7 ms·

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

by burke 4y ago

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.
    - overgard 4y ago
      So, just straight facts here. In F2P games, (and gambling), the vast majority of the profits come from a very small minority of people called "whales". The vast majority of users never spend a dollar. These whales are usually people with a gambling addiction or some other psychological issues, and they can and will bankrupt themselves and their family. Yes, they have some of the responsibility here, but people that design games to prey on these people deserve some responsibility too. Just a personal anecdote, I used to work on a F2P game years ago before I knew these things. Once, I wrote a visual effect for some dragons that players had to pay for which used some pretty fancy shader code. As a consequence of said fancy shader code, some low-end devices with poor ES2 standard support didn't run the shader properly. One day, we had a crazy lady drive to our office across interstate lines, about a 16 hour drive, and she threw a tantrum because she thought that we had "scammed" her out of getting the visual effect she paid for (I guess she was older and didn't realize it was just a bug). Some people get way too invested in this stuff, and as moral human beings we have to be mindful of that and not just blame the crazy person.
- 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.

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

by 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.
  - overgard 4y ago
    So, just straight facts here. In F2P games, (and gambling), the vast majority of the profits come from a very small minority of people called "whales". The vast majority of users never spend a dollar. These whales are usually people with a gambling addiction or some other psychological issues, and they can and will bankrupt themselves and their family. Yes, they have some of the responsibility here, but people that design games to prey on these people deserve some responsibility too. Just a personal anecdote, I used to work on a F2P game years ago before I knew these things. Once, I wrote a visual effect for some dragons that players had to pay for which used some pretty fancy shader code. As a consequence of said fancy shader code, some low-end devices with poor ES2 standard support didn't run the shader properly. One day, we had a crazy lady drive to our office across interstate lines, about a 16 hour drive, and she threw a tantrum because she thought that we had "scammed" her out of getting the visual effect she paid for (I guess she was older and didn't realize it was just a bug). Some people get way too invested in this stuff, and as moral human beings we have to be mindful of that and not just blame the crazy person.
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.