Resources

This page gathers resources on game monetization, revenue optimization, trends, history, regulation, and compliance. It began as a way to group related blog articles but then became something more. To learn more about any of these topics, contact us.

Media Mix Models (mMM), Marketing Mix Models (MMM), and Observational Causal Inference (OCI)

The people at Game Data Pros have been thinking about Media Mix Models (MMM) and Observational Causal Inference (OCI) for a long time.

Here are a few of our favorite publications:

Podcasts and Webinars

This section highlights podcasts featuring insightful discussions with members of the Game Data Pros team, sharing their expertise on game analytics, monetization, and industry trends:

Bill Grosso joined Sean Murphy for Startups After AI, a webinar about how AI is changing the economics, structure, and purpose of software startups.
Bill Grosso appeared in a Mobile Finance Collective webinar to explain how media mix modeling helps gaming and mobile-app businesses measure channel contribution and incremental ROAS; watch an extract from the presentation. The full presentation is available to Mobile Finance Collective members.
Bill Grosso appeared in a Mobile Finance Collective webinar to discuss adaptive and personalized pricing in digital products, and why multi-armed bandits can outperform long-running A/B tests; watch an extract from the discussion. The full presentation is available to Mobile Finance Collective members.
Bill Grosso appeared on Marketing Measurement Matters to talk about the importance of Open Source MMM, using marketing analytics for good, and the PIE paper.
Bill Grosso appeared on the FastSpring podcast to talk about how well our 2026 predictions are faring at the end of Q1.
Bill Grosso appeared on Marketing Measurement Matters to talk about the importance of Marketing Measurement in Gaming.
Bill Grosso appeared on Recast’s Marketing Measurement Coffee Break to talk about Why Most MMMs Fail Validation Tests.
Bill Grosso and Julian Runge appeared on Meta’s You’re Better Off Knowing podcast to discuss building a culture of experimentation.
Julian Runge appears on the Ad Exchanger podcast to talk about marketing measurement.
Julian Runge appears on the Game Economist Podcast to talk about experimentation in gaming.
Julian Runge talks with Eric Seufert and Koen Pauwels about marketing experiments and probabilistic measurement.
Bill Grosso joins Eric Seufert on the Mobile Dev Memo podcast to talk about experimentation as part of a larger optimization effort in consumer products.
Julian Runge talks with Game Economist Cast’s Phillip Black about switchback testing, supply/demand theory as applied to monopoly economies, and other racy topics.
Bill Grosso joins Christopher Kaczmarczyk-Smith, Eric Guan, and Phillip Black on the Game Economist Cast to discuss Bill’s efforts to build price personalization at scale, community pushback, the pricing power of brands, and the best things about game economists.
Julian Runge talks with Eric Seufert and Maor Sadra, CEO of INCRMNTAL, about the future of digital advertising measurement on the MDM Podcast.
Julian Runge joins the Game Economist Cast team to discuss retention, sales versus personalization, and the best theories of difficulty.

Revenue Optimization in Games

Game Data Pros takes a holistic approach to revenue optimization in games and digital entertainment. In this series of articles, we start with a broad primer on the origins of modern revenue optimization techniques in the airline, hotel, and related travel industries, then explore the unique revenue optimization obstacles faced by the video gaming industry through a detailed examination of console game and mobile game publishing:

GDC Game Revenue Optimization Mini Summit

Every year, at the game Developer Conference, we host an off-site summit. The idea is simple: have a few expert-level talks loosely centered around the idea of revenue optimization, and try to create a place where the community can gather.

Here are our two blog posts about the 2025 Mini-Summit:

(Announcement) The Game Revenue Optimization Mini-Summit Rides Again
(After the Event, with links to slides) Reporting from the 2025 Game Revenue Optimization Mini-Summit

Here are our two blog posts about the 2024 Mini-Summit:

(Announcement) Why I’m Excited by Our GDC Event
(After the event, with links to slides) Reporting from the Game Revenue Optimization Mini-Summit – David Nixon (VP Data Services, Game Data Pros)

Academic Papers

Game Data Pros is actively involved in academic research in fields related to game revenue optimization.

Here are some published papers from members of the team.

(Older) Scientific Revenue

Scientific Revenue was a machine learning startup that provided automated dynamic pricing to mobile games.

Here are some resources we still find useful from that effort:

What makes a price a good price – The very basics of price design. Intended for a game-design audience and intended to introduce core ideas in pricing.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data – Presentation from Pocket Gamer Connects, London, 2018. Invest in high-quality and highly granular data collection. If you do so, there are a lot of ways to use the data to optimize your game.
The Strange Case of the Noob Who Didn’t Buy: Big Data and Pricing (video) – 5th Annual Wolfram Data Summit 2014. Using examples from gaming to briefly outline some of the challenges involved in rethinking pricing theory and practice to reflect the new realities of digital commerce. Slides are available here (PDF).
Five Lessons I Learned from Scientific Revenue (blog post)
All Scientific Revenue presentations: Scientificrevenue, Scientific revenue | SlideShare