> Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives. It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.

Their CEO is certainly not calling everyone an idiot, just that there are some in that group of people. And personally, I greatly prefer this sort of frank talk to run-of-the-mill generic PR speak that usually comes from CEO interviews.

The next thing he says in the interview:

> I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that. It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.

Unity used to be famous for being the game engine of choice for creative indies. Games like Hollow Knight, Return of the Obra Dinn, or Ori and the Blind Forest. It seems to me very clear that Riccitello has no understanding of the value of tools for making games like that. He sees Unity as a way of pumping out endless shitty Candy Crush clones stuffed with predatory microtransactions.

EDIT: by the way, for the full context, this is the question he's answering:

> "Implementing monetisation earlier in the process and conversation is certainly an angle that has seen pushback from some developers."

The pushback the question is referring to is developers being disappointed in the ironSource merger. He's literally being asked about Unity focusing too much on microtransactions and ad technology, and in his answer to the question he refers to his critics (which, again, are his customers!) as "fucking idiots".

This guy should not be in charge of Unity.

I interpreted what he said to mean "I have respect for devs who approach this for just the art, but if you don't consider monetization into your design from the beginning, you are self sabotaging your chance at business success".

He just said that with less politically correct talk, which is easily taken out of context.

Also there's this assumption in this thread and in HN in general that "monetization" always means bleeding people out of their money. Sure much of the industry does that, but I don't think that has to be the case

Being decent and being respectful has nothing to do with politics. Strong language betrays the emotional state of the speaker than any valuable idea. All this conveyed to me was that he has very thin skin and easily triggered with no emotional maturity to rationally push back.

How ridiculous would it be for other forms of art to have "monetization design".

A chef that styles their dishes in such a way that there clearly is a gap in the dish which should contain a nice piece of steak or something else. When you are eating the dish the waiter comes with that piece in hand and asks if you want it for a small price.

Or a painter that paints a picture with elements missing. If you want to experience the true masterpiece. Please buy these extra element and also for a small price you can have better matching colors.

How such behavior is acceptable in video games is truly baffling to me. But then again I have never bought anything using a microtransaction. I think it should be illegal to be able to ask a user to buy something when in game. You also don't get a pop up when watching a movie to please enter your credit card number to be charged $2 to watch this extra scene that was cut.

I pulled my (meager) rev contribution out of their subscription service following the IronSource acquisition and this makes me confident that was the right call. All due to respect to the fine folks working on the platform, but it's not something I'm interested in using anymore.

Yesterday, I took a 5 figure loss on my Unity position to get out from under this horror show. Still feel fantastic about it.

One of the more common reasons is that inexperienced owners don’t understand their food costs and therefore design delicious, lovely menu items that actually lose money when you calculate everything that goes into them. If you want it to be more than a brief experiment, you gotta get the spreadsheets out at some point…

Waiting until the end to add it in is both evil and idiotic

Is that really so?

Sounds like pizzas where you can put things on it for additional price. Or when you buy house or car and pay extra for each little thing.

I agree that in modern games its way more intusive then it needs to be.

Anyway, that was a bit off my point which I admit. The main point I am making is "irreverent" is more descriptive than "politically incorrect." Politically incorrect would be something not culturally sensitive or offensive to people with certain politics. He didn't make that sort of gesture, he just was crude about his own customers which is mean sure but also pretty unwise just from a PR perspective.

Sure, in lazy/bad games there’s trade off, but that goes for anything. Bad games have existed for a long time for more than just money

In that case, it's obvious why the Unity CEO would say this. He has a financial incentive to get game developers to try and milk gamers for profit (because Unity gets a cut).

I think that this could ultimately push gamers and developers to use other engines/platforms. If you try to milk gamers for profit, it will eventually lead to unplayable games where the only way to compete online is to buy a ton of virtual power-ups and accessories.

Growth is generally king for tech companies.

Honestly, this was always gonna happen post iOS tracking changes. Less data means worse ads and no measurement without substantial first party scale, which will tend to lead towards consolidation.

Edit: in fact, if you look at their S1, you can see that they make money from subscriptions to their game creation tools and also from operate services, to help customers monetize and increase LTV. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000119312520...

Their point was that this implication isn't correct, because unity does indeed have a profit incentive for ads and IAP, as they're providing a platform for such. It's one of the features unity mentions on the pricing page.

