Strategy And Game Design

August 24, 2026

This post is not about Strategy or crypto.

If you follow stock market or crypto news cycles, you might have seen a few weeks back when Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy ($MSTR) rapidly dropped from $100 to $80. For most people, it probably seemed like just another indicator that the entire crypto ecosystem was in its death throes, and they probably didn’t hear about the slower and less exciting trend back towards $100. Regardless of whether ‘it's so over’ or ‘we’re so back,’ we can examine the situation for insights into our product development strategy.

Michael Saylor has spent the last 6 years converting a conventional SaaS company into the world's largest Bitcoin treasury. 

Bitcoin, like many other crypto assets, features extreme volatility as a result of its underlying mechanics, the exchanges offering tools to place trades with leverage, and the audience it attracts. A core goal of Strategy is to grow the amount of Bitcoin per share of MSTR stock, and the result is that its price moves like an already volatile asset like Bitcoin but amplified. In some respects, the volatility itself is the product.

For an audience of responsible, long-term investors, owning an asset that has multiple layers of volatility amplifying price movement is unpalatable. An asset with 10% daily swings and 75% yearly swings is too unpredictable to build long-term plans around. An entire year’s expected 10% return can get obliterated in a single day. The volatility makes the asset a non-starter for their portfolio.

There is a different kind of audience attracted to crypto assets, and in particular Strategy investment products: the gambler. Many times Michael Saylor has said that the volatility in the stock price is there for you, the gambler, to capture. Strategy is there for you to make big bets, earn life-changing money, and escape the permanent underclass, regardless of which way you think the stock is going to move in the short term.

Last year Strategy launched $STRC, an investment product which theoretically would attract long-term investors looking for stability and substantial, predictable dividend returns. $STRC has a par price of $100 and Strategy can adjust the dividend payout up or down if the price stays consistently above or below par. For the long-term investor this should reduce volatility and comes with a predictable dividend payout of around %10 which is right around the average return of the S&P 500.

The problem is that Saylor and Strategy built a massive core audience of gamblers. Even though the theoretical audience for $STRC is long-term investors looking for predictable returns, gamblers enamored with Strategy proceeded to place massive bets on $STRC’s price movement, causing the price to rapidly spiral downward by 20%.

Strategy and its CEO Michael Saylor built an audience of gamblers, spent years designing investment offerings for those gamblers and then decided they want to expand their audience beyond gamblers. If they capture more of the market, they can buy more Bitcoin and drive the price of their assets higher. $STRC was repeatedly and very clearly presented as an investment product not intended for gamblers. It was marketed as attempting to stay at the par value of $100 and produce predictable, stable returns for long-term investors seeking exposure to Bitcoin in a less volatile way.

But the existing fan base wanted it to be gambling, so they gambled with it, creating and then amplifying losses for everyone involved.

If you spend years cultivating an audience that likes one type of experience, building trust with them that everything you make is for them, you will find that pivoting to a new audience is extraordinarily painful. Your new target audience does not want what the old target audience wanted. Your old target audience does not want what your new target audience wants.

You cannot successfully explain to them that they are not wanted for a particular product or for your company’s future products. You may say the words to them and they may hear them, but they will not listen. It is not their fault for not listening, that is the expected behavior. It is your fault as a designer for creating experiences that require players to behave in a way that they will very obviously not.

In the audience transition, your audiences will go to war with each other, making each other unhappy, making you unhappy and generally degrading the overall product experience. Worse, both sides may see the complete destruction of your product and even your company as a win because it means the other side won’t have the product they wanted. The winning side wouldn’t have the product they wanted either, so it's a pyrrhic victory, but a victory, nonetheless. Both sides may even be able to claim this victory, because they both prevented the other side from getting what they wanted.

It was a painful event, but $STRC is trending back towards the par price of $100. Paper hands got shaken out, gamblers lost their money, and long-term investors with no stomach for volatility sold the bottom for a 20% loss. Did the long-term investors win? Did the gamblers win? Did Strategy win? Did anybody win?

Always remember that your audience is who they are and that if you look at things from their perspective you do have a good chance of predicting how they are going to respond to changes in your product and to new products you release. This is often described as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, but that is incorrect. That’s imagining your thinking processes from their position. You need to imagine their thinking from their perspective.

Long story short, they were selling dollars for eighty cents, and you probably missed it.