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

357 points by OskarS 4y ago

intrasight 4y ago
I'm glad the title was changed from "creators" to "gamedevs". I an think of lots of famous creators who didn't concern themselves with "monetization"
smrtinsert 4y ago
The insanity. Maybe the gamedev wants people to have fun for a change.
burke 4y ago
Or, you know, invested in building games where people retrospectively assess their time spent with the game as enriching rather than exploitative.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  > 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.
  - timq 4y ago
    Except some Nintendo games, like breath of the wild.
    - jeffwask 4y ago
      There are a raft on non-AAA publishers who produce amazing games without it Hades, It takes two are two of the recent game of the year winners that wholesale rejected exploitative monetization
  - yoyohello13 4y ago
    The maximization of profit over everything else is the cause of much suffering.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      `
      - kortilla 4y ago
        No, it’s absolutely not the legal obligation. That’s just an internet meme.
      - noandno 4y ago
        No, and no. (Editing out when disagreed with is poor form.)
        wahnfrieden 4y ago
        don’t care
    - simonh 4y ago
      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 how many cool games from small dev teams there are on the App Store and Steam. If bored housewives prefer PTW crap, well, they'd probably just be spending it on bingo or scratch cards instead. It's really just mass market casual entertainment moving out of newsagents and bingo halls and on to smartphones, but it's always been there.
      - jerf 4y ago
        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.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    So profit is the only thing that matters in life? And not leisure, which appears to be the whole point of engaging in gaming?
- jayd16 4y ago
  That's nice and all but it'll be the last thing your studio does if you didn't think about monetization. Why is "have a business model" so controversial?
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    cognitive dissonance between loving free market capitalism and having values that the market doesn’t recognize
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    because often the people emphasizing business models are insufferable sociopaths that have no interest in making quality products; they'd sell you a fart if they could get away with it... there is healthy space between, but the loudest people in business set a poor stage for the industry and it's so off-putting that many people would rather not think about it at all
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vkou 4y ago
    > 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 the food was fine, and the overall cost were similar/lower than its neighbours. Capitalism is dehumanizing, and people don't want to engage with microtransactions in the middle of having their meal. 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. The latter tends to look like that restaurant - an utter shit-show, and many people won't really care that you have a three-star Michelin chef making the pasta. Also, in gaming, the bar from your competitors is high. There are a lot of excellent titles that provide a lot of entertainment without having predatory monetization. If your title does, it'll get panned. (If it doesn't, it'll still get panned for the monetization it does have, but hey, gamers are entitled.) There's also monetization that crosses straight into gambling (loot boxes of various flavours) - or, alternatively - the apocryphal tale of two cowboys who pay eachother to eat cow patties (designing the game around whales trying to outspend eachother). These are very profitable, if shitty business models, and one should probably be regulated down[1], while the other can't scale - it's limited by the number of whales in the ocean. [1] There are a few reasonable restrictions to it, that could be introduced - requiring all purchases to be fiat-denominated, as opposed to in a smorgasbord of in-game currencies, and requiring odds & costs to be shown[2] (again, fiat-denominated). [2] If people want to spend $5,000 gambling for a hat that has an expected cost of $2,000, they are free to do it, but they should be aware of the odds.
- ChrisClark 4y ago
  Isn't that what he means when he says the loop needs to be an hour or longer, not 2 minutes? Isn't he advocating a longer rewarding sequence instead of a quick cash grab every couple minutes?
  - nightpool 4y ago
    No. He's advocating for the opposite—an enhanced "time on device" that keeps the users playing for much longer than they otherwise would have. This is well-known technique lifted directly from machine gambling in Los Vegas, where they try to draw out the "loop" long enough so that people keep playing as long as possible without ever walking away. Here's a quote about one of the best academic books on the subject, Addiction By Design: Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the “machine zone,” in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and “ambience management,” player tracking and cash access systems—all designed to meet the market’s desire for maximum “time on device.” Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers’ everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/addiction-by-design https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/ad... There's a ton of crossover in these fields between people who designed gambling machines for Los Vegas and then got in on the ground floor of the big mobile gaming boom.
everdrive 4y ago
Businesses need to make money, but I hate for every app or website to have some anti-user poison pill. I’m not sure there’s a real solution here, just an arms race.
- uoaei 4y ago
  No solution without first examining, identifying, and criticizing the incentives that are induced when the profit motive is assumed as a central tenet of modern society. If the point of enterprise is to make money, then that's what they will do. If the point of enterprise is to do something else, then they will do something else.
selfhoster11 4y ago
It takes one to know one, I guess. Not being interrupted during gameplay by prompts to spend money or watch ads is a feature.
- jayd16 4y ago
  Committing to a full price game is also thinking about monetization.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    That's not the first thing that comes to mind when you mention "monetisation" these days to the average gamer or gamedev. Without further context, the word is usually interpreted as bleeding your customer for more attention/money.
  - epups 4y ago
    And this is the model that's being criticised as archaic and stupid here.
    - jayd16 4y ago
      It's really not. Just making a guess is what he's talking about. You still need to right price a full paid game and I'm sure Unity would be happy to help you figure that out.
      - epups 4y ago
        What does a game engine have to do with pricing? He is clearly talking about how Unity will soon let you introduce in-game ads/payments.
        selfhoster11 4y ago
        You can already introduce in-game ads and payments with or without Unity's help. I understood the article as describing some sort of auto-detection feature that suggests where money-making hooks can be introduced - sort of how Youtube supposedly suggests to content-makers where would be a good spot to insert an ad break in the video.
api 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
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- FeteCommuniste 4y ago
  “Compulsion loop” definitely needs to go in the hall of fame of dystopian phrases.
  - Vosporos 4y ago
    /r/BoringDystopia is waiting for your submission
- endominus 4y ago
  It's phrased so... nonchalantly. Basically an out-and-out admission that they are trying to appeal to producers of addictive gambling garbage. Content rather than art. Skinner boxes rather than agency. And the market rewards them for it (not Unity specifically - I expect Riccitiello to run the company into the ground within a year or two - but rather the game companies actually making slot machine games that collectively form half the games industry by revenue).
sp332 4y ago
And yet $U is at -75%, year to date. Maybe they should have focused on making something good instead?
- henning 4y ago
  Won't someone PLEASE think of shareholder value
donedealomg 4y ago
causi 4y ago
In the eyes of the MBA, the ideal business is one whose customers hate it as much as possible while still using it.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Why would they want customers to hate it? Don't they want word-of-mouth sales?
  - causi 4y ago
    First you become indispensable, then you squeeze as much money as possible from the customer without them leaving.
srvmshr 4y ago
Famous last words. Unity is doomed with the malware company merger
- overgard 4y ago
  I doubt it; I can't imagine this is going to affect the engine/editor itself in a way you can't opt out of. Companies that want tools like ironsource would have already been using a package or custom code to do these things anyway. It does speak to the priorities of the company though -- Unity used to be about indies, but it seems like their focus is more on mobile and services. I don't think that means they're going to neglect the indies, but I think they're realizing subscriptions without royalties isn't a huge money maker for them.
  - runevault 4y ago
    The problem is a LOT of developers are starting to second guess using Unity which means no seat licenses and likely not using their ad network for in game monetization on mobile games. Will people stick by that or will they try something like Godot, not like it instantly, and jump ship back despite their concerns? Only time will tell, but the concern seems pretty widespread in the gamedev community.