Unity takes a cut from its ads business but it just does not do that for IAP any more than the animation system.

This merger has spurred me to try other engines. I keep hearing good things about Godot. That'll likely be the first one I try.

Breaking changes expected still but should end with the beta, so if you're looking to noodle around with it they're probably close enough for you to skip 3.5 and start learning on 4.

If you want to publish on consoles you need to pay someone who ported the engine to the console you want to target (or port the engine yourself). The code can't be open source because of licensing issues.

From: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...

Valve are even pushing developers towards Proton by default because they'd rather have a well maintained Windows build running in a well maintained API wrapper, than a half-baked native Linux port that never gets updated, which is often what ended up happening during their earlier Linux-native push. I believe some games that did get Linux ports are now flagged by Steam to ignore that version and run the Windows version in Proton by default, because it provides a better experience than the port.

To make things even worse, proton is said to include a significant amount of software components directly copied from windows.

What actually worries me, is the devs from gcc and the glibc perfectly ignoring the fact that there has been games on "linux" for the last decade. The glibc devs have literaly a frenzy of GNU symbol versioning, breaking game binaries built on a recent glibc that on distro with a glibc no older that 1 year and half for no good reasons. Not to mention you still cannot properly libdl the libc itself, namely do a clean ELF dynamic load of it (maybe not true anymore, have to check). Unfortunately, many game devs have the c++ tantrum and the static libstdc++ from gcc does not "libdl" properly what it needs from the glibc/posix libs, and something tells me not to hold my breath at gcc devs fixing that.

So, I guess, I'll keep playing "linux" native games until windoz... I meant they force proton upon everybody for good, or until the glibc and gcc devs managed to make it near impossible to make reasonably robust in time and compatible across "linux" distros game binaries.

Actually, I got myself a simple C compiler and built a lean win64 with vulkan support from wine, useless, no windows game binaries are that clean, except maybe the ones from ID software.

He's been there for 10 years, made $1b, could have retired before he started ... and it's unusual that those SO POINTEDLY cruel words are being used by him, based upon my 6 years of experience listening to / occasionally talking with him while I was at Unity.

It appears to be unkind, maniacal, transactional thinking in my perspective. It deserves clarification. Without clarification the impact is kind of an evil one: From a people sense, it divides people up, chides them if they are non-binary about monetization.

Pivoting to talking about himself in the next breath smells bad to me too, like a slightly muffled narcissism that excuses self-misbehavior.

And Marc Whitten cleans up / enables just after, which is common to see around narcissists: "To double down on John’s point, Unity has democratised creation [...]"

So to avoid the pathological dead-end of being considered a narcissist, he ought to restate this.

I am puzzled. I wildly guess he could be creating an "out" as CEO for himself. IDK what this is.

What would have been better messaging here? I'm not a C-level / executive and don't have a clue.

Money has diminishing returns on "success" if you define it in literally any other way than "accumulation of money" which only a narcissistic child would.

I mean, there's absolutely a market for the stuff, but it should NOT be our goal to make every game the same cookie cutter formula for "how to maximize money".

In fact, I think there's a bigger problem at hand here.

It's something about how people want to find a formula for X, so they essentially don't have to be creative and think about how to make something interesting and new.

I don't know what it is exactly, but I've been trying to pin it down for a while now.

Less a functioning human and more like a mid-sized neural net trained only on making game company short-term stock evaluations increase.

He's the game dev equivalent of Nick Bostrom's paperclip maximizer thought experiment.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

He isn't saying stuff them full of microtransactions and addictive behaviors.

Idealism can just as easily be not paying attention to any form of making money, which you know full well that lots of developers do, especially passionate game developers.

Have you ever tried to help someone make a game? Have you ever tried the finance side with them? When that CEO says some of them are fucking idiots he is absolutely right.

I mean, he is talking about the importance of tuning "compulsion loops", whatever those are supposed to be.

Sounds to me, he isn't advocating addictive behaviours because he's already taking that point for granted.

Right, we get it. But if they can't manage to do that without being condescending to their customers (and like this guy, generally sounding like a bit of an asshole) -- they shouldn't be in charge of anything.

These being very, very different things.

No -- in this guy's case it's the other things he's saying, and the broader context which brings him into that territory.

