Friend requests Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends. Ashley Belanger – May 21, 2025 9:38 am | 1 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer. At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family. As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly. "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over," a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg's words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram. Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that "it doesn't matter much" if someone's friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it's not so much focused on beating the FTC's flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe. But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn't move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta's own press releases seem to back that up. Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg's testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the "magic of friends," introducing a "friends" tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots. Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friends (wh0 can never leave its platform) to bait the loneliest among us into more engagement. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought $5 billion in Facebook's 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand "people's capacity to build and maintain relationships." At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta's platforms in the future, predicting that "several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive." Meta declined to comment further on the company's vision for social media's future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that "the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality," claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta's true rivals. "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final," Meta's spokesperson said. "Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.” Meta faces calls to open up its platforms Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, "it was so beautiful because we didn't think about bots and trolls. We didn't think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place." But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms' functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users' attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing. Meta "is still entirely based on personal social networking," Weinstein told Ars. In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after "competition became impossible" with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app's more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe's failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the "anti-Facebook." Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe's attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he's urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta's platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry. "The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data," Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. "Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched." Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta's should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said. Doctorow said that solution would create "an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat" by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And "if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy," Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive. Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing "enshittification" of platforms (a term he coined) ever since platforms took over the Internet. "I'm 55 now, and I've gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I've had too many experiences with how things fail," Doctorow told Ars. "And I just want to make sure that if I'm on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave." Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed Weinstein pointed out that Meta's alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it. As Meta's monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled "No Instagram, no privacy" rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025. In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt "blessed" to have "somehow escaped having an Instagram account," feeling no pressure to "update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with." But despite never having an account, he's found that "you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram," complaining that "it bugs me" when friends seem to know "more about my life than I tell them" because of various friends' posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as "being in control of what other people know about you" and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to "fix or regulate this," Leys suggested, or maybe some universal "etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering." On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media? Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, "just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people" or saying that "the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences." Others seemed to better understand Leys' point of view, with one agreeing that "the problem is that our modern norms (and tech) lead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network." Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, "I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine." Leys told Ars that he would "absolutely" be in favor of personal social networks like Meta's platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other "odd social dynamics." Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends' posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people's feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That's when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends' content engagement. So while it's easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram's default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels "humiliating" and like a "social risk." But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted. Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that "consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this" with features like the "friends" tab, while claiming there's less interest in this content. Leys doesn't think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or "indeed [got] tired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building... the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back," especially if it's easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences. He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that "it would still not get me on Instagram." Interoperability shakes up social media Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC's monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta's influence over the social media world may be waning just as it's facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever. The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta (then Facebook), the FTC claimed, was avoiding "training users to check multiple feeds," which might allow other apps to "cannibalize" its users. "Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves," the FTC alleged. By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook's permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged. According to the FTC, Meta continues "to this day" to "screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance," and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up. One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that "huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power" that "cross political lines" are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues. For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users. Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks. In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol "to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs," which maps users' connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate "the network effect" that locks users into platforms like Meta's "while interrupting unwanted data collection." At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into "building interoperable gateways" between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel "awkward" at first, but ultimately, it may be like "having to find the diesel pump at the gas station" instead of the unleaded gas pump. "You'll still be going to the same gas station," Doctorow suggested. Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust. The EFF supports regulators' attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that "if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better." But would interoperability fix social media? The FTC has alleged that "Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs." Meta disputes the FTC's complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network. However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called "The Economics of Social Media" in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain "resistant to interoperability" because "it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away." For Meta, research shows its platforms' network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but "clearly still exist" despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said. Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said that "interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors." He's hoping that passing these "long-overdue requirements" will "boost competition and give consumers more power." Aridor told Ars it's obvious that "interoperability would clearly increase competition," but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition "since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility." Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash. Aridor said there is currently "very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability," but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely "push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content." Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta's alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the "natural remedy" following a potential win in the FTC's lawsuit. Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta's influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg's vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends' behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram. Aridor's team's article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that's true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts. "While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives," his team's article concluded. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 1 Comments

Not every client has a firm grasp on their priorities when starting a project, but the marching orders from one Central Texas couple were abundantly clear: They wanted to convert a classic car garage on their estate into a dance hall and speakeasy, creating their own social sanctuary. After enlisting designer Sarah Stacey to bring their vision to life, that “simple” project quickly catapulted into a four-year, all-encompassing design journey when the pair added the renovation of their 4,900-square-foot primary home into the scope. It was during this time that Stacey, an avid auction enthusiast, shared her passion and expertise with her clients. “Walking through auction previews is thrilling—you wonder who owned the items and how they were used. You can feel the history,” she explains. “New homes need stories; we can design an entire room around a piece. Plus, you can save a lot of money at these events.”But before the bidding wars came planning. Stacey reimagined the space that once housed the former owner’s car collection as a moody billiards club, replete with plenty of lounge seating, a full bar salvaged from a Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and vintage collectibles, including an original Jimi Hendrix guitar. To separate the dance hall from the speakeasy, she cleverly utilized an iconic British telephone booth as the secret entrance from one area to the other. A simple push of the back wall gets you in—if you know there’s a door, that is. This is a dopamine interior.... It’s immersive and just makes you happy.For the main house, the objective was to embrace the home’s original Mediterranean style, but amplify it with a series of thoughtful selections. Stacey meticulously evaluated “every single Sherwin-Williams white” to find the ideal buttery color for the main living areas (Casa Blanca, Sherwin-Williams), incorporated 200-year-old salvaged wood beams, and designed the laundry room in the spirit of a French garden, complete with an undercounter striped sink skirt worthy of a Parisian café.She then set out to blend old-world charm—like the lavishly draped canopy bed in the primary suite—with contemporary pieces, such as large-scale pendants and multitiered chandeliers. The overall design is enhanced by colorful