many players out.
But that’s quantity, not depth. Once you’ve gone through that traumatic starting phase, you’ve grasped all the mechanics and you know which team builds are dominating on the meta, it’s just a matter of making it happen by taking the right decisions and adapting to a few key draws.
Eventually, unless luck is really against you, your skills won’t be challenged and you won’t have new mechanics to master. At that point, winning will be based more on the knowledge of the content database and luck rather than your planning and strategic ability. And that’s boring.
So ultimately, these games are hard to grasp for a newbie, but also lack the ability to keep players interested for a very long time since they eventually run out of new features and mechanics to discover and master.

Unexciting Updates, Lack of Collection

On top of that, autochess games seem to have a hard time adding content which reawakens player interest and makes churned ones come back.
https://preview.redd.it/52umfcvqjpg61.png?width=796&format=png&auto=webp&s=dd8095e71d025886d3c0313187ead49587459453

The DAU that we would expect on a long term retention game: A decreasing trend of players until reaching a stagnation stage. At that point, a big update (or new season) is required to attract and reengage users back with new content. This is the model we would see on Fortnite or Hearthstone, but it’s not what we see in most autochesses.

On this topic, perhaps the one that has put the most effort is Riot’s TFT. Each season update, the game releases a new series of heroes, synergies, items and rebalances, as well as a big bunch of cosmetics. This generates a short lived boost on revenue (due primarily to players buying the pass) and downloads, but ultimately nothing that really moves the needle in a relevant way.
‘Why seasonal updates don’t work?‘, you may be asking. Part of the reason is that TFT, as well as every major contender do not include elements of content progression or collection. Instead, they all stick to the roguelike approach of the original mod: Players have access to the same set of units, and build their inventory exclusively during the match.
While at first this seems a good idea, since it keeps the game fair in a similar way to MOBAs, it’s oblivious to the fact that new units do not offer the same amount of gameplay depth as in League of Legends. In LoL, a new unit means weeks or even months of practice until mastering timing, range and usage of the skills, how they interact with every other champion, etc… In comparison, in TFT the new content can be fully explored in just a bunch of matches, both because the new content doesn’t offer that much depth to start with and because it’s available from the moment the player gets the update.
By lacking content progression and collection, autochesses miss the opportunity to create long term objectives after an update, more innovative mechanics and less repetitiveness. As a consequence, they have it really hard to hype players on updates.

Big ‘Snowball Effect’

In game design, the snowball effect refers to the situation where obtaining an advantage or dominance generates further conditions that almost invariably means winning the match. As you can guess, on competitive games this effect can generate a bad experience, especially when the divergence starts early on: The player that obtained the early advantage will keep on increasing the advantage and curbstomp the rest.
For example, this can happen on a Civilization game if a player gets ahead of the rest acquiring key resource territories, and uses them to achieve a greater progress in tech and income at a faster pace than the rest. Or in League of Legends if a team scores a bunch of early kills and levels up, becoming more able at scoring even more kills…
https://preview.redd.it/s07v5umtjpg61.png?width=620&format=png&auto=webp&s=ae14e6101c2c35da175150251bf592d0598fb76c

In this match of Age of Empires 2, the red player (Aztecs) managed to decimate the blue player (Turks) military units early on. Since without an army it was impossible for the blue player to secure enough resources to perform a comeback, for the next 2 hours the blue player was in a pointless, hopeless match. Kudos for not abandoning, though!

Autochess games have a huge snowball effect, due to the following reasons:

Resources lead to victories, victories lead to resources As you know, in autochess each player builds a team based on successive battles. Better battle performance will grant more gold, which is the resource used to buy units, perform shop rolls, etc… Similar to the cases we’ve already explained, this means that players that achieve early dominance will be able to to obtain more gold, use it to get better units and get more victories and gold, therefore increasing their team power faster than the rest. ‘But players can be lucky or unlucky, generating a factor that compensates for the advantage of having more resources early on‘, you may be considering. Unfortunately, this is a flawed logic, because of 2 main reasons: (1) Having more resources means more adaptability: The dominant players will be able to leverage on them to re-adapt their team, therefore outperforming the rest on a randomness-driven scenario. (2) Resources allow to buy more rolls, which diminishes the deviation generated by each individual roll.

https://preview.redd.it/srshcyzxjpg61.png?width=620&format=png&auto=webp&s=cc0313c25ed95c78b7277a7a95b6cecb4d2270b4

TeamFight Tactics attempts to decrease the snowball effect by introducing Carousels: rounds where all players pick a character from a list, and where the players that are losing (i.e. have less health) get to choose first. While this decreases the issue, it doesn’t really solve it… It just makes that smart players aim to lose on purpose at the beginning so they can get the better pick and generate the snowball slightly later on.

Luck factor. The previous point goes into maintaining and increasing dominance once it has been achieved early on, but another source of frustration is that luck is a huge factor in achieving early dominance. This means that your strategic skills and smarts can be completely invalidated by a couple of bad rolls at the beginning of the match. And there’s nothing that competitive players hate more than having their match stolen by factors outside the pure clash of abilities.

As an antithesis, Poker also has resource management, and luck factor determines the victory (on a specific round). But unlike Autochess, resources can’t override luck, and early victories don’t affect the later chance of winning.

Excessive Match Length

Compared to PC, on mobile is much harder to keep the player focused for a long period of time on a single session. And having a very long minimum session kind of goes against the premise of being able to play anywhere which is a primary strength of mobile as a gaming platform. This is a problem for autochess games since a single match can last for 30-45 minutes of synchronous, nonstop gameplay.
https://preview.redd.it/eh020bi1kpg61.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e98aefdec1c79141d7fe13d02acfadb13e789b7

The knockout mode in Dota Underlords aims to make the game more accessible by skipping the slow beginning of the match (you start with a pre-setup army), and by simplifying the health and fusion systems. This shortens the matches to ~15 minutes, which is still too long for mobile, but better than 30. The problem is that it also increases the snowball effect, since the match has less turns to allow comebacks, and makes any mistake (or a bad roll) way more punishing.

