Gone are the days when the only rewards in a game were a chance to play for a little bit longer. Game companies are waking up to the fact that it pays to give real rewards to their consumers so they keep coming back.
Chethan Ramachandran
As Ned Lerner recently wrote in a guest post for us, “prizes are everywhere. People love prizes. They give us competition and drama. Las Vegas thrives on relatively mindless games like slot machines, craps, and blackjack, where the engagement isn’t nearly as deep as in video games. So why do the people who make video games ignore what could be the dramatic centerpiece of our best-known games, the prize?”
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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