carpets, including a striking snake pattern in the living room and a hand-tufted graphic rug in the dining area. Auction house wins, antique treasures, and Parisian flea-market finds complete this unexpected and unconventional Texas haven.FAST FACTSDesigner: Sarah Stacey Interior DesignLocation: Central TexasThe Space: A garage-turned-speakeasy with a dance hall and a 4,900 sq ft main house with 3 bedrooms, 2 living rooms, a dressing room, sauna, and wet bar. SPEAKEASYThe former garage transformed into a go-to party hub.Stephen KarlischWallpaper: Phillip Jeffries. Sconces: Visual Comfort. Bar Stools: Nior. Armchairs: Hickory Chair. Coffee table: Sunpan. Drink Tables: Robert James. The bar is from a Ruth’s Chris restaurant and has become the heart of the space. It’s where friends and family naturally gather, often ending the night belting out karaoke songs, tipsy and totally in the moment.Stephen KarlischStephen KarlischThe husband won the six Orgy lithographs by Picasso at an online auction and Stacey hired artist Elisa Gomez to paint the frames. One of the standout features above the bar table is an original Jimi Hendrix guitar—a striking tribute to the rock 'n' roll legend. A custom tufted banquette in Schumacher fabric sits alongside Robert James café tables and under Hinkley pendants for the ultimate lounge experience.Stephen KarlischSeating: Hickory Chair. Coffee table: vintage. Rug: vintage, EtsyA cozy corner of the room is designed for dance breaks, providing plentiful options where guests can sit and take five. A framed archival photograph of Jimi Hendrix features a guitar that the couple purchased for their own collection. Stephen KarlischA British telephone booth gets recast as the secret entrance between the speakeasy and dance hall. See Stacey's go-to formula for a memorable entrance below. Create your own one-of-a-kind entrance like designer Sarah StaceyFind something that resonates with you. Stacey’s clients considered a Coca-Cola machine but fell in love with this phone booth.In this case, the designer brought on a contractor to remove the back of the booth and then cleverly recreate it as a hidden door.Keep it simple with a wall panel that pushes open, or go elaborate with an engineer-approved coded release—just type in the numbers and voilà!Always make sure there’s a manual way in and out!LIVING ROOMA warm white by Sherwin-Williams complements the original stone floors.Stephen KarlischSofas: custom, in Vervain fabric. Seating: Alfonso Marina, in Pierre Frey (chairs) and Fox Linton (bench) fabrics.Vivid and bold, the living room design comes alive through a colorful carpet, highlighted by a striking snake-patterned centerpiece designed by a tattoo artist. The Picasso to the right of the fireplace went missing, but was thankfully found and now has a place of prominence.KITCHENClever storage solutions are packed in this European-inspired kitchen.Stephen KarlischRange: La Cornue. Backsplash and Countertops: Aria Stone Gallery. Runner: vintage, Black Sheep Unique. Island Pendants: Urban Electric. Island: DeVOL.  Stephen KarlischLight fixture: Vintage. Dining table: Vintage. Dining chairs: Gregorius Pineo with Pierre Frey fabric.  A prep island by Devol provides easy access to dinnerware stored behind glass doors. It’s finished with an aged copper countertop that sets off the beveled white oak herringbone floor. New herringbone wood floors add a built-in patina to this newly created kitchen. The breakfast room chairs are upholstered in Pierre Frey fabric that Stacey treated with a wipeable vinyl coating. Pendants: The Urban Electric Co.WET BARA convenient bar for entertaining in the main living space. Stephen KarlischSconces: Allied Maker. Stools: Paul Ferrante, in Kelly Wearstler fabric. Table Lamp: Sunday Shop. Wanting an option to entertain in the main house, the homeowners asked Stacey for a bar with seating and room for their collection of cocktail glasses. A mirrored backdrop adds shine and glamour while bouncing light around the room. DINING ROOMContemporary and vintage pieces make this dining room memorable.Stephen Karlisch Dining chairs: Gregorius Pineo, in Moore & Giles leather. Chandelier: custom, Apparatus Studio. Rug: Christopher Farr.In the dining room, an eclectic mix of furniture and accessories meld into a one-of-a-kind entertaining scene. The mismatched Venetian mirrors were won at an auction, the bust of David originally sat outside in the flower beds, and the painting was found online. OWNER'S SUITEA bedroom bathed in rich green sets the scene for a luxurious, serene escape.Stephen KarlischPaint color: Chimichurri by Benjamin Moore. Wallcovering: Porter Teleo. Bedframe and fabric: Alfonso Marina.Stephen KarlischLight fixture: Fortuny. Sofa: Vintage, recovered in House of Hackney fabric. Trunk: Vintage, Louis Vuitton. Inspired by kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with metallic lacquer, the Porter Teleo wallcovering sets the palette for this room. Yards of Fortuny fabric give the Alfonso Marina bed a regal air. The vintage sofa is reupholstered in a luxurious House of Hackney textile, featuring a bold, substantial trim detail.BATHROOMLavish stone and custom flooring create a one-of-a-kind en-suite.Stephen KarlischStone: Aria Stone Gallery. Vanity: Custom. Fixtures: Watermark. Sconces: Apparatus Studio.A custom terrazzo floor by Marble Buro grounds this space. Its unique coloration and less organic structure allow the marble backsplash and elaborate custom wood-carved mirrors, meant to mimic Black Forest-style design, to take center stage.Stephen KarlischStacey originally wanted the marble book-matched, but when her fabricator said the slabs weren’t symmetrical, they decided to rotate each one 180°, creating a consistently random design with even veining. Bench: custom.LAUNDRY ROOMThis utilitarian space is full of natural light. Stephen KarlischPaint: Stone Blue, Farrow & Ball. Wallpaper: Botanica Claustra by Papier Francais. Backsplash: Zia Tile. Curtain fabric: Clarence House.Papier Français partnered with Bibliothèque Nationale de France to bring back more than 60 archival prints, including this Bon factory flowering-trellis wallpaper, which turns this utilitarian space into a year-round spring jewel box. THE DRESSING ROOM The "closet" was quickly expanded to feel more like a boutique retail space.Stephen KarlischCeiling wallpaper: Gracie. Light fixture: Visual Comfort. Sofas: Mr. Brown in De la Cuona fabric and Samuel & Sons trim. Carpet: Nourison. Pillows: Dedar. Library ladder: Alaco. Hardware: Armac Martin.Stephen KarlischPaint color: Brinjal by Farrow & Ball. Hardware: Armac Martin.The entire main house and garage renovation began with a closet redesign. Stacey came to assess the closet, cataloging everything from long- and short-hang sections to shoes and bags, and it quickly became clear the space was too small. This discovery sparked the decision to expand and elevate the closet...and set the stage for a full home transformation.SAUNAThe ultimate in-home spa experience. Stephen KarlischA discreet sauna is the preferred spot to recover after a night of dancing. About the DesignerSarah Stacey is known for her artful approach to layering, creating spaces that balance timeless elegance with a fresh, eclectic edge. Raised in Louisiana and influenced by antique auctions, Southern cities, and global travel, her style embraces bold contrasts and personal storytelling. With a background in studio art and interior design from LSU, she brings a vibrant, collected sensibility to both residential and commercial projects. Now based in Texas with her musician husband and their son, Sarah’s work is infused with the same energy and joy that defines her life.SHOP THE SPACEFarrow & Ball Stone Blue Paint Color$143 at Farrow & BallItalian Venetian Murano Blue Glass Chandelier$8,250 at 1stDibsLa Cornue Cornu Fé 110 Range Matte Black$13,275 at Williams SonomaCredit: Williams SonomaPablo Picasso LithographNow 20% Off$3,000 $2,400 at 1stDibs

Image: Austin VoigtAt PAX East, we had a chance to sit down with the lively Nico Papalia and Top Hat Studios - developer of Athenian Rhapsody, and its newly-announced prequel, Tales of Tuscany (releasing on “whatever you play games on,” including Switch, in 2026). We wanted to learn a bit more about what inspired such a mad-cap universe, and where the WarioWare / EarthBound / Pokémon-esque ideas all stemmed from. While it was a bit of a challenge to talk over the raucous laughter coming from the crowd gathered at the demo booth, we managed to get an inside glimpse at Papalia's surprising backstory and his work on both games.Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube813kWatch on YouTube Here is our interview with Nico, which was just as entertaining and zany as the universe these games are based in... Nintendo Life: So, let's start from the top — what was the inspiration behind the universe of Tales of Tuscany and Athenian Rhapsody? There seem to be some Earthbound vibes in there... Nico Papalia: Honestly, I didn't even play Earthbound until AFTER I started Athenian Rhapsody - fun fact! I bit into it and was like, 'I feel like this meshes with me,' and I felt like it looked like what I was making. Definitely inspired by Pokémon on Game Boy Advance, played a lot of that. I also played a lot of Castle Crashers - The Behemoth are my friends, so I talked to them a lot, and we're actually discussing working on something together too — very slapstick-y, you know — but they're so tight about their IPs, so... we're still talking. I had big ideas - but I never knew programming, I went to school for art, I was doing traditional pencil art and stuff - I didn't know what I was doing. So it built over time, and I'm very fortunate and lucky that I was able to share this at the scale that I did, and turn it into my job. It's very personal. "Slapstick-y" is definitely the right word for these games, they're hilarious. Yeah, it doesn't take itself too seriously, so the inspiration for the world is just basically my life, my friends, and what I think is funny at the moment. I'll just throw funny things in there as I think of them - and the players seem to love it. I'm a solo dev, so I can kind of have the final say and just do whatever I want. It's fun. In the first game, I took some risks and had this 'invisible grilled cheese' in the map, like an item, and I thought nobody was going to find it - but someone found it within eight hours of launch! I crashed out on social, I bugged out. Will there be any secrets or easter eggs to find in Tales of Tuscany? There aren't too many secrets yet - I'm still developing it, and I just finished the main story, so now I have to do the 'evil' story, and I'll kind of just throw some extra stuff in there before it releases, probably around spring 2026. Tell us a little more about how the two games differ. You know, making Athenian Rhapsody was kind of slow. I started with GameMaker, and it just kind of snowballed. So I honestly didn't really know what I was doing, going into the first game. It was in 4:3 ratio, like Game Boy Advance - because I'm a big GBA guy. So at first I was like, "Yeah, this is awesome!" Then, you know, it comes to porting it and I'm like... "Oh no." So, Tales of Tuscany is in the RIGHT resolution. It's also got more control customisations, quality-of-life stuff like that. Round 2: bigger, better, stronger. I like to say, Athenian Rhapsody is like Pokémon Emerald, and Tales of Tuscany is more like Pokémon Black & White - based on the battles and stuff, with the camera movement, sprite work, stuff like that. So you're clearly a big Pokémon fan too! What are some of the different games you played growing up? I played a lot of Game Boy Advance games - Madagascar, Power Rangers Dino Thunder, Minish Cap, and things like that. My grandma would just go buy them for me. Or I played Crash Bandicoot on the PS2, and I would just stay in the starting area and mess with stuff - I never progressed in the game, and that was actually probably what I do with most of these games. I never progressed; I just did things. And I guess it all kind of just formed that inspiration for me. Image: Top Hat Studios Interesting - so are you a bit of a completionist then? Because this game — with all of the different choices and storylines — seems a bit overwhelming for a completionist, like you could never *actually* complete it entirely. You know what, when I was a teenager, I was more of a completionist; I would 100% complete Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze and stuff like that. But a lot of times, I was just kind of a stupid guy who didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't advance through the plots, I never got Rayquaza [in Pokémon Emerald] - so I would just go and do random things. And now, I'm actually kind of the opposite of that. So making Athenian Rhapsody and Tales of Tuscany, I want a kid to be able to just go around and have fun. The games seem to be designed almost like a constant dopamine hit. Players are allowed to just be mischievous and do whatever they want. And there's probably no way you could experience every single choice available to you in the games. That's exactly it! That's kind of what me and my friends like. You kind of have to get in there a few times, and the way it worked out, some players like that, and some don't. Some people are that objective, numeric, "I'm done, check the box" thing - but with these games, the experience is always going to be different, depending on who you have in your party and the choices you make. Another thing is that, it doesn't feel 'perfect', and a lot of people like that. Did you always intend for the game to be a 'choose-your-own-adventure' style like that? Yeah, I always intended for it to be like that, but I didn't exactly know how to do it at first. I couldn't figure it out. So, Athenian Rhapsody was not programmed very well... Tales of Tuscany is programmed much better, I was able to pull it off better. But I just had to start small and build off of it, because I had big ideas - but I never knew programming, I went to school for art, I was doing traditional pencil art and stuff, I didn't know what I was doing. So it built over time, and I'm very fortunate and lucky that I was able to share this at the scale that I did, and turn it into my job. It's very personal. Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube813k As someone who studied art and went to school for it, did that help with the development of the game itself - at least, the art aspect of it? That's actually a sick question - it must have! I went to SUNY Oneonta, awesome school, I had a lot of great teachers. I was all into anatomy — transformational anatomy — and it took me kind of a while to figure it out, using space and character design. So when I started Athenian Rhapsody, my pixel art was very poor - I didn't have these fully-saturated colours yet, I didn't figure that out yet. My sprites, I was doing the pillow shading... so it took me a while to get it. There's some kind of interlink, but that skill definitely wasn't immediate; I had to learn to access that part of my brain, learning the basics of pixel art. Even in Athenian Rhapsody, when you play it, you'll see there are 10 things going on in one room; that's because I didn't know what I was doing with the space! That honestly led to this feeling of extremely hyper pace, things around every corner... But it works! The absurdism is what makes it all so endearing. Part of it sounds like it was accidental, trial-and-error, but that actually became a really cool thing. Exactly! And I was just doing what I wanted to do. I got lucky that people liked it. Some people think it's a little too much, but I've also heard from a lot of players who really like it, saying they love the story. Another publication, the reviewer said he thought the story "changed vibes too much," and that's where he wrote me off for points. But I've got other people — especially younger kids, but a lot of adults, too — saying they love that about the story! And I personally think it's very needed. A lot of times in this industry, people can take themselves a little too seriously, and I appreciate that you're just doing what you wanna do. It seems like people are drawn to that. Yeah, I try and get very personal and show myself as I am. That's how I built this, doing tutorials online and building a following just being myself. I just took my phone and filmed my screen showing "Today I did this," and I was just being real. But I'm lucky, I still just get to do whatever I want. Like for Tales of Tuscany, the team thought it was a little bit of a risk, making the main character a sheep... Lambypoo - it reminds me of my dog's toy, Lambchop! Oh my god, YES! That's exactly it! I have a hundred of those laying around my house, ripped up! That's where it came from, I'm so glad you said that! So I was just like... yo, what if I had a button, where the lamb just started "baaa"-ing? And that's where the idea for the 'Baa' button came from. You know, it doesn't always have to be this "Hold X, charge your sword..." - you can just have fun with it. So the 'Baa' turned into an interaction tool - you can break plants and cars and stuff, because people just wanna do fun stuff, like the dopamine hits we talked about earlier. So I'm trying to hone in on that. Images: Top Hat Studios I'm still shocked you hadn't played the Earthbound / Mother games prior to starting your first game. It feels like such a spiritual successor to those games. Right? And when it comes to the flavour text in those games, like the options are: "Yeah", or "I'm lactose intolerant" - that's exactly how I write, too. It almost unlocked something, when I saw that. I was like, 'Okay, so this is okay what I'm doing, this irreverence.' I watched a documentary on Earthbound, and the director was saying he had a very intuitive approach - he didn't plan it all out, he just did it block-by-block, and that's exactly what I do, too. So I guess it's that same brain type, maybe? And I had friends from my school who were trying to tell me: "Yeah, you have to block the whole game out" and all of this stuff, and I was like: "Dude, but I'm changing it every day?". So there are a lot of differences between the two games and how much I planned out Tales of Tuscany, but they're the same spirit. Speaking of Earthbound, I've heard you refer to your games as "JRPGs" a few times - what does that label mean to you specifically? Honestly, I've been saying "JRPG" lately just because I think of a long-narrative-based game, and "RPG" is too broad. But I don't know... I also call it an "IRPG" sometimes — "Italian RPG" — because I'm Italian, and Italians do like long conversations. For someone who's never heard of either of your games, what's the one thing you would say to get them to take a look at this series? Out of all of the RPGs and JRPGs out there, there are a lot, and a good one that really makes it to the finish line is hard to find. This game has a lot of love in it, there's something to love in it for everybody, that's a big part of how I made the game. I loved Game Freak's early philosophy of trying to strike a balance between 'cute' and 'cool', and how everyone has a favourite pokémon. And with Athenian Rhapsody, I tried to make one follower that everyone could love. It's the game that conforms to what you like, and everyone will get something out of it. The 'rhapsodies' are like Gen 1 trading; I wanted everyone to get something out of it. In Pokémon, you can port your Pokémon across all of the consoles, and that's kind of what I was trying to do. We'll see how that works! So, the 'munchkins' are making a comeback, too, only this time, the weasels are watching you and ruining everything. This new feature seems pretty cruel, and I'm wondering what happened to you as a child that made you want to torture people? HA! So, in the first game, I had a debug option in the 'pause' menu — just a placeholder — and it was called 'munchkins', and all these stupid things. And I was like, eff it, I'm gonna make 'munchkins' a real thing. So basically, you have to wait, like, 8-10 hours to download them, and you have a 50% chance of failing... and if it works, it's just a picture of some art of mine that says like, "Congratulations" - but I didn't realize everyone was going crazy over that! So with Tales of Tuscany, I thought 'Okay, I won't have a random 50% chance of failing at the end... but there WILL be weasels... and the weasels come and slowly go across the screen, and when they tell you, you have to press an input, otherwise they'll corrupt the munchkin.' I thought, 'I can't just do the same thing again', so I changed it up a little bit. Nobody else is doing munchkins! Nobody else is doing something to the player where they're like, 'No, you do it the way I want you to do it, or else you fail, and I'm not making it easier because you're complaining.' @athenianrhapsody Revolutionary new gameplay mechanic. Wishlist Tales of Tuscany on Steam #pixelart #indiegames #undertale #deltarune #earthbound #nintendo #athenianrhapsody #pokemon #indiegame #gaming #jrpg #omori #yumenikki #fearandhunger #lisathepainful #chainedechoes #talesoftuscany #warioware ♬ original sound - Athenian Rhapsody You're just going to make the game you want to make, and purposely live outside of the box. Was there anything too crazy in Tales of Tuscany that ended up getting vetoed yet? Yeah, there are a few things my publishers tell me I have to edit... I know more how to skirt the line now, but there were a few parts that might have to change. There's this character from Athenian Rhapsody called Uncle Billiard, and he's in this one again because he's a great character - and he has this hot dog place, but they all call the hot dogs 'wieners'... and there's this one character who's like, "Oh yeah, my double wiener sandwich..." and looking back on it, I'm like, "I can't just be throwing 'wiener' around like that." Or like, I wanted to have an enemy with a plumber's crack, and a mechanic where you have to throw things in it. And I actually vetoed that for Athenian Rhapsody, because it was kind of disgusting. ...Ask forgiveness, not permission? Yep, that's my motto! Image: Top Hat Studios Do you have plans to add any more to this universe, or do you think you'll go in a totally different direction? Honestly, I think this IP was a good one, it's strong. I did specifically want to do three RPGs. Why three, because of Earthbound? Oh, I didn't even think about that! I just thought it would be a nice number. You should do three, and just never release the final one here. HA, yeah, I'll just say there's a third! You know, I did originally want to do three, but making this game, I'm nearing the end of the creative development, and I kind of want to take a break from RPGs for a bit. We're doing the mobile game, too - it's called Goobie Garden, and Thunder Goober is in it, he obviously hit something, so even if I do decide to take a break with the IP, I'll always come back to it. But I think for my next console game, I'd like to do something a little more simple, mechanic-based... maybe a battler? I'd like to do a roguelike game. Not sure yet though! This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Thank you, Nico Papalia (@AthenianRhapso1 on X) and the team at Top Hat Studios, for taking the time to answer our questions. Tales of Tuscany will be coming to PC and consoles in 2026. Will you be playing Tales of Tuscany when it releases? Did you play Athenian Rhapsody? Let us know in the comments below. Plenty of new Switch (2) offerings See Also Share:0 2 Austin started gaming at 2 years old and has been addicted ever since. Her Zelda, Mario, Pokémon & Animal Crossing obsessions freak people out. She habitually carries a mini projector around to play her Switch in console mode in weird places. Her favorite gaming snack is pizza rolls, because greasy controllers are her bugaboo. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles Nintendo Unveils Diddy Kong's Brand New Design Cap's off The First Review For Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time Is In A fantasy score? 12 Switch Games Are Getting Free Switch 2 Upgrades, Here's What You Can Expect Nintendo's free updates arrive next month Review: Capcom Fighting Collection 2 (Switch) - A Cracking Collection Of Top-Class Arcade Fighters A Dream(cast) collection

Image Credit: Chat GPT o3I’ve been using AI coding assistants like Claude Code for a while now, and I’m here to say (with all due respect to people who have substance abuse issues), I may be an addict. And boy is this is an expensive habit.Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting. Vibe coding operates on the principle of variable-ratio reinforcement, a powerful form of operant conditioning where rewards come unpredictably. Unlike fixed rewards, this intermittent success pattern (“the code works! it’s brilliant! it just broke! wtf!”), triggers stronger dopamine responses in our brain’s reward pathways, similar to gambling behaviors.What makes this especially effective with AI is the minimal effort required for potentially significant rewards — creating what neuroscientists call an “effort discounting” advantage. Combined with our innate completion bias — the drive to finish tasks we’ve started — this creates a compelling psychological loop that keeps us prompting.I don’t smoke, but don’t these bar graphs look like ciagrettes?Since Claude Code has been released, I have probably spent over $1,000 vibe coding various projects into reality (some of which I hope to announce soon, don’t worry).But lets talk about the expense too, because I think there’s something bad there as well: coding agents, and especially Claude 3.7 (the backend of Claude Code), tend to write too much code, a phenomenon that ends up costing users more than it should.Where an experienced developer might solve a problem with a few elegant lines with a thoughtful functional method, these AI systems often produce verbose, over-engineered solutions that tackle problems incrementally rather than addressing them at their core.My initial reaction was to attribute this to the relative immaturity of LLMs and their limitations when reasoning about abstract logic problems. Since these models are primarily trained to predict and generate text based on patterns they’ve seen before, it makes sense that they might struggle with the deeper architectural thinking that leads to elegant, minimal solutions.My human code on the left, Claude Code on the right implementing the same algorithmAnd indeed, the highly complex tasks I’ve handed to them have largely resulted in failure: implementing a minimax algorithm in a novel card game, crafting thoughtful animations in CSS, completely refactoring a codebase. The LLMs routinely get lost