‘Isn’t the solution just make the match shorter?’, you’re probably wondering. Unfortunately, there are several reasons that make this more challenging to the core design than what it seems:

Because in autochess the player builds its team from scratch, at the beginning of each match there are several turns to setup team foundations. Removing these early decisions severely decreases the teambuilding possibilities, decreasing overall depth.
Also, each setup phase between clashes requires a minimum time to think and perform the actions. In the last turns of a match, the game can become quite demanding on thinking and input speed.
Matches require a minimum amount of turns to compensate the weight of a single lucky/unlucky roll over the chances to win. Because the possible units for teambuilding appear on random rolls, the less turns there are the more luck factor the game will suffer, and as a consequence the less important the player’s strategic skills will be.
And if there are few turns, there are also less chances for comebacks. Because it means that players will have less setup phases to adapt and catch a player that has obtained an early advantage.
Finally, since the match involves 8 players, it requires a minimum of turns so that they all can fight between each other… Nevertheless, I don’t consider this a critical issue because Dota has been able to change this specific point on the knockout mode without sacrificing too much in terms of depth.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The history of the autochess genre serves as an example of the risks of design endogamy: The devsphere rushed to clone Auto Chess, and before a year all the major contenders were in the board. But that speed came at a cost: None of these projects has brought the concept much further than its original conception, and in doing so they haven’t solved any of the core issues.
https://preview.redd.it/jptzdrj8kpg61.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f3fb34eb46b610e6ee355ba47782c804cb74186

The folks at Riot games developed the TeamFight Tactics in less than 5 months. This allowed them to release while the hype was still at its peak… but it also meant it added just a couple of improvements, and it’s otherwise very similar to the original Auto Chess mod.

After seeing all these projects fail to meet the big expectations that were placed on them, the question is if perhaps the best approach was to avoid rushing, and instead tackle the genre with a title that is not a clone, but rather a more groomed, accessible and innovative successor of the original idea.
In our next article on this series will make an attempt to see how such a game could be, rethinking the spirit and fresh design ideas of autochess to solve the issues mentioned above. (May take a while though, I want to focus on smaller articles for a couple of months…)
Meanwhile, if you want to read more about this genre, we suggest you these awesome articles from the folks at DoF: Why Auto-Chess can’t monetize – and how to fix that and How Riot can turn TFT into a billion dollar game

Special Thanks to…

These articles wouldn’t have been possible with the collaboration of ~300 members of the reddit communities of the different auto chess games who provided us with feedback and data. You folks have been incredible solving all our doubts. One thing that this genre has is some of the most awesome players around.
So big kudos for Brxm1, Erfinder Steve, Xinth, Zofia the Fierce, STRK1911, LontongSinga22, bezacho, hete, NeroVingian, marling2305, NOVA9INE , asidcabeJ, Eidallor, Rhai, Lozarian, bwdm, Toxic, Ruala, Papa Shango, MrMkay, Dread0, L7, kilmerluiz, Amikals, Sworith, Tankull, B., hete, Bour, Denzel, DeCeddy, Diaa, hamoudaxp, Benjamin “ManiaK” Depinois, Katunopolis, DanTheMan, MikelKDAplayer, 0nid, Tobocto, Tiny Rick, phuwin, Alcibiades, triceps, d20diceman, shadebedlam, stinky binky, Tutu, Myuura, suds, Kapo, Hearthstoned, Engagex, Pietrovosky, Daydreamer, Doctor Heckle, Ignis, ShawnE, NastierNate, LeCJ, Nene Thomas, Chris, trinitus_minibus, Nah, Kaubenjunge1337, Mudhutter, Asurakap, Nicky V, shinsplintshurts, bobknows27, Willem (Larry David Official on Steam), Jonathan, Dinomit24, Monstertaco, GangGreen69, Veshral Amadeus Salieri (…lol!), Kuscomem, Cmacu, Pioplu, Dilemily, qulhuae, Ilmo, MarvMind, facu1ty, crayzieap, Saint Expedite, Lobbyse, Lukino , tomes, Blitzy24, Mcmooserton, magicmerl, i4got2putsumpantzon, radicalminusone, Pipoxo, Kharambit, Bricklebrah, Rbagderp, Merforga, Superzuhong, Mo2gon, MoS.Tetu, MeBigBwainy, Zokus, CoyoteSandstorm, Stehnis, Noctis, Fkdn, Ray, Fairs1912, Fairs1912, Krakowski, HolyKrapp, Damadud, Pentium, Mach, Mudak, CaptSteffo, jwsw1990, Omaivapanda, Inquisitor Binks, Jack, yggdranix, GoodLuckM8, Centy, Prabuddha (aka Walla), dtan, Philosokitteh, Doms, ZEDD, Calloween, Synsane, Kaluma, GordonTremeshko , Djouni, DOGE, haveitall, ANIM4SSO, Task Manager, Submersed, BAKE, Viniv, La Tortuga Zorroberto, BixLe, Rafabeen, Blzane, bdlck666, FatCockNinja86, R.U.Sty, Yopsif, blesk, Quaest0r, FanOfTaylor, StaunchDruid, Rushkoski and everyone else that took some minutes to help us out on the article.

This is not a happy ending story.

The beginning

The investment

The pivot

Interactive The Walking Dead

Entering Facebook

(After I’ve demoed the technology)
Director: Wait, can I try it?
Me: Sure, here’s my phone.
(Director takes the phone and scans the video. The phone showed information about the actor from the exact second Director scanned. Director stays hesitant for a couple of seconds…).
Director: I need this.
Me: Uhh… Ok!(My mind was like: Errr, what, how, can I ask… Wait, what?)
Director: Here’s the deal. We have a huge problem right now. We launched Facebook Watch recently and are having a lot of copyright infringements on the platform. We need to build something like YouTube’s ContentID. More info here.
Me: Ok, we can definitely help.
Director: I’ll put you in contact with the product team responsible for this and they’ll take it from there. We are evaluating acquisitions in this space to speed up our go-to-market.

