ARCANIX’s Oscar Clark on the EU’s DFA, Lightning Lessons, and the Primacy of Player Value, Part 2

Oscar Clark, the Co-Founder and Director of ARCANIX, a “decision intelligence platform for games,” was a guest of the Player Driven podcast in October. After introducing Clark, last week’s Design Desk blog refreshed the podcast’s content by expanding on Clark’s concerns about the Digital Fairness Act that continues to wend its way through the European Union’s drafting/consultation phase for a potential vote next year.

I caught up with Clark at GDC in San Francisco in March and got a selfie in Moscone West.

In this concluding half of our podcast refresh, we’ll uncover (1) the roots of Clark’s Lightning Lessons on YouTube and beyond, (2) the core problem ARCANIX is attempting to solve and (3) why he believes that focusing on player value is more crucial than ever.

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“Doom Scrolling for Good” and Getting ARCANIX Off the Ground

A question that Greg Posner, the founder and lead host of the Player Driven podcast, asked ARCANIX’s Oscar Clark late last year involved Lightning Lessons. Posner said he “fell in love with” these “fantastic” short educational videos that Clark has posted for some time to social platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn, and that tackle specific topics in and around game design, development, and ongoing support.

“What gave you the thought of starting to put out those Lightning Lessons as bite-sized chunks of information?” Posner wondered.

“Being old and having done Live Ops forever,” was Clark’s answer. “There are lots of lessons that go with that. One of the things I find an interesting struggle is [that] we don’t always have a common set of language to describe it. There are very few people in a position to share experiences across multiple platforms.”

“I’m, hopefully, good at, or at least interested in, finding patterns, finding the fundamentals,” he continued. “One thing I thought about is that I’ve been doing these hour-long sessions. And if you think about it, formats generally out there have not moved away from the hour-long thing. There’s still long format video essays, which are ironically getting longer on YouTube.”

Wait…was that an indirect shot at our hourlong podcasts?!

“I do an actual play, kind of like a fun game thing, where I have, you know, four people in the room. I put them through a dilemma in 20 minutes time. I then kind do a debrief afterwards to say what shenanigans they got up with, that kind of thing. It’s a fun little thing called Anything Could Happen.”

If you’re curious, YouTube is home to some of these Anything Could Happen videos.

“And as I was doing that it occurred to me,” Clark added, “I’m using, like, minute snippets or 30 second snippets from that show to promote that show. What if I took some of the webinars I did and actually broke them down into single topics that could be done in a minute, you know, as a short, and it’s a minute long because shorts might have to be less than 60 seconds.”

A light bulb had gone off and it led to Lightning Lessons.

“I looked back at some of the decks, ideas, some of the talks I’ve done,” he continued, and “each of the slides generally takes something like a minute. So, what can I do? Can I take a topic, can I break it down?”

“I do think there’s something in trying to have a conversation with people about actually what goes on. One I did recently was about data. How often do we talk about why we’re doing certain things with data?”

Clark said he had “a paid user acquisition person talk about attribution…Do you know what attribution means? ‘Yeah, it’s how we work out who the audience is and where they came from. We can attribute this ad to that person, to that install.’ That’s great. But not everybody has a history of understanding how data works. And that’s an example of one. What can I say about data in 60 seconds? That’s kind of where it came from.”

Posner grinned.

“You’re showing them behind the curtain. How do you do this? What is Live Ops? Gen A and Gen Z, who are spending all their time on short form videos, right? It’s a no brainer. I like to think it’s doom scrolling for good.”

“Doom scrolling for good,” Clark reiterated. “I think that is something that’s underestimated when people talk about TikTok. They see the dances, they see things. They don’t always see the cooking videos, they don’t always see the ‘how to plumb’ videos. I had ignored TikTok as an audience and I haven’t started this yet, but my intention is to try it.”

“Maybe ask me in a few months time if I’ve actually managed to put [Lightning Lessons] on TikTok.”

A quick search in early June didn’t turn up such an account.

“What I want to try and do is distill these moments of questions,” Clark said. “As well as help people aspiring to work in games get some sense of, like, the scale of this. Think about it. Games are incredibly complicated to make.”

“I’m not gonna go into it now,” continued Clark, “but Paul Kilduff-Taylor did a fantastic piece on the issues around the Stop Killing Games debate and why that’s problematic or it’s lacking nuance. You know, the amount of work that’s involved in building, designing, developing and sustaining a game that’s live is mind blowing, mind blowing. When you see some of the reactions people have about ‘Why, why, why did they have to shut that down?’ Well, because it costs money to run the thing and you haven’t got enough people playing it to pay for it.”