in the sauce when it comes to thinking through the high level principles required to solve difficult problems with computer science.In the example above, my human implemented version of minimax from 2018 totals 400 lines of code, whereas Claude Code’s version comes in at 627 lines. The LLM version also requires almost a dozen other library files. Granted, this version is in TypeScript and has a ton of extra bells and whistles, some of which I explicitly asked for, but the real problem is: it doesn’t actually work. Furthermore, using the LLM to debug it requires sending the bloated code back and forth to the API every time I want to holistically debug it.In an effort to impress the user and over-deliver, LLMs end up creating a rat’s nest of ultra-defensive code littered with debugging statements, neurotic comments and barely-useful helper funcitions. If you’ve ever worked in a highly functional production codebase, this is enough to drive you insane.I think everyone who spends any time vibe coding eventually discovers something like this and realizes that it’s much more worthwhile to work with a plan composed of discrete tasks that could be explained to a junior level developer vs. a feature-level project handed off to a staff engineer.There’s also the likelihood that the vast majority of code that LLMs have been trained on tends to be inelegant and overly verbose. Lord knows there’s a lot of AbstractJavaFinalSerializedFactory code out there.But I’m beginning to think the problem runs deeper, and it has to do with the economics of AI assistance.The economic incentive problemMany AI coding assistants, including Claude Code, charge based on token count — essentially the amount of text processed and generated. This creates what economists would call a “perverse incentive” — an incentive that produces behavior contrary to what’s actually desired.Let’s break down how this works:The AI generates verbose, procedural code for a given taskThis code becomes part of the context when you ask for further changes or additions (this is key)The AI now has to read (and you pay for) this verbose code in every subsequent interactionMore tokens processed = more revenue for the company behind the AIThe LLM developers have no incentive to “fix” the verbose code problem because doing so will meaningfully impact their bottom lineAs Upton Sinclair famously noted: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Similarly, it might be difficult for AI companies to prioritize code conciseness when their revenue depends on token count.The broader implicationsThis pattern points to a more general concern in AI development: the alignment between how systems are monetized and how well they serve user needs. When charging by token count, there’s naturally less incentive to optimize for elegant, minimal solutions.Even “all you can eat” subscription plans (e.g. Claude’s “Max” subscription) don’t fully resolve this tension, as they typically come with usage caps or other limitations that maintain the underlying incentive structure.System instructions and verbosity trade-offsThe perverse incentives in AI code generation point to a more fundamental issue that extends beyond coding assistants. When she was reading a draft of this, Louise pointed out some recent research from Giskard AI’s Phare benchmark that reveals a troubling pattern that mirrors our coding dilemma: demanding shorter responses jeopardizes the accuracy of the answers.According to their findings, instructions emphasizing conciseness (like “answer this question briefly”) significantly degraded factual reliability across most models tested — in some cases causing a 20% drop in hallucination resistance. When forced to be concise, models face an impossible choice between fabricating short but inaccurate answers or appearing unhelpful by rejecting the question entirely. The data shows models consistently prioritize brevity over accuracy when given these constraints.There’s clearly something going on where the more verbose the LLM is, the better it does. This actually makes sense given the discovery that chain-of-thought reasoning improves accuracy, but this issue has begun to feel like a real tradeoff when it comes to these almost-magical systems.We see this exact tension in code generation every day. When we optimize for conciseness and ask for the problems to be solved in fewer setps, we often sacrifice quality. The difference is that in coding, the sacrifice manifests as over-engineered verbosity — the model produces more tokens to cover all possible edge cases rather than thinking deeply about the elegant core solution or a root cause problem. In both cases, economic incentives (token optimization) work against quality outcomes (factual accuracy or elegant code).Just as Phare’s research suggests that seemingly innocent prompts like “be concise” can sabotage a model’s ability to debunk misinformation, our experience shows that standard prompting approaches can yield bloated, inefficient code. In both domains, the fundamental misalignment between token economics and quality outputs creates a persistent tension that users must actively manage.Some tricks to manage these perverse incentivesWhile we wait for AI companies to better align their incentives with our need for elegant code, I’ve developed several strategies to counteract verbose code generation:1. Force planning before implementationI harass the LLM to write a detailed plan before generating any code. This forces the model to think through the architecture and approach, rather than diving straight into implementation details. Often, I find that a well-articulated plan leads to more concise code, as the model has already resolved the logical structure of the solution before writing a single line.2. Explicit permission protocolI’ve implemented a strict “ask before generating” protocol in my workflow. My personal CLAUDE.md file explicitly instructs Claude to request permission before writing any code. Infuriatingly, Claude Code regularly ignores this, likely due to its massive system prompt that talks so much about writing code it overrides my preferences. Enforcing this boundary and repeatedly belaboring it (“remember, don’t write any code”) helps prevent the automatic generation of unwanted, verbose solutions.3. Git-based experimentation with ruthless pruningVersion control becomes essential when working with AI-generated code. I frequently benchmark code in git when I arrive at an “ok it works as intended” moment. Creating experimental branches is also very helpful. Most importantly, I’m ready to throw out branches entirely when fixing them would require more work than starting from scratch. This willingness to abandon sunk costs is surprisingly important — it helps me work through problems and figure out the AI’s hangups while preventing the accumulation of bandaid solutions on top of fundamentally flawed approaches.4. Use a cheaper modelSometimes the simplest solution works best: using a smaller, cheaper model often results in more direct solutions. These models tend to generate less verbose code simply because they have limited context windows and processing capacity. While they might not handle extremely complex problems as well, for many day-to-day coding tasks, their constraints can actually produce more elegant solutions. For example, Claude 3.5 Haiku is currently 26% the price of Claude 3.7 ($0.80 per token vs. $3). Also, Claude 3.7 seems to overengineer more frequently than Claude 3.5.Moving toward better alignmentWhat might a better approach look like?LLM coding agents could evaluated and incentivized based on code quality metrics rather than just token counts. The challenge here is that this kind of metric is quite subjective.Companies could offer pricing models that reward efficiency rather than verbosity (I have no idea how this would work, this was Claude’s dumb idea)LLMs training should incorporate feedback mechanisms that specifically promote concise, elegant solutions via RLHF (e.g. showing developers multiple versions of the same code and having them pick the opitmal one, perhaps this is already happening)Companies realize that overly verbose code generation is not good for their bottom line (e.g. Sam Altman admitted that users saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT is costing them millions of dollars)This isn’t just about getting better AI — it’s about making sure that the economic incentives driving AI development align with what we actually value as developers: clean, maintainable, elegant code that solves problems at their root.Until then, don’t forget: brevity is the soul of wit, and machines have no soul.Thanks to Louise Macfadyen, Justin Kazmark and Bethany Crystal for reading and suggesting edits to a draft of this.— -PS: Yes, I used Claude to help write this post critiquing AI verbosity. There’s a delicious irony here: these systems will happily help you articulate why they might be ripping you off. Their willingness to steelman arguments against their own economic interests shows that the perverse incentives aren’t embedded in the models themselves, but in the business decisions surrounding them. In other words, don’t blame the AI — blame the humans optimizing the revenue models. The machines are just doing what they’re told, even when that includes explaining how they’re being told to do too much.The perverse incentives of Vibe Coding was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Choose wisely! The correct answer, the explanation, and an intriguing story await. Correct Answer: Facebook A brief explanation why In the world of software, a billion monthly active users (a metric also known as "MAUs") isn't just a milestone, it's a coronation. It marks an ascension from useful to essential, a tool embedded in the muscle memory of daily life. Facebook was the first mobile app to cross 1 billion MAUs in June 2015. It took them 8.7 years to achieve the feat. At the time, this was seismic: the social network had not only transitioned successfully to smartphones but had become the default layer of digital social interaction worldwide. That figure would later balloon to over 3 billion, cementing Facebook's role in the architecture of the internet. Then came TikTok. Launched outside of China in 2017, ByteDance's short-form video app hit a billion MAUs by September 2021 – in just five years. No app had ever scaled faster. TikTok's secret weapon was its content discovery algorithm which mixed entertainment, identity, and community, all delivered in 60-second dopamine loops. Other giants that have reached the billion MAUs fast but were still outpaced by TikTok includes Instagram (7.7 years), YouTube (8.1), and even Facebook Messenger (4.9), which grew rapidly in part because Facebook decoupled the chat service from its main app, effectively forcing adoption. WhatsApp is another giant (owned by Meta/Facebook) which hit the the 1 billion MAUs mark in 2016 and surged past a staggering 3 billion in 2025. WhatsApp still has no ads and no fees, so it's become the default SMS replacement in many countries. For Meta it's turned into a strategic AI gateway, powering customer service, commerce, and chatbot deployments, with great success in massive markets like India, Brazil, and Indonesia. For full context, compare this warp-speed growth to legacy software that is still used by billions. It took Microsoft 25.8 years for Windows to hit a billion users. Office followed closely at 21.7 years. Even Google Search, launched in 1997, needed 12 years to reach the billion user milestone. The difference lies in platforms and a full paradigm shift. It's no coincidence that all modern billion-user apps share a few key traits: they're usually free (or feel like it), global by default, integrated into daily life (social, messaging, navigation, video), backed by massive infrastructure, and optimized for mobile. But perhaps most importantly, they're habit-forming. Arguably, the next major shift is already underway. New contenders are rising in generative AI, decentralized social networks, and super apps that blend communication with commerce.