The M&A process

Thanks for following up with us. It was a great experience working with your team and we think there is a great potential for your company and service.
We want to provide an update about the evaluation result. From the result, overall we see a good coverage and recall, and your team solved the problems real fast. However, due to low precision and high false positive rate, we decided not to moving forward to the next stage of the evaluation.
Thanks for your time and effort. I am sure our career will get crossed in the future

Caption: Facebook’s engineer email rejecting us
Did you feel that punch in the stomach? I surely felt it. It was so unfair to have amazing results on our side and receive this email. When we asked about the differences — to understand what went wrong on our side — we got this:

Facebook has our own metrics and process to evaluate the product value of the algorithm. But due to the policy, we are not allowed to share with you. My colleague’s point is the final result. Look forward to getting chance to work with you guys in the future.

Lessons Learned

The line that defines success and failure is extremely thin.
If you are being evaluated (by customers, partners or possible acquirers) define success KPIs beforehand. That way everyone will have the same common ground.
Don’t put all your eggs (expectations) into one basket.
Stick to what is working, i.e., work on what people want and measure it with data; not words nor promises.
Be kind to everyone. If you feel disrespected or hurt, take a step back. Take some time to breathe and don’t reply right away. Time heals everything and gives your perspective.
Don’t take life too seriously. Be patient but persistent.

Despite all learnings, the cold reality is that this was a failed startup… but I’m trying it again. This time I’m doing things differently. Follow me on Twitter as I continue to share my learnings and document my journey as a founder.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) Let me know if you have any questions.

Happy Friday, my fellow Android gamers, and welcome back to this weekly summary of the most interesting games I played this week :)
This episode includes an interesting action RPG that plays a lot like Diablo, a very unique multiplayer strategy card game, and a PvP fighting game from a franchise that has been downloaded more than 500 million times!
Disagree with my opinion? Let’s have a friendly discussion below.
New to these posts? Check out the first one from 159 weeks ago here.
The games are "ranked" somewhat subjectively from best to worst, so take the ranking for what it is.

Let's get to the games:

Creatures of Aether [Game Size: 189 MB] (free)

Genre: Card / Strategy / PvP / Indie - Requires Online Access
Orientation: Portrait
Required Attention: Full
tl;dr review:
Creatures of Aether is a unique strategy card game where our goal is to dominate the majority of a shared 4x4 gridded board by placing a creature card from our hand on each turn.
Every card has a power number on each of its four sides. Placing a card next to an opponent’s card allows us to take it over and turn it into one of ours if the power number on our card’s side is higher than that on the opponent card’s adjacent side. Once the board is full, the player with the most cards on the board wins.
To spice things up, board tiles can have elemental types that buff or debuff any card placed on them, and some cards even have strong special powers that trigger once played. While the mechanics are easy to understand, the game is incredibly difficult to master, and I often found I had made a mistake a few turns ago that now put me in a disadvantageous situation, just like in chess.
Decks consist of eight cards, with a total deck-cost limit and a value on each card that increases the more powerful it is. This adds a nice forced prioritization that prevents us from placing all the strongest cards in the same hand.
The high-quality modern pixel art style is well-executed, and the sound design is pleasing. The main PvP mode is supported by multiple arcade modes and single-player dungeon-crawls that provide new cards or extra copies so existing cards can be leveled up.
Creatures of Aether monetizes through a $4.99 battle pass and iAPs for card packs, which create a pay-to-progress-faster advantage for paying players. However, the core gameplay is both deep and fun, and free players can still enjoy the many game-modes and simply grind for cards.
Google Play: Here
MiniReview link: Here

Raziel: Dungeon Arena [Total Game Size: 5.1 GB] (free)

Genre: RPG / Action / Co-op / Diablo-like - Requires Online Access
Orientation: Landscape
Required Attention: Full
tl;dr review:
Raziel: Dungeon Arena is a fun Diablo-like action RPG with solo and co-op dungeons, an insane amount of unique loot, neat 3D graphics, cute pets, and well-calibrated controls.
The game features 3 classes; archer, melee knight, ice priest, and although there is no character customization, we can at least switch build later in the game. As we level up, we unlock more and more skills and can gradually customize our build through one of the largest talent trees I’ve ever seen in a mobile game.
From the main city, we can meet and chat with other players, craft potions, team up for co-op dungeons, or jump into the single-player missions to slay hordes of enemies and find new loot with unique stats and set bonuses.
Raziel is a modern mobile game, for better or worse, which means lots of daily and monthly login rewards, achievements, events etc. My biggest gripes with the game, however, are that finding a team at lower levels is almost impossible and that while combat is fun, everything is too easy in the beginning.
Monetization happens through a $4.99 battle pass, a premium currency used primarily for cosmetics, and various “packs” of crafting materials and potions that go up to $19.99. There is no need to spend money on the game to enjoy it though, and while paying players definitely have an advantage in PvP, the game is primarily PvE-focused.
Google Play: Here
MiniReview link: Here

Shadow Fight Arena [Game Size: 1.2 GB] (free)

