Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO

https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/79190/unity-ironsource-john-riccitiello-marc-whitten-merger/

by OskarS • 4 years ago

357 356 4 years ago

everdrive• 4 years ago

Businesses need to make money, but I hate for every app or website to have some anti-user poison pill. I’m not sure there’s a real solution here, just an arms race.

uoaei• 4 years ago

No solution without first examining, identifying, and criticizing the incentives that are induced when the profit motive is assumed as a central tenet of modern society. If the point of enterprise is to make money, then that's what they will do. If the point of enterprise is to do something else, then they will do something else.

burke• 4 years ago

Or, you know, invested in building games where people retrospectively assess their time spent with the game as enriching rather than exploitative.

formerkrogemp2• 4 years ago

Or, you know, invested in building games where people retrospectively assess their time spent with the game as enriching rather than exploitative.

The most profitable franchises have not done this. It's all timesinks, pay-to-win, and microtransactions.

timq• 4 years ago

Except some Nintendo games, like breath of the wild.

yoyohello132• 4 years ago

The maximization of profit over everything else is the cause of much suffering.

selfhoster1114• 4 years ago

So profit is the only thing that matters in life? And not leisure, which appears to be the whole point of engaging in gaming?

jayd169• 4 years ago

That's nice and all but it'll be the last thing your studio does if you didn't think about monetization. Why is "have a business model" so controversial?

wahnfrieden10• 4 years ago

cognitive dissonance between loving free market capitalism and having values that the market doesn’t recognize

micromacrofoot• 4 years ago

because often the people emphasizing business models are insufferable sociopaths that have no interest in making quality products; they'd sell you a fart if they could get away with it... there is healthy space between, but the loudest people in business set a poor stage for the industry and it's so off-putting that many people would rather not think about it at all

vkou2• 4 years ago

Why is "have a business model" so controversial?

The same reason that a restaurant that charged you for water, more if it's cold or hot outside, by the second for the time you spent inside it, an extra gratuity if you used the restroom, more if you sat at a 4-person, instead of a 2-person table, had rolling ads in a tablet implanted into your table (That you could pay to turn off), etc, etc would be panned.

Even if the food was fine, and the overall cost were similar/lower than its neighbours. Capitalism is dehumanizing, and people don't want to engage with microtransactions in the middle of having their meal.

There's a qualitative difference between dealing with someone who figures out how to provide a good service, and then get paid for it, and dealing with someone who figures out how to get paid, and then tries to build a good service around it. The latter tends to look like that restaurant - an utter shit-show, and many people won't really care that you have a three-star Michelin chef making the pasta.

Also, in gaming, the bar from your competitors is high. There are a lot of excellent titles that provide a lot of entertainment without having predatory monetization. If your title does, it'll get panned. (If it doesn't, it'll still get panned for the monetization it does have, but hey, gamers are entitled.)

There's also monetization that crosses straight into gambling (loot boxes of various flavours) - or, alternatively - the apocryphal tale of two cowboys who pay eachother to eat cow patties (designing the game around whales trying to outspend eachother). These are very profitable, if shitty business models, and one should probably be regulated down[1], while the other can't scale - it's limited by the number of whales in the ocean.

[1] There are a few reasonable restrictions to it, that could be introduced - requiring all purchases to be fiat-denominated, as opposed to in a smorgasbord of in-game currencies, and requiring odds & costs to be shown[2] (again, fiat-denominated).

[2] If people want to spend $5,000 gambling for a hat that has an expected cost of $2,000, they are free to do it, but they should be aware of the odds.

ChrisClark• 4 years ago

Isn't that what he means when he says the loop needs to be an hour or longer, not 2 minutes?

Isn't he advocating a longer rewarding sequence instead of a quick cash grab every couple minutes?

nightpool• 4 years ago

No. He's advocating for the opposite—an enhanced "time on device" that keeps the users playing for much longer than they otherwise would have. This is well-known technique lifted directly from machine gambling in Los Vegas, where they try to draw out the "loop" long enough so that people keep playing as long as possible without ever walking away. Here's a quote about one of the best academic books on the subject, Addiction By Design:

    Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the “machine zone,” in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and “ambience management,” player tracking and cash access systems—all designed to meet the market’s desire for maximum “time on device.” Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers’ everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/ad...

There's a ton of crossover in these fields between people who designed gambling machines for Los Vegas and then got in on the ground floor of the big mobile gaming boom.

selfhoster1114• 4 years ago

It takes one to know one, I guess. Not being interrupted during gameplay by prompts to spend money or watch ads is a feature.

jayd169• 4 years ago

Committing to a full price game is also thinking about monetization.

selfhoster1114• 4 years ago

That's not the first thing that comes to mind when you mention "monetisation" these days to the average gamer or gamedev. Without further context, the word is usually interpreted as bleeding your customer for more attention/money.

epups4• 4 years ago

And this is the model that's being criticised as archaic and stupid here.

api• 4 years ago

FTA: ... "they tuned their compulsion loop" ...

We've done it folks. We've found business models far shadier than standard issue surveillance capitalism.

This whole attention economy thing is just so unbelievably gross. The only things lower on the moral totem pole these days are cryptocurrency scams and the really shady/exploitative side of the porn industry.

FeteCommuniste• 4 years ago

“Compulsion loop” definitely needs to go in the hall of fame of dystopian phrases.

Vosporos• 4 years ago

/r/BoringDystopia is waiting for your submission

endominus• 4 years ago

It's phrased so... nonchalantly. Basically an out-and-out admission that they are trying to appeal to producers of addictive gambling garbage. Content rather than art. Skinner boxes rather than agency. And the market rewards them for it (not Unity specifically - I expect Riccitiello to run the company into the ground within a year or two - but rather the game companies actually making slot machine games that collectively form half the games industry by revenue).

sp332• 4 years ago

And yet $U is at -75%, year to date. Maybe they should have focused on making something good instead?

henning2• 4 years ago

Won't someone PLEASE think of shareholder value

causi2• 4 years ago

In the eyes of the MBA, the ideal business is one whose customers hate it as much as possible while still using it.

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

Why would they want customers to hate it? Don't they want word-of-mouth sales?

causi2• 4 years ago

First you become indispensable, then you squeeze as much money as possible from the customer without them leaving.

srvmshr• 4 years ago

Famous last words.

Unity is doomed with the malware company merger

overgard7• 4 years ago

I doubt it; I can't imagine this is going to affect the engine/editor itself in a way you can't opt out of. Companies that want tools like ironsource would have already been using a package or custom code to do these things anyway.

It does speak to the priorities of the company though -- Unity used to be about indies, but it seems like their focus is more on mobile and services. I don't think that means they're going to neglect the indies, but I think they're realizing subscriptions without royalties isn't a huge money maker for them.

runevault• 4 years ago

The problem is a LOT of developers are starting to second guess using Unity which means no seat licenses and likely not using their ad network for in game monetization on mobile games.

Will people stick by that or will they try something like Godot, not like it instantly, and jump ship back despite their concerns? Only time will tell, but the concern seems pretty widespread in the gamedev community.

henning2• 4 years ago

Doing mobile ad IRR modeling spreadsheets, tweaking ad copy to rank higher in search engines, and other business-y MBA crap is easier than actually building a good game, especially if you don't actually like games and are just getting into "e-sports and mobile".

gsatic• 4 years ago

No surprise. This is probably the most useless and mindless generation of leaders the US has ever produced.

hklgny3• 4 years ago

This seems like a click bait title to me, he "technically" uses those words, but the article seems a lot more sensible to me than inflammatory. We should definitely be thinking through sales/marketing when building games just like we do when building software. Not sure why you wouldn't be.

Edit to add: This rings true even when you decide "not a priority this time", that's still thinking it through

bastawhiz3• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: Minecraft did essentially zero marketing and is monetized only in the sense that you need an account to log in (which is easily bypassed for single player) and it was/is the biggest and most valuable game of all time.

hklgny3• 4 years ago

For sure - you can often find anecdata that works out well. But I think being conscious about that decision up front as a developer is still a good idea. If you choose to go the Minecraft route then great. Just know what you're getting into and what bets you're making.

coffee_beqn• 4 years ago

That’s hardly a solid business plan though. We’ll be the next Minecraft because of magic! What about the 1000s of games released every week that fail to get more than a thousand downloads?

