i like beautiful and pure ceos that are able to effectively do their jobs by paying attention to basic and obvious macroeconomic trends and then using the insights gained to operate their businesses without knee-jerk layoffs and mergers.
Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
141–150 of 370 posts
Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#142Did 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.
Elden Ring's massive success shows the market for games without MTX is absolutely active and large.
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.
Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#143Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#144So nobody just writes games for fun anymore? Seems like the Unity CEO has a very narrow view.
Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#145Yeah, 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 earli…
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?
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Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#146The 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 mo…
Those are very fair points, and I agree.
For me personally, authenticity is more about choosing to speak vs. laying low on certain topics.
Sure you can still lie when you speak to it, but at least you're being truthful on your desire to express.
Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#147This would be great advice... If it weren't for the fact that Unity is mainly used by small to medium size studios (yes, they do have 50% market share), while in-house, Unreal and some other well known engines, rule the AAA market.
It's the AAA studios and publishers who can afford the bad PR that comes with exploiting your audience, by throwing exorbitant amounts of money at marketing.
Meanwhile, the indie studios can't afford that, and relay on word of mouth, streamers/YTubers, luck, and just plain simply being a good product. Exploiting your audience is a great way to burn bridges that you don't have the resources to repair by fanning the media monster into hyping your next title.
Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#148Did 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.
>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 microtrans…
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.
Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#149Compare to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's presentation on game development from ~2006 including, among other things, his thoughts on the merits of Haskell
https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...
I'll put all my money on Sweeney over this asshole.
Re: Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO
#150a man with a hokus pokus business degree and a history of working pseudo-jobs in lazy c-suite positions is really not in a position to call anyone an idiot. especially not the excellent craftspeople who know how to make their own video games. fuck off john riccitiello, keep your worm-infested brain away from us!