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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.
Unity is doomed with the malware company merger
Or, you know, invested in building games where people retrospectively assess their time spent with the game as enriching rather than exploitative.
> 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.
And yet $U is at -75%, year to date. Maybe they should have focused on making something good instead?
Edit to add: This rings true even when you decide "not a priority this time", that's still thinking it through
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_...
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.