Xeamek• 4 years ago

"Most valuable game of all time"

Is it though? Yes, it did sell the most copies of any game ever, but how are you justifying to call it "the most valuable"?

bonestamp2• 4 years ago

Fortnite is also a free to play game, that requires no purchases to be equally competitive to paid players, and it is one of the most profitable games too. Players can pay for skins, celebration dances, theme music, etc.

That said, this is not the only way to make a living as a game developer and I'm happy to pay up front for a game that provides the full richness of the experience to all players.

decremental2• 4 years ago

Only thing that I'd add to this is that the Bedrock Edition has a store on which you can buy skins, texture packs, total conversions, maps, etc. Microsoft is definitely pushing for monetization outside of unit sales.

jerf2• 4 years ago

"Minecraft did essentially zero marketing and is monetized only in the sense that you need an account to log in"

No, Minecraft has been monetized for a while: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/catalog

That said, I've found it on the inoffensive side. It's got a plug on the title screen but my kids zip past it easily enough. Most of what you can buy involves a reasonable amount of work, they're not selling slight retexturings for $25. They've given away enough free stuff (of substance!) that I don't even feel bad that the free stuff is to remind you the market exists. No lootboxes.

telmo• 4 years ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

― Upton Sinclair

tyrust• 4 years ago

Not sure why you wouldn't be.

Art is an end in itself. Not everything that takes work needs to make needs to be immediately converted into money.

overgard7• 4 years ago

I think the difference though, is what you're saying is "think about what your audience wants and how to tell them you're providing it" which is perfectly sensible, versus what "monetization" is generally referring to, which is "make your gameplay funnel people into buying things outside the initial purchase/download"

ncr1004• 4 years ago

Nah - his behavior is bad.

Sure the concepts are also relevant / informative. However the impact is pro-bias, shaming people who don't think like he does.

It deserves a sincere apology.

naravara• 4 years ago

The headline is pretty sensationalist. The full quote "Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives. It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots."

wyldfire• 4 years ago

“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour.

A 'compulsion loop' sounds bad to me, I'd never heard the term before. Although if I try to take a step back I suppose this term could be used to describe any game and not just one of the lootbox-mania or idle games.

However, the wikipedia article [1] states:

A core or compulsion loop is any repetitive gameplay cycle that is designed to keep the player engaged with the game. ... A compulsion loop may be distinguished further from a core loop; while many games have a core loop of activities that a player may repeat over and over again, such as combat within a role-playing game, a compulsion loop is particularly designed to guide the player into anticipation for the potential reward from specific activities

For some reason, all I can think of is that game from ST:TNG [2]. I'd like to say that I am somehow above it all but back when I used to play FPS games, it was probably just the same thing. Nonstop dopamine infusion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...

actinium226• 4 years ago

Compulsion loop does sound rather dystopian and "attention-hacking" but it's interesting that he says "two minutes when it should have been an hour," instead of the other way around. An hour long compulsion loop sounds like it could be an immersive experience.

That said, I'm not hearing nice things about IronSource and it sounds like maybe there's better ways to get user feedback than the particular implementations they're using and are going to use with IronSource.

phkahler3• 4 years ago

Two minutes would be a holdover from 1980's arcade games. That's about how long you'd play on a quarter. Maybe 3 minutes.

bakuninsbart• 4 years ago

I've developed to be a terrible gamer: Great games that are finished in 7 hours usually don't feel worth the money, while games that do these compulsion loops quickly feel like a waste of time.

I think I'm not alone in that, and the few games I really enjoyed in the last couple of years were significantly text-based and/or complex simulations for this reason.

tagami• 4 years ago

Compulsion loop aka Skinner Box aka Operant Condition Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

cmelbye• 4 years ago

From what I've seen of mobile games, in practice it means that it starts off fun and well balanced. Then after [x] minutes it starts to get a bit frustrating, and suddenly you're unable to make progress without sitting and waiting or banging your head against the wall. This presents a choice to the player. They can choose to put the game down until they unlock some power up that helps them pass the level. Or, they can pay money to receive the instant dopamine hit of getting back to the beginning of the "compulsion loop".

The real dystopia is that I'm 99% sure these games dynamically adjust durations, prices, and incentives based on the user's past behavior to extract as much money per hour of play as possible. Essentially a machine that identifies and preys on a person's weaknesses.

nonbirithm• 4 years ago

I wonder if there is a point that a game or other experience can become "predatory" solely focusing on the time someone spends on it regardless of monetization. To my own mind, there are many games that I can't put down for hours, sometimes missing out on sleep entirely for days. But the capitalistic part doesn't apply to me since I never play games with in-game monetization. Still, a lot of my time is sucked away by those activities (sometimes >18 hours a day), and I sometimes have to stop myself and question my priorities.

As an example, Minecraft is only a $20 one-time purchase, but free and/or open source mods made by people who are motivated by fun instead of profit have created a staggering amount of content that happens to be really addictive to someone like me. For the $20 I got the equivalent of years of content and novelty that I can never hope to fully explore.

I wonder if any given computer program that's given a colossal amount of development resources thrown behind it will ultimately come somewhere close to irresistible, and would suck away various parts of our less interesting hopes and dreams regardless of how much monetary currency the creator is expecting the user to pay. There just happens to be a motive to tack on some extra profit if the game is pseudo-irresistable, where all that time would have been "wasted" on someone's freeloading video game addiction instead. It makes me wonder if what is known as "predatory" is just a pathological explosion of what someone thinks of as a successful accomplishment (my "any given side project could one day addict us all" theory).

xg155• 4 years ago

but it's interesting that he says "two minutes when it should have been an hour," instead of the other way around.

Didn't sound very nice to me. More like an elder drug lord who knows that too many overdoses are bad for business or a virus that evolves to be less lethal because dead hosts don't spread.

Or in this case: a two minute compulsion loop would probably make it really obvious that the game is trying to hook you and might trigger some kind of counter reaction: Players realizing it's a slot machine and uninstalling it to stop themselves from wasting time. Whereas a hour-long loop might keep a player hooked without them realizing it.

bit_logic• 4 years ago

Another term for this is grinding. The CEO is saying they should have made the grinding parts of the game longer. Grinding is usually boring and repetitive part of the game that's required to advance. A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.

haunter• 4 years ago

Yet a lot of people love this and there are multiple genres (MMOs and ARPGs) built around it. Heck even Minecraft is just a mindless grind for some

dragontamer3• 4 years ago

A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.

A great RPG however, provides you with the tools to advance without ever grinding.

Most Fire Emblem games for example, are carefully tuned (thanks to a pretty interesting experience point formula) to rig your "active members of the party" to a particular level. Fire Emblem effectively asymptotes your character's level to what is expected for a particular map.

In Fire Emblem, 100 experience points is a level up. However, a stronger character gets less experience points, while a weaker character gets more. So weaker characters grow much faster, maybe leveling up after defeating just one foe. While a strong character ("the Jeigen" as Fire Emblem fans call it), may need 20+ wins before they level up.

As such, most Fire Emblem games feel like "there's no grind", because the experience point system is designed to never have a grind to begin with. Weak characters feel weak for their first few combats, but exponentially level up and catch up to the rest of the party in just a few maps. While your strongest characters feel like they're "wasting the precious enemies" (there's only a set number of enemies per map. Killing an enemy for +5 exp on your strongest character is just not good tactics when the same enemy is +100 exp on your weakest character).

-------

Even Pokemon to a large extent does this well. You can defeat all the gyms without ever "Grinding". It gets harder and harder to advance, but the game has enough tactics (Swords Dance, X Attack, etc. etc.) to allow you to win even with 10-levels or 15-levels behind the computer.

I think "no grind" Pokemon playthroughs are pretty fun. It completely changes the game and kind of provides the player an entry point into the competitive scene (you need to use competitive meta strategies vs the CPU if you expect to win with 10-to-15 level disadvantages against them).

--------

EDIT: It should be noted that Fire Emblem / Pokemon does offer a grind, but only as a method of last resort. Children who are incapable of ever understanding advanced tactics like Swords Dance or Calm Mind, are given a "grind" which guarantee progress.

Similarly, Fire Emblem has "grind levels" that serve as a way to increase your character's strength. But a lot of "hardcore" Fire Emblem fans try to avoid the grind levels and beat the game "grind free".

From this perspective, "Grind" exists as a way to allow casual players to advance, while trying to stay balanced so that stronger players (on their 5th or 6th playthrough with deep understanding of the mechanics of the game) can play without that "emergency escape hatch" so to speak.

theptip• 4 years ago

Grinding is just one way to lengthen the loop. Or you can create lots of compelling content, like Elden Ring, which did not feel grindy to me at any point in 130 hours.

