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Comment by Netcob | Hacker News Reader

Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago.

It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has ruined mobile gaming and is now making its way into console and PC gaming. As an intern I attended a company-wide meeting where the CEO proclaimed that game quality didn't matter and making money is the sole focus. On the other side of the war, a very vocal subset of the gamers is treating gaming as the only purpose their lives have, and will viciously attack developers personally with death threats and doxxing, or review-bomb even unrelated games into oblivion if the game publisher did something wrong. Which will hardly affect the giants at all (what will you do, not buy the next game from a popular series?), but can crush indie developers. Not to mention the whole work culture that expects any game developer to work 80h per week for less pay because you "love gaming".

CDPR devs must be close to a nervous breakdown by now. Crunching for months/years despite their bosses promising it won't happen, seeing their game released too early and then ripped apart by critics and fans, and finally getting their personal data leaked.

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It doesn't always have to be like this though. Look at Factorio – the devs are happy (looking from the outside, but they are always very enthusiastic about how they love the game), the community loves it (there are infinite remarks of people who sunk thousands of hours into this game, all for a single payment of 25 €), and they don't seem to have any financial issues either. I have not seen many disappointed people around Factorio (maybe that dev of the IR mod [1]).

[1]: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=83197

If they released a $50 DLC that just adds a bunch of super difficult achievements I'd pick that up just to support them. I've sunk 4 figures of hours into that game and I regret not having any of my goals left to achieve. I've done speedrunning, mega factories, difficult map settings, etc.

Just figured out that I can start a custom map and turn off the biters.

Been playing into the wee mornings for a week now. Got into the logic system heavily.

I'm optimising production in my sleep now. Send help. Can't stop.

You joke, but I think that this is why "addicting" is never a quality you want in a game, even one like Factorio where it is a product of good-intention game design and isn't just rent-seeking. Addiction is destructive.

Off topic: what do you use logic for? I am at a loss on how to use it effectively.

The first effective use you stumble across is oil refining chains. Only turn on heavy cracking if heavy oil is backing up, etc.

Found my project for tonight, "thanks" I guess? :D

I run a logistic robot based system with individual buildings receiving and sending items with chests.

With logic I can connect the input or output inserter to the roboport and only feed items to the chests if the total number of items in the robot network is under a certain amount.

The other big use is cycling power between solar and steam. Plug in the steam power's water pump to an accumulator and set it to turn off when the accumulator capacity is over, say, 50%. This way you won't feed excess power to the network and waste fuel.

At what stage do you find "wasting fuel" on power an issue? Early game one x red-belt of coal will supply fuel for electricity generation. One you go to solar + accumulators you very quickly don't need steam power anymore unless you're going robot heavy, in which case you'll just stamp a small nuclear plant.

...because I want to spend 5 hours optimising stuff like that? =)

My base is a total clusterfuck and not a perfect city grid of maximised train-based transports to hyper-optimised factory blueprints. Just the way I like it.

I recommend the Industrial Revolution 2 mod. It's free and feels like a $50 DLC

Same with Hades by Supergiant Games. Its an amazing game and the company is proudly kicking people out if they try to stay after hours.

It is possible but you can also squeeze the life out of your replaceable staff and hold them guilt hostage (if you don't work as hard as everyone else then you are making them work harder). If the project has crunch time for the most development time then its not a crunch its the norm.

Disclaimer: Supergiant also sold out to Epic Games, one of the game industry harbingers of doom and workplace abuse(together with Activision-Blizzard). Might not want to give those any money.

I waited and got it on steam.

You can't blame them for taking time exclusive money, they are a business afterall. And its not like they support their practices.

They absolutely support their practices by doing business with them. Not only did they list their game for sale on their store, they took their money (earned via those business practices) to give them the exclusive right to sell the game on their store for a period of time. This has the goal of driving even more customers to Epic. They don’t do these deals out of benevolence.

Have you bought a Nestle product? Is so you support child slavery.

By your logic:

> You absolutely support their practices by doing business with them.

Life is not black and white.

> Have you bought a Nestle product? Is so you support child slavery.

If Nestle is engaging in child slavery and you buy their products then yes you obviously are supporting child slavery through indirect material cooperation. Behaving morally isn't easy, which is why it's so rare.

This seems like a pretty cut and dry example though. It’s a direct financial relationship where Epic profits off of Supergiants games. That money is support. It allows Epic to propagate their views and business model.

Whether or not you choose to adapt your purchasing decisions based on this knowledge is a separate question of your ethics and other factors.

I try to avoid Nestlé products and would not enter into a major business relationship with them if I had the choice. The extent to which I decided to entangle my life or business of theirs would change the degree to which I felt like I’d be supporting their business practices. I agree, it’s not black and white, but I don’t understand how you can say a company doesn’t support Epic’s business practices when they choose to accept their money and help expand their share of the marketplace they operate in.

By this logic, should we avoid any game that uses Unreal Engine?

You should discourage the use of Unreal Engine and avoid it wherever possible if you believe that Epic is an unethical company, of course.

How far does that chain extend though? If I buy a tuna melt from the local sandwich shop, and the owner of that shop goes and buys a video game, and the game company paid Epic for Unreal Engine, did I just support Epic?

And what do you believe in?

Taking their money is absolutely supporting Epic and what they do. Supergiant have every right to chose money above everything else but a few gamers won't take it and will just not buy their game at all. I didn't buy it and I'm aware I make no difference to them but if I had bought it I'd be part of the problem.

>You can't blame them for taking time exclusive money, they are a business afterall.

Yes, I can blame them for that. When running a business you have to decide what your core principles are and which ones, if any, you are willing to compromise for money.