henning 4y ago
Doing mobile ad IRR modeling spreadsheets, tweaking ad copy to rank higher in search engines, and other business-y MBA crap is easier than actually building a good game, especially if you don't actually like games and are just getting into "e-sports and mobile".
gsatic 4y ago
No surprise. This is probably the most useless and mindless generation of leaders the US has ever produced.
hklgny 4y ago
This seems like a click bait title to me, he "technically" uses those words, but the article seems a lot more sensible to me than inflammatory. We should definitely be thinking through sales/marketing when building games just like we do when building software. Not sure why you wouldn't be. Edit to add: This rings true even when you decide "not a priority this time", that's still thinking it through
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  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.
  - hklgny 4y ago
    For sure - you can often find anecdata that works out well. But I think being conscious about that decision up front as a developer is still a good idea. If you choose to go the Minecraft route then great. Just know what you're getting into and what bets you're making.
  - coffee_beqn 4y ago
    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?
    - cmeacham98 4y ago
      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.
      - hklgny 4y ago
        Because if you read the article his advice wasn't to engage in predatory mechanics - and that's why this conversation is so inflammatory for folks. It's a bad title. Here's the quote: “It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.” “But this industry divides people between those who still hold to that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product. And I don’t know a successful artist anywhere that doesn’t care about what their player thinks. This is where this cycle of feedback comes back, and they can choose to ignore it. But to choose to not know it at all is not a great call.”
naravara 4y ago
The headline is pretty sensationalist. The full quote "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."
wyldfire 4y ago
> “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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
- actinium226 4y ago
  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 they're using and are going to use with IronSource.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    Two minutes would be a holdover from 1980's arcade games. That's about how long you'd play on a quarter. Maybe 3 minutes.
    - structural 4y ago
      And most of them were tuned for profit too, so it's not like this is a new concept. It does feel like a lot of the mobile and F2P monetization folks are the same ones that enjoyed profiting from arcade games and see them as being similar to slot machines (except better, because they only pay out in neurochemicals, not money!). There's been a quiet war for decades between people who want to design games as art, and people who want to design them as a predictable recurring revenue stream. I'm not sure what iteration we're up to now.
chomp 4y ago
Yeah, 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 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.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  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?
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    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.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      I agree and hope it would provoke wider reflection beyond how it affects the HN crowd on their couches
    - janoc 4y ago
      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.
jl6 4y ago
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 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.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  >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 microtransaction-free, is fun, straightforward, and takes inspiration from video lottery terminals. Yes, really! Its creator, Luca Galante [1]: >“Slot games are very simple,” he tells The Verge. “All the player has to do is press one button, and the game designers have to find a way to push the player to press that button. [The player] is actually spending money every time they press it, and because of that, there’s a huge attention to detail on the sounds, the animations, and the sequences, because you have so few elements to work with. Basically, [the designers] try to maximize the importance and impact those elements have on the player. I just absorbed that knowledge basically just by being in the industry. And so when making a game, I have automatically applied it to what [I’ve been] doing.” >That’s all reflected in Vampire Survivors. Starting a game immediately drops you into the action, and the only controls to think about are moving your character and picking upgrades. You don’t even need to press a button to use your weapons. The charming retro graphics feel like they’re ripped straight from a long-forgotten Super Nintendo Castlevania game, and you’ll hear a delightful chime every time you pick up one of the countless experience gems. Opening treasure chests seems to intentionally create the feeling that you’re pulling a slot machine; pixelated weapons stream by on ribbons of color as coins fly everywhere, all backed by a catchy jingle. (If you get lucky and find a chest with five items, there are actually fireworks.) [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/19/22941145/vampire-survivors-early-access-steam-pc-mac-luca-galante https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/19/22941145/vampire-survivor...
morley 4y ago
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 idiot, just that there are some in that group of people. And personally, I greatly prefer this sort of frank talk to run-of-the-mill generic PR speak that usually comes from CEO interviews. The next thing he says in the interview: > I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that. It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.
- jeffwask 4y ago
  He's saying every game needs to be an MTX riddled nightmare to be successful. As a gamer I reject that and have been with my wallet for a while. There are hundreds of dev teams producing great stuff below the AAA level that only ask me to buy the game once not every day.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    IMO it's not clear just from the immediate context in the article that he's actually advocating for MTX or ads. If he is, then he deserves all the flak. If he's simply talking about having a market fit so your game sells at all, then IMO that's just talking about the viability of the game as a product - and in this case it's just about whether making the game makes financial sense, not whether you can juice the customer for more money.
    - jeffwask 4y ago
      He just executed a merge of his company with a company that produced know malware delivery platforms for installing scamware. I think we can guess where his intentions lay
yoyohello13 4y ago
"Idiot" in this case means anybody who prioritizes anything over money.
- kthartic 4y ago
  That's not how I understood his words, like at all. He means that monetisation should be considered as part of the creative process. Many indie devs could've been sitting on gold mines, but that those rewards (which could've lead to the creation/evolution of more games) weren't reaped because they didn't consider it. Now of course some of those devs wouldn't care about that at all, but I bet there's also some whose jaws would've dropped if they were told how much they could've made.
  - pugworthy 4y ago
    > ...monetisation should be considered as part of the creative process That mindset is the antithesis of open source. And believe it or not, not every game dev is into it to make money. There was some classic interaction between Nimblebit and Zynga back when where Zynga offered to buy Nimblebit, who politely turned down the offer. It could have made a huge amount of money for the founders, but they preferred making their money by creating great games.
    - kthartic 4y ago
      > That mindset is the antithesis of open source. Aren't 99% of successful indie games closed source? > And believe it or not, not every game dev is into it to make money Oh absolutely, did you not read my comment?: > Now of course some of those devs wouldn't care about that at all My point is x% don't care about the money and just want to make great games. Cool! I'm all for it. But y% probably would care about the money if they knew how much they could've gotten had they considered monetisation as part (keyword being part) of the creative process.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
I knew I remembered the name John Riccitiello from somewhere as a dumbass. And it turns out, it's 1997 to 2004 and 2007 to 2013 at Electronic Arts. The two periods known as the absolute worst times in terms of quality and scumbaggery when it comes to monetization of games for EA. Oh, and also as someone who was fired because EA was bleeding out money, fucked up not one but four consecutive high profile game launches and was in litigation with about half of its studios. Thanks John, but I seem to have a slight idea at who the fucking idiot in the room might be, unfortunately, you're failing upwards.
- epups 4y ago
  This is extremely relevant information. This guy is a fucking idiot himself.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  Oh, the man who helped tank my favorite game studio (RIP Maxis). Yeah, I wouldn't listen to him about much of anything.
groby_b 4y ago
To all the folks complaining it's gross: This is Riccitiello. Of course it's gross. That's who he is. He's one of the reasons a whole lot of good people left the games industry, and continue to leave.