Left: Stop Killing Games, a consumer rights movement, was started by the YouTuber Ross Scott in 2024, after Ubisoft shut down The Crew. Right: Paul Kilduff-Taylor, Co-Founder and CEO of Mode 7, an UK-based indie game developer/publisher, blogged on Substack (and has explained elsewhere) that the effort to make game studios/publishers “face penalties” if they don’t “implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems” is much more problematic than it first appears.

Posner was sympathetic to Clark’s position. Posner acknowledged it takes “a long time to make and create” video games and “then you need to create communities these days,” and you must keep marketing and supporting these games and their player communities over time. Making and launching a game as an indie, Posner added, and having it resonate like the “solo dev” LocalThunk has with Balatro, approaches a miraculous outcome by itself.

“Balatro, I mean, that’s a one-man dev that did an amazing thing,” Clark agreed. “I’ve got other devs who made solitaire games who were going but, but, but, but, but, at the end of the day, you can never know what’s going to hit the zeitgeist. And, you know, that game did. I think I can see why it did because, you know, when you basically cross Texas Hold ‘Em with, essentially, evil, a character out of a Saw-type mindset.”

Balatro has paid off like a royal flush in Las Vegas for the game’s publisher, Playstack, which sold an 84.5% share of itself to IMC for a reported $151 million at the end of May.

Skills Mapping and the ARCANIX Vision

Switching gears, Clark said that most people in the games industry are “not very good at training juniors to become seniors, seniors to become, you know, leads.”

“If your best coder is going to become a manager of people that’s a different set of skills, and you’re taking less of their time and their expertise in coding and putting more of their time in their, probably, less expert area of managing,” he continued. “We’re not training people. We don’t even have common definitions of what the roles are and what the skills need to be.”

A theme of identifying and defining common terms and processes had emerged in the discussion.

“What skills are you missing if you want the next job? How can you get that? Well, if you’ve got…[definitions and] discrete mechanisms, it’s a lot easier for government to provide grants, to give tax exemptions, to give all sorts of things. It’s lot easier for training companies to be able to offer companies pathways and for companies to use it as a recruitment technique, as well as…to give incentives to their staff to remain with them.”

“Maybe I’m a bit utopian about it. Maybe this is just me being aspirational but I genuinely think this is the stuff that we need because the number of times you have somebody who’s been a junior, [and then] someone leaves, now has to do someone else’s job.”

“Game teams, particularly in the UK, but more generally, don’t tend to be huge,” Clark said. “They don’t tend to have the capacity to have a learning and development team inside the company. A 30-person company generally can’t afford to do that, whereas a 500-person company generally needs to do that.”

“But it gets worse, because we’re now seeing a wave of redundancies in the games industry, or we’ve been through a wave over several years, probably the largest downturn I’ve ever seen in my entire career of nearly 30 years.”

“I wrote a book on games-as-a-service ten years ago. I’ve just finished a new book on game economy design called Playing with Balance that’s going to come out in February next year [Note: His new book debuted in March and is here]. I believe in this stuff because I happen to have a ridiculous ego that wants to talk about it.”

“If you read Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun, you’ll see one of the first things he talks about is where play comes from. Play is how we learn. Why on earth are we not using more playful techniques even in the games industry? And what more gamified could you get than game badges?”

Posner relayed a personal story that affirmed Clark’s take.

“I helped coach my son’s baseball team,” said Posner. “I was talking to the other coach because the other team was much better than ours. I hope none of my kids are listening! And I was like, ‘What do you do?’ And he’s like, ‘We try to make practices fun so they stay engaged.’ I’m like, ‘That makes so much sense,’ because I’m sitting there, trying to coach these kids, and they’re all wrestling each other and I want to rip my hair out. I’m just like, ‘If you make it fun, they’ll want to play more.’”

“You mentioned skills mapping,” Posner said, circling back to Clark’s larger point. “I think skills mapping is the coolest part of this. A lot of people want to be managers and directors, like you mentioned, but if you actually see the skills of what a manager and director does, for me personally, that’s miserable. You’ve got to manage people…If you’re a coder and you think you want to be a manager, that is wildly different.”

Clark nodded.

