9 ms·

I'm an analyst for a gaming company too, so let me offer my perspective. I consider myself to be an ethical, non-creepy person, and I disagree with what this p

by physcab 15y ago

I'm an analyst for a gaming company too, so let me offer my perspective. I consider myself to be an ethical, non-creepy person, and I disagree with what this person says. Yes, gaming companies are extremely data-driven and they measure everything they can. I'm in charge of dashboards that have over 300 KPI's (key performance indicators) on them. What do we measure? A whole lot of shit. ARPU, ARPPU, HC (hard currency) spend/gained, SC (soft currency) gained/spend, Retention, DAU, Spend DAU, Gained DAU, Downloads, Activations, plus funnels for every page, every user action you can think of. Do I think measuring all this is creepy? No. Why? Because when I come in the morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within an hour if the build the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that affected 30% of our users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the Engineering team, they can create a hotfix, and users can be happy again. Engineers are happy knowing that we have actual data to validate and confirm their gameplay suggestions (made during scrum/sprint planning sessions). I also report monetization metrics to the VP's. They want to know if the boatloads of money they are spending on user acquisition are actually paying off. And the PM's want to know if users are playing the game, or how far they get into the game. Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. These users even have names. They're called "whales" in industry parlance. Why wouldn't you want more of them in your game? This is a business afterall. I feel just as bad as the next person wondering whether some of these "whales" are addicts. I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? There's no way we can know because we never get that data. All I see is what's reported in ItunesConnect. Do we ever record any personally identifiable information? No. Do we ever sell or distribute this data to outside parties? No. Can any of this data ever be used maliciously? No. Personally, I like the way game companies work (hence why I work in the industry). It teaches you to measure everything. You make decisions quickly. And no one can argue with the facts. You'll know real fast whether the product is shitty and you can do an about-face, gather the troops, and push out something new.