ER has a couple loops, with dungeons taking O(hour), and regions taking O(10hour). But there is no hard requirement to grind baked in at any level. (Of course, there is a requirement to Git Gud, which might make it feel grindy to some.)

Semaphor• 4 years ago

A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.

That’s ARPGs and JRPGs (and maybe some action RPGs), CRPGs typically don’t have any grinding.

jhallenworld• 4 years ago

Having read Wheel of Time recently.. "[The Forsaken] Graendal in the Age of Legends was famous as a great psychologist and a noted ascetic. After her conversion to the Shadow, she became a master manipulator and an extraordinarily skilled user of Compulsion weaves... She is very particular about her servants, often choosing people of great status, power, or renown and reducing their minds to empty husks"

panick21_• 4 years ago

But be carful, she uses compulsion like a hammer to distract from the fact that she is also amazing a light touch compulsion.

ycombinete• 4 years ago

Path of Exile has the most exquisite set of compulsion loops within loops. Even when you’re aware of it they’re so satisfying.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

A 'compulsion loop' sounds bad to me

Yes, it is bad. Crack cocaine has a really tight compulsion loop, for example.

facorreia• 4 years ago

For more information on the Skinner Box theory and how it is applied to exploit human psychology for monetization purposes:

https://levelskip.com/how-to/Skinners-Box-and-Video-Games

fuzzythinker• 4 years ago

Thank you for the "The Game" wiki link. It's pretty much a software virus on intelligent beings' minds. Very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if something like it has been deployed in other intelligent worlds.

overgard7• 4 years ago

It's not a great sounding phrase, but a compulsion loop can be a pretty harmless thing. Think about a cliffhanger in a book or a tv show -- something that gets you to come back to the next episode/chapter. That's really the same thing. Right now I'm playing God of War, and there's a compulsion loop of doing side quests to make my character stronger. There's definitely a compulsiveness to that -- I stayed up too late last night doing that -- but it's not particularly evil.

astrostl• 4 years ago

Explicit references to a "compulsion loop" make me want to delete all my non-indie video games and take a shower.

chomp2• 4 years ago

Yeah, this is gross. He has a point that when you are selling a game, you're in it for a non-zero amount of profit, so you do have to think about compulsion and keeping people coming back to the game - if people aren't drawn back over multiple sessions then they're going to walk away thinking they spent money for 2 minutes of playtime and they'll be upset.

But the context of the question was moving monetization earlier in the development process. This is something that winds up feeling very broken in most games. You can tell when the game is a fleshed out around a scaffold of "how can we extract payment" and it always feels lame. In fact, some of my favorite games are the opposite - the core gameplay is built out, and then the monetization is added as a cosmetic store.

wahnfrieden10• 4 years ago

are you suggesting that game dev labor should be valued by society in other ways than via the market? the market finds that this type of monetization is more profitable. why does HN turn anti-capitalism when it comes to games?

whateveracct2• 4 years ago

For the same reason people turn anti-capitalism when it comes to art and music.

There's more reasons for a game to exist besides making big bucks.

selfhoster1114• 4 years ago

Because it's common consensus that capitalism went way too far with games. Microtransactions and/or ads and dark patterns are endemic, diminishing enjoyment of games and unduly robbing people of attention/money. Online activation is a thing. And it's not that it's "fine not to do these things", because there are so many offenders, both high and low-profile, that it seems "all right" to do these things to developers who are still on the fence, which poisons the pool even more than it already is.

chomp2• 4 years ago

Not anti-capitalist, quite the contrary, you deserve to be compensated for the fruits of your labor at a rate that the market will bear.

However, there's what the market will bear, and what the market can be coerced into paying. The latter is definitely more money than the former. The point at which you step into a game and then are psychologically manipulated into spending more than you otherwise would have, that isn't right. Building out gameplay loops that are only fun if you fork over more cash after you've invested considerable time into the application and leveraging the sunk cost fallacy to pull more cash out of your user, do you really respect your consumer at that point, or their wallet?

People are free to build what they want. I'm allowed to call it gross. I'm also allowed to say that those gameplay mechanics feel broken and not fun.

Run a thought experiment next time you play a game. If money was no object, and you were able to pay the developer the average value of their customer (total revenue divided by their total downloads), and in return, all purchase screens are removed, would that game be even more fun? In my experience, they'd usually wind up being a husk, a very generic, boring gameplay loop with nothing enticing. That's how you know that the enticement is actually manipulation.

stereolambda• 4 years ago

Capitalism is one of the words that are so general and used for so many phenomena it often becomes useless in a conversation. One can think some market behavior is unethical and to be opposed by individual action, but not see an acceptable political way to remedy this. I don't generally subscribe to this type of thinking, but it is a position. People also tend to see production of culture as something that should be different from producing/selling cars or potatoes.

Besides, people seem to call "capitalism" a set of laws and regulations that are good for current large capital holders, and freely extracting money from people if you have superior psycho/marketing and lawyer power. But there is a vast, vast space of possible regulatory conditions that would still be essentially capitalist in how economy functions.

scratcheee• 4 years ago

The way the psychology of gambling has entered the games industry has indeed produced more money, but at the same kind of costs that the gambling industry has always created.

I don't advocate for killing this new gaming industry, just as I don't advocate for killing the more traditional gambling industry, but both need much stricter supervision than most markets because they attack a weak point in human psychology, and taken too far, they harm humanity more than they generate value.

In the end any "distortion" of the market requires a strong justification, but I think the justifications used against the gambling industry have always been pretty compelling, and they appear to apply just as well to modern games industry techniques.

Another way to put it is that the "value to society" of modern games techniques contains a negative externality: damage to the players comparable to that of gambling addictions. You could solve it with the equivalent of a carbon tax, though defining the cost of different tactics feels impossible, so I'd argue that the traditional gambling restrictions are a better fit (illegal in many places, illegal for children, legal limits, requiring various warnings and protections to discourage extreme behaviours, high taxes, etc).

Many families play boardgames with their children at home. Fewer visit blackjack tables. I think theres a fair argument that these broadly match the different financial strategies in the games industry. How much of this behaviour is parental wisdom and how much is limited accessibility thanks to legal restrictions is a hard question to answer, but I have a suspicion that the world would be a worse place with unrestricted gambling. But kids _do_ sit at home opening lootboxes as their parents watch tv, I'm not sure if the effects are much different.

selfhoster1114• 4 years ago

if people aren't drawn back over multiple sessions then they're going to walk away thinking they spent money for 2 minutes of playtime and they'll be upset

The solution to that is to git gud and build a game that's actually enjoyable to play, not wireheading players with dirty tactics.

jl6• 4 years ago

Did you know there is a market for pre-war steel? This is steel manufactured before 1945 that is uncontaminated by radionuclides:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

There will soon be a market for pre-microtransactions games.

Also: I used to hate on the casino industry for using the term “gaming” to euphemistically refer to gambling, but now they’re not so different so I’ll let them have that one.

revolvingocelot3• 4 years ago

There will soon be a market for pre-microtransactions games

I'd argue there already is -- what's currently called "indies". IMO the greater threat is the "compulsion loop". Plenty of excellent games, both historical and modern, are content to challenge the player without much in the way of enticement. But in this late year, we're having to contend with things like Vampire Survivors [0], which, while being microtransaction-free, is fun, straightforward, and takes inspiration from video lottery terminals. Yes, really! Its creator, Luca Galante [1]:

“Slot games are very simple,” he tells The Verge. “All the player has to do is press one button, and the game designers have to find a way to push the player to press that button. [The player] is actually spending money every time they press it, and because of that, there’s a huge attention to detail on the sounds, the animations, and the sequences, because you have so few elements to work with. Basically, [the designers] try to maximize the importance and impact those elements have on the player. I just absorbed that knowledge basically just by being in the industry. And so when making a game, I have automatically applied it to what [I’ve been] doing.”
That’s all reflected in Vampire Survivors. Starting a game immediately drops you into the action, and the only controls to think about are moving your character and picking upgrades. You don’t even need to press a button to use your weapons. The charming retro graphics feel like they’re ripped straight from a long-forgotten Super Nintendo Castlevania game, and you’ll hear a delightful chime every time you pick up one of the countless experience gems. Opening treasure chests seems to intentionally create the feeling that you’re pulling a slot machine; pixelated weapons stream by on ribbons of color as coins fly everywhere, all backed by a catchy jingle. (If you get lucky and find a chest with five items, there are actually fireworks.)