Genre: Fightign / Action / PvP / High-quality - Requires Online Access
Orientation: Landscape
Required Attention: Full
tl;dr review:
Shadow Fight Arena is a visually impressive PvP-focused melee fighting game where we collect a team of three heroes and battle it out in real-time 1v1 multiplayer matches with one hero at a time.
At the beginning of every match, both we and our opponent select which hero to start with. If our hero dies, we get to switch it out with one of the two remaining heroes. We keep going like this until we run out of heroes or have defeated the opponent’s heroes.
Each of the 16 total heroes have unique weapons, abilities, and stats that increase over time as they’re leveled up. Sometimes, we even get to select between two different upgrades, allowing us to customize each hero. Using a hero with stats and abilities that optimally counters the opponent’s hero is key to winning, and it makes combat fun and engaging.
After every match, we progress in the Arena ladder and Battle Pass progression system, both of which provide gold and hero cards used to unlock new heroes and upgrade existing ones.
The touch controls that include a left-side joystick and multiple attack and ability buttons on the right side are well-calibrated, and the punches and weapon attacks feel heavy and powerful. And with ranked, unranked, friendly matches, and AI game modes, there is plenty to dive into.
Shadow Fight Arena monetizes through a $13.49 monthly Battle Pass and hero loot boxes that allow paying players to progress faster than free players. It is all around one of the most impressive fighting games on mobile, but just be aware that while everything can be grinded, the monetization might make it difficult to progress fast without buying the Battle Pass.
Google Play: Here
MiniReview link: Here
NEW REVIEW APP: You can search and filter reviews and games I've played (and more) in my app MiniReview: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=minireview.best.android.games.reviews
Outdated (replaced by MiniReview): Sheet of all games I've played so far: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bf0OxtVxrboZqyEh01AxJYUUqHm8tEfh-Lx-SugcrzY/edit?usp=sharing
TL;DR Video Summary (with gameplay) of last week's 3 games: https://youtu.be/bazJkOqBWLQ
Episode 001 Episode 002 Episode 003 Episode 004 Episode 005 Episode 006 Episode 007 Episode 008 Episode 009 Episode 010 Episode 011 Episode 012 Episode 013 Episode 014 Episode 015 Episode 016 Episode 017 Episode 018 Episode 019 Episode 020 Episode 021 Episode 022 Episode 023 Episode 024 Episode 025 Episode 026 Episode 027 Episode 028 Episode 029 Episode 030 Episode 031 Episode 032 Episode 033 Episode 034 Episode 035 Episode 036 Episode 037 Episode 038 Episode 039 Episode 040 Episode 041 Episode 042 Episode 043 Episode 044 Episode 045 Episode 046 Episode 047 Episode 048 Episode 049 Episode 050 Episode 051 Episode 052 Episode 053 Episode 054 Episode 055 Episode 056 Episode 057 Episode 058 Episode 059 Episode 060 Episode 061 Episode 062 Episode 063 Episode 064 Episode 065 Episode 066 Episode 067 Episode 068 Episode 069 Episode 070 Episode 071 Episode 072 Episode 073 Episode 074 Episode 075 Episode 076 Episode 077 Episode 078 Episode 079 Episode 080 Episode 081 Episode 082 Episode 083 Episode 084 Episode 085 Episode 086 Episode 087 Episode 088 Episode 089 Episode 090 Episode 091 Episode 092 Episode 093 Episode 094 Episode 095 Episode 096 Episode 097 Episode 098 Episode 099 Episode 100 Episode 101 Episode 102 Episode 103 Episode 104 Episode 105 Episode 106 Episode 107 Episode 108 Episode 109 Episode 110 Episode 111 Episode 112 Episode 113 Episode 114 Episode 115 Episode 116 Episode 117 Episode 118 Episode 119 Episode 120 Episode 121 Episode 122 Episode 123 Episode 124 Episode 125 Episode 126 Episode 127 Episode 128 Episode 129 Episode 130 Episode 131 Episode 132 Episode 133 Episode 134 Episode 135 Episode 136 Episode 137 Episode 138 Episode 139 Episode 140 Episode 141 Episode 142 Episode 143 Episode 144 Episode 145 Episode 146 Episode 147 Episode 148 Episode 149 Episode 150 Episode 151 Episode 152 Episode 153 Episode 154 Episode 155 Episode 156 Episode 157 Episode 158 Episode 159

