Tetris v. Meta
The Cold War's building blocks return to screens, big and small.
Tetris the movie premiered at the SXSW Film Festival on March 15, 2023, and was released on March 31, 2023 by Apple TV+. This is simply a good film, and it’s an ‘office’ drama or better, a ‘deal-making’ drama, similar in that respect to blockbuster productions like ‘The Social Network’ or ‘Succession’. And Tetris the movie Is ‘The Big Short’ Meets ‘Bridge of Spies,’ says Matthew Vaughn.1
No wonder that a massive surge in searches incl. downloads of the TETRIS game has taken place in early, 2023.
But our graph shows Tetris already made an incredible surge in early 2022 — that is a year BEFORE the Apple TV+ trailer release.
The surge came after a dramatic and rapid decline in 2020 due to the fact that in 2020 EA’s (Electronic Arts’) license for the game expired, and the mobile version of the game was discontinued and rendered inoperative.
That seemed a tragic end to a game which a decade earlier (by 2010), had “reached 100 million paid downloads, making it the best-selling paid mobile game of all time, and third best-selling game of all time altogether.”
When in January 2020, EA announced that they would retire their mobile version of the game [called Tetris and Tetris Blitz] on April 21, 2020, and the game became unplayable after this date, (even if the full version was purchased), the reactions on Twitter were far from happy.
However this tragedy turned out to only be an incredible opportunity and things would only get better for both the players and for The Tetris Company, when it licensed the rights to N3TWORK to create a new version with the debut title Tetris Royale. It was built for mobile devices worldwide — excluding China, and would include the following features:
A hallmark battle mode for 100-players competing for the #1 spot.2
The capability to compete for top spots on the leaderboards every season.
Classic mode including Massive daily competitions with thousands of players, in which rewards can earned, ie customisation options and power-ups. 3
Solo Marathon mode, in which one can spend hours preparing for battle.
And last but not least: no need for a dedicated console.
As soon as the game was soft launched as a beta in the New Zealand region on March 25, 2019, a new uptake in interest became apparent, although this was followed, a year later by another decline in interest, caused by N3TWORK’s delisting of Tetris Royale and merging the game with its regular Tetris App. But consumers’ interest soon picked up again towards the end of 2021, after the rights to develop and publish Tetris mobile were handed over from N3TWORK to PLAYSTUDIOS on November 29, 2021.
Despite the ups and downs, overall interest in Tetris remained stable through 2022, with dips in January 2022 and 2023 - which are normal as by January the actual usage of Christmas presents gets in full swing — presents which of course rather came in the form of in a wrapped package, which is great fun to rip open to reveal hardware (read VR headsets) which competes ruthlessly with for instance a mobile Tetris app — hard to imagine under a Christmas tree.
As our timeline evolves in 2023 we see a massive surge again. The correlation of this surge with the April ’23 announcement of ‘Tetris the Movie’ - and its March ’23 trailer, is no coincidence. The Guardian explains:
‘Tetris, like many of the adjacent shows and films before it, is aiming for the same effect that The Social Network had back in 2010, slickly transforming the mechanical beats of a timeline into the smoother beats of a story, and like many of the adjacent shows and films before it, that becomes an impossibly high bar to meet. But it does a solid enough job trying to meet it, admirably attempting and failing to capture that same Sorkinesque snap, but proving entertaining enough to justify its existence.”
“Tetris finds its fun in the details of contracts and the specifics of deal-making, realising that even when it’s not on a screen in your hands, it’s all one big game.” 4
What we do see though with this steep and steady increase in interest for Tetris over the last 3-4 years is the simultaneous decline in interest for Meta’s VR devices as Oculus and Quest and a complete deflation of the hype around the “Metaverse” — which was “off to ominous start after VR headset sales shrank in 2022 — according to a MSNBC report of DEC 28 2022. 5
Absolut Conclusion
It is clear why this decline of VR and the Metaverse took place:
Firstly, it was preceded by a massive growth in 2021 for VR headset revenue in the US, as it doubled from about $530 million in 2020. 7; any big high will contrast with the lows before and after it.
But secondly and more importantly the perfect storm that started in 2022, with the coinciding rises in inflation, interest rates and energy costs, and its big impact on the cost of living, obviously resulted in consumers’ avoidance of purchasing unnecessary gaming hardware —which is of course annoyingly necessary if the gaming-type is VR — with Meta’s Oculus and Quest as prime examples.
In these unfortunate circumstances, a free App like Tetris which can be easily dowloaded for free on the all-encompassing, ubiquitous and already purchased iOS or Android smartphones or tablets, is a far more attractive gaming option if parents want to treat their children and themselves at once. The massively collective nature of mobile and online gaming which connects friends as well as soon-to-be-friends worldwide, as opposed to cutting oneself off from Reality with a relatively big and expensive VR device on one’s face, is surely also a influential factor after the traumatic years of lockdown-induced isolation. Finally being on the move to school and work again after the lockdowns, means that gaming during dead travel time on trains and buses is surely more convenient on a mobile device than with one’s head encapsulated in a VR headset.
The level of interest for tetris in the US, after the initial hype-peak has slowed donw, but is still +50% higher than before. Whether the interest will be maintained as was chess after The Queen’s Gambit is still to be seen. Can't wait to see in which position the blocks end up falling.
Another comparable and fascinating movie-game tango is Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, October 23, 2020, after which an enormous uptake took place of the chess game by both adults and children – pushed by many parents the world over to after-school chess classes — and of purchases of chess sets, as the New York Times reported in November 2020. “In the weeks since “The Queen’s Gambit” premiered, [chess sets] sales have grown 125 percent.”
Mehta, Ivan. "EA's Tetris mobile game is dead, but an alternative is already here". TNW. January 24, 2020 - 5:50 am: “Electronic Arts (EA) announced that its popular mobile games, Tetris and Tetris Blitz, will be taken off the App Store and Play Store on April 21 [2020]. April 2023.
https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_Royale
https://www.engadget.com/2019-06-28-tetris-battle-royale-mobile-game.html retrieved 20 Apr 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/16/tetris-movie-review-taron-egerton