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/19/22941145/vampire-survivor...

djur2• 4 years ago

This is just arcade design. Vampire Survivors might have a more bombastic way of presenting random drops, but otherwise it's not meaningfully different from something like Robotron or Gauntlet.

RosanaAnaDana• 4 years ago

Every game has a compulsion loop. In chess its a full game of chess. In Street Fighter II it is one full fight with up to 3 rounds. Its a very dystopian sounding but very central component to almost all games.

icu• 4 years ago

Thank you for explaining my recent videogame behaviour. I think the last AAAs I played through was Ghost of Tsushima and the Demon Souls remake. I feel less inclined to play AAAs and I find myself gravitating to Gris, Sable, Untitled Goose Game and Trek to Yomi to name a few.

JackFlapper• 4 years ago

I think Apple Arcade and similar are already doing this. Games on there are free from microtransactions/ads.

smoldesu2• 4 years ago

...besides the recurring nominal fee that you have to pay to retain "ownership" of a title? I think you misunderstand what "free from microtransactions" means.

datpuz• 4 years ago

That's why there are so many hugely successful remakes/remasters of old games in recent years. I might just be getting old, but the AAA studios don't seem to be capable of making great games anymore, now that business guys are running the show.

nitrixion3• 4 years ago

Elden Ring's massive success shows the market for games without MTX is absolutely active and large.

asdff• 4 years ago

But if you never publish those games and no other publishers ever do, you deny that market from existing. I have plenty of gamer friends. They move like sheep yearly to the next title because thats where the playerbase marches to. There is no alternative unless they want to wait 10 minutes between rounds and have half full matches or deal with totalitarian private servers. A publisher like EA has no incentive to ever allow a game like that to be greenlit under their brand, and every incentive to forever shirk it out. A smaller time publisher like those behind Elden Ring can come in with a game like this, but the big time publishers know that the best practice is to wring the cow dry for all they can because it comes to pasture yearly.

opyate• 4 years ago

YES! I registered gamblingisnotgaming.com with a view to put some material on there about the difference between games and gambling, the dangers of addiction, etc, but dread the idea of getting sued because of it, so it's currently not hosting anything.

It's also especially annoying when searching for jobs in games, and these ruddy e-gambling companies keep popping up on searches, because "gaming".

overgard7• 4 years ago

Honestly, I think there already is a market for that. I know personally, when I buy mobile games, I completely avoid the F2P space. The last mobile game I played was The Oregon Trail (on Apple Arcade), and I gotta say, it was incredibly refreshing playing a game on the phone that was just a game. No annoying timers or things like that to convince me to buy "gems" or whatever currency. (I'm not sure if that game is completely clear from that, but I didn't notice it at all if it was there)

Even in F2P games, there's a huge chunk of gamers that take pride in "I've never bought anything in this game". I think culturally "whales" are frowned upon, even though they (sadly) make up the vast majority of F2P games profits.

When guy's like this CEO talk about monetization btw, IMO a lot of these methods are really shady, because the vast majority of profits come from a very small minority that are unable to exercise self control around these "compulsion loops." On the surface, "if you don't want to pay for it you don't have to" seems friendly enough, but when you realize that essentially all the profits are coming from people that have (arguably) an addiction, it feels a bit gross. Not that all monetization is bad. I don't have a problem with like, selling hats or outfits or things that don't affect gameplay, but when your gameplay is designed to open peoples wallets... it's a bit of a grey area IMO.

philistine4• 4 years ago

The dichotomy between cosmetics and gameplay-impacting microtransactions is irrelevant. They both produce the addiction you describe.

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

But if there's a market for "pre" microtransaction games, then wouldn't there be a market for "non" microtransaction games? And couldn't you just... make those? It's not like microtransactions are literally dispersed in the atmosphere.

joshstrange• 4 years ago

There is a market, unfortunately it might be a small one as I've been unable to find good resources to find games without IAP or without "bad" IAP, aka gems, coins, powerup, speedup, etc. The only good IAPs are DLC, Full Unlock, or Remove Ads. If a game has anything but that I will not download the game. No matter how many times they scream "Free to play" we all know that's 100% bullshit (and if you don't then I've got a bridge to sell you). The only exception to this rule is if the only IAP is cosmetic-only (think: Fortnight).

All other F2P games progress to the point that they require you to pay to proceed either by making your progress slow down to near-zero and/or forcing you to grind for hours to move forward even a tiny bit. No, it's not "The game is just harder", they specifically make the game too hard at a certain point to force you into paying. It's a really ingenious system where they will let you get quite far in the game before they turn the screws, when you think "Well I have played X hours, I can spend $Y on this powerup". PvZ2 is a good example of this. EA absolutely ruined the PvZ franchise (they even went back and screwed up PvZ1, adding ads/IAP even if you bought the game previously) with their greed.

F2P/IAP game developers have perverse incentives to milk you for all you're worth and no matter how "pure"/"moral" they think they want to be. The siren call of money will always lead them to ruin games and make them effectively P2W, even if subconsciously. It's simply too easy to do, just bump the boss HP up by a factor of 10, make this part of the level near-impossible without a powerup, etc.

Apple Arcade helps will some of this but the catalogue is limited (though there are some real gems in there, some of which are games that were F2P/P2W initially). I've found Apple's "Games you might like" or "Based on your downloads" to actually be surprisingly good. I just have to filter them out if they have "bad" IAPs.

worker_person• 4 years ago

Building a RetroPie is a fun project that can end in having hundreds of old games. https://retropie.org.uk/

bluescrn• 4 years ago

There will soon be a market for pre-microtransactions games.

It's already too late to get into the hobby of collecting retro games/hardware. eBay prices have been shooting upwards for a good few years already.

Thankfully, the classics are well-preserved via emulation (and in some cases, FPGA recreations of older hardware). But there's an ever-increasing number of games that simply aren't able to be preserved due having no access to server-side components, and many others lost from the early days of mobile gaming (e.g. 32-bit iOS games from before F2P took over), with no way to run them on modern hardware and no emulation solutions yet, even if the games themselves have survived somewhere.

morley• 4 years ago

The full quote for context:

Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives. It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.

Their CEO is certainly not calling everyone an idiot, just that there are some in that group of people. And personally, I greatly prefer this sort of frank talk to run-of-the-mill generic PR speak that usually comes from CEO interviews.

The next thing he says in the interview:

I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that. It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.

jeffwask7• 4 years ago

He's saying every game needs to be an MTX riddled nightmare to be successful. As a gamer I reject that and have been with my wallet for a while. There are hundreds of dev teams producing great stuff below the AAA level that only ask me to buy the game once not every day.

selfhoster1114• 4 years ago

IMO it's not clear just from the immediate context in the article that he's actually advocating for MTX or ads.

If he is, then he deserves all the flak. If he's simply talking about having a market fit so your game sells at all, then IMO that's just talking about the viability of the game as a product - and in this case it's just about whether making the game makes financial sense, not whether you can juice the customer for more money.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

He's saying every game needs to be an MTX riddled nightmare to be successful.

Come on, that's clearly not what he's saying in that quote. I don't like microtransactions either, but it makes your position weaker to get hyperbolic.

He's saying you have to include monetisation when planning for your game, rather than pretending it doesn't exist. To me this seems so obviously true that it's almost a product design axiom, let alone a priority for businesses. The question is how it should be done, and how well it will be done, which he says nothing about in that quote.

OskarS• 4 years ago

I don't think the full context does him any favors. The way he talks of gamedevs that are not engaging in predatory behaviour ("beautiful and pure, brilliant people") is incredibly condescending. Like, "yes children, once you grow up you'll realize how foolish your idealism has been and you'll stuff your game full of gems you can overpay for!". These are his customers he's talking about. And later talking about "compulsion loops"... just, no.

Unity used to be famous for being the game engine of choice for creative indies. Games like Hollow Knight, Return of the Obra Dinn, or Ori and the Blind Forest. It seems to me very clear that Riccitello has no understanding of the value of tools for making games like that. He sees Unity as a way of pumping out endless shitty Candy Crush clones stuffed with predatory microtransactions.

EDIT: by the way, for the full context, this is the question he's answering:

"Implementing monetisation earlier in the process and conversation is certainly an angle that has seen pushback from some developers."

The pushback the question is referring to is developers being disappointed in the ironSource merger. He's literally being asked about Unity focusing too much on microtransactions and ad technology, and in his answer to the question he refers to his critics (which, again, are his customers!) as "fucking idiots".