David Fernandez Remesal took the job of CEO of Sandsoft in 2020 and moved to Saudi Arabia, where his mobile game company is based. He set up a studio in Riyadh and also hired mobile game developers in places like his native Spain, Finland and China. Fernandez Remesal focused on esports at first, but pivoted to mobile games as a more viable business approach. The summers are a lot hotter for sure, but Fernandez has sweated out the hard work of establishing a new studio in a place where game development skills are only just being fostered now for the new generations of game developers. While Brazil is a bigger and more established market, Fernandez Remesal, who worked on games like Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga before leading Sandsoft. We talked about mobile game trends at our fireside chat at Gamescom Latam in a talk entitled, “The Mobile Frontier: Big Trends and Smarter Moves for 2025.” We covered a lot of ground in our fireside chat at Gamescom Latam in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We hit topics like Apple’s move to emphasize user privacy over targeted ads as it deprecated the Identifier for Advertises (IDFA). We also covered the antitrust ruling that could bust the floodgates open when it comes to developers being able to advertise their own web shops (where they can charge lower prices and don’t have to pay a 30% commission to Apple and Google) inside their mobile games on the Apple and Google app stores. We explored the consequences if game developers are also able to use their own payment systems — which take around 3% commissions rather than 30% — in mobile game transactions. Sandsoft is focused on taking advantage of these trends by focusing on midcore gamers, which is becoming a bigger part of the overall mobile games market. And Sandsoft is also busy working on AI tools that can help developers work more efficiently. And we looked at other opportunities for mobile to grow as the mobile-first generation grows up and becomes a bigger part of the population of gamers. We also assessed when it’s the right time for local talent to take on local stories and spread them to the global stage with authentic triple-A development. Here’s an edited transcript of our on-stage interview. Sandsoft CEO David Fernandez Remesal GamesBeat: I’m here with David Fernandez Remesal, the CEO of Sandsoft. I’ll have him introduce himself, his career in games, and the origins of Sandsoft. David Fernandez Remesal: I’m pleased to be in Brazil. It’s my first time. I’d like to thank everyone here. You’re doing an incredible show. I’m kind of what I could call mobile native when it comes to game development. I started my career working on mobile games almost 20 years ago. Those of you that were around, that means before smartphone games. I worked at a company called THQ that you may remember. They were one of the pioneers, as a triple-A games company, in doing mobile games as well. I started my career at THQ Juarez, their mobile game division. After that I had the privilege of working with two industry titans at a company called Digital Chocolate. That was Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, and Ilkka Paananen, who happens to be the CEO and founder of Supercell as well. I spent part of my career working on an app store with Nokia. I also worked on the N-Gage handheld device. In that particular case I made the wrong choice. I went for the loser in the smartphone era. But eventually I learned quite a bit about how you need merchandise, games, and apps on an e-commerce platform. After doing something in the mobile advertising space, I also had the honor of joining King, where I worked for almost five years on a couple of franchises. One was Bubble Witch Saga, and then Candy Crush Saga. I was at the King London studio when I left to run Sandsoft five years ago. GamesBeat: Sandsoft is interesting to this market in part because you’re also in an emerging market, albeit a very different part of the world. The company is headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Can you talk about how that happened to come about? Fernandez Remesal: We’re slightly earlier in terms of the game industry in Saudi compared to what we see here in Brazil, particularly toward game development capabilities. But we have a nice consumer market. It’s not as big as Brazil. But let me get started with how Sandsoft was created. For those of you who are not familiar with Saudi Arabia, they have a plan called Saudi Vision 2030. The main proposal is to diversify the economy away from oil and gas. As part of that program, they’re trying to build what we call a knowledge economy. Gaming is a pivotal part of that transition. We’re part of a large Saudi corporation that was founded to support that plan. They decided to diversify their group. Gaming was one of the things they wanted to do. Sandsoft was born in 2019, originally as an esports company. The first thing we did as a company was the PUBG Mobile event in Saudi Arabia. But [we] realized esports was not a business. It was maybe more of a show, rather than proper commercial ongoing activities you can run in a sustainable way. They decided to venture into mobile game development and publishing, which is what we do today. We’re developing games in our own studios, and we’re a global games publisher. We’re supporting game development studios in the mobile space to commercialize their games. Iza’s Supermarket GamesBeat: What are you working on? What is your focus? How big is the team, and where are they? Fernandez Remesal: We now have roughly 100 people. We’re split into four different markets. We have people in Saudi Arabia, where we’re headquartered. We also host a game development studio there. We have satellite offices in Spain, where we also have a development studio. Then we have a couple of publishing operations in China and Finland. We also have a small studio in France. That’s where we have our operations. In terms of focus, as I mentioned to you, we’re focused on mobile platforms. We have a few games with aspirations to become cross-platform, but we’re mobile first. GamesBeat: You moved to Saudi Arabia. Can you talk about what that was like for you? Fernandez Remesal: Yes, I did. I’ve been there for four years now. The weather aside – the summer is really hot – it was a big cultural change for a European to come over to a country that was maybe more conservative, that was more closed than other countries I’ve lived in. But I felt that if you are respectful, if you try to understand the things that are changing, and if you adapt to the pace of change, it’s quite livable. The people are very passionate about games specifically. There’s a young, savvy population. They consider themselves gamers. When you tell them you work in games, they respect you. It’s different from other countries, where people think you play games all day. They don’t realize that this is an art form, that this is something that goes beyond just play. GamesBeat: A reminder that it’s a global industry. Gaming is not what it used to be. It used to be from Japan, the U.S., and Europe. Now it’s a very different world. Fernandez Remesal: Correct. It’s becoming very global. Like we see here. It’s not just about all the people attending to play games, but also all the game companies showcasing their games, which is really exciting. GamesBeat: How far along are your games? Fernandez Remesal: In terms of our game development studios, we’re just starting our first prototypes. Both studios started in 2023, but it took us some time to get the initial core teams that we could trust to develop their game ideas into commercially viable games. We have been in a kind of boot camp at both the studios for a year. Now they’re starting to prototype what we can see as more commercial games. As a publisher we have a few games already in the market. Maybe the first we released was in partnership with Jam City, DC Heroes and Villains. We’re also raising a few other games that–mobile free-to-play games, you don’t have a red button where you hit it and the game is live. It’s more about ongoing progress. You’re keeping them in development and improving the games. Then you try to find ways to scale. In this case through user acquisition. In that sense we’ve had games available in the market for more than three years. We have six games in our portfolio. Two of them are more mature. We expect to scale them in the first half of the year. GamesBeat: Let’s get into some of the trends in the mobile industry. What do you see? What matters to you? What is important to pay attention to in mobile? Fernandez Remesal: Let me start with something that is in many cases not looked into enough. We’re seeing a change in the audience itself. We need to acknowledge that Generation Z is coming in. They bring a completely new way of consuming content. They’re less attracted to deep, engaging experiences. If I could call them, in a way, the digital generation, they’re focused on short-term or short-form entertainment, where they can get their dopamine and adrenaline and then engage further. They’re a generation that doesn’t pay a lot of attention until they get really hooked on the things they’re doing. From that perspective, we see a shift in consumer behavior. We see different session lengths, different ways of engaging with games. The industry is growing by double digits in regions like South America and the Middle East and southeast Asia, while the more western markets aren’t growing as much. That’s linked to the average age in these regions. They have much younger populations in these emerging markets, where they consume games as a native entertainment form. There’s a new consumer coming in from Generation Z, bringing new consumption patterns in their session habits and rates of play. At the same time, there’s an opportunity to propose different kinds of content. Epic Games is still tangling with Google and Apple on antitrust. GamesBeat: One of the interesting trends that’s emerged in mobile is the importance of the relationship between developers and platforms. We saw Apple’s decision a few years ago to prioritize user privacy over targeted advertising. It made targeted advertising much harder. Game companies lost the ability to very precisely target people who favored certain kinds of games. They had to go back to more of a guessing game around how to zero in on which users they wanted to target. This had an impact over years. Do you think we’ve learned how to deal with this change in the market and still be able to find the users that you need? Fernandez Remesal: IDFA is not going to go away. Privacy is going to be with us. It’s going to be something that everyone has to pay attention to. That’s been critical in the mobile space, because of the merchandising problems we see in the app stores. We see a lot of problems in content discoverability. That means most of the growth we’ve seen in these games has been through performance marketing user acquisition. One thing that we’re seeing more and more is game developers trying to build communities everywhere. Trying to expose their games. Trying to create communities through influencers, through Discord and content creation. But eventually IDFA is here to stay. GamesBeat: Speaking of the developer-platform relationship, we’ve had an antitrust case going on for a long time, four and a half years now, between Epic Games and Apple. Yesterday we got a ruling from the judge that held Apple in contempt of court. This has a lot of significance for whether or not mobile game companies can go outside of Apple’s store and advertise lower prices on their web shops or other sites. They can sell the same things at lower prices than the app store because Apple takes a 30% cut. Apple appealed this and had been able to dodge the effects of it, even in Europe, where they had a 27% core technology fee they introduced. Now the judge has said, “No more of that. You can’t evade this ruling anymore. You have to allow game companies to tell their users that there are lower prices elsewhere.” This is a fundamental antitrust protection for consumers. The ruling should affect the whole industry. What’s your view? Fernandez Remesal: We were talking last week, early this week. Eventually, we’ll see some form of platform disruption, especially when you look at mobile platforms. Mobile has been mostly governed by two platform companies, Google and Apple. There have been other app stores in the Android ecosystem, but in the end there are few opportunities for you to get content, and particularly games, on your mobile device. That’s a situation set for disruption. Eventually, particularly in countries that are more protective toward consumers–they’re upset about these oligopolies. They’d like to offer consumers more opportunities to discover content and do so in a way that’s fair for both consumers and game developers. The Digital Markets Act, in the United Kingdom, was one of the first changes we saw trying to open the mobile gaming ecosystem a bit more, trying to ensure that developers have some choice and consumers have some choice. But as you mentioned, that was a segue way for Apple to introduce a new tax, a new fee for game developers if they wanted to go that route. What we saw a few hours ago–it looks really recent. But game developers now have the opportunity to have a direct relationship with consumers. They can build that relationship in a way where they can offer consumers more alternatives and choices. First of all, price points. You can offer different price points compared to what’s available in the app stores. For those of you who are game developers, in the app stores you cannot select any price point you want. They’re fixed. They have ranges you can pick from, but you can’t just select any price point at all. The second factor, as you mentioned, is discounts. Trying to ensure that if you’re proposing this direct to consumer offering, you can adjust your margins and provide more value to consumers. Eventually that ensures that you as a game developer can get a broader part of the value share you’re creating with the consumer, but at the same time give some back as well to the consumer in a way where they can pay less when they’re using a web shop. The thing that we’ll hopefully start to see soon is that it’s not just about you informing consumers that they can have other ways to consume your content and buy content outside of your app, going to the web to buy it. Eventually it will open up the actual app to more real payment methods in games, as you see in other apps in the app stores. GamesBeat: We’re not quite sure what the line will be. Will Apple allow people to use their own payment systems as an alternative to Apple