- antiverse 4y ago
  Just shows they're not a good culture fit.
whateveracct 4y ago
The best games aren't Products. Mine never will be :)
rbanffy 4y ago
Not everything in life is a pursuit of profit.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I too love the fucking idiots. Or artists as I prefer to call them.
phkahler 4y ago
“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour. 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. There isn’t a developer on the planet that wouldn’t want that knowledge.” Cool. I had to look that up and found Wikipedia informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop Thanks for the tip!
epups 4y ago
This short-sightedness will ultimately kill big publishers. Yes you can milk customers and it will be profitable in the short run. But in the long run, your clientele will consist solely of idiots. Look at EA and Blizzard for examples of this.
_jal 4y ago
I think he's probably right, in context. And I also think this is increasingly why I just don't play new games anymore. I like the output of those clay-carver idiots, and don't like product from savvy businessgamers. Cash extraction machines aren't fun. When I want an escapist experience, "social" bullshit incorporating status skins and whatnot is an utter turnoff, as is effectively mandatory upsells for in-game whatevers. I'm sure losing people like me works out on the balance sheet. I'll be over here, yelling at clouds.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  It'll eventually collapse under its own weight like Atari in the 80s.
yAak 4y ago
The Big Lebowski comes to mind: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."
cesaref 4y ago
'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 meaningful, but from my experience, such a mechanism really doesn't exist. As a study, it would be interesting to imagine what minecraft would have looked like if the concept had been developed by an established game company, using all the latest wizz-bang graphics and sound. If it had been well funded, and had focus groups and a team of industry veterans helping out, would it be the game it is today, with the following it has? I would go as far as suggesting that the most amazing creative innovations happen from the indie scene - amateurs doing what they love for it's own sake, and monetisation coming a distant second. Most crash and burn, or are boring 'me too' efforts, but every now and again, a Minecraft, or a Linux appear.
- janoc 4y ago
  >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 ...
bob1029 4y ago
Focus on monetization/profit as the first priority in a creative effort is the world's biggest flashing neon sign for shitty leadership. Making a AAA video game is a gigantic gamble no matter how you slice it. Trying to hedge this gamble up front with micro transactions will result in vicious design cycles that further increase the effective risk profile of the project to your business. This is all a matter of higher-order consequences to me. I always believed the harder you focused on the money (especially in gaming), the harder it would be to obtain. Only once you completely wash yourself of that madness can your mind expand and engage in more empathetic thinking. If you are trying to make something fun, empathy is critical. Obsession with money robs most humans of that trait. I think Blizzard is a good example of how money has nearly zero impact on the amount of fun that can be produced, especially when looking at fun per unit of capital involved. I believe running a game studio like a hedge fund is the critical error here.
- 93po 4y ago
  If these people only care about money, I don't understand why they don't go into some other business. Take your bunches of money and go make a real estate investment firm or something.
jamesgreenleaf 4y ago
> if you’re not thinking about monetisation during your creative process, you’re a “fucking idiot.” This is why Poe's work is not enjoyable. Knowing he died penniless makes all his creativity worthless. Likewise William Blake - what a fool, laboring upward into futurity! /s
- barrysteve 4y ago
  It is a little foolish to marry heaven and hell..
lbrito 4y ago
>It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way Yeah, I don't know about that. For every pay-to-play game there are 10 excellent indie games on Steam/GoG that still "works that way".
barrysteve 4y ago
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 before. What is the unity CEO pushing for? Cookie cutter games? There is a GDC lecture from way back in 2017-2018, where one man did his thesis on what motivates people in video games. When people see the 'victory screen' or story cutscene or audiovisual reward feedback for an action, what are they responding to deep down inside? He did a metastudy of 70-something studies on this topic and they barely agreed on anything. Nobody really has a firm answer for why people are motivated to play video games and you end up with a lot of handwaving around dopamine. Why is Mr Riccitielo still pushing compulsion loops like we should be yanking players into addiction? Games are so much more than that. See the recent Ocarina Of Time beta showcase at GDQ.
- dvlsg 4y ago
  > What is the unity CEO pushing for? Cookie cutter games? Does Unity take a cut of any microtransactions run through their ecosystem?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Nope, licenses are paid up-front and per-seat. I think they optionally had a free tier where you could pay nothing except a royalty on your overall earnings, but I don't think that exists anymore (and even if it did, it always made sense to just buy the licenses). Broadly speaking, though, no. Unity does not offer any payment services that he would directly/indirectly benefit from. This just seems like a bizarre offhand attack at his customerbase.
    - aroman 4y ago
      Most of Unity's revenue does not come from licensing the engine. It comes from their "services" portfolio, which includes advertising and other tools for monetizing, including via IAPs (although they don't take a cut of IAPs, they offer tools to help implement them and improve monetization e.g. A/B testing). I agree it was a bizarre attack at his customer base, but it makes sense given Unity's merger with Ironsource (mobile game advertising giant). The message seems to be clear: Unity is for people who want to make games that make money, not for indies who want to create for the love of craft.
barrad0s 4y ago
One of those quotes that I bet can be taken extremely different when heard vs when read.
f17 4y ago
Counterpoint: Stardew Valley. No IAP bullshit, no lootbox chicanery... and yet I doubt its creator is hurting, financially speaking. Of course, we're talking about an outlier here. Excellence doesn't guarantee anything, but it is a strategy that sometimes works. The irony is that you'd expect the big publishers to be the ones willing to take on risks and put out products that are excellent but maybe not financial blockbusters. They're the ones who can afford to parlay a reputation for excellence into further success of their more commercial products (since they're diversified and more likely to live long enough to realize the returns). Yet, it's only indies and self-publishers who seem to care about doing the best work... and this isn't limited to games, but visible in all the arts right now. The entities that can afford big risks and long-term plays (inherent to excellence strategies) nevertheless avoid them, and the small actors are invariably the ones making them.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  When people say Stardew Valley is a counterpoint, are they saying publishers shouldn't pay developers at all until their game is a massive success? ConcernedApe spent 4 years working on the game on a pretty much ramen salary and then hit a success; I vastly prefer whatever dysfunction we have now, to publishers not paying any salaries unless you come with a 1-in-100 success. Games are a hit driven business; so if you have a success you are incentivized to milk it; if you don't want to be forced to milk it, then don't build 100M-budget games. If you are building a $100M game and not baking in monetization, then you are an idiot.
  - janoc 4y ago
    I think the problem is that we have to have $100M games - or bust. There is very little funding available for those "less than blockbuster" titles. Even with predatory monetization it is extremely hard to recoup costs caused by such budget - there is a market for only so many Worlds of Warcrafts or similar long running games where the huge costs can be amortized over millions of players and years of subscriptions. If you don't build the game around the "AAA" assumption that requires you to ship (and have made!) hundreds of gigabytes of artwork, scripting and what not, then a lot of these monetization pressures go away - unless your producer pushes to put it back in, because, hey, free money!
cityzen 4y ago
Wait, are you telling me this fucking idiot said that: John Riccitiello, the CEO of gaming company Unity Technologies, repeatedly sexually harassed female colleagues, propositioning them for sex and then threatening one if she spoke about his behavior, the former executive claims in a lawsuit filed last week. I mean, if you sexually harass your employees... you're a fucking idiot! and a fucking piece of shit...
devteambravo 4y ago
Fund indie games or deal with this overlord, folks. I know what I'm going to do.
Cognitron 4y ago
That’s OK, a lot of those “fucking idiots” are probably switching to UE5 now, so he won’t need to worry about them.
overgard 4y ago
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.
antiverse 4y ago
>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.
humanwhosits 4y ago
Unity sure is taking some bad PR hits
xwdv 4y ago
I wish the game industry would crash hard as people realize most games these days are nothing but time wasting addictive loops, and all these people that are in it for pure profit get blown out, leaving only the true craftsmen as the only ones making games.