This guy should not be in charge of Unity.

zero_• 4 years ago

Godot seems to gain popularity. Maybe it has a chance to become the choice for indies.

SpaceManNabs2• 4 years ago

he used to be pretty high up in EA. He also worked at a PE firm that especialized in media, although I think better of PE firms than most people. Point being is that I am not surprised at his revenue driven perspective.

hmmazoids• 4 years ago

"yes children, once you grow up you'll realize how foolish your idealism has been and you'll stuff your game full of gems you can overpay for!"

As someone who has worked at a start up that really took off, didn't truly think out monetization and prayed at some point the free users would be willing to play assuming we gave the right features and benefits, I would say you're incredibly naïve. So in retrospect, this isn't that poor of a take.

snek_case• 4 years ago

I haven't worked with Unity, but I'm assuming they get a percentage of the money spent through microtransactions and monetized content? They're essentially a platform, kind of like the Apple app store, and taking a cut?

In that case, it's obvious why the Unity CEO would say this. He has a financial incentive to get game developers to try and milk gamers for profit (because Unity gets a cut).

I think that this could ultimately push gamers and developers to use other engines/platforms. If you try to milk gamers for profit, it will eventually lead to unplayable games where the only way to compete online is to buy a ton of virtual power-ups and accessories.

crayboff• 4 years ago

I haven't seen much of what he says in general so I don't know if he has a really antagonistic trend in his he talks.

I interpreted what he said to mean "I have respect for devs who approach this for just the art, but if you don't consider monetization into your design from the beginning, you are self sabotaging your chance at business success".

He just said that with less politically correct talk, which is easily taken out of context.

Also there's this assumption in this thread and in HN in general that "monetization" always means bleeding people out of their money. Sure much of the industry does that, but I don't think that has to be the case

mmazing• 4 years ago

Yep.

I mean, there's absolutely a market for the stuff, but it should NOT be our goal to make every game the same cookie cutter formula for "how to maximize money".

In fact, I think there's a bigger problem at hand here.

It's something about how people want to find a formula for X, so they essentially don't have to be creative and think about how to make something interesting and new.

I don't know what it is exactly, but I've been trying to pin it down for a while now.

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

I think it does do him favors.

He isn't saying stuff them full of microtransactions and addictive behaviors.

Idealism can just as easily be not paying attention to any form of making money, which you know full well that lots of developers do, especially passionate game developers.

Have you ever tried to help someone make a game? Have you ever tried the finance side with them? When that CEO says some of them are fucking idiots he is absolutely right.

seydor• 4 years ago

Who should be in charge of Unity?

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

That's just sticking your head in the sand and pretending that you can't see all of the indie devs that are wholeheartedly using microtransactions and injecting ads into their games. You can opine about how Unity should be a pure game engine for pure-hearted indie devs who make games out of passion, not filthy lucre. But that doesn't match reality, I'm afraid.

dcow3• 4 years ago

I mean, like it or not, it kinda sounds like this is the guy who should be in charge of Unity. Strong leaders are willing to tell people things they don't want to hear. Weak leaders regurgitate PR and marketing softball garbage and have no vision. To him, with all the data and knowledge he has, it's probably night and day obvious the difference in sustainability between studios that incorporate a recurring revenue model and those that don't. I don't think he's saying "no game should ever not have micro-transactions". I think he's saying "in this day an age, if you're serious about building a sustainable studio, growing to the type of success fledgling studios imagine, and leveraging the Unit platform to help you do it, you're gonna need some recurring revenue component somewhere in your portfolio and that's why we have invested in tools to make that easier for people".

ByersReason• 4 years ago

Well, that and the fact that their rendering engine isn't really competitive with Epic, who do get it ....

s1artibartfast7• 4 years ago

Key words are "earlier in the process".

If you are going to have monetization mechanisms, ignoring them during development and trying to bolt them on at the end is indeed idiotic.

ncr1004• 4 years ago

Unusual!

He's been there for 10 years, made $1b, could have retired before he started ... and it's unusual that those SO POINTEDLY cruel words are being used by him, based upon my 6 years of experience listening to / occasionally talking with him while I was at Unity.

It appears to be unkind, maniacal, transactional thinking in my perspective. It deserves clarification. Without clarification the impact is kind of an evil one: From a people sense, it divides people up, chides them if they are non-binary about monetization.

Pivoting to talking about himself in the next breath smells bad to me too, like a slightly muffled narcissism that excuses self-misbehavior.

And Marc Whitten cleans up / enables just after, which is common to see around narcissists: "To double down on John’s point, Unity has democratised creation [...]"

So to avoid the pathological dead-end of being considered a narcissist, he ought to restate this.

I am puzzled. I wildly guess he could be creating an "out" as CEO for himself. IDK what this is.

What would have been better messaging here? I'm not a C-level / executive and don't have a clue.

ruskyhacker• 4 years ago

This guy gets it.

Fortunately and unfortunately (we likely won't see him be burned at the stake) he'll be out of the game soon. Throwing shade at the devs as well as pissing off the consumers, pure marketing GeNiUs

soneca• 4 years ago

”And personally, I greatly prefer this sort of frank talk to run-of-the-mill generic PR speak that usually comes from CEO interviews.”

There is this desire for “authenticity” in the current zeitgeist. You see it everywhere, but mostly in how the crowds love people like Trump and Elon Musk.

I think this is an understandable reaction from being lied a lot by polite PR-trained people. Politicians and businesspeople mostly.

But I think there are two very relevant types of bias that people who praises this apparent authenticity:

1 - Thinking people who use an aggressive, unapologetic tone do not lie. They do lie. I see no evidence that they lie less than “polite” people. The thing is that the mainstream is smaller and much much less dominant than it was decades ago. So you can get away offending a lot of people, because there will still be a lot of people left that will adore you. So you can use unapologetic tone that offend a group of people. It pays to offend a group, as long it is not your group. It gives you credit to lie to your group without getting caught.

2 - Thinking polite people are always lying. The other side of the coin. We see so many PR-trained people lying emulating polite people that we start to equal politeness to insincerity. But a lot of people are genuinely polite, considerate and kind. They tell the truth and try not to offend anyone.

These biases, equaling offensive tone to authenticity is, I believe, a misleading and dangerous way to see the world. You use a flawed heuristic that leads you to believe in liers while bragging you are avoiding liers.

pcurve• 4 years ago

Those are very fair points, and I agree.

For me personally, authenticity is more about choosing to speak vs. laying low on certain topics.

Sure you can still lie when you speak to it, but at least you're being truthful on your desire to express.

la64710• 4 years ago

Very well put, Sir!!

Sorry to see the new generation falling for these con-artists.

My humble advice as a nobody is look at things objectively and understand that words have unintended consequences so make a conscious effort to not insult others.

s1artibartfast7• 4 years ago

I think there is another angle to it beyond Truth vs lying.

There is also content and clarity. A lot of generic PR speak is devoid of actual content, it doesn't mean anything.

In this example, he is making a clear claim, like it or not. There is no ambiguity or double speak.

I think a lot of people are willing to tolerate disagreement and even lying if it is done in simple language opposed to evasion.

If you disagree, you know it. If they are lying, it is also clear because their statements aren't stuffed full of weasel words.

majkinetor3• 4 years ago

Very nice thinking regarding ultra popular folks like Musk.

However, IMO it doesnt hold truth for others which risk rage and clearing from insulted. Insulting people is always risky buisiness but if you want to show that you give a shit that shouldnt stop you.

I pesonally dont like to work with polite people very much because I know they always euphemize the truth. Some things are so shitty that if you frame it in polite way you simply lie.

mehlmao• 4 years ago

I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that.

Few people have driven as many once-successful studios into the ground as Riccitello.

ehnto3• 4 years ago

Hopefully I'm not putting words into their mouth, but the implication here is that those people are idiots because they're not making as much money as they could be by using the techniques he believes in. The second implication is that they are doing this unknowingly. That's a pretty naive outlook. Some people are either not in it for money, or don't care about the money more than they care about the integrity of their product and experience of their customers.

badloginagain• 4 years ago

It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand.

The thing about a decent monetization model is that is _has_ to be thought about and structured from the very beginning.

If you are going to have a live team creating content for a game over the long term, then the game has to make money over the long term as well. If you try to hamfist that monetization model at the end, it looks like a hamfisted monetization scheme that players are _very_ attuned to.