cbs 15y ago
>Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. >I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? Ahhh, ignorance is plausible deniability bliss.
- physcab 15y ago
  One of my greatest worries going through Engineering school was working on a product that would inadvertently harm people. I once wanted to work at a Lithium Ion battery start-up because I wanted to help create an energy source free of geo-political and climate turmoil. Then I discovered those sources were some of the most toxic to the environment both in the harvesting and the disposing of the material. I then went on to do graduate research in explosives detection. We created machines that would help detect bombs in Iraq and landmines left in a peaceful villages. But then TSA used the machines to look at people's private parts and there was a mass privacy scare. My point is: you can't go life worrying who might use the things you create for harmful purposes. You may be ignorant, but the alternative will drive you insane.
  - loopdoend 15y ago
    You do realize that the whole point of these games is socially engineering people into parting with as much money as possible, right? They're paying money for a chance at winning certain pixels and you're pretending in your head that they're all wealthy millionaires and justifying it to yourself. If you don't want to make games for addicts perhaps you should stop working for companies that make games for addicts. You're not fooling me.
    - physcab 15y ago
      > You do realize that the whole point of these games is socially engineering people into parting with as much money as possible, right? Isn't this the point of any business? > If you don't want to make games for addicts perhaps you should stop working for companies that make games for addicts. I don't believe we make games for addicts. When I show our game to my friends and family they say things like "oh this game is cute", "this creature is funny", etc. The vast majority of our users are people who enjoy casual gaming when they're bored sitting on a plane or on the train.
      - loopdoend 15y ago
        That vast majority of your users account for what, like 10% of your revenue, or less? The real point of your product is targeting addicts, whales, as you called them, and manipulating them into paying money for nothing. Yes, actually nothing, because you rig the odds and dangle carrot shaped pixels above their heads and use every psychological trick in the book, the state of the art, to get them to keep playing. That is not the point of business for me, most businesses offer something of value.
plinkplonk 15y ago
"when I come in the morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within an hour if the build the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that affected 30% of our users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the Engineering team," Why aren't the engineers doing this themselves? (Honest question, not snark) Analyzing performance/results data is (should be? :) )part of all engineering.
- far33d 15y ago
  Because doing real data analysis is hard and time consuming. If you are a very data-driven company, you need someone focused on it.
- physcab 15y ago
  They do. But sometimes these bugs are less obvious and hard to spot without data. In this particular case, it was an animation bug that occurred during a tutorial of a game, whereby the animation caused the game to crash, but only on a subset of older IPhones and under certain memory conditions. So even though the build got through QA, it was tough to understand what would happen out in the wild. Well, on that morning I noticed that a large percentage of our users were starting this particular tutorial step but not completing it. And since all of our data is cohorted by both install date and build version, the engineering team knew exactly where to look to fix the issue, despite no knowledge on my part of a bug ever being introduced.
  - plinkplonk 15y ago
    That is a great answer, Thank You. Now to pick your brains a bit. :) What are some good resources for engineers to pick up some advanced analysis skills (specifically to do the kind of work you do)? Is it as simple as going back to college to do some courses in Advanced Statistics? Any particular sub branches of stats/math to focus on? Any good books you can recommend ? Thanks in advance. PS: I work in Machine Learning,and am fairly knowledgeable in maths/stat but often have difficulty recommending the right sequence of books,courses etc, to people who want to follow a similar path - it doesn't help that I am entirely self taught - and often have to mumble vague generalities like "learn all the math you can and learn to code really well" etc. Recently I am getting questions about how someone can get good at "data science" and "behaviour analysis". Just wondering if there is a standard learning path for something like "casino science"
burgerbrain 15y ago
Irrelevant perspective from an outsider: Your post sent a chill down my spine. That's how creepy it is.
- physcab 15y ago
  I'm curious why you consider it creepy. Note that we don't see any identifiable information and all of the metrics I report are all used to improve gameplay and help monetize the product.
  - skurry 15y ago
    Have you seen Rain Man? Remember that control room from which the casino executive monitors what's going on on the casino floor? That dashboard is your virtual control room. To me, the "free-to-play" social gaming industry appears to be eerily similar to the gambling industry. You even use the same terminology ("whales"). And the gambling industry has always been a little shady, trying to squeeze as much money as they can out of people who can't really afford it. Maybe that's why it appears creepy to some of us?
    - physcab 15y ago
      That is a good point. And actually I didn't know we used the same terms! I'm obviously aware of what goes on in the industry and its similarities to gambling are something I think about a lot. But as an analyst, I feel like I have a lot of power in helping to create games that are fun and engaging, plus learning how to drive a product to be successful. I don't think of it as a spam machine or a front for taking money from the poor. Maybe the business model needs to be changed. If its virtual currency that makes it creepy, then maybe switching to a fixed-cost product is something the industry as a whole needs to move to. We're still in the infancy here in learning how to harness mobile devices to make better products.
      - rdouble 15y ago
        The fact that your job exists is kind of the creepy part. Games that are just made for fun don't have teams of analysts trying to optimize games in order to modify player behavior. That said, your comments have been pretty interesting. How did you get the job in the first place?
HaloZero 15y ago
I think having all that information is fine, but the issue is Zynga just focuses solely on that, they don't try to make games fun. They just make games to make money, even taking out features that are fun to users. So do you measure those metrics and say, "this feature doesn't make enough money so we're gonna cut it even though users think it's fun?"
callmeed 15y ago
"I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff?" Did you ever stop to consider perhaps money isn't the worst fallout? The families of addicts suffer as well–and I suspect, when we look back years from now, we'll see a pattern of spouses and children ignored & damaged because companies like Zynga analyze/optimize everything in order to maximize engagement. A single person can't compete with that. You're not just engineering people to part with their money–you're using your skills to get them to part with their time. Sorry, but I consider what you do (& Zynga does) unethical.
- physcab 15y ago
  I believe that people can make judgement calls about what do to with their free time. I don't think what I do (which is to perform analysis) is any different than what the same analysts at Blizzard do when they make Starcraft or World of WarCraft. Or the people that performed analysis at Nintendo when the first Duck Hunt came out. I have friends who play Starcraft II a couple hours a day. I've known people who will skip work and play 8 hours a day. I've seen a 60 minute story on someone who was addicted to World of Warcraft. This is a chronic problem of the industry as a whole, but its not a reason to stop making games because the majority of users can have fun responsibly.