Julesman 4y ago
What he says ONLY applies for AAA games. Metrics and research push every game into the same few buckets. Just like web design best practices imply that every website should be roughly the same. Chasing what 'works' the best has little to do with stickiness. Yeah, you can be addicted to Candy Crush and play it endlessly without any joy at all. But that kind of stickiness is a problem and not in the soul of gaming. Real stickiness comes from some kind of authentic joy. And coders and marketers don't know how to put that on screen.
a-dub 4y ago
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.
johnnymarr666 4y ago
a 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!
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
So nobody just writes games for fun anymore? Seems like the Unity CEO has a very narrow view.
lemoncookiechip 4y ago
This 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.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
Compare 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-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced... I'll put all my money on Sweeney over this asshole.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
twawaaay 4y ago
Umm... People who cannot envision other people may have different value system are "fucking idiots".
omoikane 4y ago
Related thread from yesterday: Unity merges with IronSource - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051
theandrewbailey 4y ago
I remember this guy. John Riccitiello was the CEO of EA when they got the Worst Company in America twice. I can't tell if he was the mastermind of driving EA into the ground, but he accelerated it. He was just as scummy and profit driven then as now.
- 1ark 4y ago
  The ability for him to get another CEO position after getting canned from EA is mind blowing.
rowanG077 4y ago
Ah yes if you are not actively working to prey on people you are a "fucking idiot".
thrillgore 4y ago
Unity sure knows how to pick its leadership. Instead of trying to make the technology compete with Unreal, Godot, and custom-rolled game engines, they are gonna double down on a sea of forgettable mobile games that aren't sustainable once the whales leave.
shadowgovt 4y ago
He's obviously heavily incentivized to think so, since his company doesn't make money if devs don't make money.
turdit 4y ago
anyone making actual art is technically a fucking idiot compared to someone making money the same way a martyr is an idiot
sk8terboi 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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fareesh 4y ago
You can monetize and keep the gameplay pure. DOTA2 for example.
davidkuennen 4y ago
Monetization should be a key consideration from the very beginning for any kind of product that's supposed to generate revenue. Nothing new here.
hgs3 4y ago
No one should be surprised by these remarks. Companies always market themselves like their a force for good, "democratizing game development" in Unity's case. In actuality, all that matters is making the Benjamins.
dang 4y ago
Url changed from https://mobilegamer.biz/devs-not-baking-monetisation-into-the-creative-process-are-fucking-idiots-says-unitys-john-riccitiello/ https://mobilegamer.biz/devs-not-baking-monetisation-into-th..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- woojoo666 4y ago
  Should the title be changed too?
  - dang 4y ago
    Probably, but I couldn't find an obviously better one, and so much of the thread was already in reaction to this one, that I timed out on it.
stephc_int13 4y ago
Making games is both an Art and a Business, and it always has been this way, but the F2P model, especially on mobile, tends to put heavy constraints on the game structure, transforming it into a time sink, engineered to keep you inside for as long as possible. (what they call Engagement and Game As A Service)
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Other things monetized to great success: - facebook (soooo much better with 80% ads) - google search (soooo much better with an entire first page of ads) - app stores (I love how they "curate" and "enforce standards") - insulin (mmmm, monopolize a drug whose manufacture is open and charge 10x for that, that's the free market) - college tuition and education (even nonprofits can be completely ruined by MBAs) - military/defense Well, the list goes on. Gotta love those MBAs with their excel spreadsheets and strike price stock options.
pelasaco 4y ago
clickbait hot take..
coryfklein 4y ago
Actual title of the linked article is: > John Riccitiello: this industry divides people who shun monetisation and those who embrace what makes a successful product Instead, we get the non-representative clickbait "fucking idiots" in our title, which goes against the HN ethos and guidelines: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- woojoo666 4y ago
  And looks like the clickbait is working too, this is one of the top posts of the day already. Bit ironic that OP is condemning dark patterns like iAP, when clickbait is a dark pattern itself
blaze33 4y ago
I can't help but notice the underlying conflict giving rise to these sort of controversies. What is a game? What makes a successful one? Ok, checks dictionary: "an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun". I remember buying Age of Empires or Total Annihilation as a kid. That was before the ubiquitous internet, you asked your friends and read game magazines before heading to the shop to buy the CDROM. New games had similar prices but some were better (from the player pov) than others and I feel like at that time, being fun and entertaining more directly correlated to commercial successes. Now everything is online: the games, the stores, the payments. We have in game transactions, DLCs, pay-to-win, pay-to-not-wait-24h, in game gambling, analytics to optimize, etc. And also this definition of gaming: "to manipulate (a situation), typically in a way that is unfair or unscrupulous". What gives? > “But this industry divides people between those who still hold to that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product." So yeah, could this divide actually come from our definition of "success"? Is it about maximizing the financial ROI using all the tricks we know to hook and exploit whales? Is it about making an actually fun and enjoyable game? I wonder...
ohCh6zos 4y ago
I just don't purchase anything with a store or anything buyable attached to it. My only gripe is when those don't exist on release and get added in a few months later.
MrYellowP 4y ago
People who don't want to use the results of decades of scientific research to psychologically abuse mindless morons into giving them money are fucking idiots. Okay. Well, he's probably not wrong, but I'd rather be a fucking idiot than taking advantage of so many people.
davesque 4y ago
The link title doesn't match to the article title so I suspected the comment wouldn't look as audacious in context. But actually it doesn't look much better. Here's the relevant snippet: Interviewer: Implementing monetisation earlier in the process and conversation is certainly an angle that has seen pushback from some developers. Riccitiello: 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. I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that. It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care. Sure, he's not technically saying the fucking idiots and the anti-mtx devs overlap completely. But it would be hard for someone to convince me that he wasn't implying that. Also, it's a crafty bit of voodoo he does when he describes the previous era of well planned, well tested games that stood on their own once handed over to the publisher as having been thrown "over the wall." Makes it sound awfully bad when in reality it often meant the product was just better. Ah well, he's financially incentivized to say all this crap so what can you do?
- ncr100 4y ago
  The paragraph after the f'ing sentence feels like clean-up to me, and IMO deserves a proper apology.
swarnie 4y ago
Mainstream gaming is dead to me and has been for 8-10 years. It seems focused on yearly sports releases (which could really be 100mb rooster update packs), endless reskined Ubisoft sandboxes and the latest iteration of that shooter you've already bought 12 times before. Obviously im in the wrong..... This is what the market wants apparently. My 80k of disposable yearly income can't compete with whatever auts Whale they can catch with "surprise mechanics". The buying public will vote with their wallets and the publishers will continue shovelling in bland paste to fill the demand void.
altruios 4y ago
Go go Godot! ...and gamemaker studio, unreal, and a host of other's that don't do this monetization through ads... unity was nice while it lasted... time to let it die. only you can prevent advertising - by not putting ads in games (note to game devs: don't be evil, don't just follow orders from your boss either if those orders are evil).
lobocinza 4y ago
I'm not playing any future game that is developed with Unity.
boosteri 4y ago
UU
hatenberg 4y ago
What wver happened to the sexual harassment lawsuit he got hit with for hitting on a lesbian VP?
1ark 4y ago
Riccitiello is a class A sociopath. He managed to almost drive EA to the dumps, before getting sacked. For exactly the same practices he advocates here. It would have been so much better if David Helgason made someone who he built the company with as CEO, instead of a serial executive. EA learned from their mistake. The kind of posturing Riccitiello has to do in this article is exactly what narcissists do. Obviously, after being cut from EA, the kind of smooth talking he must have done to get this job is beyond me. Did they just ignore his track record? The people here defending him shows how good he is a persuading people, unfortunately.

