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

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

#101

Post by panick21_ »

jhallenworld wrote: post #92
wyldfire wrote: post #19

> “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 repet…

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"

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

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

#102

Post by datpuz »

jl6 wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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

#103

Post by cmeacham98 »

coffee_beqn wrote: post #40
bastawhiz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’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?

Is there some correlation between predatory mechanics and game popularity I don't know about? I'm not sure that games that follow the Unity CEO's advice have a better chance of breaking that barrier.

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

#104

Post by selfhoster11 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #68
selfhoster11 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

are you saying that capitalism innately has a good solution for games, but that it became slightly ill and can be reformed back to excellence? seems odd to promote “capitalism, but not like this”

I'm saying that in the past (before the microtransaction era) the parameters of capitalism in the gaming industry were tuned such that it was commercially viable (and most importantly, normal) to release a nice, toxicity-free game and sell it for a reasonable one-time fee that the customer pays once, and is then free to enjoy without an ongoing commercial (or otherwise) relationship with the publisher.

If you could somehow turn back the clock, you could go back to this tolerable trade-off, but you never twice step into the same river. The only options available now are to either find another set of parameters of capitalism enabling this trade-off, or to avoid most mainstream gaming.

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

#105

Post by overgard »

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.

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

#106

Post by tagami »

actinium226 wrote: post #35
wyldfire wrote: post #19

> “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 repet…

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 t…

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

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

#107

Post by dragontamer »

bit_logic wrote: post #84
wyldfire wrote: post #19

> “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 repet…

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.

> 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.

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

#108

Post by antiverse »

>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.

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

#109

Post by janoc »

whateveracct wrote: post #50
wahnfrieden wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

The problem is that those AAA games people demand are not possible to make without those big bucks. People demand to be paid and that work does cost a ton of money.

So careful what you ask for. Even an indie developer needs to pay bills and put food on the table somehow. Very very few game developers got rich developing games, in most of the studios burnout and attrition because of the extremely toxic work environments are common too.

That doesn't mean that stuffing ads, subscriptions and microtransactions everywhere is the only way forward. However, saying that "there's more reasons for a game to exist besides making big bucks." sounds like you are suggesting that the developer of the next Call of Duty sequel should be working those 60-80 hour weeks only for their personal enjoyment from delivering something for the gamer to play (and then loudly complain online and demand this or that - or else!) and sense of dedication to their fanbase.

That really doesn't work like that.

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

#110

Post by soneca »

morley wrote: post #25

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…

> ”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.

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