241. Why We Should Make Dating Games
While the gaming industry continues to implode, online dating is ever on the rise. People are willing to spend far more on dating apps, and app competition is weak. It's time for advanced dating apps
I started using dating apps in 2010 with the purpose of understanding how they work and don’t work, with the ultimate goal of gamifying them. By 2011 I had teamed up with Sebastian Coman and we made Flirt Planet 3D, the first 3D interactive dating game. By 2012 I was Microsoft’s first game economist and was helping Take 2 with CivWorld and Civilization Online. To me the ultimate promise of online games is to create social playgrounds where people can make friends, build relationships, and generate a reputation.
I spent years prior, including returning to university at the age of 41 for economics, developing the field of game economics to act as a form of social glue promoting interdependent persistent social environments. Meanwhile gaming industry leadership wanted to turn online games into captive gambling and microtransaction hubs with ever decreasing opportunities for persistent social interaction.
Thus my interests increasingly diverged from that of game development leadership. But here’s the thing: consumer interest remained in alignment with my goals for them, and antagonistic to the goals of game development leadership. I warned the industry and especially leadership that if leadership continued to act in the interests of leadership, and not consumers, this was a recipe for commercial disaster.
Now we are in a period of massive long term game dev layoffs, and my 2025 explanation that we were seeing actual Divestiture by major players (not just layoffs) seems to have gained widespread acceptance. Meanwhile dating apps have gained very widespread acceptance. In 2016 I gave a paid lecture on the current state of mobile game development in Saint Petersburg where I explained that the best mobile game at that time was Tinder, and I explained why. Sorry the video capture failed the first 11 minutes but you can hear me talking.
Since then Tinder has gone on to be adopted by people looking to date at rates almost equal to all other apps combined. Tinder’s revenue was roughly equivalent to Roblox’s net revenue (Roblox has to pay content creators, Tinder does not) in 2023 and Tinder’s revenue plateaued after that. Tinder’s struggles were predicted and I will go into detail as to why later in this paper.
So many investors have asked me to make a competitor to Roblox, which is seen as a darling of game development (if you ignore the various forms of child exploitation). None have asked me to make a competitor to Tinder, which strikes me as odd. Here I explain why that is odd as Tinder is extraordinarily vulnerable to competition and Roblox is not. Roblox has other problems, namely regulation and civil lawsuits.
Datings Apps are Games
I made the case for this in my 2016 Saint Petersburg lecture where I focused on Tinder and explained how demographics favored these sorts of games in the future.
The Strengths of Tinder versus conventional online games are:
Totally free user generated content (UGC)
Higher quality and variety of UGC
Rewards that players value much more than virtual assets
High risk and high reward means optimal dopamine delivery
Simplicity of base gameplay loop, so easy onboarding
The hardest part for users might be getting pictures, but social media has been promoting “selfies” and such for years so that effort is now minimized
The Weaknesses of Tinder versus conventional online games are:
Tinder is adult only (in theory), so more narrow demographic
Tinder is primarily for singles (in theory, but not practice), so again a narrower demographic
Tinder delivers dopamine, but not the product (Connection) it is advertised to deliver
Match group uses “catch and kill” to block competition, leading to lack of innovation in the core product
Match attempts to copy the most ancient and lowest performing business models used in online gaming across its ~45 products
LinkedIn similarly tries to copy Tinder’s business model, with matching underperformance
The increasing mismatch between what the dev (Match) wants to sell and what consumers want to buy is generating agitation and organised resistance, mirroring what is happening in the rest of game dev
The biggest problems with Tinder are actually intentional on the part of Match. They seek to monopolize the dating app sector by buying up all competitors. They then “dumb down” superior products (like OKCupid) to make sure consumers only have mediocre choices. The biggest problems that Tinder and other games share are antiquated business models and content-demand mismatches. Solving both of those situations has been my brand for over a decade. That’s not a coincidence, as I operate in the future, not the past.
The Purpose of My Work and Substack
As you can see from my 2016 lecture, I used trend analysis to see what products will be in demand by consumers in the future and I develop those technologies. Industries that rely on Data Driven Design (DataDD) look into the past to see what worked and copy that. This prevents innovation and adaptation, and only benefits iteration. This benefits developers in the short term and dooms them in the long run. It does nothing to benefit consumers as cost reductions are not passed on to the consumer. The end game is where the user base shrinks and devs have to raise prices (which accelerates the user base decline, causing a Death Spiral). You see this happening in real time with Tinder.