>And its not like they support their practices.

Taking their money and listing their game on the Epic store is an endorsement of Epic's business practices, just like listing your app on the Apple App Store is an endorsement of Apple's business practices.

What a truly bizarre disclaimer.

Supergiant took the timed exclusive deal so they could afford to avoid crunch while developing one of their games. Do you take issue with them treating their employees well?

If you have an issue with how Epic treats its game developers then don't buy Epic games. If you avoid buying games from other developers out of some bizarre logic that this will somehow "teach them" to deal with Epic, you'll just end up driving them out of business or toward the crunch deathmarches they were trying to avoid.

Otherwise, by your logic, you should avoid buying games from any AAA developer, or from any digital storefront (including Steam), or for any console. Basically, you would need to avoid buying games at all except from a very small set of indie developers.

How exactly is getting a better rate for game distribution "selling out?" Supergiant benefitted themselves and their developers by getting more money for the game.

I don't understand the vocal support for Steam over Epic Games. Steam literally charges you more and there are no competitors as big as Steam. I'd rather have a de facto duopoly vs a monopoly. And yes, I'm aware of GMG, Origin, Blizzard, etc.

You can't both be amazing and have sold out to Epic. It is one or the other.

The difference between AAA and indie games seems to be night and day in terms of working conditions

I'll take "boring" (but not too boring) and pays the bills any day before "cool but will be unhealthy mentally/physically"

They're not hostage to their publisher, it seems.

Factorio is awesome. It's kind of funny-ironic that a counter-example to "making games as addictive as possible" is an indie game addictive enough to be called "cracktorio" by its fans.

It's a different kind of addiction. Factorio is the ultimate nerd-snipe[0] for a large class of people who enjoy flexing their brains. The addictiveness is a side effect the developers maximizing having fun (for the aforementioned subset of the population).

When people talk about "making games as addictive as possible" in the general and pejorative sense, they usually mean something else: they mean that the optimization goal is not "fun", but "making money off players". That very often involves making games less fun on purpose, to exploit player's psychology against them. You keep frustrating them on purpose - but not hard enough for them to abandon the game entirely - in hopes that over time, enough of them will break and buy the paid content or unfrustration features, to relieve their psychological pain. Explicitly additive aspects get included to maximize the time the player is exposed to these monetization opportunities.

Addictiveness is ultimately a red herring in these discussions. Factorio is designed as a win-win game, the devs wants to give their players the best experience in the game's category. Modern, pay-to-win, addictive games are designed by malicious people with no moral compass, who want to extract as much money as possible from people, as cheaply as possible.

(Like with many of the big problems in our industry, focusing on tech or immediate "sciency-sounding" consequences is missing the forest for the trees. These problems all stem from people being allowed to exploit others for money. Solutions to mitigate immediate consequences will be worked around very quickly. Real solutions need to involve restrictions on the types of business that can be done.)

[0] - https://xkcd.com/356/

Yes, exactly.

I just played a mobile game, and as usual it has a hundred different in-game currencies that you can buy with real money. Every time I finish a level there's an endless parade of meaningless "rewards", and I see some coins going into a piggybank. When it was full, I clicked it, and the game congratulated me for now being eligible to buy the contents.

The game is a clone of puzzle bobble. Like you said, none of that is making puzzle bobble a "better game". It's saying "Wow, you won/earned something! It's almost yours now, you just have to pay this tiny fee to actually have it...". I don't feel like I'm on the same side as the developer, and this is worlds apart from how Factorio treats players.

Since "addictive" still has positive connotations in gaming, I'll just call it "manipulative" from now on.

I think a tell-tale feature of manipulative games is Farmville-style time-gating. They structure their progress around meaningless actions like clicking upgrade buttons, but you can only press that button every couple hours. So playing optimally isn't so much about strategy or skill, but more about incorporating the game into your daily routine.

The intent is of course to form a habit, so that players habitually play the game no matter if it is still fun. Combine that with a good reward system that gives you positive reinforcement at random intervals, and you get something that is designed to addict you to the game.

Why is this kind of manipulation bad but RNG-gated content, such as in most roguelikes, which are loved by lots of people, not bad? These value judgements are always arbitrary and hiding the biases of the speaker.

You, personally, don't like time-gated content. That's fine. But it's another thing entirely to say that because you don't like it it's morally wrong. Tons of people have no problem with it and in fact enjoy being limited by how much time they can play a game per day and to slowly build up their progress over time.

Plus, for many games these things are this way for multiple reasons. For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day. In such an environment, time-gating is a perfect solution for both the legal problem of not encouraging people to play for too long in a single day, but also as a way to prevent people from levelling too fast beyond what the game has to offer. In this latter case it's just another way of keeping people engaged until you release new content.

> For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day.

That's an interesting point I've never heard of before, thanks for bringing it up.

Still, I think there's more to tease apart about time-gating. As a high-schooler, I spent plenty of time on time-gated games (AstroWars and OGame). From that experience I know this mechanic alone is very addictive, and I make a conscious decision to avoid these types of games now. I had my fun (particularly social type, my fiends were hooked in just as much as I was). And, I don't consider this mechanic to be a problem alone. What matters is why it's there. Is it to make the game fun, in its particular way? Or is it to maximize the players' exposure to monetization opportunities?

The root of my point is this: particular mechanics a game employs don't matter; what matters is why those particular mechanics were chosen. Intent, not engineering.