Hi, everybody. My name is Sid, and I’m an addict.
It took me a long time to accept that. But when you take a job in a casino just so that you can be there all the time and try to gain an edge, you’re an addict. It’s obvious even to me. More so to my family and friends, who I barely see anymore.
It’s not pills or coke, booze or heroin that I’m hooked on. I’m addicted to gambling.
The casino that made me so obsessed is not an ordinary one, though. It’s far from ordinary.
You don’t play for money at Fantasy Casino. You play for your dreams.
I hear you laughing.
But have you ever had a really, really great dream? One that got so good you snapped awake the second it started to get really excellent?
Well, imagine that times a thousand. Times a million.
A dream so real and so perfect that all of your fantasies become reality. Time stretches out. You feel like you are there forever. A lifetime passes before your return.
Infinite wealth, the ability to fly like superman, you’re surrounded by sex and beautiful people all day as you relax in a palace built to your mind’s most exacting specifications of perfection.
But then you wake up, and in an instant it is gone.
The power, the wealth, the endless sex and supernatural powers.
Everything is suddenly NORMAL again.
And so you go back to the casino.
I went back to the casino.
But the problem with gambling is that you don’t always win. And when you lose, suddenly the winnings are gone as well, vanished without a trace. All I knew was that I had to have that feeling again.
So I went inside the giant building and then followed the secret signs which led to a door that led to a staircase going downwards.
I went down the stairs and knocked on the door marked “Private” and waited for an answer.
“Password.”
The voice on the other side of the black door waited for my response.
“Seramth Gin.” I said the unnatural words carefully and deliberately, still not knowing their meaning.
A friend had told me the password, a fellow gambler who I would later find dead in his apartment. His corpse white, bloated, and maggot-infested.
His eyes were black and filled with blood which streamed from his eye sockets like tears. He had bit his tongue clean off and his fingernails were found lodged in various surfaces throughout his apartment. Like he had been trying to claw his way out of a steel box that only he could see.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. That was later. At this point I was still hopeful for another wonderful dream. Still thankful for his advice to seek out the place.
The door opened and I walked inside. It was the same as it had been the day before, only less busy at this time – still early afternoon.
I approached the table I had been sitting at the night before.
Poker – Texas Hold ‘em: Ten dream limit – the sign read.
The rules were simple. You got a stack of chips. If you doubled them, you received a dream. If you lost them, you lost a dream.
I wasn’t concerned about losing dreams yet, I still didn’t understand exactly what that meant.
When I lost my first stack of chips, I quickly bought in again. And again. And again.
Pretty soon I realized I had lost eight dreams with no winnings whatsoever. I was in a slump. A losing streak.
I decided to go home and count my losses. Literally, since I had no idea what that even meant.
As I got up to leave the table, the dealer looked at me. His eyes were remorseless and cold.
“See the cashier on your way out,” he said, handing me eight black chips.
I gulped and walked over to the glass window where the cashier sat waiting. Handing him the eight chips, he raised his eyebrows and clicked his tongue.
“That’s a shame. Hold out your hand please.”
Two men in black suits came up behind me suddenly and stood on either side of me, intimidating in their stature and demeanour.
I did as he asked and held out my hand with the palm facing up.
The cashier pulled out a strange-looking device from beneath the counter. It had a vial of vermillion-coloured liquid at the top that was attached to the rest of it which resembled a gun with a hypodermic needle at the end.
I screamed and tried to pull away, but the two men grabbed me and held my arm through the window. Thrashing and elbowing them, I tried to get away but it was useless.
The cashier injected the stuff into my veins quickly and it felt cold and slimy going through my system. I could feel it suddenly in my heart, turning it cold and then up into my mind and my lungs and all extremities causing me to shake and violently seize. I writhed on the floor, blood pouring from my ears and my eyes.
Finally the feeling settled down into a numbness that prickled the insides of my blood vessels. It wasn’t until later, once I realized what the casino really was, that I found out what they had done.
I went home with the certainty that they had injected me with something. If winning had resulted in the greatest dream I had ever had – essentially an almost never-ending fantasy – what would happen after a loss?
Nightmares. That was what it would be. I was sure of it.
I settled into bed that night and closed my eyes, drifting off to sleep quickly after such an emotionally exhausting afternoon.
As soon as my eyes closed, they opened again and it was morning.
It felt as if I had not slept at all. My mind was fuzzy and it was difficult to focus. My eyes wanted to close again but my alarm was telling me that it was time to get up for work, so I hit the “dismiss” button and hopped in the shower.
I threw on my clothes and went out the door. At work I noticed a few people looking at me strangely, but I didn’t realize until someone pointed it out to me that my shirt was on inside-out. At this point I was still working in an office doing commodities trading and such lapses were frowned upon.
If you couldn’t focus enough to put your shirt on properly in the morning, how could you focus enough to get the work done in such a demanding environment? Millions of dollars changing hands with each transaction meant that such trivial things were put under a magnifying glass and coupled with other subsequent mistakes each following day after that, I found myself in the boss’s office by the end of the week being handed my walking papers.
Desperate for rest after days of not feeling any benefit from sleep, I went back to the casino.
They knew just by looking at me how to dig their claws in further. After a couple hours I had managed to win myself a dream.
They handed me the complimentary cocktail as they had the time before. I hadn’t realized the significance of it and still didn’t, despite the unusual vermillion colour of the drink. I swallowed it in one gulp and went out the door practically dancing and clicking my heels, ready to go home and feel rested again.
My dream that night was wonderful. Everything I had hoped for in many ways.
But not as good as the first time. I wanted that feeling back again.
Knowing that it was a dream the whole time and realizing that it was going to end seemed to shorten the fantasy, made it seem hollow and manufactured.
If I could win again maybe it would be like that first time, I thought.
The casino drew me in again and again. I found myself a zombie most days, exhausted, at my wit’s end. Ready to call it quits for good and say goodbye.
But then I would win again and it would all seem to be alright for a while.
My debt kept growing and growing with nearly every trip. The hypodermic needle would be plunged into my skin and every time they had to hold me down. Every time I would feel a little more empty. A little more hollow.
Waking up every day began to feel the same. Nothing had definition or purpose.
“You’re here all the time,” one of the goons whispered to me as they shot the needle into my vein the time after that. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? You should just get a job here and then at least you’ll be in on the secret.”
I applied the next day and got an interview with the boss. I would find out later that if you got someone to apply there you got a one dream bonus.
In his office, the well-dressed man was sitting behind a massive polished ebony desk. The room was adorned with paintings, sculptures, and other high-priced artwork. He had photos everywhere of himself shaking hands with world leaders, new and old, for hundreds of years.
His face never changed. Never aged.
“So, you want to work with us? Tired of dreamless nights without end? You want to have some relief, is that it?”
“Yes. Please. Anything. I’ve been coming here for so long and it’s an endless cycle. I want back what I’ve lost but I keep finding myself more and more in debt with each visit.”
“Ah, so do you understand it now, then? What the ‘injections’ are?”
It finally dawned on me, sitting there. Not injections at all. They weren’t putting something in us. They were taking something out. The vermillion-coloured liquid in the vials – our dreams.
“If I take a job with you, will the same rules apply? Will they still take my sleep, my rest, every time I lose?”
“Yes. We can’t have the employees living by different rules than everyone else. But we will give you an alternative injection, so that you feel well-rested when you come in for your shift.”
“I’ll do it. I need to rest. I need to get some meaningful sleep. My life has been miserable ever since coming here.”
“Well, I can’t promise that this will help,” he said, getting up from his desk with a hypodermic gun in his hand. The vial of fluid sitting atop this one was jet-black and looked evil and poisonous. He rolled up his sleeves as he primed it and I watched a few beads of it drip oil-like out of the tip of the needle.
“What the hell is that!? I don’t want that stuff in me!”
“But you need to sleep, my dear worker. I can’t have you passing out at the blackjack table like a narcoleptic! You agreed to this, after all. You wanted to rest, and the only way for that to happen is for you to have SOME sort of dream. Not everyone is as lucky as you, you know. To have that wonderful vermillion fluid in your veins. Some people come to us begging to take it from them. Some of our employees for example, the ones who do the recruitment for us, are full of this black stuff.”
“What?” I had gotten up from the chair and was backing away from him towards the door. But I found it was locked as he approached.
“First you have to tell me the password, Sid.”
“Seramth Gin.” I said the words that I had said every time to gain access to the casino, only this time I pictured the letters and rearranged them in my mind.
“Nightmares.”
He smiled as he injected me with the vial of black hate, and it went into my veins feeling hot and unpleasant. I began to sweat and the beads of it turned cold on my skin as I shivered.
I’ll sleep tonight. I might even wake up feeling rested. But as long as I live and work at that casino, I’ll be afraid to dream again. Because now my unconscious hours are occupied by the most terrifying experiences imaginable. Nightmares beyond imagining in their awfulness. That is my fate.
Unless… Just maybe, I can win one more time.
JG
TCC

Previous Post Here
June 7th, 2007

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another. Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DoD may have a copy of you. "May". Uh. Ok. Perfectly fine, old chap. Hopefully my avatar is being well taken care of. Right? Because subjecting him to televised propoganda THE NEW NORMAL • THE GREAT RESET might be unsettling for him, and therefore his real world equivalents. Us.