Bad monetization design is like bad game design, it makes the game worse. Good monetization design can allow you to support your game for _decades_.

League of Legends would have died years ago if not for a monetization model that worked over the long term.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

And personally, I greatly prefer this sort of frank talk to run-of-the-mill generic PR speak that usually comes from CEO interviews.

I think a lot more CEO talk frankly than we give credit for. The difference would be that many of them are polite and considerate, and their baseline isn’t abrasive language. NPR had an interview of toy maker about Prime day, and it was pretty frank and natural, with pretty emotional topics, without calling anyone fucking idiots.

TameAntelope• 4 years ago

I think he says "the biggest fucking idiots" in the way some of us say, "aren't thinking of all the angles".

If folks are getting wrapped up in the insult, they're not reading his tone correctly. He says it lovingly, and even if you disagree with that kind of tone, it's disingenuous to say he's literally calling these people "fucking idiots".

twoquestions• 4 years ago

Why should Ferrari move on to something other than clay and carving knives? I really can't see a render on a computer screen of any size giving you the same visceral understanding of how a car looks walking up to it and moving around it, which is absolutely critical for a premium product like that. Maybe a VR rig might be useful in prototyping, I don't know.

That comment makes him look even more like a short-sighted asshat.

cartoonfoxes• 4 years ago

It does, or ignorant at the least. All the auto manufacturers use clay, not just for Italian sportscars.

Automotive technical surfacing in CAD is stupid hard, and is a waste of time for the design staff. The clay models are easier to work with in every sense - easier to change, easier to refine, easier to show and discuss, etc. Designers can apply reflective film to the clay which shows reflections much as the finished product would, and can even be painted. The final surfaces are reverse-engineered from scans taken from those clay models.

ncr1004• 4 years ago

.. and it loses any Unity Ferrari business.

Is there positivity somewhere in this kind of talk, like will it somehow win Unity more business? I am not seeing it.

techdragon• 4 years ago

I’ll be as blunt as he is.

With the full context … he still sounds like an asshole.

Admittedly an “authentic” asshole I genuinely believe that’s how he feels, but he strikes me as a corporate suit wearing asshole … a real Bobby Kotic (I think his name deserves to be a pejorative for assholes in the gaming industry)

He can talk nice about it, but he’s saying anyone who isn’t focused on the money is and idiot, the stupid thing about that is that he clearly thinks “pay once” is for fucking idios and just let the mask slip to show this disdain for customers that want quality games that aren’t trying to productise the players. He’s saying if you don’t want to be sold, avoid anything built with Unity. Which is to bring it full circle… fucking stupid of him.

spookie• 4 years ago

Oh please, defending predatory, manipulative behavior and calling others fools for not indulging in such morally corrupt actions? There are "baked in monetization" practices that went so out of hand, that have become illegal in several democratic, and free countries. Let's just think about that for a second.

I'm ashamed to even have to reply to this.

These "brave", utterly perverse statements, given out by these decadent businesspersons, shouldn't be met by anything other than criticism, and disbelief.

He's totally calling out for developers to embrace these ill practices. It's fucking disgusting, manipulative behavior.

yoyohello132• 4 years ago

"Idiot" in this case means anybody who prioritizes anything over money.

kthartic2• 4 years ago

That's not how I understood his words, like at all. He means that monetisation should be considered as part of the creative process.

Many indie devs could've been sitting on gold mines, but that those rewards (which could've lead to the creation/evolution of more games) weren't reaped because they didn't consider it. Now of course some of those devs wouldn't care about that at all, but I bet there's also some whose jaws would've dropped if they were told how much they could've made.

pugworthy• 4 years ago

...monetisation should be considered as part of the creative process

That mindset is the antithesis of open source.

And believe it or not, not every game dev is into it to make money. There was some classic interaction between Nimblebit and Zynga back when where Zynga offered to buy Nimblebit, who politely turned down the offer. It could have made a huge amount of money for the founders, but they preferred making their money by creating great games.

ohgodplsno• 4 years ago

I knew I remembered the name John Riccitiello from somewhere as a dumbass. And it turns out, it's 1997 to 2004 and 2007 to 2013 at Electronic Arts. The two periods known as the absolute worst times in terms of quality and scumbaggery when it comes to monetization of games for EA. Oh, and also as someone who was fired because EA was bleeding out money, fucked up not one but four consecutive high profile game launches and was in litigation with about half of its studios.

Thanks John, but I seem to have a slight idea at who the fucking idiot in the room might be, unfortunately, you're failing upwards.

epups4• 4 years ago

This is extremely relevant information. This guy is a fucking idiot himself.

Mezzie• 4 years ago

Oh, the man who helped tank my favorite game studio (RIP Maxis).

Yeah, I wouldn't listen to him about much of anything.

groby_b• 4 years ago

To all the folks complaining it's gross: This is Riccitiello. Of course it's gross. That's who he is.

He's one of the reasons a whole lot of good people left the games industry, and continue to leave.

antiverse2• 4 years ago

Just shows they're not a good culture fit.

whateveracct2• 4 years ago

The best games aren't Products. Mine never will be :)

rbanffy• 4 years ago

Not everything in life is a pursuit of profit.

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

I too love the fucking idiots. Or artists as I prefer to call them.

phkahler3• 4 years ago

“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour. Sometimes, you wouldn’t even notice the product difference between a massive success and tremendous fail, but for this tuning and what it does to the attrition rate. There isn’t a developer on the planet that wouldn’t want that knowledge.”

Cool. I had to look that up and found Wikipedia informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop

Thanks for the tip!

epups4• 4 years ago

This short-sightedness will ultimately kill big publishers. Yes you can milk customers and it will be profitable in the short run. But in the long run, your clientele will consist solely of idiots. Look at EA and Blizzard for examples of this.

_jal• 4 years ago

I think he's probably right, in context. And I also think this is increasingly why I just don't play new games anymore. I like the output of those clay-carver idiots, and don't like product from savvy businessgamers.

Cash extraction machines aren't fun. When I want an escapist experience, "social" bullshit incorporating status skins and whatnot is an utter turnoff, as is effectively mandatory upsells for in-game whatevers.

I'm sure losing people like me works out on the balance sheet. I'll be over here, yelling at clouds.

bioemerl• 4 years ago

It'll eventually collapse under its own weight like Atari in the 80s.

yAak• 4 years ago

The Big Lebowski comes to mind: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."

cesaref• 4 years ago

'Sometimes, you wouldn’t even notice the product difference between a massive success and tremendous fail, but for this tuning and what it does to the attrition rate'

He throws this in as well, and I think it's if anything a more important quote. I think anyone working in a creative industry would like for there to be a process whereby you can 'fail fast' and realise that you aren't making something that's fun or meaningful, but from my experience, such a mechanism really doesn't exist.

As a study, it would be interesting to imagine what minecraft would have looked like if the concept had been developed by an established game company, using all the latest wizz-bang graphics and sound. If it had been well funded, and had focus groups and a team of industry veterans helping out, would it be the game it is today, with the following it has?

I would go as far as suggesting that the most amazing creative innovations happen from the indie scene - amateurs doing what they love for it's own sake, and monetisation coming a distant second. Most crash and burn, or are boring 'me too' efforts, but every now and again, a Minecraft, or a Linux appear.

janoc4• 4 years ago

He throws this in as well, and I think it's if anything a more important quote. I think anyone working in a creative industry would like for there to be a process whereby you can 'fail fast' and realise that you aren't making something that's fun or meaningful, but from my experience, such a mechanism really doesn't exist.

Oh they do. But they don't fit with the classic waterfall model of publishing where you pitch a title to a publisher, publisher gives you some money, you work your butt off for a few years, deliver the title to the publisher, it goes on sale - and gets panned to the ground because this or that.

Feedback, fast iteration, etc. exists and are applied also in game industry. But it is usually the indies, working with their supporters and fans who release alpha/early beta versions of their games often and then work with the feedback which gets integrated for a future version.

E.g. Factorio is a great example of this. Or Christopher Tin (the composer who made the Grammy winning soundtrack for Civilization) works like this - releasing bits and pieces of his upcoming work to fans and supporters early - and using the feedback he gets as he goes.

With big buck AAA titles you don't have this except for NDAed closed beta testing and sometimes focus groups. But those rarely are your core audiences. And even when the testers say the title is bad/not ready, it gets overruled by the publisher/management because missing the Christmas sale would be disastrous ...

bob10292• 4 years ago

Focus on monetization/profit as the first priority in a creative effort is the world's biggest flashing neon sign for shitty leadership.