Products dependent on DataDD are extremely vulnerable to competition from innovative products that meet consumer demand. If one shows up and you can’t “catch and kill” it, you are screwed. This is why aspiring monopolies like Match can be forced to pay a super premium to acquire your more innovative product, if you don’t want to compete directly.
Visitors to my substack are mostly game developers. They likely wonder why I talk about dating, thinking it’s just a hobby of mine and that I’m trying to be a dating guru influencer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have no intention of selling myself as a dating guru. What I’ve been building here over the last couple years is the foundation of understanding that game developers will need to make successful dating games. Here today I’m starting to put it together so that devs will understand the business case and opportunity behind dating games.
Your industry is dying and you don’t know what to do about it. I’ve been predicting this since 2017, because I operate in the future, not in the past. Investors, disenchanted with game dev, are divesting from our industry and moving to AI. It is the new shiny. I see the promise in AI, but in the rush to develop AI they have not employed the sort of people that would design efficient ways to go about that. The resulting lack of efficiency means they will run out of (investor) money before they reach their goals, and they will do environmental damage that will harm all economies without anyone funding a cleanup.
Then the remaining investors that still somehow have money (because they dumped early) will be looking around like the John Travolta meme wondering what to do next. If I do my job properly here, I will demonstrate that dating games will be a very promising option.
Why Dating Games?
I made my core breakthroughs in dating game design in 2016, and have been iterating on them since then. That covers issues like discoverability (which also plagues the broader game dev industry), advanced business models (ditto), solving the D2-Oxy Heterocomplex paradox (ditto), and linking this to solutions for Demographic Collapse. The reason the largest challenges in game dev are shared with dating apps is because dating apps are games. I said it in 2016, it’s still true today, and it will still be true 50 years from now.
Those roadblocks which I’ve been quietly unblocking since 2016 also plague social media products, but in different ways. The biggest problem that social media shares with game dev is that the devs there are making products for themselves, not consumers. This only persists commercially when there is no competition, or the competition also doesn’t know how to solve your problems. Once that changes, you become non-competitive.
AI is hot right now because it is seen as a transformative military technology. I explained this in the same paper where I predicted the current game dev divestment. Even if the events I talk about there don’t happen, big money thinks it will so that’s where the money is going. AI is being advertised to the public as something to boost human productivity. That’s a lie. I explained back in 2010 how AI could be used to boost human productivity in my Third Tier of Game Development paper which Microsoft and Unity and presumably other tech giants studied carefully.
Since they did not use AI to solve the core productivity problems I identified in Third Tier, and are instead replacing humans, it is clear what their intentions are. This is one of those core lies that causes me to have an attitude. When the dust settles on the mismanaged AI rollout, and all the pre-scripted global military conflicts, we will be left with a number of existential crises that require attention (in order):
Ecosystem Collapse
Demographic Collapse
Clean Water and Oil Depletion
Microbial Evolution (Which I mentioned in Third Tier)
Ecosystem collapse is number 1 because without an ecosphere, no need to worry about the rest. Our current approach to AI and war is accelerating this. But ecosystem collapse is a very slow process. Likely no one alive today will see just how bad that gets as it might peak in awfulness 500 or 1000 years from now. We can’t predict that mathematically because it’s highly dependent on the total global human population. And all the predictions (based on DataDD) of pop growth are wrong because major events all trend it down and tend to be non-linear (compounding) so they will overcome linear trends.
The other 3 will affect us in our lifetime, if we live another 10+ years. AI will drastically accelerate #3. All of these, and any wars we have, will reduce the human population. That actually helps #1 as the Ecosystem Collapse is being caused by us. Get rid of us and the planet will start to recover. #3 and #4 will also get better if there are less of us around.
Demographic Collapse is different, and this is what politicians and economists don’t seem to understand. If we kill half the humans on Earth, that’s good for Earth. If we lose half our people, our water and oil will last twice as long. Microbial evolution is accelerated by population density (like in cities), so again less people helps here. But with Demographic Collapse, all the factors that could reduce human population in a big way also make DC worse. Any animal population that is under stress will produce less children. That includes us.