Pay? Fernandez Remesal: Right. But from that perspective, games have been punished compared to other apps. Why are we not able to build that kind of relationship with consumers? Why can’t we propose a specific payment or subscription mechanic that other entertainment options can do in the app stores? Sandsoft’s Potions & Spells. GamesBeat: Assuming that payments are not going to change, the next best thing is web shops. Set up your own store on the web. In the past companies could not advertise that web shop’s existence inside the app, but now they can. They can say that you can get something for cheaper prices elsewhere. Xsolla has been opening a lot of these web shops and operating them for companies. They have more than 500 of them now. But nobody knew about them. They do say that consumers are using them. They’re going back at a 30-40% rate and creating a 10-16% lift in revenues for developers, or in some cases higher. Those sound like fairly promising results relatively early for alternative web shops. Fernandez Remesal: That’s correct. Particularly, if you’re a consumer that pays in mobile free-to-play games, you’re trying to get the best value for money. Eventually this kind of core, engaged audience that makes up the payers in your game, they already know they can go to the shop to get a better offering. For the greater mass of consumers that don’t pay, they’re not really aware they can go to the web shop to buy content and get better deals than going through the app stores, the in-app shops. There are two issues here. One is about consumers getting more value for money here. The second is about developers getting more value from the value chain and delivering more of it back to consumers as well. GamesBeat: The net result is that it’s more money going to the bottom line for developers to reinvest in their business. That’s been sorely needed, especially in the last two and a half years. We’ve seen a real painful downturn in the global game industry. Every penny counts these days. Fernandez Remesal: It’s a better distribution of value in this case, considering what everyone puts on the table. Maybe in the early days of the app stores there were more merchandising options for developers, ways to get value from the app stores. There was less content. Your content could reach more users. There was value in the promotional activity the app store would run for you. Now that’s heavily driven by UA. In that context, the app stores really just become a payment method. From that perspective, developers capturing more value and giving more value back to consumers is good, because that’s reinvested in the game industry. Game developers capture more value and that helps them create better content and engage better with consumers. GamesBeat: We’ve talked about some of these trends. How are you most closely aligning your company to some of these trends, to take advantage of them? Iza’s Supermarket is a game from Sandsoft. Fernandez Remesal: There are a couple of trends we didn’t discuss much. One is about how mobile games in particular are becoming more complex. Three years ago we were talking about hypercasual games, games mostly monetized through in-game advertising. Because of the challenges around privacy, games are becoming more deep now. They have microtransactions. Even casual games are becoming more complex. They have metagames on top. They have deeper economies. Casual games are becoming more mid-core. Mid-core games are going this way as well, to more core game mechanics. You see plenty of games with battle passes, with more core engagement loops that you didn’t see before. And then when you go to really core games, they’re becoming more like casual games. They’re trying to simplify at the core, trying to make themselves more accessible. There are some shifts on the way. Game developers are making games that are in a way more complex, but they’re trying to simplify the core game mechanics to be more accessible. As a company we’re trying to follow these trends. We’re working on a few casual games that we’re releasing with our exterior partners. We’re trying to observe how we can propose these deeper economies in games that feel very accessible, that are easy to play, that are easy to grasp and explain through a simple ad, but that can eventually retain and engage people for a long time. The second trend we didn’t discuss much was generative AI. That’s transforming not just game development, but many industries. It’s a new tool for everyone to use and leverage. Any game company, or any company at all, in the long term needs to have a proper AI strategy. In our case we’re leveraging AI mostly for content creation, mostly for ads at this moment. We’re enriching our NPCs through AI. But I presume that we’ll be adding efficiencies in most of the things we do, like game programming. We’re doing code reviews with AI now. We’re doing some small level designs with AI. That’s one of the tools that’s going to provide superpowers to game developers. David Fernandez Remesal moved to Saudi Arabia to run Sandsoft. Teams that, a few years ago, were considering building an engine of their own, they don’t do that any more. They use Unity or Godot or Unreal. Now there are pipelines for game development that will be transformed by the use of AI. Things that need 10 people to do them nowadays, one developer might be able to do them more efficiently a year from now. GamesBeat: Would you consider bringing mobile ads into the company because of AI advances? Mobile ad optimization now can be done quite well by AI. Fewer people can get much more work done in terms of creating variations on ads to test them in the market and see which particular ad does well. That optimization process was often handled by outsiders. Could that change? Fernandez Remesal: On the go-to-market you’re precisely right. For mobile games, what we call creative optimization is part of the way that you can optimize your growth strategy. But it’s broader than that. When you think about how, particularly in this case, artists work, they work on content production. You create some illustrations of characters and environments, and this is transformed by AI. With one artist you can get 100 different concepts with just a couple of prompts. Before, in the manual world, you’d need to spend probably half a day to just create one. This is about being more open for creativity, to get more options for exploring characters, environments, and art styles. It’s not just on the advertising side, too. It’s on game creation, too, to explore new concepts in a broader way. GamesBeat: In Saudi Arabia you have some parallels to Brazil in some ways, in terms of what you do with the team that you have. The team is relatively new to games. You’re growing a local staff. We saw some very interesting trends in the past year around Black Myth: Wukong. It was a Chinese-made game made for Chinese consumers, the Chinese market. It did spectacularly well on the global stage as well, 25 million copies sold right off the bat. It validated the notion that a country’s local content could be appealing on a global scale. A lot more games are being greenlit in China now with hopes that they’ll reach a global market. Sandosoft’s PocketNecro For you, in Saudi Arabia, do you have a choice to make around whether to make local content or global content? Fernandez Remesal: As a game developer, we’re creating content for global markets. We’re not doing content to be consumed locally. But that doesn’t mean–as in any part of the world, you have local stories, local myths, local themes that you can expose and eventually create connections with consumers and players everywhere in the world. When I think about our talent pool, I won’t deny that we’re quite an international company. We have 100 people on the team who come from 30 different nationalities. We’re still a nascent state in terms of local Saudi talent. We don’t have enough capability to create these local stories in a way where they feel authentic, where they’re told by the right people. But that will come eventually. I think there’s a good analogy when you think about movies and television. There are plenty of stories from this part of the world that have been told. We talked about Aladdin, about Prince of Egypt. There are plenty of stories that resonate with global audiences. But we need to have the real people, the local talent that can tell these stories in a way that eventually attracts a global audience and can become a mass market opportunity, rather than a niche thing for the local market. GamesBeat: A lot of this is maybe a stepping-stone process. You have to level up your team. You have to make sure that they can grow to be veterans of the industry. Then at that point the opportunities change. You can use them to be the central creators of the content. Fernandez Remesal: Correct. When you’re creating games, when you’re creating many kinds of content, it comes from your own passion. There’s some sense of the market involved, understanding whether there’s a commercial opportunity, but it comes from people’s passion. The passion is there, but the skills and capabilities are not there yet to think about a global game opportunity. We’ve seen that in other games. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of that, where they’ve taken worlds and themes that resonate in the region, but not to the extent that it feels like a proper story from that part of the world. But you’re precisely right. We need to wait a few years to have this capability in place so we have a credible story to tell in a commercial way and can meet the quality expectations that global audiences have. GamesBeat: From what you’ve seen, what is your assessment of where talent is? Whether in your region or other regions of the world as well. Where is the best mobile gaming talent now? Sandsoft’s Wizario Fernandez Remesal: The answer for me is quite easy. You just need to look at the games that make the top of the charts. China has definitely become the world leader in game development talent for mobile games. It’s not just about Tencent or Netease or MiHoYo. Plenty of game developers are creating games that are consumed globally. That’s the larger talent pool for mobile games. It’s true as well that the pool is expanding quite broadly. Creating mobile games is more accessible than going for triple-A console games. There are plenty of pockets of excellence in Europe, in the U.S., in Latin America. I’m really impressed by people here in Brazil, in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Chile. That’s becoming more accessible. Talent is developing in many parts of the world. In my region, in Saudi Arabia, it’s very new. I think that’s resonating with people here in Brazil. Maybe we’re Brazil five years ago. There were some pockets of talent that were trying to get their first companies into the market. We’re on the route where we’re importing talent to support game development, but also building local talent, so we can develop the whole industry. Another topic that’s not so much a trend as a reality now, it’s about going cross-platform. There are plenty of mobile first games that are thinking about moving to different platforms. When you think about how you can go to market, how you can prototype, mobile is usually the cheaper platform to do that. We see more and more teams getting their IP into PC and console coming from mobile. We’re observing that more and more. Another trend we see is transmedia. Maybe that was a buzzword at one point, people thinking about migrating IP from games into other art forms, but we definitely see it quite a bit now, particularly the series we’ve seen from Netflix and Amazon and so forth. Rovio is doing movies. Transmedia is becoming a trend for companies with deep pockets and deep budgets. GamesBeat: The biggest thing to watch right now, I would agree, is AI and where it’s going to change things. I believe that mobile gaming is one of the areas where it’s going to have the biggest impact. AI can’t create triple-A games yet, but there are a lot of things related to the business of mobile games that can be automated. We’ll see where that takes hold and gets traction. Fernandez Remesal: Something that we’re seeing quite a bit here in Brazil is the renaissance of web gaming. WebGL has really improved lately. We see amazing experiences on the mobile web. Mobile web will be an opportunity for game developers. It links to what we mentioned before with web shops and how you can monetize. GamesBeat: We have the Nintendo Switch 2 launching very shortly. The interesting thing about now versus years ago is that Nintendo is no longer the first device that kids get their hands on as a gamer. It’s smartphones and tablets now, mobile games. That’s how they learn to play games, which represents a sea change for companies like Nintendo. They have to follow this trend. The youngest gamers are only going to know the brands that they see on mobile. Fernandez Remesal: That’s precisely right. Mobile is the first gaming device for many, many people, particularly kids. That’s where they discover content. It’s not just games. It’s how they find all forms of entertainment – streaming media, music, and games as well. Disclosure: Gamescom Latam paid my way to Brazil. GB Daily Stay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox daily Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured.