Fortunately and unfortunately (we likely won't see him be burned at the stake) he'll be out of the game soon. Throwing shade at the devs as well as pissing off the consumers, pure marketing GeNiUs

If you are going to have monetization mechanisms, ignoring them during development and trying to bolt them on at the end is indeed idiotic.

As someone who has worked at a start up that really took off, didn't truly think out monetization and prayed at some point the free users would be willing to play assuming we gave the right features and benefits, I would say you're incredibly naïve. So in retrospect, this isn't that poor of a take.

But it's a poor take because the kind of monetization he's talking about taps into an addicted person's dopamine pathway.

Most run of the mill SaaS work like utilities instead as far as monetization goes.

You don't really have the standing to preach here.

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.

I think we can guess where his intentions lay

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.

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).

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

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.

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

https://youtu.be/ZR6-u8OIJTE

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

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.

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

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

Few people have driven as many once-successful studios into the ground as Riccitello.

There is this desire for “authenticity” in the current zeitgeist. You see it everywhere, but mostly in how the crowds love people like Trump and Elon Musk.

I think this is an understandable reaction from being lied a lot by polite PR-trained people. Politicians and businesspeople mostly.

But I think there are two very relevant types of bias that people who praises this apparent authenticity:

1 - Thinking people who use an aggressive, unapologetic tone do not lie. They do lie. I see no evidence that they lie less than “polite” people. The thing is that the mainstream is smaller and much much less dominant than it was decades ago. So you can get away offending a lot of people, because there will still be a lot of people left that will adore you. So you can use unapologetic tone that offend a group of people. It pays to offend a group, as long it is not your group. It gives you credit to lie to your group without getting caught.

2 - Thinking polite people are always lying. The other side of the coin. We see so many PR-trained people lying emulating polite people that we start to equal politeness to insincerity. But a lot of people are genuinely polite, considerate and kind. They tell the truth and try not to offend anyone.

These biases, equaling offensive tone to authenticity is, I believe, a misleading and dangerous way to see the world. You use a flawed heuristic that leads you to believe in liers while bragging you are avoiding liers.

There is also content and clarity. A lot of generic PR speak is devoid of actual content, it doesn't mean anything.

In this example, he is making a clear claim, like it or not. There is no ambiguity or double speak.

I think a lot of people are willing to tolerate disagreement and even lying if it is done in simple language opposed to evasion.

If you disagree, you know it. If they are lying, it is also clear because their statements aren't stuffed full of weasel words.

As in, they couldn't even get out a straight line about what ironSource's actual product is.

To be clear, I was making a comment and speculating on the publics attraction to blunt language.

It seems like you are agreeing with me - you are sick of vapid and nonsensical PR bullshit.

I don't think anyone is in favor of the PR bullshit, except the people who hide behind it.

Wouldn't you prefer something more direct?

Also, what another poster said still applies: "blunt" language may appear to be more honest, but it really isn't. You can lie or misrepresent while being blunt just as well as with twisted PR phrases.

E.g., maybe it's John's deep belief that game devs should build their games around monetization from the start and so he made the merger to empower his users to do that - or maybe, he made the merger because it was a lucrative business decision for Unity and his "blunt advice" is just him trying to sell that move to his userbase.

However, IMO it doesnt hold truth for others which risk rage and clearing from insulted. Insulting people is always risky buisiness but if you want to show that you give a shit that shouldnt stop you.

I pesonally dont like to work with polite people very much because I know they always euphemize the truth. Some things are so shitty that if you frame it in polite way you simply lie.

For me personally, authenticity is more about choosing to speak vs. laying low on certain topics.

Sure you can still lie when you speak to it, but at least you're being truthful on your desire to express.

Care to enlighten me on how to achieve this?

Sorry to see the new generation falling for these con-artists.

My humble advice as a nobody is look at things objectively and understand that words have unintended consequences so make a conscious effort to not insult others.

With the full context … he still sounds like an asshole.

Admittedly an “authentic” asshole I genuinely believe that’s how he feels, but he strikes me as a corporate suit wearing asshole … a real Bobby Kotic (I think his name deserves to be a pejorative for assholes in the gaming industry)

He can talk nice about it, but he’s saying anyone who isn’t focused on the money is and idiot, the stupid thing about that is that he clearly thinks “pay once” is for fucking idios and just let the mask slip to show this disdain for customers that want quality games that aren’t trying to productise the players. He’s saying if you don’t want to be sold, avoid anything built with Unity. Which is to bring it full circle… fucking stupid of him.