DC is not a population problem per se. In DC it is the ratio of young to old that is the issue. Wars tend to kill more young people, and microbial evolution tends to kill more old people (but sometimes a lot of babies too). It’s really handy how COVID seemed to ignore children. If you were going to genetically engineer a bioweapon that would take out all the old people but leave the young intact, you couldn’t do much better than COVID.
Any country that can’t balance out their ratio of young to old is going to collapse. That means you either need to make more babies, or dispose of your elderly. COVID-like biological agents work on the latter, so would Draconian social frameworks like Logan’s Run.
Full-on authoritarian governments (I’m not pointing any fingers) are going to get rid of their elderly since that’s pretty inexpensive to do and eliminates the drag on the economy. For the rest of us, if you are lucky enough to not be in one of those countries, they will have to make more babies. The technical term for this is pro-natal policies.
This is a matter of societal life or death as an economy can’t be balanced with a large number of elderly being supported by too small a number of youth. Because our leadership and academics don’t understand DC, everything they’ve tried has failed, in every country. That’s why I spent a while writing a six paper series on what DC is, what causes it, and how to solve it. Those are papers 92 to 97 from early 2025. As the economies collapse, there is an ever decreasing amount of resources available for children and this triggers an economic Death Spiral.
Wait too long and the Death Spiral becomes inevitable. Japan lowered their interest rates to zero (or lower) because they borrowed too much money and couldn’t even afford the interest payments. This is another example of a Death Spiral. Japan is borrowing again, so all us economists are watching on the edge of our seats to see how that turns out.
But Japan has also created the first state-sponsored dating app, because they are the vanguard for dealing with DC. They know that because of their existing economic problems, birth rates have dropped way below replacement rates. The resulting DC is going to make their existing problems unmanageable. While no country has the luxury of ignoring DC, Japan at least is doing something about it. Throwing money at an authenticated dating app (I talk about how essential authentication is in the 2010 Third Tier paper) is way more effective than just giving money to new parents. That isn’t working in any country.
What I’m getting at here is that while Tinder is a huge success just because of consumer demand for dating apps, right now Tinder is only monetisting consumers. Advanced dating apps, the ones that include mandatory authentication, are the ones that are going to help reverse DC. As soon as you move from anonymous participation to authentication, all the bad actors and dopamine addicts are going to exit and people seeking serious relationships (the kind that promote children) will be advantaged.
Using authentication in their dating apps would reduce the size of the target demographic, which is why Match will never do it. Consider that if your app not only helps consumers, but also the overall economy at the same time, now you have two target demographics: daters and the local government. While daters will struggle to spend $100 a month, governments will eagerly spend this and more to solve their DC issues. No conventional game, at least the ones with primitive business models, can compete for revenue generation.
[Advanced business models can monetize different groups in different ways in parallel. For instance, when PokemonGO came out in 2016 I recommended that Niantic move to a two layer monetisation model where they charged businesses for Pokestops. By not doing so, Niantic left at least hundreds of millions of dollars on the table.]
If you want to monetise consumers AND governments simultaneously, you are going to need advanced business models that are far more complex. As you can see, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 15+ years. Not because I was bored and didn’t have anything better to do, but because I operate in the future and I anticipated the need. It’s a bit lonely working on tech that people don’t know they need yet, but once they figure it out I will be 15 to 20 years ahead in tech. Just don’t wait forever, I may have essentially stopped my biological clock but I’m still going to time out eventually.
Obstacles to Making Dating Games
The biggest obstacle to making Dating Games is that gamers, and especially game devs, are playing games because they don’t have better social options that might be more enticing. The result is that, while technical/computer skills are high, game devs have some of the lowest social skills around. That said, the guys at OKCupid were pretty nerdy. But they tried a lot of new things and ended up with a novel product and the best dating app to date.
Dating Games/Apps are still Games and much of the tech involved crosses over. New social systems, reward systems, progression systems, and business models have to be added. All the tech I’ve been developing over the last 15+ years. Authentication also has to be added, but that’s something that’s going to be forced onto us anyways very soon. Not for the reasons I explained in Third Tier, but to create even greater information asymmetry under the guise of child safety.
Instead of weaponizing data for the purpose of information asymmetry, we can provide data to our consumers as a service to help eliminate information asymmetry from dating. This is also known as “catfishing” and it’s a problem in the labor pool too, not just the dating pool. Of course we already do this with social media, where people build reputations in hopes of becoming the highly coveted “influencer”. This isn’t really any different than what happens in a dating game.