  - intended 15y ago
    What WoW was and what it is now are different things. WoW vanilla was an MMO, WoW Burning C was basically moving towards the disney land model and away from the mmo. The overall business model has acknowledged the power of the Zynga model, and all actions so far have been moving towards Zynga's model and not away.
    - gaius 15y ago
      For a non-gamer, can you explain the difference?
      - 15y ago
newman314 15y ago
"Do we ever record any personally identifiable information? No. Do we ever sell or distribute this data to outside parties? No. Can any of this data ever be used maliciously? No." The answer may be no for now (that you know of). You can't guarantee that it will stay that way forever. Given Pincus' general shadiness to make a buck, I can totally see a slow quarter or two driving a decision to "update" the privacy policy to sell data to 3rd parties. Similarly, it's not a big programmatic change to start tracking PII as well as cross-referencing to existing information. So while you may not have any ill intentions, I doubt you can speak for all of Zynga's actions over time. I would emphasize the "over time" component since it tends not to be taken into account by most people which is a big reason why we are being bombarded by SOPA-like legislation. (Didn't win this one? No problem, we've got ACTA, etc. And should ACTA fail, I'm sure there's something else over the horizon)
- physcab 15y ago
  Even if they did, I'm not so sure it would be that big of a deal (to most users anyways). I mean, Facebook has all of that data and more, and they definitely sell it to 3rd parties. Hell, you can learn anything you want about a person using their Graph API. So even though I don't believe in it (I deactivated FB for this reason), I'm not sure how much financial benefit you can gain from <UserID> <StrawberryFarmID> TSV files which most of this data is anyways.
  - newman314 15y ago
    My point being there are many companies that rely on data mining these days. Zynga may only track <UserID> <StrawberryFarmID> today but not necessarily tomorrow. FB is merely more blatant about it. It is my sincere wish that the US adopt a strong privacy policy like the UK's Data Protection Act (with the loopholes fixed).
jamesbritt 15y ago
Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. These users even have names. They're called "whales" in industry parlance. Why wouldn't you want more of them in your game? This is a business afterall. I thought that term sounded familiar. http://www.worldfreepoker.com/poker-glossary.html#W http://www.worldfreepoker.com/poker-glossary.html#W "Whale: A poor player with a lot of money to lose." I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? Sure, just like at casinos. You're right, in a way; there are people with more money than brains who are happy to blow a good chunk of it gambling and are really no worse off for it because they're rich. But, realistically, you and I both know that's never the whole story.
- physcab 15y ago
  Right, which is why I said this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3556270 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3556270 You and I also know that this isn't a problem inherent to just casual mobile games. It's a chronic problem to the gaming industry as a whole, and its not going to stop people from making entertainment for the millions of users who aren't addicts.
  - learc83 15y ago
    I think his problem (the previous poster) is not that there are addicts who happen to play these games. Sure there are addicts out there and you're not going to stop them. He is pointing out that, like casinos, these games are specifically targeting these addicts, and these games probably couldn't even exist without the addicts to support them. >its not going to stop people from making entertainment for the millions of users who aren't addicts. These games aren't made for the millions of users who aren't addicts. These games are made specifically for addicts. >Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k It's like the difference between selling alcohol and selling cigarettes. Alcohol is mostly sold to normal people, and percentage of the population abuses it, but virtually every single cigarette made is sold to an addict. Alcohol manufacturers could exist without addicts, cigarette companies couldn't. If you make a Farmville type game there's a good chance you are depending on "addicts" to keep you in business. I'm not declaring casual games to be immoral by the way. I'm just pointing out the difference.
harryf 15y ago
> Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k That effectively means the only way to "win" is by becoming a whale; casual play is basically not rewarded. That's the problem I have with most online games; the greatest benefits go to those spending unhealthy amounts of time and money on them. IMO a mature gaming industry will be one that is able to reward a similar playing commitment to a weekly trip to the cinema; 2 hours play a week is still rewarding. That would make games attractive to a much larger audience IMO and be sustainable; you're not pushing players to burnout. Just out of interest; do you track KPIs around hours of play per day? How many hours is a typical whale spending?
Tossrock 15y ago
People spend over 10k on microtransaction games? I find that kind of amazing.
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
  Amazing? shocking i would say. A family of 3 in a third world country can live moderately comfortably for a year with that amount of money.
  - Tossrock 15y ago
    Yeah, I deleted 'horrifying' and 'disgusting' before settling on the less inflammatory 'amazing'.
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  well comapred to some real world games I have played minatures games at our club where there was £4 to 5K of models on the table ok it was a big demo game using 3-4 guys models. Oh and that is the raw cost of the models what it woudl be if you had to by that painted is anyones guess
  - cheald 15y ago
    In that case, at least, there are physical goods that had to be created, shipped, and sold in a store. Social games' "products" are numbers in a database.
crystalis 15y ago
The article's "At the end of one sprint, a QA dude was complaining about the drop rate of a specific item being absurdly insane, and therefore UnFun. I looked at the code, and tweaked some values, gave it back to QA guy, and fun was restored. Product Manager overrides this, goes for unfun, yet more profitable version." speaks against your "and users can be happy again."
furyofantares 15y ago
I don't think you feel as bad as the next person wondering if the people spending 10k are addicts. If you did, I don't think you'd be willing to maximize how much money you can get out of them, and I don't think you'd be willing to call them whales. You can justify it to yourself saying you have no real evidence they aren't getting 10k+ value out of the game but I rather doubt you are particularly confident of that, either. And I doubt you went into the industry to spend your time trying to satisfy 5% of your users, especially given you have a deragatory name for them. Which isn't to say I think terribly poorly of you, but it isn't entirely non-creepy. Out of curiosity, do you offer users a feature to prevent themselves from spending money if they self-identify that they have a problem?
DannoHung 15y ago
Do any of your KPI's measure fun experienced? If you're not maximizing that above all else, that is why you are hated.
- hythloday 15y ago
  I realize this is a rhetorical question, but the serious answer is that you can't measure fun (without an EEG?), just proxies for it. Typically these are things like how much time someone spends doing something, how much they spend on it, how much they talk to their friends about it. I'm pretty sure that yes, the dashboard physcab maintains supports these. If you have a better way of measuring fun then you can make several fortunes selling this.