Making a AAA video game is a gigantic gamble no matter how you slice it. Trying to hedge this gamble up front with micro transactions will result in vicious design cycles that further increase the effective risk profile of the project to your business.

This is all a matter of higher-order consequences to me. I always believed the harder you focused on the money (especially in gaming), the harder it would be to obtain. Only once you completely wash yourself of that madness can your mind expand and engage in more empathetic thinking. If you are trying to make something fun, empathy is critical. Obsession with money robs most humans of that trait.

I think Blizzard is a good example of how money has nearly zero impact on the amount of fun that can be produced, especially when looking at fun per unit of capital involved. I believe running a game studio like a hedge fund is the critical error here.

93po• 4 years ago

If these people only care about money, I don't understand why they don't go into some other business. Take your bunches of money and go make a real estate investment firm or something.

jamesgreenleaf• 4 years ago

if you’re not thinking about monetisation during your creative process, you’re a “fucking idiot.”

This is why Poe's work is not enjoyable. Knowing he died penniless makes all his creativity worthless. Likewise William Blake - what a fool, laboring upward into futurity! /s

barrysteve2• 4 years ago

It is a little foolish to marry heaven and hell..

lbrito• 4 years ago

It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way

Yeah, I don't know about that.

For every pay-to-play game there are 10 excellent indie games on Steam/GoG that still "works that way".

barrysteve2• 4 years ago

Frank Stephenson who designed the Ferrari F430, some BMWs and the good looking Mini from 2004, has a youtube channel. He sticks to pen and paper because computers lock him in too early in the design process.

I don't get what Mr Riccitiello is on about. Clay is a great way to sketch car ideas.

Mike Morhaime of Blizzard fame sees indie games as a space where the small guys can try out games that have never been made before. What is the unity CEO pushing for? Cookie cutter games?

There is a GDC lecture from way back in 2017-2018, where one man did his thesis on what motivates people in video games. When people see the 'victory screen' or story cutscene or audiovisual reward feedback for an action, what are they responding to deep down inside?

He did a metastudy of 70-something studies on this topic and they barely agreed on anything. Nobody really has a firm answer for why people are motivated to play video games and you end up with a lot of handwaving around dopamine.

Why is Mr Riccitielo still pushing compulsion loops like we should be yanking players into addiction? Games are so much more than that. See the recent Ocarina Of Time beta showcase at GDQ.

dvlsg• 4 years ago

What is the unity CEO pushing for? Cookie cutter games?

Does Unity take a cut of any microtransactions run through their ecosystem?

smoldesu2• 4 years ago

Nope, licenses are paid up-front and per-seat. I think they optionally had a free tier where you could pay nothing except a royalty on your overall earnings, but I don't think that exists anymore (and even if it did, it always made sense to just buy the licenses). Broadly speaking, though, no. Unity does not offer any payment services that he would directly/indirectly benefit from. This just seems like a bizarre offhand attack at his customerbase.

philistine4• 4 years ago

What is the unity CEO pushing for? Cookie cutter games?

Not cookie cutter. Cookie clicker.

joe463369• 4 years ago

It's a bit of a non-sequitur, but a charitable reading is that he's saying Frank Stephenson can do this with cars, and maybe Lucas Pope and Jon Blow can do it with games, but most indie devs aren't generational talents, so they should spend some time thinking about how they might convince the public to buy their game.

barrad0s• 4 years ago

One of those quotes that I bet can be taken extremely different when heard vs when read.

f17• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: Stardew Valley. No IAP bullshit, no lootbox chicanery... and yet I doubt its creator is hurting, financially speaking.

Of course, we're talking about an outlier here. Excellence doesn't guarantee anything, but it is a strategy that sometimes works.

The irony is that you'd expect the big publishers to be the ones willing to take on risks and put out products that are excellent but maybe not financial blockbusters. They're the ones who can afford to parlay a reputation for excellence into further success of their more commercial products (since they're diversified and more likely to live long enough to realize the returns). Yet, it's only indies and self-publishers who seem to care about doing the best work... and this isn't limited to games, but visible in all the arts right now. The entities that can afford big risks and long-term plays (inherent to excellence strategies) nevertheless avoid them, and the small actors are invariably the ones making them.

nemothekid• 4 years ago

When people say Stardew Valley is a counterpoint, are they saying publishers shouldn't pay developers at all until their game is a massive success? ConcernedApe spent 4 years working on the game on a pretty much ramen salary and then hit a success; I vastly prefer whatever dysfunction we have now, to publishers not paying any salaries unless you come with a 1-in-100 success.

Games are a hit driven business; so if you have a success you are incentivized to milk it; if you don't want to be forced to milk it, then don't build 100M-budget games. If you are building a $100M game and not baking in monetization, then you are an idiot.

janoc4• 4 years ago

I think the problem is that we have to have $100M games - or bust. There is very little funding available for those "less than blockbuster" titles.

Even with predatory monetization it is extremely hard to recoup costs caused by such budget - there is a market for only so many Worlds of Warcrafts or similar long running games where the huge costs can be amortized over millions of players and years of subscriptions.

If you don't build the game around the "AAA" assumption that requires you to ship (and have made!) hundreds of gigabytes of artwork, scripting and what not, then a lot of these monetization pressures go away - unless your producer pushes to put it back in, because, hey, free money!

_gabe_• 4 years ago

Stardew Valley sold over 400,000 copies across Steam and GOG.com in two weeks,[13][72][73] and more than a million within two months.

Stardew Valley sold at $14.99. At 1 million copies in two months that's around 15 million gross, which works out to a 3.75 million payout for each of those 4 years of Ramen living. I would happily live off Ramen for a payout like that, and I think this is usually what people are talking about when they say this game is a counterpoint.

No, this doesn't mean you don't pay developers if you're a giant company. But it does mean that you don't need to put in MTX or AAA quality to have a successful game. 3.75 million a year could support 37 developers at 100k a year. Which means you could lead a small team to mild success instead of busting out 100s of developers for a 100 million budget game.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley#:~:text=Senso....

cityzen• 4 years ago

Wait, are you telling me this fucking idiot said that:

John Riccitiello, the CEO of gaming company Unity Technologies, repeatedly sexually harassed female colleagues, propositioning them for sex and then threatening one if she spoke about his behavior, the former executive claims in a lawsuit filed last week.

I mean, if you sexually harass your employees... you're a fucking idiot! and a fucking piece of shit...

devteambravo• 4 years ago

Fund indie games or deal with this overlord, folks. I know what I'm going to do.

Cognitron• 4 years ago

That’s OK, a lot of those “fucking idiots” are probably switching to UE5 now, so he won’t need to worry about them.

overgard7• 4 years ago

I guess my feeling is, if you're in the game industry and your core concern is maximizing profit, you're in the wrong industry. He seems to be suggesting that the key to success is selling your soul. However, even people that cynically monetize everything and use every dark pattern available have enormous chances of failure. For every Zynga or Candy Crush there's a million similar things that failed. At least if you're going to fail, aim high. There are so many samey games that come out and are immediately forgotten. IMO, if you're going to make a game and work in the game industry you should do it because you have a great vision for what can be accomplished artistically in a well made game.

antiverse2• 4 years ago

Riccitiello: One thing I always find interesting is, anytime there is talk about the stock market and the future of recession, the one growth industry becomes pundits. People with something to say and not a lot of knowledge about what they’re talking about.

Yeah, that's HN in a nutshell.

humanwhosits• 4 years ago

Unity sure is taking some bad PR hits

xwdv• 4 years ago

I wish the game industry would crash hard as people realize most games these days are nothing but time wasting addictive loops, and all these people that are in it for pure profit get blown out, leaving only the true craftsmen as the only ones making games.

Julesman• 4 years ago

What he says ONLY applies for AAA games. Metrics and research push every game into the same few buckets. Just like web design best practices imply that every website should be roughly the same.

Chasing what 'works' the best has little to do with stickiness. Yeah, you can be addicted to Candy Crush and play it endlessly without any joy at all. But that kind of stickiness is a problem and not in the soul of gaming.