357 points by OskarS 4y ago

I'm glad the title was changed from "creators" to "gamedevs". I an think of lots of famous creators who didn't concern themselves with "monetization"

smrtinsert 4y ago

The insanity. Maybe the gamedev wants people to have fun for a change.

burke 4y ago

Or, you know, invested in building games where people retrospectively assess their time spent with the game as enriching rather than exploitative.

formerkrogemp 4y ago
> 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.
- timq 4y ago
  Except some Nintendo games, like breath of the wild.
  - jeffwask 4y ago
    There are a raft on non-AAA publishers who produce amazing games without it Hades, It takes two are two of the recent game of the year winners that wholesale rejected exploitative monetization
- yoyohello13 4y ago
  The maximization of profit over everything else is the cause of much suffering.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    `
    - kortilla 4y ago
      No, it’s absolutely not the legal obligation. That’s just an internet meme.
    - noandno 4y ago
      No, and no. (Editing out when disagreed with is poor form.)
      - wahnfrieden 4y ago
        don’t care
  - simonh 4y ago
    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 how many cool games from small dev teams there are on the App Store and Steam. If bored housewives prefer PTW crap, well, they'd probably just be spending it on bingo or scratch cards instead. It's really just mass market casual entertainment moving out of newsagents and bingo halls and on to smartphones, but it's always been there.
    - jerf 4y ago
      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.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  So profit is the only thing that matters in life? And not leisure, which appears to be the whole point of engaging in gaming?
jayd16 4y ago
That's nice and all but it'll be the last thing your studio does if you didn't think about monetization. Why is "have a business model" so controversial?
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  cognitive dissonance between loving free market capitalism and having values that the market doesn’t recognize
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  because often the people emphasizing business models are insufferable sociopaths that have no interest in making quality products; they'd sell you a fart if they could get away with it... there is healthy space between, but the loudest people in business set a poor stage for the industry and it's so off-putting that many people would rather not think about it at all
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 4y ago
  > 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 the food was fine, and the overall cost were similar/lower than its neighbours. Capitalism is dehumanizing, and people don't want to engage with microtransactions in the middle of having their meal. 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. The latter tends to look like that restaurant - an utter shit-show, and many people won't really care that you have a three-star Michelin chef making the pasta. Also, in gaming, the bar from your competitors is high. There are a lot of excellent titles that provide a lot of entertainment without having predatory monetization. If your title does, it'll get panned. (If it doesn't, it'll still get panned for the monetization it does have, but hey, gamers are entitled.) There's also monetization that crosses straight into gambling (loot boxes of various flavours) - or, alternatively - the apocryphal tale of two cowboys who pay eachother to eat cow patties (designing the game around whales trying to outspend eachother). These are very profitable, if shitty business models, and one should probably be regulated down[1], while the other can't scale - it's limited by the number of whales in the ocean. [1] There are a few reasonable restrictions to it, that could be introduced - requiring all purchases to be fiat-denominated, as opposed to in a smorgasbord of in-game currencies, and requiring odds & costs to be shown[2] (again, fiat-denominated). [2] If people want to spend $5,000 gambling for a hat that has an expected cost of $2,000, they are free to do it, but they should be aware of the odds.
ChrisClark 4y ago
Isn't that what he means when he says the loop needs to be an hour or longer, not 2 minutes? Isn't he advocating a longer rewarding sequence instead of a quick cash grab every couple minutes?
- nightpool 4y ago
  No. He's advocating for the opposite—an enhanced "time on device" that keeps the users playing for much longer than they otherwise would have. This is well-known technique lifted directly from machine gambling in Los Vegas, where they try to draw out the "loop" long enough so that people keep playing as long as possible without ever walking away. Here's a quote about one of the best academic books on the subject, Addiction By Design: Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the “machine zone,” in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and “ambience management,” player tracking and cash access systems—all designed to meet the market’s desire for maximum “time on device.” Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers’ everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/addiction-by-design https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/ad... There's a ton of crossover in these fields between people who designed gambling machines for Los Vegas and then got in on the ground floor of the big mobile gaming boom.

everdrive 4y ago

Businesses need to make money, but I hate for every app or website to have some anti-user poison pill. I’m not sure there’s a real solution here, just an arms race.

uoaei 4y ago
No solution without first examining, identifying, and criticizing the incentives that are induced when the profit motive is assumed as a central tenet of modern society. If the point of enterprise is to make money, then that's what they will do. If the point of enterprise is to do something else, then they will do something else.

selfhoster11 4y ago

It takes one to know one, I guess. Not being interrupted during gameplay by prompts to spend money or watch ads is a feature.

jayd16 4y ago
Committing to a full price game is also thinking about monetization.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  That's not the first thing that comes to mind when you mention "monetisation" these days to the average gamer or gamedev. Without further context, the word is usually interpreted as bleeding your customer for more attention/money.
- epups 4y ago
  And this is the model that's being criticised as archaic and stupid here.
  - jayd16 4y ago
    It's really not. Just making a guess is what he's talking about. You still need to right price a full paid game and I'm sure Unity would be happy to help you figure that out.
    - epups 4y ago
      What does a game engine have to do with pricing? He is clearly talking about how Unity will soon let you introduce in-game ads/payments.
      - selfhoster11 4y ago
        You can already introduce in-game ads and payments with or without Unity's help. I understood the article as describing some sort of auto-detection feature that suggests where money-making hooks can be introduced - sort of how Youtube supposedly suggests to content-makers where would be a good spot to insert an ad break in the video.

api 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
FeteCommuniste 4y ago
“Compulsion loop” definitely needs to go in the hall of fame of dystopian phrases.
- Vosporos 4y ago
  /r/BoringDystopia is waiting for your submission
endominus 4y ago
It's phrased so... nonchalantly. Basically an out-and-out admission that they are trying to appeal to producers of addictive gambling garbage. Content rather than art. Skinner boxes rather than agency. And the market rewards them for it (not Unity specifically - I expect Riccitiello to run the company into the ground within a year or two - but rather the game companies actually making slot machine games that collectively form half the games industry by revenue).

sp332 4y ago

And yet $U is at -75%, year to date. Maybe they should have focused on making something good instead?

henning 4y ago
Won't someone PLEASE think of shareholder value

donedealomg 4y ago

causi 4y ago

In the eyes of the MBA, the ideal business is one whose customers hate it as much as possible while still using it.

phendrenad2 4y ago
Why would they want customers to hate it? Don't they want word-of-mouth sales?
- causi 4y ago
  First you become indispensable, then you squeeze as much money as possible from the customer without them leaving.

srvmshr 4y ago

Famous last words. Unity is doomed with the malware company merger

overgard 4y ago
I doubt it; I can't imagine this is going to affect the engine/editor itself in a way you can't opt out of. Companies that want tools like ironsource would have already been using a package or custom code to do these things anyway. It does speak to the priorities of the company though -- Unity used to be about indies, but it seems like their focus is more on mobile and services. I don't think that means they're going to neglect the indies, but I think they're realizing subscriptions without royalties isn't a huge money maker for them.
- runevault 4y ago
  The problem is a LOT of developers are starting to second guess using Unity which means no seat licenses and likely not using their ad network for in game monetization on mobile games. Will people stick by that or will they try something like Godot, not like it instantly, and jump ship back despite their concerns? Only time will tell, but the concern seems pretty widespread in the gamedev community.

henning 4y ago

Doing mobile ad IRR modeling spreadsheets, tweaking ad copy to rank higher in search engines, and other business-y MBA crap is easier than actually building a good game, especially if you don't actually like games and are just getting into "e-sports and mobile".