It depends on the rogue-like. I first noticed this addictive quality in the original Diablo. Once I took a couple psych 101 courses, it became pretty clear that Diablo was addicting because of the random loot drops. In other words, they were a variable interval schedule of reinforcement. You don't know when you next good loot drop is going to be, so keep playing indefinitely. (In this sense, this system is identical to a slot machine) Diablo was the first game that I truly "lost hours" to. It's not as if I didn't play other games for long periods of time, none had ever dilated my time or put me in a haze before Diablo. The next game to do this (for me) was Diablo II, then much later, Borderlands.

I've seen a lot of people struggle with this concept over the years. so I want to clarify a few things:

- People equivocate the word "addicting." That is, they switch between two meanings: "specific behavioral addiction, as defined by a schedule of reinforcement," vs. "something I enjoy a lot of an spend a lot of time doing."

- I've also seen people confuse any kind of reward in a video game (eg: beating a boss, winning in multiplayer, obtaining a high score, etc.) as being "addicting" and equivalent to various skinner box techniques noted above. (schedules of reinforcement, time gating, etc.) The problem is of course, that these things are not equivalent at all. Someone addicted to Space Invaders high scores is very much not the same as someone who threw their life away to play World of Warcraft.

- Not all games that have loot drops should be considered addicting in this sense. I would say that in hindsight, this is pretty clear. Diablo II is very addicting, but look at the forums, and check out some gameplay videos. No one is highlighting the gameplay, or boss fights, or music, or setting. They're all talking about loot drops. Whatever the developer's original intent, the gameplay of Diablo II is loot drops. Compare this with something like Dark Souls. Yes, there is loot in this game, and enemies do drop it. But except for a few achievement hunters, no one is talking about all their time spent grinding in Dark Souls. Really, the core of Dark Souls' gameplay revolves around overcoming the various challenges presented to the player.

I wonder if there is a business to be made out of taking these pay to play mobile games and straight up cloning them (not ripping off the graphics, that would land one in legal hot water, but just making the exact same game) and sell them for a one off payment. If there were companies that did that, and they would be known for making high quality puzzle games that are not pay to play, I would buy from them without even trying out their new games (after they gained my trust with the first few games). Technically it would be easy (most of these games are simple), you need graphics people who don't mind just grinding out content without needing to be very artsy, so I would imagine part of the lost revenue that the lootbox companies do get, could be offset by not having to spend a bunch of time thinking about what sort of game you really want to make and make decisions about gameplay etc. Just copy from existing games and sell to the 'don't like pay for play' crowd.

Maybe there just arent' many of us who don't mind paying for games as long as we don't have to buy hearts and diamonds and coins and what not.

I disagree with this notion. The primary reason why Factorio doesn't feel unethical or exploitative is because the kind of addictiveness it exploits is one that uses your brain, whereas the kind of addictiveness these "unethical" games exploit is one that feels more dumb and low brow. It has nothing to do with it being win-win like you mentioned.

There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence, the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over, are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value.

Is there a better word to use than "addictive" to describe the brainy one over the unethical one?

Enthralling

Engrossing

Captivating

If there is one it shouldn't be used. Both types of games are addicting in fundamentally the same way. The only thing that differs is the main trait which each game is using as its primary host. The "unethical" type of game is as unethical as the other, which means they're either both very unethical or both very not unethical, depending on how you want to look at it.

Addictive for games can just be shorthand for "you want to play it again and again". I don't see anything wrong with it when there isn't a more appropriate shorthand to use, except when used with games that are designed to make you pay more and more to play.

And I disagree with your take. I've played a lot of videogames in my life, plenty of them feeling "more dumb and low brow".

For instance, as a kid, I've spent some ridiculous amount of hours playing Unreal Tournament (and to the lesser degree, Quake 3 Arena) - some of it with friends in an Internet cafe, but a lot in single-player mode too. I'd consider these two games to be pretty addictive for their time. But they were addictive because they were fun. Not because they tried to lure me in with skinner boxes, keep me in with time-gating, and monetize me with microtransactions.

Or, more recently, I've spent countless of hours playing 2048. At some point it became my go-to activity for every moment I wasn't actively concentrating on something. It may sound like an "intellectual" game, but in reality it's pretty braindead once you get the gist of it. You could probably say that the time I spent with it was unhealthy, but again, at no point it tried to be anything but fun. There were no features in there designed with exploitation in mind.

Or, roguelikes and roguelites. Between Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and RimWorld, I'm probably approaching some 1000 hours of total play time. Both are fun and addictive, in the positive sense. Neither has any of the addictive money-making features in them.

I could go on. But the point is, I maintain that ill intent is a better way to categorize games than "addictiveness". And I hate to invoke the "you'll know it when you see it" cliche, but the difference between the games designed to be fun and the games designed to milk you is glaringly obvious. Entertainment has value, and good entertainment tends to be addictive (it's pretty much a tautology). But it takes more than good entertainment to create a problem.

Well, I still disagree. I've also played lots of games in my life so I also think I know what I'm talking about.

You view roguelikes and roguelites as positively addicting because of your personality and the fact that those games test for the traits you care about, not because they're objectively better than other games that focus on another trait.

You probably don't view MMORPGs where the entire point of the game is just grinding mindlessly for months or years as positively addicting because your personality isn't the type that would like that, but there are tons of people in the world who aren't like you and like the average HN reader who would agree with you.

I've written more extensively about this before so I feel like keeping arguing here might be pointless, but in case you're curious for a more full version of the argument: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/66

I mean there's an old anecdote about how Chess was seen as dangerously addictive.

In any case, I think making something that is emergently addictive or addictive because it is fun is different from engineering something to be addictive by liberally lifting from all the years of research that went into slot machine design.

I don't know whether you frequent casinos but if you sit in the slot area for a while then compare that to big budget mobile p2w games (including Clash Royale which is actually also fun) is quite alarming. There are so many design similarities that lootbox games are basically slot machines without needing to pay out money...