“That being said, I do love getting into economy design,” Clark said. “There’s so many things that come out of game design, particularly usability, user flow. I mean, the loop. There’s a great book called Hooked by Nir [Eyal, and] actually, that’s a game loop. It’s a game loop. The idea is you’re encouraging people, by giving them triggers, and then you’re giving them actions and rewards, and then you’re encouraging them to reinvest. That’s a game loop.”

Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Building Habit-Forming Products debuted in 2013.

Posner mentioned ARCANIX and asked Clark if his efforts at the company related to this skills mapping topic, and the broader, intricate and nuanced topic of how live games are designed, built, launched, and supported in today’s challenging environment.

“We recently got funded for a Live Ops strategy platform or Live Ops insight platform, if you like,” Clark answered. “So really, really exciting. We just got funded by a credible bunch at ForsVC, based in Belgium. And also a Belgium-based tech incubator accelerator program [imec.istart]. Amazing people. It’s always good when you’ve got smart people who understand the space you’re in working with you, as investors.”

Left: The cover of Oscar Clark’s new book, Playing with Balance. Right: ARCHANIX’s home page.

Color on ARCANIX’s founding round from late last year by ForsVC is here, and some more context on imec.istart’s investment portfolio is here.

Clark summed up what ARCANIX is about this way: “We’re building, essentially, a self-service tool that encapsulates all of the experience we’ve had of what it takes to make sure that you can deliver sustainably, reliably, and profitably, live [gaming] experiences.”

Find the Fun

At one point in last October’s podcast with ARCANIX’s Oscar Clark, host Greg Posner asked Clark what game he’s been playing recently.

“I just finished playing the Assassin’s Creed, the one in Baghdad,” Clark responded. “I find myself, at the moment, whatever’s been in Game Pass, and that’s terrible. Game Pass is the laziest way to find games. But in terms of games…I’m either on my on my Xbox or I’m using my PlayStation, like freebie games.”

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage came out in 2023 and its hero is Basim Ibn Ishaq, a street thief who becomes a master assassin in 9th century Baghdad.

“Tribal Wars by InnoGames, [which] I played that for about 18 months,” Clark added, “was such an intense experience. You were going to have your tribe destroyed at some point, but you worked with other people to keep your village going, even if it meant you getting up at four in the morning to do raids. I am not kidding you. That is insane. But we did it.”

“We even started to use external comms tools because we were worried that there were spies in our clan,” Clark continued. “Insane. Anyway, this is the point: People are passionate about games. Let’s focus on that. Let’s create marvelous games that they love, but also that’s part of who they are, part of your identity. You look at somebody carrying, I don’t know, a backpack with a Zelda shield on it. It’s part of their identity.”

Posner expressed admiration for Clark’s ability to play games, contribute meaningfully to ARCANIX’s platform and strategy, and to keep traveling, talking, and writing about video games.

“I do love travel,” Clark said, nodding, “but I do spend an awful lot of time in airports. And that’s not riveting. That’s not exciting. But I think it’s important because…I do not want to think about my carbon footprint…but my point is more that I get to sit in front of people who are making games and hopefully inspire them to want to make better experiences for players, to be able to do that profitably.”

“We underestimate the value of creating good commercial games,” he continued. “It’s a different value than creating art. Creating art, games as art, is fabulous. Please do it. No problem at all. But it’s different from creating good commercial games,” which must deliver a clear value proposition to gamers.

“The level of things that we do in games in terms of code development, terms of narrative writing, in terms of, like, art, all of these have applications so far beyond games. And there are a number of economies in the world…Jordan, various other countries, by the way, they absolutely see games as the way to bring up their economy more generally, because people love the idea of understanding the skills involved in making games and the fact that it can be applied elsewhere is amazing.”

I had no idea about this, but Jordan’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship (MoDEE) has indeed contributed to a larger economic vision effort that’s focused on improving the “quality of life for all citizens” while also buttressing “sustainability.”

One of the “issue we’ve got in the games industry at the moment is that we’re all very good at tracking the tasks we do,” Clark said. “We’re not necessarily as good at tracking the deliverables. If you’re going to do a tournament, you’ve got to take that through design, development, deployment, delivery, and then do the analysis of the impact. We’ve got to track that all the way through, and where the problems that happen, where the issues, risks happen.”

“More importantly,” he continued, “we’ve got to understand the impact that that has on the player experience in terms of engagement, retention, and revenue. And only by having this holistic view, can we actually do that predictably, efficiently, and profitably. So that’s what we’re trying to build, it’s a platform to help teams, save them from the pain, and let them take control of their Live Ops.”