by physcab 15y ago

cbs 15y ago

>Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. >I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? Ahhh, ignorance is plausible deniability bliss.

physcab 15y ago
One of my greatest worries going through Engineering school was working on a product that would inadvertently harm people. I once wanted to work at a Lithium Ion battery start-up because I wanted to help create an energy source free of geo-political and climate turmoil. Then I discovered those sources were some of the most toxic to the environment both in the harvesting and the disposing of the material. I then went on to do graduate research in explosives detection. We created machines that would help detect bombs in Iraq and landmines left in a peaceful villages. But then TSA used the machines to look at people's private parts and there was a mass privacy scare. My point is: you can't go life worrying who might use the things you create for harmful purposes. You may be ignorant, but the alternative will drive you insane.
- loopdoend 15y ago
  You do realize that the whole point of these games is socially engineering people into parting with as much money as possible, right? They're paying money for a chance at winning certain pixels and you're pretending in your head that they're all wealthy millionaires and justifying it to yourself. If you don't want to make games for addicts perhaps you should stop working for companies that make games for addicts. You're not fooling me.
  - physcab 15y ago
    > You do realize that the whole point of these games is socially engineering people into parting with as much money as possible, right? Isn't this the point of any business? > If you don't want to make games for addicts perhaps you should stop working for companies that make games for addicts. I don't believe we make games for addicts. When I show our game to my friends and family they say things like "oh this game is cute", "this creature is funny", etc. The vast majority of our users are people who enjoy casual gaming when they're bored sitting on a plane or on the train.
    - loopdoend 15y ago
      That vast majority of your users account for what, like 10% of your revenue, or less? The real point of your product is targeting addicts, whales, as you called them, and manipulating them into paying money for nothing. Yes, actually nothing, because you rig the odds and dangle carrot shaped pixels above their heads and use every psychological trick in the book, the state of the art, to get them to keep playing. That is not the point of business for me, most businesses offer something of value.