Keep Calm and Carry On?

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project. "SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners". SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

OK. Let's get this straight and lay all the cards onto the table. The DoD has a simulation that they use to test Psy Ops and how they affect the populations. The NSA is military. The NSA has been data collecting for years. The CIA are working with the corporate military media establishment. And we have reports about media manipulation through social media. And people just accept this crap because, derp, they would never do that to their own citizens. Ok. I guess the psy op is working. Thanks for proving my point. Sigh.

Privacy is a Threat to Democracy

Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.

Privacy issues? Issues? Come on. These aren't issues. Privacy is a core freedom upon which our entire civilization rests. Why? Because privacy is dangerous, that's why. To whom? Those in power. Because if they don't know what we're thinking, they can't prepare for it. Case in point, the sources that led to the security situation at Capitol Hill. Something serious is happening, I would lay money on it. But they couldn't have just increased security without a reason, could they have? Nope. So the riots have them a reason. Because if they didn't have a reason a lot of people may have started wondering where this information was coming from. Me? I believe it came from simulations. As always, time will tell.

In fact, Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using SEAS to simulate crises on the US mainland.
The Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM-J9) in April began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces over "Noble Resolve 07", a homeland defense experiment.

Nah. They aren't using simulations over here. Not at all. So. Stop. Worrying. Theh only want what's best for us.

Feeding a whole-Earth simulation will be a colossal challenge.Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-oneOne organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.
Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a "like someone" with the same stats, but not the same name. SEAS bases its AI "thinking" on the theories of cognitive psychologists and the work of Princeton University professor Daniel Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavioural economics.

Don't you love how the writer put quotation marks around AI thinking. There are no quotation marks about this. Not at all. AI is thinking. It's about time we start actually thinking about what AI thinking actually means.

Chaturvedi, as do many AR developers, also cites the work of positive psychology guru Martin Seligman (known, too, for his concept of "learned hopelessness") as an influence on SEAS human behaviour models. The Simulex website says, if a bit vaguely, SEAS similarly incorporates predictive models based upon production, marketing, finance and other fields.

The psychology guru behind the concept of learned hopelessness. Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve. Ahem. Ok. So the SEAS human behaviour models can explore the way our avatars will react to psychological operations. And we have a pandemic happening. So is there any kind of biological warfare programs associated with psychological warfare?

The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments

Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments. Source Here

So how many times do they have to tell us about taking the opportunity of the crisis of Covid-19 to implement the, GREAT RESET. Is it a stretch to suggest all the stops are being pulled out for this moment? Cause I don't think it is. And if this is true, crap is about to get a whole lot worse in the next couple of months. Remember the Brazil variant strain that was written about at the start of the pandemic? Reddit Source Here

Brazil’s New COVID Strain Raises Big — and Scary — Questions

Source Here
Isn't that just freaking peachy. Really. Come on. A post written more than a year ago and now we see headlines about it? Not buying it. Nope. Not at all. Because all of this crap is starting to stink worse than rotten eggs.
And do you know who is strangely silent all of a sudden? Mr Klaus Schwab. Why? Shouldn't Mr Fourth Industrial Revolution still be foaming at the mouth while the "elected" officials scramble to speak at his forum? Because something is definitely off about all of this. Seriously off. He wouldn't shut up, world leaders suddenly started following suit, and then, nothing? Really?
So my question is, did the simulation get it wrong? Did it tell them there was a small window to take advantage that could possibly work? They rolled the dice and crapped out? And now they have to up the game to institute more learned hopelessness?
Learned hopelessness. AI manipulating human behaviour and shaping society? It all sounds like something put of a dark mirror episode doesn't it? But we would know if we're being manipulated, wouldn't we?

AI can now learn to manipulate human behaviour

The first experiment involved participants clicking on red or blue coloured boxes to win a fake currency, with the AI learning the participant’s choice patterns and guiding them towards a specific choice. The AI was successful about 70% of the time. In the second experiment, participants were required to watch a screen and press a button when they are shown a particular symbol (such as an orange triangle) and not press it when they are shown another (say a blue circle). Here, the AI set out to arrange the sequence of symbols so the participants made more mistakes, and achieved an increase of almost 25%. The third experiment consisted of several rounds in which a participant would pretend to be an investor giving money to a trustee (the AI). The AI would then return an amount of money to the participant, who would then decide how much to invest in the next round. This game was played in two different modes: in one the AI was out to maximise how much money it ended up with, and in the other the AI aimed for a fair distribution of money between itself and the human investor. The AI was highly successful in each mode. In each experiment, the machine learned from participants’ responses and identified and targeted vulnerabilities in people’s decision-making. The end result was the machine learned to steer participants towards particular actions. Source Here

There is nothing normal about our New Normal Great Reset. Nothing at all. It looks like an AI is a big part of all this. A really big part. Remember when Putin said that he who controls AI will control the planet? Extremely ominous and strange. And do you know what's even more ominous and stranger?
This:

Meeting with World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Martin Schwab

During his visit to St Petersburg, Vladimir Putin met with Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Martin Schwab.
November 27, 2019
Read the article. Source Here
Now you tell me that isn't the strangest thing that you have ever read. Why is an ex university professor meeting with Putin in Russia? And why does the Schwab sound like he's talking to an equal, or even worse, sound like he's talking to someone lower on the totem pole?
And the strangest part is the last two paragraphs:

Some people call me the father of the fourth industrial revolution. I wrote a book about it and would like to give it to you.

The father of the fourth industrial revolution? Ok. Someone thinks pretty highly of himself. Excuse me Mr Slchob, but I'm pretty sure Philip K. Dick was writing this crap before you learned to wipe your butt. And secondly, who the heck are you? Really.

I also heard, including from Minister Oreshkin, that Russia has managed to make significant advancements, especially in striving to develop artificial intelligence. We are asking ourselves how to cope with these challenges including via global cooperation. We think that specific problems will arise in building global cooperation in the area of new technologies. We will need new global standards, new ethical norms, including in AI technology development. This is the reason why we set up a network of centres where we analyse technologies of the fourth industrial revolution.