“Machine learning is not particularly controversial but AI is quite controversial,” added Clark. ARCANIX is “trying to take an ethical view about how to use those tools because I think one of the things that’s clear is that whilst there might be some issues with the financial models around AI at the moment—the way that voice actors are compensated for the use of their voice, I think is a massive issue, which is being discussed very openly at the moment, [and] obviously similar problems—but when we’re talking about, you know, the ability to be able to use your data and to understand your data in the context of other people’s data without having any risk of compromising either private data or commercially sensitive data, there is an opportunity there to create insight that human beings cannot find.”

“I think that when we can unlock the ability,” he continued, “for machine learning to track patterns around, you know, what happens if you do a tournament? What impact does that have on sentiment? What impact does that have on player engagement, retention? How long [do] they spend playing the game in that particular period of time? How likely they are to want to go buy something?”

“The beauty of that is that we can actually provide framing for how we build experiences that better match what players want. And do you know what? We’re back to that thing. Player value is what drives the best games.”

“Not trying to focus and fixate on revenue,” Clark stressed. “Fixating on player value drives engagement. Engagement drives retention, and it’s retention that drives revenue at the end of the day.”

“One of my favorite things,” said Posner, that I’ve “learned was ‘find the fun.’ And if you find the fun, build on it.”

“Yeah, great line,” responded Clark. “It’s a great line, but it’s also, like, ‘find the fun’ but also ‘Why am I going to come back tomorrow?’ I’m a massive believer in retention. It’s the reason I love Live Ops games…I love narrative games but look at soap operas. Soap operas are stories that can last decades. So why are we limiting ourselves?”

“What is the game for? Often, you know, you only have to look at some Newzoo data. Last year, I think it was something like 12% of player time was spent on new games.”

Per an online check, Newzoo did report in 2025 that 12% of total PC and game console playtime in 2024 was spent on new games.

“The rest was spent on older games,” Clark continued. “Why? Well, because we actually have things that we want to enjoy and carry on with. And I think that’s really important, you know, to recognize that retention matters.”

“Most game developers want to make great experiences for players,” added Clark. What “we haven’t been good at doing recently is encouraging the wider regulatory framework to trust us and to understand us. And we’ve actually let ourselves down by not holding people who are bad actors to account ourselves. And I think part of problem is we’re currently not sharing any data.”

“We can’t, for example, prove that we’ve actually got a handle on the loot crate problem. We’ve actually resolved it. Most of the reasonable, respectable teams have actually removed that as a problem. And yet we still have it brought up and thrown in our face because we’re not proving that we’ve done that.”

While it’s true that cases like the Star Wars Battlefront II saga, which was detailed in part one of this profile, have become less severe and frequent in recent years, it’s equally true that industry self-regulation has clear limits.

When push comes to shove, precious few companies voluntarily leave money on the table due to self-imposed ethical constraints that don’t run afoul of any laws.

In the runup to the Great Recession in the late 2000s, to take a very stark, costly example from another industry, Wall Street’s biggest commercial banks were assumed to be self-regulating themselves out of home mortgage securitization fiascos. They didn’t.

The entire U.S. economy and millions of homeowners (and related investors around the globe) paid a massive price for falsely assuming that self-regulation was working in U.S. mortgage markets.

Clark just published a new book about balancing video game economies. Huge props! I’m sure it’s excellent.

Having EU legislators consult on the draft DFA with industry experts, like himself and Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen, is one thing. Letting these consultants rewire how those laws ultimately work is something else. Industry experts are never neutral in their views. Lawmakers must always assume that buried in the recommendations coming from people who work at for-profit companies is at least a kernel of self-interest.

We should know by the end of 2027 if the DFA’s “hammer” comes down on the “nail” of real or perceived problems in the F2P/IAP game monetization space with well-balanced, well-targeting force and or not. There is a vital balance to be struck between the interests of game developers/publishers and the interests of the region’s tens of millions of gamers.

If there’s a bone that I, personally, have to pick with the otherwise excellent exchange between Posner and Clark late last year, it’s this: I suspect that Clark is a little too invested in the idea that industry self-regulation is a panacea. At least in the U.S., an mountain of evidence has shown that “industry self-regulation” con be converted into an open invitation for destructive/extractive collusion by large for-profit suppliers. If the DFA hammer fails to strike next year, then it won’t be small studios that suffer increased lawyers fees but rather, potentially, millions of gamers in the EU who’ll wind up paying for the extractive “dark design patterns” that Clark himself acknowledged have been a real issue in the video game industry.