plinkplonk 15y ago

"when I come in the morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within an hour if the build the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that affected 30% of our users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the Engineering team," Why aren't the engineers doing this themselves? (Honest question, not snark) Analyzing performance/results data is (should be? :) )part of all engineering.

far33d 15y ago
Because doing real data analysis is hard and time consuming. If you are a very data-driven company, you need someone focused on it.
physcab 15y ago
They do. But sometimes these bugs are less obvious and hard to spot without data. In this particular case, it was an animation bug that occurred during a tutorial of a game, whereby the animation caused the game to crash, but only on a subset of older IPhones and under certain memory conditions. So even though the build got through QA, it was tough to understand what would happen out in the wild. Well, on that morning I noticed that a large percentage of our users were starting this particular tutorial step but not completing it. And since all of our data is cohorted by both install date and build version, the engineering team knew exactly where to look to fix the issue, despite no knowledge on my part of a bug ever being introduced.
- plinkplonk 15y ago
  That is a great answer, Thank You. Now to pick your brains a bit. :) What are some good resources for engineers to pick up some advanced analysis skills (specifically to do the kind of work you do)? Is it as simple as going back to college to do some courses in Advanced Statistics? Any particular sub branches of stats/math to focus on? Any good books you can recommend ? Thanks in advance. PS: I work in Machine Learning,and am fairly knowledgeable in maths/stat but often have difficulty recommending the right sequence of books,courses etc, to people who want to follow a similar path - it doesn't help that I am entirely self taught - and often have to mumble vague generalities like "learn all the math you can and learn to code really well" etc. Recently I am getting questions about how someone can get good at "data science" and "behaviour analysis". Just wondering if there is a standard learning path for something like "casino science"

burgerbrain 15y ago

Irrelevant perspective from an outsider: Your post sent a chill down my spine. That's how creepy it is.

physcab 15y ago
I'm curious why you consider it creepy. Note that we don't see any identifiable information and all of the metrics I report are all used to improve gameplay and help monetize the product.
- skurry 15y ago
  Have you seen Rain Man? Remember that control room from which the casino executive monitors what's going on on the casino floor? That dashboard is your virtual control room. To me, the "free-to-play" social gaming industry appears to be eerily similar to the gambling industry. You even use the same terminology ("whales"). And the gambling industry has always been a little shady, trying to squeeze as much money as they can out of people who can't really afford it. Maybe that's why it appears creepy to some of us?
  - physcab 15y ago
    That is a good point. And actually I didn't know we used the same terms! I'm obviously aware of what goes on in the industry and its similarities to gambling are something I think about a lot. But as an analyst, I feel like I have a lot of power in helping to create games that are fun and engaging, plus learning how to drive a product to be successful. I don't think of it as a spam machine or a front for taking money from the poor. Maybe the business model needs to be changed. If its virtual currency that makes it creepy, then maybe switching to a fixed-cost product is something the industry as a whole needs to move to. We're still in the infancy here in learning how to harness mobile devices to make better products.
    - rdouble 15y ago
      The fact that your job exists is kind of the creepy part. Games that are just made for fun don't have teams of analysts trying to optimize games in order to modify player behavior. That said, your comments have been pretty interesting. How did you get the job in the first place?