Blackbird Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 25, 2017 7,250 Brazil do you like to see damage numbers displayed on screen at each attack? i've started to dabble with JRPGs for the first time recently (FFXVI, P3 Reload), and i'm also interested on Clair Obscur, for sure. but this tiny little aspect bothers me, even in other genres, it just feels like that messes the visibility way too much and it becomes very busy. at the same time, i can see it being kind of a welcoming sign that makes you feel at home, as a JRPG fan. so, how do you feel about it?  Last edited: Today at 11:34 AM Twig Member Oct 25, 2017 8,392 i enjoyed seeing a bunch of 9999s in clair obscur turn into much bigger numbers once i got the limit break love damage numbers  texhnolyze Shinra Employee Member Oct 25, 2017 26,335 Indonesia I always turn them off when possible, JRPG or any other genre.   AviAvi ▲ Legend ▲ Member Jun 23, 2021 9,822 I just like knowing how much damage I'm doing to a boss, that can be through damage numbers or a health bar going down, as long as I can see that I'm actually making an impact. I don't get a hit of dopamine when I see big damage numbers though. That may also be why Balatro didn't grab me as much lol  ghostcrew The Shrouded Ghost Administrator Oct 27, 2017 31,776 Yup. From tabletop RPGing to video game ass JRPGs - i wanna see the literal number of damage I am doing (or taking). If I rolled my dice while playing D&D and the DM just said 'you dealt some damage to the goblin' I would be vwery unsatisfied.  RochHoch One Winged Slayer Member May 22, 2018 21,264 Absolutely Big numbers are satisfying, and they give you feedback on what you're doing  PlanetSmasher The Abominable Showman Member Oct 25, 2017 132,609 I think they're satisfying. Especially when they're done well.   steviestar3 One Winged Slayer Member Jul 3, 2018 5,436 Yeah, it's fun. I turn them on in other genres too when the option is available (Monster Hunter, Team Fortress 2) though that's more because the information is actually useful there while in JRPGs it's mostly just for the flavor.   Wrexis Member Nov 4, 2017 29,283 You know I was thinking about making this thread earlier after playing a bit of FFXVI and Clair Obscur. I do because it lets me see if damage is resisted or enhanced etc with elemental weaknesses, but I don't make it a game to hit ALL THE NUMBERS. Story wise in FFXVI it was very cool to see your character progress in the story itself as the numbers went up though. When you hit a 4 million damage on Titan you know things are getting serious. It definitely required knowledge of previous Final Fantasies though I think. They became useless in some games like Disgaea because you could hit trillions if memory serves. 99999999999999999 means nothing.  Geg Member Oct 25, 2017 6,588 It's good information to have most of the time, unless they just completely clutter the screen lol   Faiyaz Member Nov 30, 2017 6,613 Bangladesh Literally couldn't care less either way, but some of the best jRPG's in recent memory have them (Dragon Quest XI, Persona 5, Xenoblade 3, FF VII Remake, SMT V:Vengeance, Octopath Traveler 2, Metaphor, Trails games, etc.), so why not.   AaronMT Member Oct 27, 2017 8,365 Toronto I like them. They serve a purpose in demonstrating feedback from a game's mechanics and systems.   falcondoc Member Oct 29, 2017 7,978 Of course I want to see them   Ashes of Dreams Fallen Guardian of Unshakable Resolve Member May 22, 2020 19,580 It's pretty important to know if what you're doing is more or less effective than any other given thing. RPGs are about numbers, after all. You wouldn't close your eyes and ignore the damage you deal in D&D. Show them numbers.   Lumination Member Oct 26, 2017 15,973 I want to pick both yes options.   Desma "This guy are sick" Member Oct 27, 2017 6,731 Yeah, I need the numbers   Zekes Member Oct 25, 2017 7,926 Why wouldn't I want to see the numbers Show me the numbers  Dezzy Member Oct 25, 2017 3,784 USA Yes, but not in games where you see tons of numbers flying everywhere, or huge numbers like 9275739. it's just visual spam at that point because I can't actually do the math.   ConflictResolver Member Jan 1, 2024 4,775 Midgar The numbers are part of the genre. I hate the mentality that the numbers were only ever a stand in for actual action. Action games are action games. RPGs are RPGs. Lumination said: I want to pick both yes options. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Same lol  Cren Member Oct 3, 2024 103 Growing up playing Ragnarok Online and WoW made me love seeing my damage. The way damage is shown in COE33 feels so good to see.   Mobius and Pet Octopus Member Oct 25, 2017 16,722 It's important to see the damage. It doesn't necessarily have to get as obfuscating as it can be in certain games, even Clair Obscur. At least Clair Obscur has a damage total, although hard to see sometimes, that lets you know how much your move has done in totality. But even there I wish it was a bit clearer, or a total that is the entire turn. Seems like a good mod could really address that.   southwest Member Sep 15, 2022 2,724 for any genre if it's turn based, I want them on.   Kent Member Jun 4, 2018 1,198 Minneapolis, MN Yes - I need to see the functional impact of what I'm doing. I'm just waiting for a game to have it be thematically-appropriate enough to render damage numbers in hexadecimal or scientific notation.  Suede Gotham's Finest Member Oct 28, 2017 14,944 Scotland Yes, I like to see how much damage I'm doing. Also seeing 9999 damage always brings a burst of dopamine for me.  sderttreds Member Jan 6, 2023 1,238 yes, especially the game where you can respec your build unlimited times   OP OP Blackbird Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 25, 2017 7,250 Brazil Lumination said: I want to pick both yes options. Click to expand... Click to shrink... ConflictResolver said: The numbers are part of the genre. I hate the mentality that the numbers were only ever a stand in for actual action. Action games are action games. RPGs are RPGs. Same lol Click to expand... Click to shrink... i was thinking about that and it makes sense, added the ability to give 2 votes!  hydruxo ▲ Legend ▲ Member Oct 25, 2017 22,674 Yes. Number go up, brain happy.   foshy Member Nov 2, 2017 206 really depends on the game, i generally like them but at the same time i don't miss them in pokemon. i like how power & hp amount is implied with the difference in scroll speed of the health bar there.   Yam's Member Oct 27, 2017 4,547 It's a core part of seeing your team becoming stronger for me.   Bucca Member Oct 25, 2017 5,454 bigger number better person bigger number better person  Landmaster Member Jan 21, 2018 167 Love it. But I like it when developers show restraint with their damage numbers. Too large and they start to lose all meaning.   closer Member Oct 25, 2017 5,542 i like number   Titantodd Member May 3, 2023 2,766 hydruxo said: Yes. Number go up, brain happy. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Yes, exactly this. Nubby's Number Factory is probably going to be on my top 10 games this year for exactly this reason.  WildArms Member Apr 30, 2022 2,819 Yeah, it's nice. Just don't get too ridiculous with fonts or extremely high numbers and we're good. (Probably the old school MMO player in me wanting that.)   twister926 Member Apr 28, 2022 771 No and I am really surprised by the results. I never felt any excitement from seeing big numbers. I definitely feel satisfaction when I pull some wild ability combo that eats health of boss' health bar.  RecipeforDisaster Member Jul 15, 2022 167 I don't really care if it's turn based, but if it's real-time then please for the love of god let me turn the numbers off.   RPGsandFGCs Member Jun 30, 2024 1,006 California Normally, yes, but there were so many popping up CONSTANTLY in Rebirth that I downloaded the mod to turn them off. I think it still had numbers pop when crits happened which was a great compromise.  psynergyadept Shinra Employee Member Oct 26, 2017 19,007 Yes it just feels right!   Dogui Member Oct 28, 2017 10,919 Brazil Would activate damage numbers in every game if I could. Want a health bar along with it as well, because info is never too much. This kind of stuff never affected my immersion with the game. Edit: Also, a Jrpg without option to show numbers would be almost a game breaker for me. Unless it's really really good, of course.  Last edited: Today at 12:22 PM Jonathan Lanza "I've made a Gigantic mistake" Member Feb 8, 2019 8,763 If they need to be there then I have no issue with em If they don't then I do.  Vincent Grayson Member Oct 27, 2017 7,321 Mount Airy, MD I don't need the damage numbers popping up all over as long as there's some kind of clear indication of how much damage I'm doing versus how much damage the enemies can take. Having just finished E33, so much of the damage information becomes overwhelming at a point...but I don't know that there's an easy solution that doesn't involve either burying more information or making much simpler combat/progression systems, and neither of those are good options.   OP OP Blackbird Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 25, 2017 7,250 Brazil twister926 said: No and I am really surprised by the results. I never felt any excitement from seeing big numbers. I definitely feel satisfaction when I pull some wild ability combo that eats health of boss' health bar. Click to expand... Click to shrink... that's kinda how i feel about it. a health bar is enough and preferable, although my most liked approach is minimal, more immersive UI. i usually get more satisfaction from the animation work itself, hit reactions and damage on models (blood splatter/cloud, sparks, ragdoll physics and/or gore if it is there).  Jibberhack Member Oct 30, 2017 1,385 It gives you instant feedback about how well a particular attack is doing against an enemy. Give me the health count of the enemy as well without needing to spend a turn to reveal them.   mattynunchucks Member Oct 27, 2017 644 Number get big.   Greywaren Member Jul 16, 2019 13,030 Spain Damage numbers are cool, I always want damage numbers.   Lumination Member Oct 26, 2017 15,973 Blackbird said: a health bar is enough and preferable, although my most liked approach is minimal, more immersive UI. i usually get more satisfaction from the animation work itself, hit reactions and damage on models (blood splatter/cloud, sparks, ragdoll physics and/or gore if it is there). Click to expand... Click to shrink... A well-constructed jrpg is essentially math in a trench coat. Seeing the solution to the formula you have concocted is part of the appeal. On the other end, I think of something like Bayonetta. No hp, no numbers, just model damage. And in that game, there is little to no math in my loadout. Two different inputs, two different outputs.  Fawz Member Oct 28, 2017 3,971 Montreal I always turn off Damage Numbers. Games just can't help themselves and fall for power creep all the time. Numbers start big only to get ridiculously bigger and more numerous. Total visual impairment Ragnarok Online (classic) is the only one where I enjoy the numbers, both because of the style/VFX/SFX and that they're generally quite low so actually insightful. Though even then when playing in large groups or doing large-scale AoE it turns to clutter I wish I could disable  OP OP Blackbird Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 25, 2017 7,250 Brazil Lumination said: A well-constructed jrpg is essentially math in a trench coat. Seeing the solution to the formula you have concocted is part of the appeal. On the other end, I think of something like Bayonetta. No hp, no numbers, just model damage. And in that game, there is little to no math in my loadout. Two different inputs, two different outputs. Click to expand... Click to shrink... i can see the appeal. not my cup of tea, but i understand it.  mute ▲ Legend ▲ Member Oct 25, 2017 29,306 I need to have some indication of how I am performing and watching health bars dwindle down (esp. with today's spongey enemies) isn't granular enough.   Infinite Barrels Member Mar 28, 2024 300 more numbers  

Energy vs. hearts.Last week, Duolingo announced a major shift: they’re replacing their long-standing hearts system with a new “energy” mechanic. The company frames this as a way to make learning more motivating by focusing on rewarding correct answers rather than punishing mistakes.But after spending 48 hours thinking about this change and analyzing reactions across the internet, I’ve come to see it as something far more nuanced: a masterclass in behavioral psychology that serves both users and Duolingo’s bottom line in fascinating ways.What’s actually changingUnder the old hearts system, users started with five hearts and lost one for each mistake. When all hearts were depleted, you couldn’t continue learning until you either waited (hearts regenerated over time), watched ads, practiced old content to earn hearts back, or paid for premium.The new energy system gives users 25 energy units. Each lesson costs one unit to start, and mistakes also cost energy. The key difference? Users can earn bonus energy at random intervals when answering correctly.As Moses Wayne, a senior staff engineer at Duolingo, explains to The Verge: “We feel like this is a way that we can motivate you to focus on things you’re getting right rather than penalizing for the things that you’re making mistakes on.”It sounds positive on the surface. But there’s much more happening under the hood.The psychological switch: from loss to expenditureThe hearts system was built on loss aversion (our tendency to feel losses more intensely than equivalent gains). Users would desperately try to avoid mistakes to keep their hearts. In psychological terms, this creates anxiety that can inhibit learning, especially for a complex skill like language acquisition.The energy system cleverly shifts the frame from “losing hearts through mistakes” to “spending energy to learn.” This slight repositioning transforms the psychological experience. Instead of punishment, it’s now an investment.But here’s where it gets particularly interesting, and perhaps concerning.At time of writing, users will still be seeing this when they run out of hearts.Variable rewards: the slot machine mechanismThe new system incorporates one of the most powerful