The problem is that in social media there isn’t sufficient authentication. People can use filters, false pictures, or AI deep fakes to hide who they are. This is a big problem that strong authentication solves. What it doesn’t solve is what I’m going to call The G-String Paradox until I come up with a better term. The GSP means that people will try to exaggerate their positive qualities to get attention. That’s why you have 13 and 14 year olds essentially dancing nude on social media because they want to “win”. And this is how you win on social media today. The same thing goes for people taking pictures of themselves in sports cars or on private planes.
I solved that problem in 2016, it took me many years. There are ways to filter out this noise, and a big part of it is removing the Win/Loss Binary from your games. I would love to tell you how this all works, but that tech is my retirement plan. I am showing you what needs to be solved, and that’s keeping with my policy of sharing the bottom 25% of what I know as a form of public service.
Future Games
Whether we add advanced social systems to games first, or advanced game mechanics to dating apps first, all roads lead to an eventual merging of both to make Dating Games. If you are first to market, you capture market share. If you are slow, you just might go out of business. If you haven’t already. That’s reality. People desperately need help reducing their loneliness and will fantastically reward those apps that work. Tinder is currently designed to not work because Match does not possess the technology required to help consumers while also generating strong revenue.
That’s a technological hurdle, but it’s not a big technological hurdle. This isn’t AI-level tech that’s needed, just smart tech that people don’t know how to do yet. Once they know how to do it, it won’t be a big deal. Games like Flirt Planet 3D (which was decades ahead of its time) can then be folded into these Dating Games to make rich immersive experiences.
As with Pokemon GO, since dating typically involves a lot of spending at a variety of allied businesses (like restaurants), there are possibilities here for advanced business models that charge both the daters and the venues they frequent using your app. Planning for success not only makes improving your product later on easier, but also signals to users that you plan to be around a while. That’s critical with Dating Games because these demand and reward long term participation. You want your players to think you are going to be around long enough to justify their time and money investment.
The average gamer only buys one game a year. That’s ~$50 a year. Today the average spend on a first date is $200 (!!). That’s the entire median gaming budget for four years, in just a few hours. Meanwhile, almost every game that comes out has dozens or hundreds of competitors very similar to it. That’s masochistic to throw your time and money into making something with such a meager chance of success.
If you can make a dating app that makes dating even just 10% more efficient for people, that would be worth $400 to someone that only goes on 20 dates a year. I’ve seen influencers bragging about how they go on 8 dates in 5 days, on rotation. Even if they are not spending but are making the other person spend, that’s still money flying around. Daters will reward you if you provide value for them, and all you have to do is make something better than Tinder. That’s really not hard, by design, because the Match business model depends on all their products being mediocre.
If you scare Match with something better, that could be easy money. OKCupid was sold to Match in 2011 for $50M, that’s $73M in 2026 dollars. They spent $6M developing it. Imagine if you made a game on a $6M budget, sold it to 500,000 people as a F2P game, and then sold it again to another company for $73M. You’d be a rockstar in the industry almost overnight. That’s pretty hard to do in today’s gaming industry due to all the competition.
In the near future, you could sell it to a sovereign entity (like Japan) for even more money than Match will give you. Or they might pay you to make country specific versions for their use. The growth potential in Dating Games is huge and constantly getting larger. That’s just not the case in today’s gaming industry which has almost half its workers unemployed.
Please consider the possibilities. I hate to see billions of people lonely. The idea of society collapsing just because our dating technology is lagging also saddens me. Of course I also don’t like seeing hundreds of thousands of my brothers and sisters in game dev out of work. The “Tea” app was, in my opinion, a malicious gendered dating related app. But it was created for ~$100K using “vibe coding” and generated about $5M before being terminated by all platforms. The demand is there, even for slop, we just have to get out there and do it.
Special Note to my readers: My skill sets in the industry are unique. I have never applied for a job in game dev. All the roles I’ve had with large and small companies over the last 30 years were because those studios/companies asked me for help. If you are needing someone with my skills, any recruiter or AI tool will suggest my name. I’ve been the most prolific writer in the space for 26 years. My games have generated billions of dollars in revenue, mostly not in the USA or UK. Due to racism and safety concerns, I will not apply to a job posted by your company, ever. It has not happened in 30 years. If you contact me, and the request is ethical, I will do my utmost to help you. I am a dual USA/Australian citizen, but left the USA out of safety concerns 7 years ago.