HaloZero 15y ago

I think having all that information is fine, but the issue is Zynga just focuses solely on that, they don't try to make games fun. They just make games to make money, even taking out features that are fun to users. So do you measure those metrics and say, "this feature doesn't make enough money so we're gonna cut it even though users think it's fun?"

callmeed 15y ago

"I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff?" Did you ever stop to consider perhaps money isn't the worst fallout? The families of addicts suffer as well–and I suspect, when we look back years from now, we'll see a pattern of spouses and children ignored & damaged because companies like Zynga analyze/optimize everything in order to maximize engagement. A single person can't compete with that. You're not just engineering people to part with their money–you're using your skills to get them to part with their time. Sorry, but I consider what you do (& Zynga does) unethical.

physcab 15y ago
I believe that people can make judgement calls about what do to with their free time. I don't think what I do (which is to perform analysis) is any different than what the same analysts at Blizzard do when they make Starcraft or World of WarCraft. Or the people that performed analysis at Nintendo when the first Duck Hunt came out. I have friends who play Starcraft II a couple hours a day. I've known people who will skip work and play 8 hours a day. I've seen a 60 minute story on someone who was addicted to World of Warcraft. This is a chronic problem of the industry as a whole, but its not a reason to stop making games because the majority of users can have fun responsibly.
- intended 15y ago
  What WoW was and what it is now are different things. WoW vanilla was an MMO, WoW Burning C was basically moving towards the disney land model and away from the mmo. The overall business model has acknowledged the power of the Zynga model, and all actions so far have been moving towards Zynga's model and not away.
  - gaius 15y ago
    For a non-gamer, can you explain the difference?
    - 15y ago

newman314 15y ago

"Do we ever record any personally identifiable information? No. Do we ever sell or distribute this data to outside parties? No. Can any of this data ever be used maliciously? No." The answer may be no for now (that you know of). You can't guarantee that it will stay that way forever. Given Pincus' general shadiness to make a buck, I can totally see a slow quarter or two driving a decision to "update" the privacy policy to sell data to 3rd parties. Similarly, it's not a big programmatic change to start tracking PII as well as cross-referencing to existing information. So while you may not have any ill intentions, I doubt you can speak for all of Zynga's actions over time. I would emphasize the "over time" component since it tends not to be taken into account by most people which is a big reason why we are being bombarded by SOPA-like legislation. (Didn't win this one? No problem, we've got ACTA, etc. And should ACTA fail, I'm sure there's something else over the horizon)

physcab 15y ago
Even if they did, I'm not so sure it would be that big of a deal (to most users anyways). I mean, Facebook has all of that data and more, and they definitely sell it to 3rd parties. Hell, you can learn anything you want about a person using their Graph API. So even though I don't believe in it (I deactivated FB for this reason), I'm not sure how much financial benefit you can gain from <UserID> <StrawberryFarmID> TSV files which most of this data is anyways.
- newman314 15y ago
  My point being there are many companies that rely on data mining these days. Zynga may only track <UserID> <StrawberryFarmID> today but not necessarily tomorrow. FB is merely more blatant about it. It is my sincere wish that the US adopt a strong privacy policy like the UK's Data Protection Act (with the loopholes fixed).

jamesbritt 15y ago

Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. These users even have names. They're called "whales" in industry parlance. Why wouldn't you want more of them in your game? This is a business afterall. I thought that term sounded familiar. http://www.worldfreepoker.com/poker-glossary.html#W http://www.worldfreepoker.com/poker-glossary.html#W "Whale: A poor player with a lot of money to lose." I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? Sure, just like at casinos. You're right, in a way; there are people with more money than brains who are happy to blow a good chunk of it gambling and are really no worse off for it because they're rich. But, realistically, you and I both know that's never the whole story.