That comment makes him look even more like a short-sighted asshat.

Automotive technical surfacing in CAD is stupid hard, and is a waste of time for the design staff. The clay models are easier to work with in every sense - easier to change, easier to refine, easier to show and discuss, etc. Designers can apply reflective film to the clay which shows reflections much as the finished product would, and can even be painted. The final surfaces are reverse-engineered from scans taken from those clay models.

Is there positivity somewhere in this kind of talk, like will it somehow win Unity more business? I am not seeing it.

The thing about a decent monetization model is that is _has_ to be thought about and structured from the very beginning.

If you are going to have a live team creating content for a game over the long term, then the game has to make money over the long term as well. If you try to hamfist that monetization model at the end, it looks like a hamfisted monetization scheme that players are _very_ attuned to.

Bad monetization design is like bad game design, it makes the game worse. Good monetization design can allow you to support your game for _decades_.

League of Legends would have died years ago if not for a monetization model that worked over the long term.

I'm ashamed to even have to reply to this.

These "brave", utterly perverse statements, given out by these decadent businesspersons, shouldn't be met by anything other than criticism, and disbelief.

He's totally calling out for developers to embrace these ill practices. It's fucking disgusting, manipulative behavior.

I think a lot more CEO talk frankly than we give credit for. The difference would be that many of them are polite and considerate, and their baseline isn’t abrasive language. NPR had an interview of toy maker about Prime day, and it was pretty frank and natural, with pretty emotional topics, without calling anyone fucking idiots.

A 'compulsion loop' sounds bad to me, I'd never heard the term before. Although if I try to take a step back I suppose this term could be used to describe any game and not just one of the lootbox-mania or idle games.

However, the wikipedia article [1] states:

> A core or compulsion loop is any repetitive gameplay cycle that is designed to keep the player engaged with the game. ... A compulsion loop may be distinguished further from a core loop; while many games have a core loop of activities that a player may repeat over and over again, such as combat within a role-playing game, a compulsion loop is particularly designed to guide the player into anticipation for the potential reward from specific activities

For some reason, all I can think of is that game from ST:TNG [2]. I'd like to say that I am somehow above it all but back when I used to play FPS games, it was probably just the same thing. Nonstop dopamine infusion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...

That said, I'm not hearing nice things about IronSource and it sounds like maybe there's better ways to get user feedback than the particular implementations they're using and are going to use with IronSource.

The real dystopia is that I'm 99% sure these games dynamically adjust durations, prices, and incentives based on the user's past behavior to extract as much money per hour of play as possible. Essentially a machine that identifies and preys on a person's weaknesses.

To my way of thinking it's only slightly more reputable than bitcoin slot machine crap like stake.

I think I'm not alone in that, and the few games I really enjoyed in the last couple of years were significantly text-based and/or complex simulations for this reason.

Didn't sound very nice to me. More like an elder drug lord who knows that too many overdoses are bad for business or a virus that evolves to be less lethal because dead hosts don't spread.

Or in this case: a two minute compulsion loop would probably make it really obvious that the game is trying to hook you and might trigger some kind of counter reaction: Players realizing it's a slot machine and uninstalling it to stop themselves from wasting time. Whereas a hour-long loop might keep a player hooked without them realizing it.

There's been a quiet war for decades between people who want to design games as art, and people who want to design them as a predictable recurring revenue stream. I'm not sure what iteration we're up to now.

Roger Sharpe [1] saved pinball by demonstrating it is a game of skill.

RE: art vs profit I think there is room for both. Games are probably the best example of that. Game designers are very much artists but they are also engineers and business people.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Sharpe_(pinball)

Yes, with repetition, you can eventually learn to beat Ghosts and Goblins on a single quarter, but the game is not going to just let you do that on the first try. Games of that era are designed to lure you in, then kill you with something completely out of nowhere after your 3 minutes are up and it's time for the next person in line to put in their money. This self-reinforced when you saw someone who had put in the reps getting really far on one credit, so you would think you can do that. But no, you can't. You die at the end of the first stage like everyone else.

It's not gambling, but it's still designed to extract money as efficiently as possible.

Well sure the games tend to be skill based, but arcade machines were also novelties, like the little peep-show movie clips where you turned the crank and looked inside, or the "fortune teller" and some others. Skill games seem better because there is more replay value though.