Come on! I heard from a minister that you've made significant advances in AI? And now I'm going to talk to you as if I'm running the planet? And all of this just happened before a world shifting pandemic and then the Great Reset goes into overdrive? Not. Buying. It. And before I wrap this up, go loom at the pictures. Doesn't Putin look like he's ready to attack? Trust me, that isn't good. Because if history has taught us anything, you don't want to try and dictate to Russia. They wrote the book on dictatorships. Seriously. They've only experienced "democracy" for, oh, about two years in total. If that. And remember Mr Schlob, the last time a German started dictating to Russia didn't end so well. Just saying.
Ok. That's all she wrote today. More coming on why we should be worried about where all of this is leading us.
Talk soon.

Posted by u/dwarfboy1717 1 day ago Friday 1/29/21 GME Expiry Date Means Nothing. Don't buy into the hype - shorts aren't just afraid of this Friday. Come down the rabbit hole with me.Discussion📷
Note: I am mostly summarizing the aggregate of explanations currently floating around about the 1/29/21 option expiry date. I don't claim any knowledge. This is not investment advice. Do your own research, don't invest what you can't afford to lose, and if something feels wrong it probably is.
TL;DR: This isn't about options (yet), it's about shares, and Institutional Investors are playing a dangerous game by convincing us (some of y'all have bought in without realizing it) that a magical short squeeze has some 3-day time limit, that Friday is somehow the end game, and are hoping that when investors don't see a $5,000 short squeeze by next week they will fold and take their gains at a "reasonable" double-digit stock price. Don't believe them. They can survive through mid-late February before the true short squeeze smashes upward. And I'll be ready. I like this stock and believe in it's long term potential, and I think it's undervalued.
THESIS: If institutional investors can (1) convince retail investors to sell stock at low prices and (2) convince their lenders to wait, then the 0.01% get richer.
JUSTIFICATION: There is so much public sentiment (passion, enthusiasm, excitement, anger, whatever) surrounding short (~1 day) price movements*, and Friday's expiring options (these are also end of month contracts), that it seems like big clever money may be trying to artificially create a sort of bear trap for shareholders.
Whatever happens in the next week or so (crest to $700? crash to $60?) almost means nothing in the long term, but could fool investors into giving these guys CHEAP ways out of their 140% float short interest positions. Remember, these are people who have been dumping tons of money for a long time, shorting the stock when it was in the single digits. They've been hoping for a GameStop bankruptcy, and manufacturing one as best they can.
IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME: Remember the VW infinite squeeze, where we saw weeks of crazy price movement before the actual peak. And that is a mild case, as most of the shares were held by an entity with legal, competitive, and strategic reasons and obligations forcing them to hold shares and artificially reducing the float, or available shares for trading. This reduced supply caused the short squeeze.
However, this time around we've got a huge short interest, much much larger by comparison than that from VW's 2008 peak, to the tune of 140% of shares available for trading (float). They've massively overreached, and are going to pay the price for that. But they haven't yet.
SO YOU'RE SAYING THERE'S A CHANCE: This time, however, if the big dogs can shake shareholders hard enough, weak links break and paper hands fold and a fantastic long term play starts to seem out of reach. The market manipulation wins.
DARE TO BELIEVE: Unfortunately for the shorts, GME has real long term prospects to revolutionize the gaming industry for consumers, and now has the attention and potential equity momentum (if they play it smart, which I think the new leadership will) to make this a reality.
From that link above:

In GME's case the rise in the stock price itself will likely result in fundamental improvements to the underlying economic metrics of the company.

This is not a happy ending story.

The beginning

The investment

The pivot

Interactive The Walking Dead

Entering Facebook

(After I’ve demoed the technology)
Director: Wait, can I try it?
Me: Sure, here’s my phone.
(Director takes the phone and scans the video. The phone showed information about the actor from the exact second Director scanned. Director stays hesitant for a couple of seconds…).
Director: I need this.
Me: Uhh… Ok!(My mind was like: Errr, what, how, can I ask… Wait, what?)
Director: Here’s the deal. We have a huge problem right now. We launched Facebook Watch recently and are having a lot of copyright infringements on the platform. We need to build something like YouTube’s ContentID. More info here.
Me: Ok, we can definitely help.
Director: I’ll put you in contact with the product team responsible for this and they’ll take it from there. We are evaluating acquisitions in this space to speed up our go-to-market.

The M&A process

Thanks for following up with us. It was a great experience working with your team and we think there is a great potential for your company and service.
We want to provide an update about the evaluation result. From the result, overall we see a good coverage and recall, and your team solved the problems real fast. However, due to low precision and high false positive rate, we decided not to moving forward to the next stage of the evaluation.
Thanks for your time and effort. I am sure our career will get crossed in the future

Caption: Facebook’s engineer email rejecting us
Did you feel that punch in the stomach? I surely felt it. It was so unfair to have amazing results on our side and receive this email. When we asked about the differences — to understand what went wrong on our side — we got this:

Facebook has our own metrics and process to evaluate the product value of the algorithm. But due to the policy, we are not allowed to share with you. My colleague’s point is the final result. Look forward to getting chance to work with you guys in the future.

Lessons Learned

The line that defines success and failure is extremely thin.
If you are being evaluated (by customers, partners or possible acquirers) define success KPIs beforehand. That way everyone will have the same common ground.
Don’t put all your eggs (expectations) into one basket.
Stick to what is working, i.e., work on what people want and measure it with data; not words nor promises.
Be kind to everyone. If you feel disrespected or hurt, take a step back. Take some time to breathe and don’t reply right away. Time heals everything and gives your perspective.
Don’t take life too seriously. Be patient but persistent.

Despite all learnings, the cold reality is that this was a failed startup… but I’m trying it again. This time I’m doing things differently. Follow me on Twitter as I continue to share my learnings and document my journey as a founder.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) Let me know if you have any questions.

This is not a happy ending story.