gsatic 4y ago

No surprise. This is probably the most useless and mindless generation of leaders the US has ever produced.

hklgny 4y ago

This seems like a click bait title to me, he "technically" uses those words, but the article seems a lot more sensible to me than inflammatory. We should definitely be thinking through sales/marketing when building games just like we do when building software. Not sure why you wouldn't be. Edit to add: This rings true even when you decide "not a priority this time", that's still thinking it through

bastawhiz 4y ago
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.
- hklgny 4y ago
  For sure - you can often find anecdata that works out well. But I think being conscious about that decision up front as a developer is still a good idea. If you choose to go the Minecraft route then great. Just know what you're getting into and what bets you're making.
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  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?
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    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.
    - hklgny 4y ago
      Because if you read the article his advice wasn't to engage in predatory mechanics - and that's why this conversation is so inflammatory for folks. It's a bad title. Here's the quote: “It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.” “But this industry divides people between those who still hold to that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product. And I don’t know a successful artist anywhere that doesn’t care about what their player thinks. This is where this cycle of feedback comes back, and they can choose to ignore it. But to choose to not know it at all is not a great call.”

naravara 4y ago

The headline is pretty sensationalist. The full quote "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."

wyldfire 4y ago

> “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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...

actinium226 4y ago
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 they're using and are going to use with IronSource.
- phkahler 4y ago
  Two minutes would be a holdover from 1980's arcade games. That's about how long you'd play on a quarter. Maybe 3 minutes.
  - structural 4y ago
    And most of them were tuned for profit too, so it's not like this is a new concept. It does feel like a lot of the mobile and F2P monetization folks are the same ones that enjoyed profiting from arcade games and see them as being similar to slot machines (except better, because they only pay out in neurochemicals, not money!). There's been a quiet war for decades between people who want to design games as art, and people who want to design them as a predictable recurring revenue stream. I'm not sure what iteration we're up to now.

chomp 4y ago

Yeah, 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 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.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
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?
- whateveracct 4y ago
  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.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    I agree and hope it would provoke wider reflection beyond how it affects the HN crowd on their couches
  - janoc 4y ago
    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.

jl6 4y ago

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 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.

revolvingocelot 4y ago
>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 microtransaction-free, is fun, straightforward, and takes inspiration from video lottery terminals. Yes, really! Its creator, Luca Galante [1]: >“Slot games are very simple,” he tells The Verge. “All the player has to do is press one button, and the game designers have to find a way to push the player to press that button. [The player] is actually spending money every time they press it, and because of that, there’s a huge attention to detail on the sounds, the animations, and the sequences, because you have so few elements to work with. Basically, [the designers] try to maximize the importance and impact those elements have on the player. I just absorbed that knowledge basically just by being in the industry. And so when making a game, I have automatically applied it to what [I’ve been] doing.” >That’s all reflected in Vampire Survivors. Starting a game immediately drops you into the action, and the only controls to think about are moving your character and picking upgrades. You don’t even need to press a button to use your weapons. The charming retro graphics feel like they’re ripped straight from a long-forgotten Super Nintendo Castlevania game, and you’ll hear a delightful chime every time you pick up one of the countless experience gems. Opening treasure chests seems to intentionally create the feeling that you’re pulling a slot machine; pixelated weapons stream by on ribbons of color as coins fly everywhere, all backed by a catchy jingle. (If you get lucky and find a chest with five items, there are actually fireworks.) [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/19/22941145/vampire-survivors-early-access-steam-pc-mac-luca-galante https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/19/22941145/vampire-survivor...

morley 4y ago

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 idiot, just that there are some in that group of people. And personally, I greatly prefer this sort of frank talk to run-of-the-mill generic PR speak that usually comes from CEO interviews. The next thing he says in the interview: > I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that. It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.

jeffwask 4y ago
He's saying every game needs to be an MTX riddled nightmare to be successful. As a gamer I reject that and have been with my wallet for a while. There are hundreds of dev teams producing great stuff below the AAA level that only ask me to buy the game once not every day.
- deleted 4y ago
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- selfhoster11 4y ago
  IMO it's not clear just from the immediate context in the article that he's actually advocating for MTX or ads. If he is, then he deserves all the flak. If he's simply talking about having a market fit so your game sells at all, then IMO that's just talking about the viability of the game as a product - and in this case it's just about whether making the game makes financial sense, not whether you can juice the customer for more money.
  - jeffwask 4y ago
    He just executed a merge of his company with a company that produced know malware delivery platforms for installing scamware. I think we can guess where his intentions lay

yoyohello13 4y ago

"Idiot" in this case means anybody who prioritizes anything over money.

kthartic 4y ago
That's not how I understood his words, like at all. He means that monetisation should be considered as part of the creative process. Many indie devs could've been sitting on gold mines, but that those rewards (which could've lead to the creation/evolution of more games) weren't reaped because they didn't consider it. Now of course some of those devs wouldn't care about that at all, but I bet there's also some whose jaws would've dropped if they were told how much they could've made.
- pugworthy 4y ago
  > ...monetisation should be considered as part of the creative process That mindset is the antithesis of open source. And believe it or not, not every game dev is into it to make money. There was some classic interaction between Nimblebit and Zynga back when where Zynga offered to buy Nimblebit, who politely turned down the offer. It could have made a huge amount of money for the founders, but they preferred making their money by creating great games.
  - kthartic 4y ago
    > That mindset is the antithesis of open source. Aren't 99% of successful indie games closed source? > And believe it or not, not every game dev is into it to make money Oh absolutely, did you not read my comment?: > Now of course some of those devs wouldn't care about that at all My point is x% don't care about the money and just want to make great games. Cool! I'm all for it. But y% probably would care about the money if they knew how much they could've gotten had they considered monetisation as part (keyword being part) of the creative process.

ohgodplsno 4y ago

I knew I remembered the name John Riccitiello from somewhere as a dumbass. And it turns out, it's 1997 to 2004 and 2007 to 2013 at Electronic Arts. The two periods known as the absolute worst times in terms of quality and scumbaggery when it comes to monetization of games for EA. Oh, and also as someone who was fired because EA was bleeding out money, fucked up not one but four consecutive high profile game launches and was in litigation with about half of its studios. Thanks John, but I seem to have a slight idea at who the fucking idiot in the room might be, unfortunately, you're failing upwards.

epups 4y ago
This is extremely relevant information. This guy is a fucking idiot himself.
Mezzie 4y ago
Oh, the man who helped tank my favorite game studio (RIP Maxis). Yeah, I wouldn't listen to him about much of anything.

groby_b 4y ago

To all the folks complaining it's gross: This is Riccitiello. Of course it's gross. That's who he is. He's one of the reasons a whole lot of good people left the games industry, and continue to leave.

antiverse 4y ago
Just shows they're not a good culture fit.

whateveracct 4y ago

The best games aren't Products. Mine never will be :)

rbanffy 4y ago

Not everything in life is a pursuit of profit.

deleted 4y ago

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JKCalhoun 4y ago

I too love the fucking idiots. Or artists as I prefer to call them.

phkahler 4y ago

“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour. 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. There isn’t a developer on the planet that wouldn’t want that knowledge.” Cool. I had to look that up and found Wikipedia informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop Thanks for the tip!

epups 4y ago

This short-sightedness will ultimately kill big publishers. Yes you can milk customers and it will be profitable in the short run. But in the long run, your clientele will consist solely of idiots. Look at EA and Blizzard for examples of this.

