Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pocketgamer.biz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 370 posts

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

#151

Post by ehnto »

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…

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.

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

#153

Post by jayd16 »

vkou wrote: post #143
jayd16 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figuring out if you can sell your game for $1 or $10 is thinking about monetization. Understanding the market is important. >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. On another note, it's funny to see HN understand tha…

Sure, and likewise, there's thinking about whether or not you're going to be a $1 title, a $10 title, a $30 title, or a free-to-play with cosmetic mtx/expansion mtx/quality-of-life mtx/power mtx. You need to have a business model, and the model needs to be complementary to what you are building. The pushback isn't to that, the pushback is when the business model is predatory, and drives the design.

Not that I'm a fan but Unity is selling analytics here. They're not taking a cut and they're not pushing predatory IAP.

The complaints are at best projection of general sentiment from an industry trend.

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

#154

Post by sometimesjerks »

jerf wrote: post #70
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.

"Minecraft did essentially zero marketing and is monetized only in the sense that you need an account to log in" No, Minecraft has been monetized for a while: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/catalog That said, I've found it on the inoffensive side. It's got a plug on the title screen but my kids zip past it easily enough. Most of what you can buy involves a reasonable amount of work, they're not selling slight retext…

Minecraft also supports 3rd party content, skins, gameplay mechanics, etc. There's a lot of things mods can do that official marketplace content can't.

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

#155

Post by jerf »

simonh wrote: post #89
yoyohello13 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Suffering. Really? All those poor suffering souls, forced to slave away playing... er... video games. Talk about first world problem. I mean sure, game addiction is a thing, but I remember people shovelling coins into arcade machines. PTW and micro transactions are just the modern equivalent. Nobody's holding a gun to these people's heads. If you ask me indie and art games are in a renaissance period. It's amazing ho…

Even from a reductionist and materialist "this game with microtransactions gives me the dopamine hits when I buy stuff" with no other considerations, I know how to get the dopamine hits for much cheaper than hundreds of dollars, and not gated behind microtransactions.

I can get only marginally more joy from getting the exact five-star gacha draw I want than I get from a Slay the Spire rare card draw that is just the card this run needs, but the former may be several multiples of the price of the latter's entire purchase price.

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

#156

Post by selfhoster11 »

jayd16 wrote: post #124
vkou wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Figuring out if you can sell your game for $1 or $10 is thinking about monetization. Understanding the market is important. >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. On another note, it's funny to see HN understand tha…

'Monetisation' as used in modern days refers exclusively to abusive tactics, or so it seems. Figuring out what you can sell your game for is just 'figuring out what you can sell your game for'.

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

#157

Post by dvlsg »

barrysteve wrote: post #80

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 be…

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

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

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

#158

Post by wlesieutre »

nitrixion wrote: post #116
zero_ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been using Unity happily for 7+ years at this point, willfully ignoring all other engines because Unity is easy to use and has native C# support. This merger has spurred me to try other engines. I keep hearing good things about Godot. That'll likely be the first one I try.

Godot has a big 4.0 release coming up, currently on alpha 11: https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-0-alpha...

Breaking changes expected still but should end with the beta, so if you're looking to noodle around with it they're probably close enough for you to skip 3.5 and start learning on 4.

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

#159

Post by crayboff »

OskarS wrote: post #52
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…

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 "comp…

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

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

#160

Post by janoc »

cesaref wrote: post #71

'Sometimes, you wouldn’t even notice the product difference between a massive success and tremendous fail, but for this tuning and what it does to the attrition rate' He throws this in as well, and I think it's if anything a more important quote. I think anyone working in a creative industry would like for there to be a process whereby you can 'fail fast' and realise that you aren't making something that's fun or mea…

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

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

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

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

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

Post reply on HN