FastSpring vs Gumroad

In-Game vs Web Store Pricing for D2C Monetization

This article from PocketGamer.biz provides guidance on pricing and packaging strategies for direct-to-consumer (D2C) web stores in mobile gaming. It emphasizes that publishers should start by understanding their game's economy, specifically the balance of sources and sinks, before setting prices. Data from an A/B test suggests that offering additional entitlements (e.g., more gems for the same price) outperforms price discounts in driving conversions and revenue. The article also highlights the importance of reducing friction through direct checkout, citing return purchase rates around 90% for FastSpring's larger clients. Additionally, it discusses alternative strategies to drive D2C behavior without changing prices, such as content creator programs, loyalty currencies, and exclusive web-store products. The piece concludes that there is no universal pricing formula; success depends on iterating based on game-specific data.

• Only 2% to 3% of players spend money in many mobile games.
• A/B test showed additional entitlements outperform price discounts in D2C conversion.
• FastSpring's larger clients report return purchase rates around 90% on web stores.

FastSpring Launches Funnel Audits: The Ultimate Monetization Insight Engine

FastSpring has launched Funnel Audits, a new monetization insight engine, as announced on September 23rd, 2026. The blog also features new posts on achieving the highest NPS among top MoRs, California SB 122 tax changes, and a partnership with Paysafe.

Hiring and promotions across major game companies

A jobs digest reports multiple hires and promotions across the mobile and broader games industry. EA promoted Cam Weber to president and chief studios officer and David Tinson to president and chief operating officer as EA completes a $55bn take-private by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s PIF. Nazara Technologies appointed Raymond A. Stauffer as CEO while founder Nitish Mittersain transitions to managing director after overseeing revenue growth and a $303m acquisition. Other moves include Michael Lieb named principal accounting officer at Unity, Martin Keely joining Epic Games as VP/GM of the Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services, Jon Middleton joining Xsolla as EVP of strategic business, and hires at Kabam, Scopely, Tactile Games and Moon Active.

• EA appointed Cam Weber as president and chief studios officer and promoted David Tinson to president and chief operating officer as EA completes a $55bn take-private acquisition by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s PIF.
• Nazara Technologies: Nitish Mittersain stepped down as chief executive to become managing director; Raymond A. Stauffer was named CEO. Nazara grew revenue from $115m to $192m and completed a $303m acquisition of Bluetile and BestPlay.
• Unity appointed Michael Lieb as principal accounting officer effective July 27; he previously served at Peloton Interactive, Shutterstock, Spotify and Ernst & Young.

AWS Skills Developers Should Master in 2026

This article outlines the core AWS skills developers and cloud engineers should prioritize in 2026. It argues that understanding cloud architecture and how services combine is more valuable than memorizing individual services. The post covers foundational topics (EC2, S3, RDS, VPC), operational patterns (load balancing, auto-scaling, monitoring, security), and modern approaches (serverless with Lambda, containers/Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform). It recommends a phased learning roadmap from fundamentals to production readiness and emphasizes hands-on projects, automation, observability, and secure design. The author also links to paid learning resources for further study.

• The article recommends core AWS skills including EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, load balancing, auto scaling, Lambda, containers/Kubernetes, security, and monitoring.
• It advocates combining AWS with tools like Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, and CI/CD to build cloud-native systems.
• The post presents a phased learning roadmap from fundamentals through production (regions/AZs, IAM, core services, architecture, automation, monitoring).

Five Checks to Validate AI-Generated SQL

This technical guide explains five quick checks to verify results produced by AI-generated SQL queries. It warns that a running query only proves syntactic correctness and outlines practical tests: (1) compare row counts before and after joins to detect fan-out, (2) watch for NULLs breaking NOT IN filters (use NOT EXISTS), (3) ensure filters sit in WHERE vs HAVING appropriately, (4) confirm the denominator used by averages or percentages, and (5) ask the AI to read the query back clause-by-clause. The author cites the BIRD benchmark (Li et al., 2023) showing large gaps between model and human execution accuracy and provides examples and remediation patterns to avoid incorrect analytics numbers.

• The article provides five checks to validate AI-generated SQL before trusting numeric results.
• Check 1: count rows before and after each JOIN to detect fan-out that inflates SUM/AVG values.
• Check 2: NOT IN fails if the lookup contains NULL; use NOT EXISTS or clean the lookup table instead.

Stop Claude Code agent writing outside directory

The article explains two complementary guardrails for preventing unattended Claude Code agents from writing files outside an intended directory: declarative permission rules in settings.json (permissions.deny) and a programmatic PreToolUse hook that inspects pending tool calls and can deny writes. It details how deny/allow precedence makes an allow-list impossible with permissions.deny alone, shows a Node.js hook implementation that defers on malformed payloads and denies out-of-scope writes, and warns that hooks cannot see writes from Bash commands, subagents, or generated build artefacts. As a post-hoc check, the author recommends running a git-status diff against an allow-list before committing to catch any changes the hook missed. The piece clarifies these measures are not an OS sandbox and outlines trade-offs such as failing-open behavior.

• Claude Code uses permission rules in settings.json with Tool(specifier) entries and precedence: deny > ask > allow.
• permissions.deny is a block-list and cannot be used to construct an allow-list for fine-grained in-project write scoping.
• A PreToolUse hook can intercept tool calls (Write, Edit, MultiEdit, NotebookEdit) and return structured JSON with permissionDecision (allow/deny/ask/defer).