Real stickiness comes from some kind of authentic joy. And coders and marketers don't know how to put that on screen.

a-dub• 4 years ago

i like beautiful and pure ceos that are able to effectively do their jobs by paying attention to basic and obvious macroeconomic trends and then using the insights gained to operate their businesses without knee-jerk layoffs and mergers.

zxcvbn4038• 4 years ago

So nobody just writes games for fun anymore? Seems like the Unity CEO has a very narrow view.

lemoncookiechip• 4 years ago

This would be great advice... If it weren't for the fact that Unity is mainly used by small to medium size studios (yes, they do have 50% market share), while in-house, Unreal and some other well known engines, rule the AAA market.

It's the AAA studios and publishers who can afford the bad PR that comes with exploiting your audience, by throwing exorbitant amounts of money at marketing.

Meanwhile, the indie studios can't afford that, and relay on word of mouth, streamers/YTubers, luck, and just plain simply being a good product. Exploiting your audience is a great way to burn bridges that you don't have the resources to repair by fanning the media monster into hyping your next title.

spywaregorilla• 4 years ago

Compare to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's presentation on game development from ~2006 including, among other things, his thoughts on the merits of Haskell

https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...

I'll put all my money on Sweeney over this asshole.

johnnymarr666• 4 years ago

a man with a hokus pokus business degree and a history of working pseudo-jobs in lazy c-suite positions is really not in a position to call anyone an idiot. especially not the excellent craftspeople who know how to make their own video games. fuck off john riccitiello, keep your worm-infested brain away from us!

twawaaay• 4 years ago

Umm... People who cannot envision other people may have different value system are "fucking idiots".

omoikane• 4 years ago

Related thread from yesterday: Unity merges with IronSource - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051

theandrewbailey• 4 years ago

I remember this guy. John Riccitiello was the CEO of EA when they got the Worst Company in America twice. I can't tell if he was the mastermind of driving EA into the ground, but he accelerated it. He was just as scummy and profit driven then as now.

1ark2• 4 years ago

The ability for him to get another CEO position after getting canned from EA is mind blowing.

rowanG0775• 4 years ago

Ah yes if you are not actively working to prey on people you are a "fucking idiot".

thrillgore• 4 years ago

Unity sure knows how to pick its leadership.

Instead of trying to make the technology compete with Unreal, Godot, and custom-rolled game engines, they are gonna double down on a sea of forgettable mobile games that aren't sustainable once the whales leave.

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

He's obviously heavily incentivized to think so, since his company doesn't make money if devs don't make money.

turdit• 4 years ago

anyone making actual art is technically a fucking idiot compared to someone making money the same way a martyr is an idiot

fareesh• 4 years ago

You can monetize and keep the gameplay pure. DOTA2 for example.

davidkuennen• 4 years ago

Monetization should be a key consideration from the very beginning for any kind of product that's supposed to generate revenue. Nothing new here.

hgs3• 4 years ago

No one should be surprised by these remarks. Companies always market themselves like their a force for good, "democratizing game development" in Unity's case. In actuality, all that matters is making the Benjamins.

dang2• 4 years ago

Url changed from https://mobilegamer.biz/devs-not-baking-monetisation-into-th..., which points to this.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

woojoo6662• 4 years ago

Should the title be changed too?

dang2• 4 years ago

Probably, but I couldn't find an obviously better one, and so much of the thread was already in reaction to this one, that I timed out on it.

stephc_int13• 4 years ago

Making games is both an Art and a Business, and it always has been this way, but the F2P model, especially on mobile, tends to put heavy constraints on the game structure, transforming it into a time sink, engineered to keep you inside for as long as possible. (what they call Engagement and Game As A Service)

AtlasBarfed• 4 years ago

Other things monetized to great success:

- facebook (soooo much better with 80% ads)

- google search (soooo much better with an entire first page of ads)

- app stores (I love how they "curate" and "enforce standards")

- insulin (mmmm, monopolize a drug whose manufacture is open and charge 10x for that, that's the free market)

- college tuition and education (even nonprofits can be completely ruined by MBAs)

- military/defense

Well, the list goes on.

Gotta love those MBAs with their excel spreadsheets and strike price stock options.

smrtinsert• 4 years ago

The insanity. Maybe the gamedev wants people to have fun for a change.

intrasight• 4 years ago

I'm glad the title was changed from "creators" to "gamedevs". I an think of lots of famous creators who didn't concern themselves with "monetization"

pelasaco• 4 years ago

clickbait hot take..

coryfklein• 4 years ago

Actual title of the linked article is:

John Riccitiello: this industry divides people who shun monetisation and those who embrace what makes a successful product

Instead, we get the non-representative clickbait "fucking idiots" in our title, which goes against the HN ethos and guidelines:

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

woojoo6662• 4 years ago

And looks like the clickbait is working too, this is one of the top posts of the day already. Bit ironic that OP is condemning dark patterns like iAP, when clickbait is a dark pattern itself

blaze33• 4 years ago

I can't help but notice the underlying conflict giving rise to these sort of controversies. What is a game? What makes a successful one?

Ok, checks dictionary: "an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun". I remember buying Age of Empires or Total Annihilation as a kid. That was before the ubiquitous internet, you asked your friends and read game magazines before heading to the shop to buy the CDROM. New games had similar prices but some were better (from the player pov) than others and I feel like at that time, being fun and entertaining more directly correlated to commercial successes.

Now everything is online: the games, the stores, the payments. We have in game transactions, DLCs, pay-to-win, pay-to-not-wait-24h, in game gambling, analytics to optimize, etc. And also this definition of gaming: "to manipulate (a situation), typically in a way that is unfair or unscrupulous". What gives?

“But this industry divides people between those who still hold to that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product."

So yeah, could this divide actually come from our definition of "success"? Is it about maximizing the financial ROI using all the tricks we know to hook and exploit whales? Is it about making an actually fun and enjoyable game? I wonder...

ohCh6zos• 4 years ago

I just don't purchase anything with a store or anything buyable attached to it. My only gripe is when those don't exist on release and get added in a few months later.

MrYellowP2• 4 years ago

People who don't want to use the results of decades of scientific research to psychologically abuse mindless morons into giving them money are fucking idiots.

Okay. Well, he's probably not wrong, but I'd rather be a fucking idiot than taking advantage of so many people.

davesque• 4 years ago

The link title doesn't match to the article title so I suspected the comment wouldn't look as audacious in context. But actually it doesn't look much better. Here's the relevant snippet:

    Interviewer: Implementing monetisation earlier in the process and conversation is certainly an angle that has seen pushback from some developers.

    Riccitiello: Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives. It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.

    I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that. It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.

Sure, he's not technically saying the fucking idiots and the anti-mtx devs overlap completely. But it would be hard for someone to convince me that he wasn't implying that. Also, it's a crafty bit of voodoo he does when he describes the previous era of well planned, well tested games that stood on their own once handed over to the publisher as having been thrown "over the wall." Makes it sound awfully bad when in reality it often meant the product was just better.

Ah well, he's financially incentivized to say all this crap so what can you do?

ncr1004• 4 years ago

The paragraph after the f'ing sentence feels like clean-up to me, and IMO deserves a proper apology.

swarnie• 4 years ago

Mainstream gaming is dead to me and has been for 8-10 years. It seems focused on yearly sports releases (which could really be 100mb rooster update packs), endless reskined Ubisoft sandboxes and the latest iteration of that shooter you've already bought 12 times before.

Obviously im in the wrong..... This is what the market wants apparently. My 80k of disposable yearly income can't compete with whatever auts Whale they can catch with "surprise mechanics". The buying public will vote with their wallets and the publishers will continue shovelling in bland paste to fill the demand void.

altruios• 4 years ago

Go go Godot! ...and gamemaker studio, unreal, and a host of other's that don't do this monetization through ads...

unity was nice while it lasted... time to let it die.

only you can prevent advertising - by not putting ads in games (note to game devs: don't be evil, don't just follow orders from your boss either if those orders are evil).

lobocinza• 4 years ago

I'm not playing any future game that is developed with Unity.

boosteri• 4 years ago

hatenberg• 4 years ago

What wver happened to the sexual harassment lawsuit he got hit with for hitting on a lesbian VP?

1ark2• 4 years ago

Riccitiello is a class A sociopath. He managed to almost drive EA to the dumps, before getting sacked. For exactly the same practices he advocates here. It would have been so much better if David Helgason made someone who he built the company with as CEO, instead of a serial executive. EA learned from their mistake. The kind of posturing Riccitiello has to do in this article is exactly what narcissists do. Obviously, after being cut from EA, the kind of smooth talking he must have done to get this job is beyond me. Did they just ignore his track record? The people here defending him shows how good he is a persuading people, unfortunately.

Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO

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