It's good that you wrote your thoughts in a longer form, and thanks for sharing it. It's an interesting argument, and one I will think about more, but based on my first reading, I find it lacking. I feel the part about Gacha Games doesn't fit well in this framework. Also, I find it hard to categorize my personality along the lines you described:

- Static/dynamic typing: borders -- I prefer static typing to dynamic typing; this is a change from preference for dynamic typing in the past; today, I find "mixing and matching" of types to almost always cause runtime errors, not new insights

- Engines/frameworks: no borders -- I dislike frameworks in general, gamedev or otherwise, I much prefer to compose libraries myself

- Roguelike/Roguelite: ??? -- I don't care about a strict definition, but having a somewhat clear definition is useful for managing expectations

- Progression/No progression: ??? -- I like both

- Grinding/No grinding: no borders -- Grinding is boring, though I'll do it if you hang a nice enough carrot in front of me

- Gacha Games: no borders -- As expressed above, I consider them immoral, and that has less to do with mechanics and more with why they're employed. That said, I don't think Gacha mechanics have any sort of special borders compared to many other fun, well-defined mechanics.

- Professions: ??? -- My professional software dev is mostly a borderful experience, but I also do gamedev on the side...

- Easy Modes: ??? -- I don't see how it fits in your argument at all, or how is it even a topic at all (except for competitive multiplayer games, about which I don't care all that much). Most games have "easy mode" in form of a wide variety of cheats to choose from.

It seems I'm leaning a bit towards "no borders", but then I think this borders/no borders split isn't really "carving nature at its joints". It does not factor personality cleanly.

Also, as additional objection, I think you could use this argument to justify getting people addicted to gambling as a matter of "personality difference". I feel this explains too much.

MMORPGs are only seen as an issue to the degree they cause harm. It’s nothing to do with being “low brow” but entirely down to the subscription model. Keep the customer logging in to keep the subscription revenue rolling.

If this is done by being fun and enjoyable, and the developer doesn’t cross the line into preying on addictive behaviour, no problem.

If the developer implements mechanics that are designed to “hook” the player to the detriment of the enjoyment and their health, then we have a problem.

>Not because they tried to lure me in with skinner boxes, keep me in with time-gating, and monetize me with microtransactions.

I'm familiar with all of these except for "time-gating." What is it?

I'm not sure if this is the correct industry term, but 'wongarsu used it and explained it here[0], so I just picked it up. Basically, it's forcing you to wait hours to do the next step in the game - so that you'll start scheduling your day around the game.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26076702

Time gating is basically any kind of mechanic that requires real-world time to pass before progression can happen.

Mobile games use time gating for "lives" or "energy" or something so you can only play so much then you have to wait. Then they try and get you to spend real money to circumvent the time gate.

MMOs use time gating to slow player progression, with mechanics where you can only earn certain rewards once per day or once per week or something. It slows players becoming too powerful too quickly, or from completing their collections too quickly or from grinding the new rare drop in the first week.

This type of stuff is even creeping into other types of games, unfortunately. Especially with every game nowadays being an online game, even the single player ones.

Wube is not predatory. The actions of a benevolent developer is much different than the actions of a predatory one.

If you want to see a company that really walks the line: look at Digital Extremes.

I love Factorio and I don't doubt that happy free-range game developers exist. But that's not what I would expect the typical game developer experience to be like.

When it comes to Factorio, I've seen some backslash/hate from gamers for dev's decision on never putting Factorio on sale.

Some people will always spite you. It's not open source either (hey, CDPR games might be, soon!).

To be fair here, their reasoning is that Factorio is worth the 25€ and that they don't want people to feel cheated because they missed out on a lower price. I don't think that's bad in any way.

No I don't think so. Thank back to the HL2 source code leak months before release of the game. The game still isn't open source even after all this time.

But yes I wholeheartedly agree with your Factorio point. I've bought 2 copies of the game so far because I enjoy it, and I don't feel cheated even though I paid full price.

Gamers are such entitled brats. If we go by what the average NES game cost in the 80s, Factorio should be at least $120, probably a lot more due to having significantly more content and replay value.

And I didn't even like Factorio. I'm just sick gamer-brand bullshit.

Steam's reputation for sales has ruined me. It is now extremely rare for me to buy a game at full price. Even a $20 game, I'll wait for a sale, as if I'd even notice the $5 I saved.

That said, once I had discovered that the Factorio devs said it would never go on sale, I decided to pick it up and was glad I did.

I'm looking forward to picking up Cyberpunk whenever it goes on sale. By then, maybe it will be a much smoother and more enjoyable experience.

I hate to be that guy, but there is a massive difference between a game like Factorio and a game like Cyberpunk. Of course we all know that, but it has an impact on the quality, etc. The technical complexity of CP requires many different technologies to work together, and that draws a large amount of gamers-- Factorio is and will remain rather niche.

There are very few Factorio stories in the game dev world.

This seems like such a needlessly negative take in vein of the "our music was better and now everything is comercialized!!!" syndrome.

We live in pretty much the golden age of gaming - the audience has never been bigger, the choice was never greater and there is no lack of evocative, emotional and masterfully crafted games.

But just like with every other medium, there's also no lack of cheap cash grabs. You movie cinema is also plastered with cheap romantic comedy dreck and not the greatest works of the year. That doesn't mean that there's nothing there though.

Game quality was not the point though, games are great. OP is talking about quality of life as a developer.

I totally agree, games are incredible right now, truly the games of my dreams as a kid. But with that bigger demographic has come the wrath of the commons, and the gaming community is just jam packed with cruelty and entitlement.

