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Comment by jeffwask | Hacker News Reader

He's saying every game needs to be an MTX riddled nightmare to be successful. As a gamer I reject that and have been with my wallet for a while. There are hundreds of dev teams producing great stuff below the AAA level that only ask me to buy the game once not every day.

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IMO it's not clear just from the immediate context in the article that he's actually advocating for MTX or ads.

If he is, then he deserves all the flak. If he's simply talking about having a market fit so your game sells at all, then IMO that's just talking about the viability of the game as a product - and in this case it's just about whether making the game makes financial sense, not whether you can juice the customer for more money.

He just executed a merge of his company with a company that produced know malware delivery platforms for installing scamware.

I think we can guess where his intentions lay

Having read the full context on the original article on pocketgamer.biz, he is, in fact, making the assertion in this post title -- that game creatives that aren't working with sales and publicity teams from the beginning to build in monetization are idiots.

Original article: https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/79190/unity-ironsource...

Edit: I say this because I don't understand how it's not clear that he's driving for monetization in every game.

The confusion is over what is meant by 'monetisation' here.

Is is "making sure the game is at all commercially viable so I can afford to keep myself alive and well fed", or "making sure that every drop of money is juiced from the customer".

Without a clear statement that he meant the latter, I decided to give him some benefit of doubt unless I have additional context (I never heard of the guy before).

It looks like the intent is to offer tools for taking money from customers. This means that the extent and character of monetization would be up to developers. It might mean adds, it might mean in game purchase opportunities. It does not necessarily mean a choice between two extremes.

Having worked under Ricitiello at EA, I am fairly confident his brain is not capable of distinguishing these concepts. I don't think he even understands the concept of "enough money".

I think using the term “compulsion loop” when taking about monetization is a pretty clear sign that he means the latter.

Making a game that can pay for itself doesn’t really need to trick people into it. Look at stardew valley for instance, or factorio, or minecraft

Sad panda, that Microsoft is doing their damnedest to shift Minecraft out of this category.

But Minecraft has a really solid compulsion loop, it’s what makes it so easy to start playing and then realize it’s nightfall. You never have to wait for anything because there’s always something else to do, you get mild gentle pressure from the environment to do things like hunger, night, mobs that inject variety. Every step of building something is set up as a reward, and there’s tiers of progress that reward basically every action. Mining and drops is literally lootboxes.

You picked basically the most addictive game in existence that uses every trick in the book as your shining example. Minecraft just hides it well.

I’m straight up talking about the connotations of using the term “compulsion”. Last I heard these described by game developers they were referred to as “game loops” or “core loop” if they were referring to the main part of the game.

Using the term “compulsion” to describe it instead comes from a certain mindset that I believe is centered around making skimmer boxes

>Is is "making sure the game is at all commercially viable so I can afford to keep myself alive and well fed", or "making sure that every drop of money is juiced from the customer".

yes, because teams typically undertake complex, expensive, and difficult projects for charity with no intention of being paid or making any financial gain

Just in case there is further confusion here he is talking about how cool it would be if you could charge per reload in shooter.

https://youtu.be/ZR6-u8OIJTE

"You are really not that price sensitive at that time"

That's just effing evil.

There are some real dark vids from GDC and the like talking about the psychology behind manipulating people into MTX and real money economies in games.

> He's saying every game needs to be an MTX riddled nightmare to be successful.

Come on, that's clearly not what he's saying in that quote. I don't like microtransactions either, but it makes your position weaker to get hyperbolic.

He's saying you have to include monetisation when planning for your game, rather than pretending it doesn't exist. To me this seems so obviously true that it's almost a product design axiom, let alone a priority for businesses. The question is how it should be done, and how well it will be done, which he says nothing about in that quote.

I think the confusion is in the art vs business part of the conversation. Some people are not making games for business purposes, they are 100% focused on the creative pursuit. Does that make them stupid? Of course not, they're competent adults who made their decision not to prioritize money over the experience of the game. I think it's pretty clear that's who he's talking about as well, with the "pure, brilliant.." comment.

> He's saying you have to include monetisation when planning for your game, rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

What's wrong about monetizing your game by, I don't know, selling copies of it?

That only gets you some of the customers’ money, not all of their money.

To me, "monetization" means everything except for just selling your product for an upfront sticker price. When it comes to games, that means subscriptions, ads or microtransactions. Arguably, the latter two aren't inherently scummy, but I find it very distasteful when a game's design is fundamentally changed to push them.

This is the reason I completely avoid F2P games to begin with. I can't deny it's financially very lucrative though.

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