physcab 15y ago
Right, which is why I said this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3556270 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3556270 You and I also know that this isn't a problem inherent to just casual mobile games. It's a chronic problem to the gaming industry as a whole, and its not going to stop people from making entertainment for the millions of users who aren't addicts.
- learc83 15y ago
  I think his problem (the previous poster) is not that there are addicts who happen to play these games. Sure there are addicts out there and you're not going to stop them. He is pointing out that, like casinos, these games are specifically targeting these addicts, and these games probably couldn't even exist without the addicts to support them. >its not going to stop people from making entertainment for the millions of users who aren't addicts. These games aren't made for the millions of users who aren't addicts. These games are made specifically for addicts. >Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k It's like the difference between selling alcohol and selling cigarettes. Alcohol is mostly sold to normal people, and percentage of the population abuses it, but virtually every single cigarette made is sold to an addict. Alcohol manufacturers could exist without addicts, cigarette companies couldn't. If you make a Farmville type game there's a good chance you are depending on "addicts" to keep you in business. I'm not declaring casual games to be immoral by the way. I'm just pointing out the difference.

harryf 15y ago

> Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k That effectively means the only way to "win" is by becoming a whale; casual play is basically not rewarded. That's the problem I have with most online games; the greatest benefits go to those spending unhealthy amounts of time and money on them. IMO a mature gaming industry will be one that is able to reward a similar playing commitment to a weekly trip to the cinema; 2 hours play a week is still rewarding. That would make games attractive to a much larger audience IMO and be sustainable; you're not pushing players to burnout. Just out of interest; do you track KPIs around hours of play per day? How many hours is a typical whale spending?

Tossrock 15y ago

People spend over 10k on microtransaction games? I find that kind of amazing.

jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
Amazing? shocking i would say. A family of 3 in a third world country can live moderately comfortably for a year with that amount of money.
- Tossrock 15y ago
  Yeah, I deleted 'horrifying' and 'disgusting' before settling on the less inflammatory 'amazing'.
mjwalshe 15y ago
well comapred to some real world games I have played minatures games at our club where there was £4 to 5K of models on the table ok it was a big demo game using 3-4 guys models. Oh and that is the raw cost of the models what it woudl be if you had to by that painted is anyones guess
- cheald 15y ago
  In that case, at least, there are physical goods that had to be created, shipped, and sold in a store. Social games' "products" are numbers in a database.

crystalis 15y ago

The article's "At the end of one sprint, a QA dude was complaining about the drop rate of a specific item being absurdly insane, and therefore UnFun. I looked at the code, and tweaked some values, gave it back to QA guy, and fun was restored. Product Manager overrides this, goes for unfun, yet more profitable version." speaks against your "and users can be happy again."

furyofantares 15y ago

I don't think you feel as bad as the next person wondering if the people spending 10k are addicts. If you did, I don't think you'd be willing to maximize how much money you can get out of them, and I don't think you'd be willing to call them whales. You can justify it to yourself saying you have no real evidence they aren't getting 10k+ value out of the game but I rather doubt you are particularly confident of that, either. And I doubt you went into the industry to spend your time trying to satisfy 5% of your users, especially given you have a deragatory name for them. Which isn't to say I think terribly poorly of you, but it isn't entirely non-creepy. Out of curiosity, do you offer users a feature to prevent themselves from spending money if they self-identify that they have a problem?

DannoHung 15y ago

Do any of your KPI's measure fun experienced? If you're not maximizing that above all else, that is why you are hated.

hythloday 15y ago
I realize this is a rhetorical question, but the serious answer is that you can't measure fun (without an EEG?), just proxies for it. Typically these are things like how much time someone spends doing something, how much they spend on it, how much they talk to their friends about it. I'm pretty sure that yes, the dashboard physcab maintains supports these. If you have a better way of measuring fun then you can make several fortunes selling this.