The most addictive games are not the ones we think about. My friends are into "competitive" gaming, games like CSGO, Dota2. These developers barely bring any content to their games and it amazes me how much profit they make for less work compared to AAA studios releasing blockbusters like RDR2. If your game is not competitive, microtransaction-ready, not a sandbox with procedural, generative stuff, the chances are that the work involved in that is sisyphic. (huge respect for Naughty Dog, Rockstar Games - they found their micro-trans niche through GTA Online though -, CDProjekt, Arkane)

This made me wonder:

Is there a parallel between the advertising industry and their ever increasing quest to mine more data and the games industry with their incessant need for DLC, microtransactions and whatnot?

It seems that middle-management/VC's in both of these industries are pushing the same processes (or could we use "dogma"?) without any empirical evidence that what they are doing is the right thing, all the while patting each other on the back because that's the way everyone else does it...

Edit: edited for clarity

Looking at Epic Games, I don't think a lot of pushing is required when you see people make enormous amounts of money like they did with Fortnite. My understanding is that they are now using all that money to finance their steam-alternative games store (with exclusives), where they can still afford to offer 1-2 games for free every single week (with a lot more around the holidays).

> Is there a parallel between the advertising industry and their ever increasing quest to mine more data and the games industry with their incessant need for DLC, microtransactions and whatnot?

There is: being "data driven", which is a short for "we need to tighten the feedback loop in our revenue optimization algorithm". The most annoying players in both industries are essentially trying to run a PID controller around the people they're monetizing. For that to work, interactions must be frequent, telemetry must be extensive.

Unfortunately we know the answer and we have data to back it up. EA earned 2x more on FUT and Apex Legends than on normal "full games": https://s22.q4cdn.com/894350492/files/doc_financials/2021/q3...

I wasn't familiar with the term sisyphic so I searched it. I got some results for sisypic, which certainly weren't what I expected but proves that the internet is for porn.

Sisyphean. Greek.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

It seems to me that the trend in tech/games/media is about stimulating the reward system, requiring less attention span, and monetize from it. Social media recommendation systems, mobile games, competitive games that finish in half an hour, etc.

Alternative exists, but probably won't make that much money...

> requiring less attention span

How ? Competitive gaming requires intense uninterrupted focus for 30 min to 1 h periods (which is what got me out of it).

I don't think it is really uninterrupted focus for 30min, but rather a lot of very intense focus for a few minutes or so? I think that is similar to videos in youtube/tiktok (not tiktok user, just heard from the others) that attract users watching a lot of videos, where each is <10mins.

That said, I'm not a gamer and I rarely play games now.

You really need to focus for 30+ minutes, there are 30 sec/minute downtime periods every few minutes, but especially in MOBA games where one mistake can snowball enemies lead, you need to be paying attention the entire match.

You're dead right, and it's a tangent but this is why rocket league is now the game for me. 7 minutes of gameplay at a time. I can fit that around my life.

CSGO? LoL? I play one game and 30-60 minutes of my day gone, half the time to a slow loss. I can't justify it as an adult steadily losing more and more of my free time anymore.

> Competitive gaming requires intense uninterrupted focus for 30 min to 1 h periods

This is technically true, but in most team based multiplayer games you actually get much shorter focus intervals due to breaks and pauses like dying (time to respawn or end of round, which can take up to multiple minutes) or running to the action from spawn (games like Overwatch).

Also the team aspect hides much of it so a lot of players go "on autopilot" too in these games, you have to keep in mind that the far majority of players in the super popular games plays at a lower level.

Compared to this a game like Starcraft 2 (1on1 competitive) actually requires uninterrupted focus for a full game with basically no breaks or pauses, but 1v1 competitive multiplayer games are not as popular as team based games.

That's true but still doesn't back his argument that these games cater to short attention span people. People sink hours straight into these games.

Competitive games and Competitive gaming is not the same thing though. You can play competitive games without being a Competitive Gamer.

You literally cant - you get banned for leaving the game before the match is finished.

Dota2 is absolutely addictive.

The chime you get from a last hit/collecting runes, The cosmetic loot boxes, e&.

I had to quit cold turkey after 1500 hours because I realized I was wasting my life.

It's sad that dota2 is far from the worst offender and I would argue one of the best f2p models, but it's addicting non the less.

> for less work compared to AAA studios releasing blockbusters like RDR2

That's a pretty wild statement. Dota 2 is one of the most supported games out there with giant patches coming multiple times per year. Perhaps only World of Warcraft can claim to be better supported. Games like RDR2 are build-and-forget. They get no long term support.

Additionally there is the difference between playing a game to experience some story (like RDR2) and playing a game because it is challenging and fun (Dota 2). These story based games like RDR2 can be great experiences in short bursts (up to a 100 hours tops), but are incredibly boring for someone who plays 4+ hours per day and puts thousands of hours into a specific game. It's like playing tic-tac-toe when you're a chess grandmaster. Mind numbingly boring.

> Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems

I quit the games industry for similar reasons. I worked in a management position at Nintendo and couldn't see anywhere evident to step up, with very few options to even step horizontally.

All the potential step ups in the so-called extrinsic motivators of work (salary, reputation, nice places to work, etc) came from pay-to-win mobile studios and the like. I could never find the intrinsic motivation to go there - I felt it's not what I signed up for when I started to work in the industry.

To add, I don't think that all micropayment models are necessarily predatory. For example, Nintendo finally caved in to mobile gaming (it started under Iwata IIRC), and from what I hear (and have very briefly seen with their Fire Emblem mobile game) their microtransaction policy is pretty fair.