psychological techniques in existence: variable reward schedules, or what behavioral scientists call “intermittent reinforcement.”When completing lessons, users now receive random bonus energy for consecutive correct answers. This unpredictability is the same mechanism that makes slot machines so addictive. As behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered decades ago, unpredictable rewards create stronger habit loops than predictable ones.The uncertain nature of “when will I get bonus energy?” creates a dopamine response that keeps users engaged far longer than the more predictable hearts system. One psychology research article noted that “variable ratio schedules have two benefits: They result in the most instances of the behavior than any of the other schedules… and they result in behaviors that are ‘hard to extinguish,” meaning the behavior persists even when rewards decrease.Duolingo isn’t the first app to use this technique. It’s everywhere in modern digital products, from social media (random likes triggering dopamine) to games (loot boxes with variable rewards). What’s notable is how Duolingo is implementing it in an educational context.The inverse energy model: Finch vs. DuolingoTo understand what makes Duolingo’s approach unique, it’s worth comparing it to another popular app that uses an energy system: Finch.In Finch, a self-care app with a virtual pet, users earn energy by completing wellness tasks. As one reviewer describes it: “My effort gives [my pet] energy, but my lack of effort takes none away.” The energy you earn through self-care allows your pet to go on adventures and grow.Energy in Finch and Duolingo are both symbolized by a ⚡Duolingo takes the inverse approach, i.e. you spend energy to engage with the product. This fundamental difference reveals contrasting philosophies:Finch’s model: Do real-world activities → earn in-app energy → enjoy rewardsDuolingo’s model: Spend in-app energy → engage with content → occasionally get energy backWhile both use similar terminology, the direction of energy flow completely changes the behavioral dynamics. One rewards external action; the other creates a closed loop that keeps users in the app.The business of artificial scarcityLet’s not overlook the monetization angle. Super Duolingo subscribers get unlimited energy, just as they previously got unlimited hearts. The new system maintains the same fundamental constraint: free users eventually hit a wall where they need to either wait, work harder, or pay up.What the energy system might do more effectively is increase the perceived value of the premium subscription. By creating a more engaging core loop with the variable rewards, users may be more likely to convert when they hit energy limits.The strategy is brilliant, if perhaps ethically complex. By transforming a negative experience (punishment for mistakes) into a more positive ne (spending a resource with occasional bonuses), Duolingo has maintained its monetization constraints while making them feel less punitive.Critics of the heart system have long pointed out that unlimited hearts are one of the main selling points of Duolingo’s premium tier, suggesting the constraint exists primarily to drive conversions rather than improve learning. The energy system continues this pattern, just with more sophisticated psychological underpinnings.The learning science questionThe most important question is whether this change actually improves learning outcomes.Duolingo claims the energy system helps users “get through more lessons,” as the data shows users can do more with the new system. But completing more lessons doesn’t necessarily mean better language acquisition.Language learning requires making mistakes. It’s a fundamental part of the process. The old heart system discouraged risk-taking by heavily penalizing errors, potentially leading users to stick with easier content where they wouldn’t lose hearts.The energy system might ease this anxiety somewhat — making a mistake costs the same as starting a new lesson. But the fundamental constraint remains: you still have a limited resource that depletes when you make errors.A truly learning-optimized approach might involve no penalties for mistakes at all, focusing instead on spaced repetition, comprehensible input, and other evidence-based language acquisition methods. But such an approach might not drive the same level of engagement or monetization.Duloingo falls somewhere in the center of the bottom right quadrantUsers vs. learnersThis tension highlights a key challenge for educational technology: the gap between what creates engaged users and what creates successful learners.The techniques that make an app sticky (intermittent reinforcement, streaks, gamification) don’t always align with optimal learning science. In fact, they can sometimes work against it by encouraging shallow engagement over deep processing.Duolingo has always walked this line, using game mechanics to keep people engaged with language learning when they might otherwise quit. The energy system represents an evolution of this approach, using more sophisticated behavioral psychology to maintain the same fundamental constraints while making them feel better.The verdict: clever design for multiple objectivesAfter analyzing this change from multiple angles, I’m left impressed by its cleverness while somewhat ambivalent about its implications.The energy system:Creates a more positive psychological framing than heartsImplements powerful variable rewards that increase engagementMaintains the same fundamental monetization pressurePotentially allows for more mistakes, which is better for learningUses randomness to create stronger habit loopsIt’s a change that serves both user experience and business goals, likely increasing both engagement and conversion to premium. Whether it truly serves learning outcomes remains to be seen, though it’s probably at least marginally better than the hearts system in this regard.What fascinates me most is how this change reveals the sophistication of behavioral design in today’s digital products. What looks like a simple mechanic change is actually a carefully engineered system to shape behavior through psychological principles.The next time you find yourself compulsively swiping for another lesson, hoping for that bonus energy to drop, remember that this feeling isn’t accidental… it’s by design.And while I appreciate the brilliance of that design, I find myself wishing more of this psychological ingenuity was directed toward optimizing learning outcomes rather than engagement metrics. Perhaps that’s the next frontier for language learning apps: finding ways to make evidence-based learning as addictive as a slot machine.Sam Liberty is a gamification expert, applied game designer, and consultant. His clients include The World Bank, Click Therapeutics, and DARPA. He teaches game design at Northeastern University. He is the former Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health.Duolingo’s small UI switch that changes everything was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nature, Published online: 14 May 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09008-9Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

Hades II introduces a new mechanic called Forget-Me-Not, which allows players to pin recipes they don't have enough crafting reagents for. While they're out in the world, the path to those resources will be highlighted, making it easier to keep track of what you need. I love this feature, in no small part because I've been making my own version of it for other games for years. It's just one of the many ways I use spreadsheets to improve my gaming.To be clear, I am not recommending that you follow in my footsteps and create a spreadsheet for every game you play. I am deeply unwell, the world is on fire, and creating little charts and tables is how I exert some semblance of control over a chaotic world. Also, not every game needs a spreadsheet.For some games, though, it's just more helpful to have your own goal tracker. Especially in sandbox games, where the quest markers are only the start of what you can do. For my purposes, I'll either use a typical Google Sheet, or if I'm feeling real spicy, I'll branch out to something like Notion for some more flexible tools. Here are just a few examples of what I do.Tracking Tears of the Kingdom armor upgradesThere are so many armor sets in Tears of the Kingdom, and tracking down every piece is super rewarding both in terms of exploration and the powers you get from different sets. What's less rewarding is upgrading the ones you already have. You need to visit Great Fairies with the right amount of ingredients, some of which are super rare or only drop from specific enemies. Some of which you might've otherwise walked right past if you didn't know you needed them. (Looking at you, Lizalfos tails.) That's why I made this armor upgrade tracker. I gave myself sections to mark off which sets I'm most interested in collecting, how many pieces I still have left to claim, what upgrade level each of them is currently at, and whether there's a set bonus I haven't unlocked yet. Most of this info is technically visible in the UI, but this way I don't have to dig through menus to see whether I've finished upgrades on the Froggy armor before I go collect a bunch of sticky lizards.I also gave myself space to write down what ingredients I need for an upgrade, which is low-key the most helpful part for me. Almost everything in Tears of the Kingdom is used to upgrade some armor set or another, but I don't always remember which ones I care about. And the only way in-game to see what ingredients are needed for an upgrade are to visit the Great Fairy directly.This saved me tons of wasted effort because, when I'm out adventuring, I can quickly look at my notes to see whether I still need a particular item when I come across it. Not only is this handy as reference, but it saves me from having to go on a farming run later for the five Thunderwing butterflies I walked right past hours earlier.Running an outpost empire in Starfield Credit: Eric Ravenscraft I have my complaints about Starfield, but that didn't stop me from spending dozens of hours building outposts to farm as many resources as possible. Is there a point to this? Not really. Most resources you need in Starfield, you can either buy or farm easily. But I like building my own mini-economies. The only trouble is, the game isn't built to be the overseer of dozens of outposts.Enter my Notion table. For this one, I gave myself at-a-glance reference points for the resources each planet has, which of those resources are available at my outpost, and which of those I'm currently harvesting. Since you get a bonus when you've fully surveyed a planet, I've also marked whether I've completed that planet's survey. (Note: I wasn't able to easily make this into a template, so you'll have to make your own version from scratch. This page from Notion will help you understand the basics, but there are plenty of other YouTube tutorials to check out if you need more guidance.)Granted, this is my own personal Sisyphean boulder, since the only reason to spend this much effort organizing Starfield outposts is for the joy (?) of outpost organizing. However, I've done similar things for games like Stardew Valley, which are a bit more objective-oriented.I used Notion for this one because I liked its approach to databases a little better than Google Sheets. You can create a full database with entries for all the data you need, but then create alternate views that only focus on some of the data you've created. For example, I also tracked what flora and fauna grew on each planet, but since I didn't need that while managing my outposts, I decided to create a view that didn't include it.Quantifying my time wasted in Overwatch 2Of all the spreadsheets I've made for the games I play, few have brought me as much pain as this one. Overwatch 2 switched to a battle pass system, with rewards that will disappear if you don't claim them by the end of the season. I play a lot of this game already, but I wanted to know just how much time it would take to complete certain rewards.So, I made myself a little calculator. I started by tracking the average amount of time it took to complete a game and how much XP I got for each game. Then I gave myself a few boxes that calculate how much time it would take to reach a reward tier, based on how much XP I'd earned so far. I got it down to a point where I only had to fill in three blocks (highlighted in blue in the sheet) to see how much more time I was planning to waste in a game for a cosmetic reward I wouldn't even use.Now, I don't need to be told to play Overwatch 2. I love playing it with my friends, and I'll gravitate to it regardless of how much it mistreats me. The real value here is that, sometimes, this spreadsheet discourages me from playing. If the game says "You're just 50,000 XP away from getting a reward!" it might seem like a good idea. The game wants you to keep playing after all. Instead, my spreadsheet says "You will have to play 41 more hours of this game to reach that level. So I sigh and close the game.This has actually helped me kick some of that "Just one more game" habit that's so easy to fall into. Every online game these days has a litany of rewards and points and blips and bloops designed to give you just a little dopamine every time you decide to keep playing. My calculator tool wasn't designed to save me time, but it did end up being more honest about it than Blizzard would ever be.Other spreadsheet ideasThese are just a few of the many examples I've made over the years. I've made sheets that calculate how much my Stardew Valley crops will yield over time, taking the guesswork out of buying from Pierre's store. (I'm also far from the first with this idea.) I've also made sheets similar to my Tears of the Kingdom tracker for upgrades in games from Skyrim to Horizon Forbidden West. Even if you're not into making your own, there's a chance some enterprising gamer out there has made arcane spreadsheets for things like how much an armor buff affects your favorite hero. Any time there's some math I want to do that the game doesn't do for me, or resource requirements I'm sick of Googling over and over, I'll turn to my trusty spreadsheets—and now you can (should?) too.