_jal 4y ago

I think he's probably right, in context. And I also think this is increasingly why I just don't play new games anymore. I like the output of those clay-carver idiots, and don't like product from savvy businessgamers. Cash extraction machines aren't fun. When I want an escapist experience, "social" bullshit incorporating status skins and whatnot is an utter turnoff, as is effectively mandatory upsells for in-game whatevers. I'm sure losing people like me works out on the balance sheet. I'll be over here, yelling at clouds.

bioemerl 4y ago
It'll eventually collapse under its own weight like Atari in the 80s.

yAak 4y ago

The Big Lebowski comes to mind: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."

cesaref 4y ago

'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 meaningful, but from my experience, such a mechanism really doesn't exist. As a study, it would be interesting to imagine what minecraft would have looked like if the concept had been developed by an established game company, using all the latest wizz-bang graphics and sound. If it had been well funded, and had focus groups and a team of industry veterans helping out, would it be the game it is today, with the following it has? I would go as far as suggesting that the most amazing creative innovations happen from the indie scene - amateurs doing what they love for it's own sake, and monetisation coming a distant second. Most crash and burn, or are boring 'me too' efforts, but every now and again, a Minecraft, or a Linux appear.

janoc 4y ago
>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 ...

bob1029 4y ago

Focus on monetization/profit as the first priority in a creative effort is the world's biggest flashing neon sign for shitty leadership. Making a AAA video game is a gigantic gamble no matter how you slice it. Trying to hedge this gamble up front with micro transactions will result in vicious design cycles that further increase the effective risk profile of the project to your business. This is all a matter of higher-order consequences to me. I always believed the harder you focused on the money (especially in gaming), the harder it would be to obtain. Only once you completely wash yourself of that madness can your mind expand and engage in more empathetic thinking. If you are trying to make something fun, empathy is critical. Obsession with money robs most humans of that trait. I think Blizzard is a good example of how money has nearly zero impact on the amount of fun that can be produced, especially when looking at fun per unit of capital involved. I believe running a game studio like a hedge fund is the critical error here.

93po 4y ago
If these people only care about money, I don't understand why they don't go into some other business. Take your bunches of money and go make a real estate investment firm or something.

jamesgreenleaf 4y ago

> if you’re not thinking about monetisation during your creative process, you’re a “fucking idiot.” This is why Poe's work is not enjoyable. Knowing he died penniless makes all his creativity worthless. Likewise William Blake - what a fool, laboring upward into futurity! /s

barrysteve 4y ago
It is a little foolish to marry heaven and hell..

lbrito 4y ago

>It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way Yeah, I don't know about that. For every pay-to-play game there are 10 excellent indie games on Steam/GoG that still "works that way".

barrysteve 4y ago

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 before. What is the unity CEO pushing for? Cookie cutter games? There is a GDC lecture from way back in 2017-2018, where one man did his thesis on what motivates people in video games. When people see the 'victory screen' or story cutscene or audiovisual reward feedback for an action, what are they responding to deep down inside? He did a metastudy of 70-something studies on this topic and they barely agreed on anything. Nobody really has a firm answer for why people are motivated to play video games and you end up with a lot of handwaving around dopamine. Why is Mr Riccitielo still pushing compulsion loops like we should be yanking players into addiction? Games are so much more than that. See the recent Ocarina Of Time beta showcase at GDQ.

dvlsg 4y ago
> What is the unity CEO pushing for? Cookie cutter games? Does Unity take a cut of any microtransactions run through their ecosystem?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Nope, licenses are paid up-front and per-seat. I think they optionally had a free tier where you could pay nothing except a royalty on your overall earnings, but I don't think that exists anymore (and even if it did, it always made sense to just buy the licenses). Broadly speaking, though, no. Unity does not offer any payment services that he would directly/indirectly benefit from. This just seems like a bizarre offhand attack at his customerbase.
  - aroman 4y ago
    Most of Unity's revenue does not come from licensing the engine. It comes from their "services" portfolio, which includes advertising and other tools for monetizing, including via IAPs (although they don't take a cut of IAPs, they offer tools to help implement them and improve monetization e.g. A/B testing). I agree it was a bizarre attack at his customer base, but it makes sense given Unity's merger with Ironsource (mobile game advertising giant). The message seems to be clear: Unity is for people who want to make games that make money, not for indies who want to create for the love of craft.

barrad0s 4y ago

One of those quotes that I bet can be taken extremely different when heard vs when read.

f17 4y ago

Counterpoint: Stardew Valley. No IAP bullshit, no lootbox chicanery... and yet I doubt its creator is hurting, financially speaking. Of course, we're talking about an outlier here. Excellence doesn't guarantee anything, but it is a strategy that sometimes works. The irony is that you'd expect the big publishers to be the ones willing to take on risks and put out products that are excellent but maybe not financial blockbusters. They're the ones who can afford to parlay a reputation for excellence into further success of their more commercial products (since they're diversified and more likely to live long enough to realize the returns). Yet, it's only indies and self-publishers who seem to care about doing the best work... and this isn't limited to games, but visible in all the arts right now. The entities that can afford big risks and long-term plays (inherent to excellence strategies) nevertheless avoid them, and the small actors are invariably the ones making them.

nemothekid 4y ago
When people say Stardew Valley is a counterpoint, are they saying publishers shouldn't pay developers at all until their game is a massive success? ConcernedApe spent 4 years working on the game on a pretty much ramen salary and then hit a success; I vastly prefer whatever dysfunction we have now, to publishers not paying any salaries unless you come with a 1-in-100 success. Games are a hit driven business; so if you have a success you are incentivized to milk it; if you don't want to be forced to milk it, then don't build 100M-budget games. If you are building a $100M game and not baking in monetization, then you are an idiot.
- janoc 4y ago
  I think the problem is that we have to have $100M games - or bust. There is very little funding available for those "less than blockbuster" titles. Even with predatory monetization it is extremely hard to recoup costs caused by such budget - there is a market for only so many Worlds of Warcrafts or similar long running games where the huge costs can be amortized over millions of players and years of subscriptions. If you don't build the game around the "AAA" assumption that requires you to ship (and have made!) hundreds of gigabytes of artwork, scripting and what not, then a lot of these monetization pressures go away - unless your producer pushes to put it back in, because, hey, free money!

cityzen 4y ago

Wait, are you telling me this fucking idiot said that: John Riccitiello, the CEO of gaming company Unity Technologies, repeatedly sexually harassed female colleagues, propositioning them for sex and then threatening one if she spoke about his behavior, the former executive claims in a lawsuit filed last week. I mean, if you sexually harass your employees... you're a fucking idiot! and a fucking piece of shit...

devteambravo 4y ago

Fund indie games or deal with this overlord, folks. I know what I'm going to do.

Cognitron 4y ago

That’s OK, a lot of those “fucking idiots” are probably switching to UE5 now, so he won’t need to worry about them.

overgard 4y ago

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.

antiverse 4y ago

>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.

humanwhosits 4y ago

Unity sure is taking some bad PR hits

xwdv 4y ago

I wish the game industry would crash hard as people realize most games these days are nothing but time wasting addictive loops, and all these people that are in it for pure profit get blown out, leaving only the true craftsmen as the only ones making games.