Hell, we had microtransactions when I was a kid with arcades. I feel a bit of pity about my former self and all the other kids spending all those quarters on fleeting moments of entertainment (the PC and home console were so much better value for money!), however I wouldn't call the whole affair exploitative.

But indeed, games as close-ended artistic works are a fairly small part of the market now, and if that's your jam, you may need to prepare yourself to navigate a niche rather than an entire industry.

Read up on Jonathan Blow [1], sounds like you might like his philosophy. The short of it is that he believes time is valuable and should be respected. I also love Braid, a game he made.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow#Philosophy_and_v...

I have sort of opposite take on video games to him. To me, video games fill in the time slots when I'm too tired to pursue anything meaningful - they're just mindless entertainment, which would otherwise be spent re-watching shows or, in the pre-electronics era, reading newspapers or staring into the fire. That's the reason I've never finished Braid - I can spend all those brain cycles on my actual work or interests, not on figuring out made-up complexity. The only complex game I play is Magic: the Gathering, and I play it for the social factor and with physical cards only - it's fun meet with friend/friends once in a while and compete in a mentally challenging game. Our friendship is better for that. I don't really see what exactly I am supposed to be getting out of playing games like Braid or The Witness though.

EDIT: There's a minority of population (which is heavily overrepresented in our industry), which enjoys solving pure logical puzzles just for the sake of solving them. Just look at how much praise Factorio gets on HN. Also famously, Feynman enjoyed to figure out keylocks and ancient hieroglyphs as a past time. Puzzle games cater mainly to such audience I guess.

I flip between thought-games and mindless games, it's no different to when I want to go out and ride my bike or just watch YouTube. Different modes for different moods.

Jonathan Blow is a refreshing character, truly passionate, opinionated but I don't feel like it's at the cost of others, and his games are pure. They don't pretend they're not games, and they eschew allll the bullshit that comes with modern games. I didn't need to sign up for an account, count any Special Points, fuss with menus or anything. Boot up the game, play away.

> he believes time is valuable and should be respected

That's what he says, but not what he does. https://youtu.be/KZokQov_aH0 Haven't experienced a bigger author disconnect in gaming in the decade.

I'm not going to watch a 40 minute video to try and work out what your argument is.

You could have at least picked out some particular puzzles like the backwards-moving-cloud puzzle piece in Braid or the Eclipse Film puzzle in The Witness. Those are tiny optional side-puzzles to games which otherwise very much do not waste your time. My interpretation is they are Jon's way of critiquing completionism.

timestamp 24:16

Wow, that platform moving does seem painfully slow!

Alright, I'll concede that some platforms do seem to move needlessly slowly.

No one is going to watch a 40 minute video with no context, dude.

It's certainly wasted in a narrative sense (yeah - that real ending is really sucky.), but the puzzles & environment can be fairly pleasing. It's not a total waste, basically. But yes, that review you posted was fairly accurate.

I find it disturbing to see how sour gaming has turned. If you would've asked me 15 years ago I would never have been able to imagine this outcome.

It's befitting of the economic extremism and pessimistic zeitgeist of our time :(

Hope there'll be a corrective force to this sometime soon before gaming turns entirely into a soulless commercialized husk.

For all the talk there is about CP2077 superficial mistakes there's really a lack of discussion about the message it's trying to convey. Is anyone even trying to understand or are they just looking at graphics and bugs?

There are indie developers who are making games that aren't the corporate monstrosities you speak of, some mentioned elsewhere in comments. The problem is there's a lot of cruft too, and the advertising budgets of the good devs are small if existing at all. I wish there was a boardgamegeek equivalent for indie games to help with the discoverability problem.

I always turned to TotalBiscuit for indie recommendations while he was still around...

Just had to vent a bit because in my mind CDPR are (still!) the good guys who attempt to hold high standards of old, not least due to GOG. And then they receive this amount vitriol that they publicly apologize (what for? that they made a competent and highly relevant game?) and now this attack.

Can we please banish consumerist entitlement and corporate nonsense from the videogame world please?

>Can we please banish consumerist entitlement and corporate nonsense from the videogame world please?

That's gonna be a "no" from the world.

If we're talking about the ransomware attack specifically, nothing has really changed. We're just shy of 18 years from the Half-Life 2 source code leak.

But in other ways, yes, the gaming zeitgeist does seem more toxic than what I had remembered being engrossed in it as a teen (or I could just looking at it with rose-tinted glasses).

> what will you do, not buy the next game from a popular series?

Yes.

The problems you describe are real, and damage both the developers and the gamers and it seems like "the only winning move is not to play". I'd argue that if you don't buy the next hyped title nothing of value is lost.

Wait out the hype, if you want to play the big title. The world might be better of if you get it as discounted, second hand or pirated.

Yeah I stopped buying Assassin's Creed a long time ago not because I don't enjoy them but because I didn't like the direction Ubisoft was heading with them.

Gaming is mainstream now. What this means practically is that there are a bunch of big players pushing junk, and a smaller portion making amazing, wonderful games. This is the problem of the mainstream. Video games are no longer a niche interest, so there is a lot of money.

Anyhow, there are more amazing games available now than any other time in history. (especially since all the old games are still available for the most part) The problem is that per capita, modern games are quite bad. In raw numbers, though, there are more amazing games out there than ever before. Much like the rest of modern media, the challenge is in filtering out the junk. There's more choice and abundance, and much of it is of poor quality.

It's especially sad to me because CDPR was one of the major developers who really seemed on the right side of things. The Witcher games never offered micro-transactions, and the DLC constituted substantial, supplementary extensions over the base game. (And it was sold DRM-Free to boot.)

