> 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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
> "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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> ”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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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".
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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"
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.
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.)
> 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).
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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).
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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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
...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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Readit News
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If you are going to have monetization mechanisms, ignoring them during development and trying to bolt them on at the end is indeed idiotic.
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.
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.
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.
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Few people have driven as many once-successful studios into the ground as Riccitello.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That comment makes him look even more like a short-sighted asshat.
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.
Is there positivity somewhere in this kind of talk, like will it somehow win Unity more business? I am not seeing it.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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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_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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).
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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).
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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.
That’s ARPGs and JRPGs (and maybe some action RPGs), CRPGs typically don’t have any grinding.
Yes, it is bad. Crack cocaine has a really tight compulsion loop, for example.
https://levelskip.com/how-to/Skinners-Box-and-Video-Games
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.
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...
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.
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.
It's also especially annoying when searching for jobs in games, and these ruddy e-gambling companies keep popping up on searches, because "gaming".
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.
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.
Not cookie cutter. Cookie clicker.
Does Unity take a cut of any microtransactions run through their ecosystem?
Edit to add: This rings true even when you decide "not a priority this time", that's still thinking it through
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.
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.
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"?
― Upton Sinclair
Art is an end in itself. Not everything that takes work needs to make needs to be immediately converted into money.
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.
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.
The solution to that is to git gud and build a game that's actually enjoyable to play, not wireheading players with dirty tactics.
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.
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.
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.
There's more reasons for a game to exist besides making big bucks.
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Isn't he advocating a longer rewarding sequence instead of a quick cash grab every couple minutes?
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.
The most profitable franchises have not done this. It's all timesinks, pay-to-win, and microtransactions.
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.
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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.