Julesman 4y ago

What he says ONLY applies for AAA games. Metrics and research push every game into the same few buckets. Just like web design best practices imply that every website should be roughly the same. Chasing what 'works' the best has little to do with stickiness. Yeah, you can be addicted to Candy Crush and play it endlessly without any joy at all. But that kind of stickiness is a problem and not in the soul of gaming. Real stickiness comes from some kind of authentic joy. And coders and marketers don't know how to put that on screen.

a-dub 4y ago

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.

johnnymarr666 4y ago

a 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!

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

So nobody just writes games for fun anymore? Seems like the Unity CEO has a very narrow view.

lemoncookiechip 4y ago

This 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.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

Compare 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-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced... I'll put all my money on Sweeney over this asshole.

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twawaaay 4y ago

Umm... People who cannot envision other people may have different value system are "fucking idiots".

omoikane 4y ago

Related thread from yesterday: Unity merges with IronSource - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051

theandrewbailey 4y ago

I remember this guy. John Riccitiello was the CEO of EA when they got the Worst Company in America twice. I can't tell if he was the mastermind of driving EA into the ground, but he accelerated it. He was just as scummy and profit driven then as now.

1ark 4y ago
The ability for him to get another CEO position after getting canned from EA is mind blowing.

rowanG077 4y ago

Ah yes if you are not actively working to prey on people you are a "fucking idiot".

thrillgore 4y ago

Unity sure knows how to pick its leadership. Instead of trying to make the technology compete with Unreal, Godot, and custom-rolled game engines, they are gonna double down on a sea of forgettable mobile games that aren't sustainable once the whales leave.

shadowgovt 4y ago

He's obviously heavily incentivized to think so, since his company doesn't make money if devs don't make money.

turdit 4y ago

anyone making actual art is technically a fucking idiot compared to someone making money the same way a martyr is an idiot

sk8terboi 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fareesh 4y ago

You can monetize and keep the gameplay pure. DOTA2 for example.

davidkuennen 4y ago

Monetization should be a key consideration from the very beginning for any kind of product that's supposed to generate revenue. Nothing new here.

hgs3 4y ago

No one should be surprised by these remarks. Companies always market themselves like their a force for good, "democratizing game development" in Unity's case. In actuality, all that matters is making the Benjamins.

dang 4y ago

Url changed from https://mobilegamer.biz/devs-not-baking-monetisation-into-the-creative-process-are-fucking-idiots-says-unitys-john-riccitiello/ https://mobilegamer.biz/devs-not-baking-monetisation-into-th..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

woojoo666 4y ago
Should the title be changed too?
- dang 4y ago
  Probably, but I couldn't find an obviously better one, and so much of the thread was already in reaction to this one, that I timed out on it.

stephc_int13 4y ago

Making games is both an Art and a Business, and it always has been this way, but the F2P model, especially on mobile, tends to put heavy constraints on the game structure, transforming it into a time sink, engineered to keep you inside for as long as possible. (what they call Engagement and Game As A Service)

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Other things monetized to great success: - facebook (soooo much better with 80% ads) - google search (soooo much better with an entire first page of ads) - app stores (I love how they "curate" and "enforce standards") - insulin (mmmm, monopolize a drug whose manufacture is open and charge 10x for that, that's the free market) - college tuition and education (even nonprofits can be completely ruined by MBAs) - military/defense Well, the list goes on. Gotta love those MBAs with their excel spreadsheets and strike price stock options.

pelasaco 4y ago

clickbait hot take..

coryfklein 4y ago

Actual title of the linked article is: > John Riccitiello: this industry divides people who shun monetisation and those who embrace what makes a successful product Instead, we get the non-representative clickbait "fucking idiots" in our title, which goes against the HN ethos and guidelines: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

woojoo666 4y ago
And looks like the clickbait is working too, this is one of the top posts of the day already. Bit ironic that OP is condemning dark patterns like iAP, when clickbait is a dark pattern itself

blaze33 4y ago

I can't help but notice the underlying conflict giving rise to these sort of controversies. What is a game? What makes a successful one? Ok, checks dictionary: "an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun". I remember buying Age of Empires or Total Annihilation as a kid. That was before the ubiquitous internet, you asked your friends and read game magazines before heading to the shop to buy the CDROM. New games had similar prices but some were better (from the player pov) than others and I feel like at that time, being fun and entertaining more directly correlated to commercial successes. Now everything is online: the games, the stores, the payments. We have in game transactions, DLCs, pay-to-win, pay-to-not-wait-24h, in game gambling, analytics to optimize, etc. And also this definition of gaming: "to manipulate (a situation), typically in a way that is unfair or unscrupulous". What gives? > “But this industry divides people between those who still hold to that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product." So yeah, could this divide actually come from our definition of "success"? Is it about maximizing the financial ROI using all the tricks we know to hook and exploit whales? Is it about making an actually fun and enjoyable game? I wonder...

ohCh6zos 4y ago

I just don't purchase anything with a store or anything buyable attached to it. My only gripe is when those don't exist on release and get added in a few months later.

MrYellowP 4y ago

People who don't want to use the results of decades of scientific research to psychologically abuse mindless morons into giving them money are fucking idiots. Okay. Well, he's probably not wrong, but I'd rather be a fucking idiot than taking advantage of so many people.

davesque 4y ago

The link title doesn't match to the article title so I suspected the comment wouldn't look as audacious in context. But actually it doesn't look much better. Here's the relevant snippet: Interviewer: Implementing monetisation earlier in the process and conversation is certainly an angle that has seen pushback from some developers. Riccitiello: 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. I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that. It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care. Sure, he's not technically saying the fucking idiots and the anti-mtx devs overlap completely. But it would be hard for someone to convince me that he wasn't implying that. Also, it's a crafty bit of voodoo he does when he describes the previous era of well planned, well tested games that stood on their own once handed over to the publisher as having been thrown "over the wall." Makes it sound awfully bad when in reality it often meant the product was just better. Ah well, he's financially incentivized to say all this crap so what can you do?

ncr100 4y ago
The paragraph after the f'ing sentence feels like clean-up to me, and IMO deserves a proper apology.

swarnie 4y ago

Mainstream gaming is dead to me and has been for 8-10 years. It seems focused on yearly sports releases (which could really be 100mb rooster update packs), endless reskined Ubisoft sandboxes and the latest iteration of that shooter you've already bought 12 times before. Obviously im in the wrong..... This is what the market wants apparently. My 80k of disposable yearly income can't compete with whatever auts Whale they can catch with "surprise mechanics". The buying public will vote with their wallets and the publishers will continue shovelling in bland paste to fill the demand void.

altruios 4y ago

Go go Godot! ...and gamemaker studio, unreal, and a host of other's that don't do this monetization through ads... unity was nice while it lasted... time to let it die. only you can prevent advertising - by not putting ads in games (note to game devs: don't be evil, don't just follow orders from your boss either if those orders are evil).

lobocinza 4y ago

I'm not playing any future game that is developed with Unity.

boosteri 4y ago

hatenberg 4y ago

What wver happened to the sexual harassment lawsuit he got hit with for hitting on a lesbian VP?

1ark 4y ago

Riccitiello is a class A sociopath. He managed to almost drive EA to the dumps, before getting sacked. For exactly the same practices he advocates here. It would have been so much better if David Helgason made someone who he built the company with as CEO, instead of a serial executive. EA learned from their mistake. The kind of posturing Riccitiello has to do in this article is exactly what narcissists do. Obviously, after being cut from EA, the kind of smooth talking he must have done to get this job is beyond me. Did they just ignore his track record? The people here defending him shows how good he is a persuading people, unfortunately.