Even as someone who never cared for their games, I really appreciated them as a developer. I can't say whether The Witcher contained compulsive/addictive elements, but CDPR was not incentivized to do so, which IMO is what matters.

I don't know whether or not this says anything about the industry, it's just a shame.

In any professional artistic/creative activity, there is always a tension between artistic freedom and profits. It's up to each individual/company to position the cursor. It's the same with movies and music, the production can be more or less profit or artistic driven. The indie studio that has a surprise success is the same as a indie band, don't expect the same output after corporate take over. And yes sometimes planets are aligned and you get a masterpiece even in a profit driven production.

I'm not a cultural relativist by any means, but it's a bit destructive to focus on whether something is artistically driven. Millions of people have a positive relationship with mass-market games such as FIFA: they just have a different utility model. These games in turn tend to derive some of their value from the social interactions that they facilitate. The fact that something is profit driven is thus not at odds with its intrinsic worth.

Meanwhile, there are tons of nominally artistic games that don't really tread new ground or say anything. It often has more to do with chance (multiple factors and talented people coming together by accident) than careful artistic consideration. That's why game studios often struggle to repeat the same magic across different titles, and why even indie bands with the least corporate influence struggle after the first album.

> a very vocal subset of the gamers is treating gaming as the only purpose their lives have, and will viciously attack developers personally with death threats and doxxing,

That reminds me of the gamers on twitter who lost their shit when cyberpunk was delayed... because they had already requested a week holiday.

tbf people on twitter are fucking insane. there is no middle ground for them, just hate or love. and they always need to have an opinion on everything. its probably the most toxic website i have ever experienced. people on it are treated like the average person when they represent such a massive niche. basically we should purge twitter and other social media sites.

Communities online all seem the same--have you seen Reddit?

Ironically, I now find industry drama to be more engaging than many high-profile games.

>On the other side of the war, a very vocal subset of the gamers is treating gaming as the only purpose their lives have, and will viciously attack developers personally with death threats and doxxing, or review-bomb even unrelated games into oblivion if the game publisher did something wrong. Which will hardly affect the giants at all (what will you do, not buy the next game from a popular series?), but can crush indie developers. Not to mention the whole work culture that expects any game developer to work 80h per week for less pay because you "love gaming".

It bothers me that so many dysfunctional people occupy so much space in gaming culture, but it is a fundamental feature of the hobby given its structure, consequences, and accessibility.

That said, there has never been as much absolute human activity focused on making high quality games in positive settings. It's just that there are so many projects around that just getting an understanding of the market and which games would give you memorable experiences requires hours of research and discovery. Don't let the negative aspects that get disproportionate air-time color your perception exclusively.

It certainly seems likely to be unpleasant there at the moment. A lot of other AAA developers do so much worse, treating salaried developers like contractors, making them crunch for no additional remuneration and then closing down the studio after the job's done. Hell, even contractors have contracts to protect them from this sort of abuse.

But I think gamedev clearly runs at two levels. There's AAAs and then there's everyone else. The smaller teams either running as a hobby or only just scraping by, and every so often there's a Mojang that makes it big.

But yeah, much easier doing B2B development work.

The mobile industry tries to make addictive "games" but I've a friend who asked Valve to remove Civilization VI from his account. Thats an addicitve game -- just like Scorcese dismisses the avengers as "Theme Parks or Rollercoasters" and not cinema. I'd dismiss many mobile games as "games" and more like digital slot machines.

It doesn't help that the gambling industry chooses to use the euphemeism "gaming" as in "gaming laws".

As a game developer I can tell you that while there are problems in many companies and part of the industry can be toxic it is not always the case. Not sure even if it's that much different to other software development industries. I understand that there's a lot of interest in the industry which places it in the spotlight in the press but the truth is way milder than people think. Most of the people I work with have a normal 40hr a day job with a normal life.

My first jobs in the industry were for games companies (in the late 90s). After about 5 years I decided that there is better money and less stress for engineers to be found in what I would then considered 'boring ass software'.

Now I enjoy playing games and reading blog posts about their engineering techniques. But I won't regret working mostly 40h weeks with vacation I can actually take and not thinking I'm going to get laid off every time I ship a project.

PC games were build to be addictive already years ago. For all the complains about mobile gaming, every single addicted gamer I knew or heard about was playing online games on console or on PC.

I know it was not your main point, but it is ridiculous how gaming culture constantly blames mobile, but the actual addictive issue happen with games like WoW or LoL.

Way before that. The dangers of "just one more turn" addiction were already well known even with games like SimCity and Civilization. The benefits to the game maker were less obvious, but still very real. As evidence, consider the fact that those franchises are still making money even after this long.

It comes with the territory, you can’t make a 200 million dollar game just because you ‘love gaming’.

Gamers are the most toxic community I have ever encountered. Nothing but parroted vitriol and entitlement. I don't even look online anymore, I just play the games and make my own opinions.

> Gamers are the most toxic community I have ever encountered. Nothing but parroted vitriol and entitlement. I don't even look online anymore, I just play the games and make my own opinions.

Sadly, this is kind of the one part that I blame CDprojectRed for even though I think they delivered an awesome product, albeit super buggy and limited one; they built the hype up so much and pushed the narrative of an immersive in depth World on e day 1 with tons of layers in the storyline and took years to develop. Had they just been honest to pre-buyers and say,'listen, please understand we wanted all these features on launch, but they're just not on day 1, so this will be released as a beta with limited features and bug fixes to come. If anyone wants a full refund we will accommodate it.' Which they eventually were forced to do for physical copies, and then gave Sony a black eye by forcing them to issue refunds from the PS+ store etc..

