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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

#231

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

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?

Lot of them fail to get traction also because they're bad. A small part because they're unlucky, too niche or other reason.

Still, with so many game out every day, it's also hard to keep track of everything. I should engage with my family (children and wife), do sport, work, learn to improve and be more efficient, see my friends, keep a healthy diet and sleep 10h every night... That's without speaking of the need to publish to be seen and heard.

So no, I won't engage with all the small games. No one will.

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

#232

Post by rowanG077 »

macNchz wrote: post #229
rowanG077 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be no monetization design in a video game. The design should be make your game good so people will buy it. How ridiculous would it be for other forms of art to have "monetization design". A chef that styles their dishes in such a way that there clearly is a gap in the dish which should contain a nice piece of steak or something else. When you are eating the dish the waiter comes with that piece in hand a…

In principle I don’t entirely disagree that the pendulum has swung way too far towards monetization and away from pure vision in video game design, but it’s funny you mention chefs not compromising…the restaurant business is notoriously low margin and very many new restaurants fail quickly. One of the more common reasons is that inexperienced owners don’t understand their food costs and therefore design delicious, lo…

I'm not saying don't charge what is necessary. I'm saying monetization shouldn't be part of the experience you are creating.

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

#233

Post by dcow »

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 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".

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

#234

Post by Semaphor »

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.

That’s ARPGs and JRPGs (and maybe some action RPGs), CRPGs typically don’t have any grinding.

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

#235

Post by joshstrange »

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.

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.

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

#236

Post by giomasce »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #115
zero_ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the current portability proposition of Godot? Unity and UE4 allow indies to cross-platform relatively easily.

Except that developers do not take advantage of that, and here I am reversing UE Blueprint bytecode to make games working on Wine.

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

#237

Post by twoquestions »

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…

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.

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

#239

Post by vlunkr »

asdff wrote: post #142
nitrixion wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EA published that Star Wars Jedi game with no microtransactions and sold 10 million copies. Yeah if you think all your customers are idiots or sheep then you'll make bad games that just manipulate people into constantly spending more, but it's clearly not the only path.

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

#240

Post by BlargMcLarg »

dragontamer wrote: post #107
bit_logic wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

That's the general theme among turn-based RPGs. The games are either too undertuned to warrant grinding for skilled players, or they are tuned so they do require some form of grinding. It's an inherent problem with stat sticks and fairly simplistic strategies. Almost no moderately difficult RPG is tuned to not have some of its player base grind, bar introducing difficulty selection.

Pokemon is absurdly easy because the story appeals to a wide variety of players. Most of which include "just give a single fast Pokemon 4 coverage moves and blast everything to pieces". Only gen 5 had a counter mechanic to this by adjusting experience to level difference.

Fire Emblem doesn't really have a grind because you fight the mobs you need during the campaign, and beyond higher difficulties the games have changed to accommodate lesser skilled players into not having to restart the entire campaign. Because it turns out, few people are looking forward to replaying 20 hours only for your 1-5 super pumped up units to not be able to beat the game (read: leaving almost all your other units underleveled or dead, no skirmishes / arena to catch up, and your remaining party can't clear the map).

Paper Mario, you can beat the entire game skipping every non-required battle and still have room to spare. Strategies are even based around keeping your HP low.

And despite not needing to grind, the former two still suffer from similar issues (beating weaker enemies with no sense of strategy to stall getting to the meat of the game). Beating required Geodude trainer number 30 with Tackle and Rock Throw may as well be grinding.

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