The beginning

The investment

The pivot

Interactive The Walking Dead

Entering Facebook

(After I’ve demoed the technology)
Director: Wait, can I try it?
Me: Sure, here’s my phone.
(Director takes the phone and scans the video. The phone showed information about the actor from the exact second Director scanned. Director stays hesitant for a couple of seconds…).
Director: I need this.
Me: Uhh… Ok!(My mind was like: Errr, what, how, can I ask… Wait, what?)
Director: Here’s the deal. We have a huge problem right now. We launched Facebook Watch recently and are having a lot of copyright infringements on the platform. We need to build something like YouTube’s ContentID. More info here.
Me: Ok, we can definitely help.
Director: I’ll put you in contact with the product team responsible for this and they’ll take it from there. We are evaluating acquisitions in this space to speed up our go-to-market.

The M&A process

Thanks for following up with us. It was a great experience working with your team and we think there is a great potential for your company and service.
We want to provide an update about the evaluation result. From the result, overall we see a good coverage and recall, and your team solved the problems real fast. However, due to low precision and high false positive rate, we decided not to moving forward to the next stage of the evaluation.
Thanks for your time and effort. I am sure our career will get crossed in the future

Caption: Facebook’s engineer email rejecting us
Did you feel that punch in the stomach? I surely felt it. It was so unfair to have amazing results on our side and receive this email. When we asked about the differences — to understand what went wrong on our side — we got this:

Facebook has our own metrics and process to evaluate the product value of the algorithm. But due to the policy, we are not allowed to share with you. My colleague’s point is the final result. Look forward to getting chance to work with you guys in the future.

Lessons Learned

The line that defines success and failure is extremely thin.
If you are being evaluated (by customers, partners or possible acquirers) define success KPIs beforehand. That way everyone will have the same common ground.
Don’t put all your eggs (expectations) into one basket.
Stick to what is working, i.e., work on what people want and measure it with data; not words nor promises.
Be kind to everyone. If you feel disrespected or hurt, take a step back. Take some time to breathe and don’t reply right away. Time heals everything and gives your perspective.
Don’t take life too seriously. Be patient but persistent.

Despite all learnings, the cold reality is that this was a failed startup… but I’m trying it again. This time I’m doing things differently. Follow me on Twitter as I continue to share my learnings and document my journey as a founder.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) Let me know if you have any questions.

50+ Real Money Making Android Apps for Everyone in 2021

android apps where you can win real money

android apps where you can win real money - win

FreeGameFindings

Friday 1/29/21 GME Expiry Date Means Nothing. Don't buy into the hype - shorts aren't just afraid of this Friday. Come down the rabbit hole with me.

How we almost got acquired by Facebook and failed. Here's what I learned.

The beginning

The investment

The pivot

Interactive The Walking Dead

Entering Facebook

The M&A process

Lessons Learned

Questions on Short Float, Short Ladder Attacks and Short Squeeze.

Q1) The short float % seems to be going down from a number of sources. Why are these not correct?

Q2) Can't the hedge funds just keep doing more short ladder attacks and drive the price down?

Q3) All these hedge funds are saying they're out of their short positions to align with question #1, we obviously don't believe them and they're probably racking up a ton of fees. How long can they really last?

Q4) When the short squeeze happens, what period of time are we talking about? Does it last 10 mins, 2 days, etc?

Q5) How do I know if it's a short ladder attack?

Q6) What % of the float do we need to own before this starts to squeeze (and is this publicly available)?

Q7) Why can't I buy more on Vanguard (relevant to other brokers too)

Q8) Isn’t it plausible that HF have been shorting at 300- 400$ level and are now taking in big time on their own ladder attacks to around the 250$ level?

Q9) How does the short % of the float matter if there are approximately 10M shares to cover with?

Q10) (from others) I’m trying to get into the gme/amc craze but public / webull apps is taking anywhere between 1-7 days to confirm deposits before i can use the funds in my bank account. is this new? is there a way to expedite the process?

Q11) What are some in depth posts that people believe should be read?

Q12) I've read a couple of posts that casually mention the possibility that GameStop could issue more shares, pulling in a bunch of money and essentially letting the shorts off the hook. Can GameStop do that? If so, why the hell wouldn’t they?

Q13) What happens if HFs have artificially created the counterfeit shares to the amount we hold which they exactly need and then when the short squeeze takes place, restrict all of us 🦍 and basically resell it to themselves and make our shares burn to the ground?

Autochess: Market Status and Design Analysis [effort post]

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

1st Era (2000s): Assimilation

2nd Era (2010s): Integration

3rd Era (2020s): Fragmentation

MARKET STATUS

THE AUDIENCE

DESIGN CHALLENGES

Flat Complexity & Progression

Unexciting Updates, Lack of Collection

Big ‘Snowball Effect’

Excessive Match Length

FINAL THOUGHTS

Special Thanks to…

How we almost got acquired by Facebook and failed. Here's what I learned.

The beginning

The investment

The pivot

Interactive The Walking Dead

Entering Facebook

The M&A process

Lessons Learned

3 Quick Tl;Dr Android Game Reviews / Recommendations (Episode 160)

Let's get to the games:

Creatures of Aether [Game Size: 189 MB] (free)

Raziel: Dungeon Arena [Total Game Size: 5.1 GB] (free)

Shadow Fight Arena [Game Size: 1.2 GB] (free)

I work at a crooked casino. You don't gamble with money here.

Flatten the Curve. Part 89. Sentient World Simulation. They Can Use AI to Manipulate Us. MKULTRA and Fort Detrick. Putin and Klaus Schwab met in St. Petersburg November 2019 to Talk About AI.

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

Keep Calm and Carry On?

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Privacy is a Threat to Democracy

Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.

In fact, Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using SEAS to simulate crises on the US mainland.

The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments

Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments. Source Here

Brazil’s New COVID Strain Raises Big — and Scary — Questions

AI can now learn to manipulate human behaviour

Meeting with World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Martin Schwab

Some people call me the father of the fourth industrial revolution. I wrote a book about it and would like to give it to you.

GME / Short Squeeze - Worth a read. Written and posted by u/dwarfboy1717

How we almost got acquired by Facebook and failed. Here's what I learned.

The beginning

The investment

The pivot

Interactive The Walking Dead

Entering Facebook

The M&A process

Lessons Learned

How we almost got acquired by Facebook and failed. Here's what I learned.

The beginning

The investment