The Watchdogs team did that, and they also delayed their launch date to October despite it being Q1 2020 with almost no backlash because they were open about it and the price of the digital version then physical copies reflected that set of circumstances, the media didn't even bother commenting on it either despite Online play not being available to this day.

Also, this shows just how sad most gamers lives really are, between paying twitch players and spending every waking hour either playing or commenting on video games on social media one can easily see they don't have much or any real social life.

It's actually really sad, and makes me think about that part of the anime 'Welcome to the NHK' about NEETism and the prevalence of dropping out of Society and creating your own virtual existence Online to fill the void.

It's sad because I was also a gamer up until Sophomore year of university when I just got way too busy going FT and Summer classes and running a business, preparing/repairing my car and going to and training for real motorsports events/weekends and being in even casual relationships--there was simply no time to put in the 5+ hours on Gran Tursimo to refine my lines at Fuji, Suzuka, Laguna Seca or the Nordschleife like I could when I was in HS.

Sadly, for me Nismo's GT academy would later prove it to be a proper outlet and use of my time had I continued as they picked drivers for their lineup in GT racing series from the challenges Online, but by then the eventual financial crash of 2008 crisis was already setting things into motion (early 2007ish) so I couldn't be bothered and I needed to graduate ASAP.

Based on the articles that came out, it would appear that it was a classic case of devs being betrayed by managment and/or the marketing department. One anecdote that struck me was that when the studio announced the April 2019 release, a number of devs thought it was a prank at first because of how implausible it sounded.

> Based on the articles that came out, it would appear that it was a classic case of devs being betrayed by managment and/or the marketing department. One anecdote that struck me was that when the studio announced the April 2019 release, a number of devs thought it was a prank at first because of how implausible it sounded.

It's certainly possible to be the case, and I'm not even ruling out the hack being an inside job given what a clusterf--- this has been so far on a PR level. People gave nearly a decade to this Indie project only to see the same Corpo narrative play out with the dev's being the 'gonks' thrown under the bus when it came to it.

How come management and project leads aren't fore-fitting their pay and bonuses until these things are resorted, mainly because it's always the foot soldiers who are the ones that solve the problems and management overseeing it has an overembelished value, if anything, in ultimately delivering on a diesreable goal.

I can see a disgruntled team of devs saying 'F it' after all of this and just making sure the whole thing ends in a big flame and jumping ship.

Which sucks because I got back into gaming to play Cyberpunk 2077 after taking over a decade off and wanted to see it all pan out, but this may not happen.

There are lots of different gaming communities of varying qualities (and toxicity levels). You paint with a broad brush, but this is understandable when the most visible aspects of online gamer culture are on the big, barely-moderated social media free-for-all platforms. The forum age was better, forums being run by people who cared about quality of discourse on their platforms. And they still exist, here and there.

ETA: Twitter and Reddit and Youtube are the social media platforms I mean. People also let their blog comments turn into free-for-alls. But doesn't a subreddit Reddit count a forum? Kinda. It's not really _run_ by its admins, like a proper independent forum.

> the most visible aspects of online gamer culture are on the big, barely-moderated social media free-for-all platforms

The most visible aspects of online gamer culture is whatever some gaming "journalist" dug up on the internet and wrote an article about.

Yes I'll concede I was generalizing, my comment is directed at the "popular internet" if that makes sense. I have spent a huge portion of my life active in gaming and gaming communities though, so I've seen the full spectrum of possibilities. I'm still active in a few communities with more mature discourse.

To stand by my statement, I've never seen a sewing subreddit send death threats and hate mail to employees just trying to keep a job, or stalk a CEOs wife out of the public eye, just because a video game has some bugs. It's not just one or two edge cases either, it's a bandwagon of hatred on the popular internet. You're right that it's platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Imgur et al, that enable it, but I don't think that diminishes the issue. There's enough of the "noisy minority" to be harmful.

welcome to earth

These are just symptoms - the fundamental underlying factor is the 30% commission taken by Valve, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Google.

Take these values down to 10-15%, and the game development business becomes a lot higher-margin, encouraging new entrants and supporting better salaries and conditions for staff.

The other problem is that games are unique that they are entirely B2C, retail products. As a result, the full taxation burden falls on them. Its not uncommon for developers to actually receive only 50% of spent revenue, after global sales taxes, platform commissions, refunds, chargebacks are taken into account.

By contrast general IT companies - if providing B2B services (including advertising) - have a much lower commission and taxation burden.

With the exception of small indie developers, I'm too cynical to believe that the difference would end up benefiting the staff.

On Steam, larger developers are charged a 20% commission, whereas Indie developers are charged a 30% commission.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-12-03-indie-deve...

You are put at a fundamentally poorer economic position if you quit your AAA job and make Indie games and release them on Steam.

And the evidence for that diagnostics is...? Got any reference that links margin to company culture?

The few people I know from the mobile gaming industry tell me the margins are insanely high. They’d spend x on ads and get back 2~5x in microtransactions. Also development costs were even lower than marketing costs.

This is the conclusion of the American Federal Trade Commission...

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-01-08-ftc-wary-o...

""heavy taxation" by Apple and Google means developers are forced to use monetisation models that "rely on surveillance, manipulation and other harmful practices.""

Seems a stretch, publishing was costly pre steam as well and there were always a cut

This is a suggestion from someone from the FTC, not a study. It would be nicer to have data instead of opinion.

For instance, PC games have microtransactions too. Many top-toxic companies are are mostly in the PC ecosystem and don’t have to pay to be on PC.

Yet you still listed Microsoft as one of the companies squeezing developers.

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