# Amy Jo Kim and Jon Radoff discuss the biggest game development trends in 2021

Source: https://metavert.io/videos/amy-jo-kim-and-jon-radoff-discuss-the-biggest-game-development-trends-in-2021  
Published: 2026-02-11  
Updated: 2026-02-12

## Originally Broadcast: October 14, 2021

In this episode, Amy Jo Kim and Jon Radoff cover some of the most important trends happening in game development: solo-to-social, technologists-to-artists, and games-to-economies. They talk about all manner of online games, MMOs, Roblox, Undertale, Axie Infinity, Cookie Clicker, Archer Danger Phone, The Office, and many others.  

Follow Amy Jo Kim on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/AmyJoKim -- or follow the GameThinking.tv channel. https://www.youtube.com/c/GameThinkingTV/videos  

Jon's ideas can be found...  
...at this blog, Building the Metaverse: https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse  
...on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jradoff  
...and at his live game services platform company, Beamable: https://beamable.com  

Make sure you subscribe here if you'd like to keep learning from thought leaders in the metaverse industry.  

0:00 Intro  
3:06 Solo to Social  
5:43 The Idle Game Genre  
6:56 Building Communities Around Games  
8:26 Live Ops & Live Event Strategy  
11:10 Technical to Artistic Team Composition  
12:48 The Creator Era  
16:14 Game Development Informing the Future  
15:32 The No Code and Low Code Movement  
17:40 Economies Around Games  
19:21 The Size of the Gaming Industry  
20:28 The Live Games Trinity  
21:57 The Marketplace Model for Games  
24:25 Community First Game Dev  
29:40 All Gaming is Social Gaming  
32:06 Play to Earn  
37:20 Play to Earn  
41:11 Sustainability in NFTs and Third Party Ecosystems  
46:03 Is Play to Earn Really Play?  
47:58 Money-Winning Competition Games  
49:41 Habit-Forming Apps Using NFTs  
52:42 The Sandbox  
55:10 Wrap Up  

#metaverse #gamedev #gaming

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**Amy Jo Kim:** the trends in gaming influence all of tech.

**Amy Jo Kim:** You and I have worked in gaming for long enough to know that everything we deal with in gaming, then you see three to five years later in the rest of tech. AI, bots, graphics, huts, etc, etc.

**Jon Radoff:** Yeah, game development is informing the whole future of everything we're doing. And that's how I really think of the metaverse at this point, which is it's just games showing you what the future of the internet is going to look like.