But games with persistent inventory like World of Warcraft are different than PacMan machines, because you could sell your items for real money.

That's also a slippery slope of an argument. Poker players claim that they are not gambling. Early stage addicts claim they are not addicts and can stop any time. Gaming, whether the player is earning money or points, all keys in on the same addictive traits of their players. Some game devs go all in on that because it is fish in a barrel stakes for making money.

I never equated alcoholic are gamblers. I said they are forms of addiction. I'm beating the drum that some game devs are targeting addicts. That's the direction I will continue this conversation as. Where ever you're going with I will no longer follow

An example of this is multiballs. The first one (per player) can start with say three shots. The next one might require six and then the third nine. This is oversimplified but the point is the progress is consistent.

The only dynamically-scaling feature I am aware of is the replay score which (can) set a starting score based on recent plays but will also scale up rapidly when it is reached (say, +50%) until it isn’t reached, at which point it resets to the starting score. But this has no actual in-game effect.

As an example, Minecraft is only a $20 one-time purchase, but free and/or open source mods made by people who are motivated by fun instead of profit have created a staggering amount of content that happens to be really addictive to someone like me. For the $20 I got the equivalent of years of content and novelty that I can never hope to fully explore.

I wonder if any given computer program that's given a colossal amount of development resources thrown behind it will ultimately come somewhere close to irresistible, and would suck away various parts of our less interesting hopes and dreams regardless of how much monetary currency the creator is expecting the user to pay. There just happens to be a motive to tack on some extra profit if the game is pseudo-irresistable, where all that time would have been "wasted" on someone's freeloading video game addiction instead. It makes me wonder if what is known as "predatory" is just a pathological explosion of what someone thinks of as a successful accomplishment (my "any given side project could one day addict us all" theory).

It's a set of design habits that served the industry well back when they were trying to get people to pump in money, but which don't really do anyone any good when it's just you at home on a fully paid-up console game. It's not malicious, it's just a habit that got uncritically elevated to a Best Practice.

ER has a couple loops, with dungeons taking O(hour), and regions taking O(10hour). But there is no hard requirement to grind baked in at any level. (Of course, there is a requirement to Git Gud, which might make it feel grindy to some.)

A great RPG however, provides you with the tools to advance without ever grinding.

Most Fire Emblem games for example, are carefully tuned (thanks to a pretty interesting experience point formula) to rig your "active members of the party" to a particular level. Fire Emblem effectively asymptotes your character's level to what is expected for a particular map.

In Fire Emblem, 100 experience points is a level up. However, a stronger character gets less experience points, while a weaker character gets more. So weaker characters grow much faster, maybe leveling up after defeating just one foe. While a strong character ("the Jeigen" as Fire Emblem fans call it), may need 20+ wins before they level up.

As such, most Fire Emblem games feel like "there's no grind", because the experience point system is designed to never have a grind to begin with. Weak characters feel weak for their first few combats, but exponentially level up and catch up to the rest of the party in just a few maps. While your strongest characters feel like they're "wasting the precious enemies" (there's only a set number of enemies per map. Killing an enemy for +5 exp on your strongest character is just not good tactics when the same enemy is +100 exp on your weakest character).

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Even Pokemon to a large extent does this well. You can defeat all the gyms without ever "Grinding". It gets harder and harder to advance, but the game has enough tactics (Swords Dance, X Attack, etc. etc.) to allow you to win even with 10-levels or 15-levels behind the computer.

I think "no grind" Pokemon playthroughs are pretty fun. It completely changes the game and kind of provides the player an entry point into the competitive scene (you need to use competitive meta strategies vs the CPU if you expect to win with 10-to-15 level disadvantages against them).

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EDIT: It should be noted that Fire Emblem / Pokemon does offer a grind, but only as a method of last resort. Children who are incapable of ever understanding advanced tactics like Swords Dance or Calm Mind, are given a "grind" which guarantee progress.

Similarly, Fire Emblem has "grind levels" that serve as a way to increase your character's strength. But a lot of "hardcore" Fire Emblem fans try to avoid the grind levels and beat the game "grind free".

From this perspective, "Grind" exists as a way to allow casual players to advance, while trying to stay balanced so that stronger players (on their 5th or 6th playthrough with deep understanding of the mechanics of the game) can play without that "emergency escape hatch" so to speak.

Pokemon is absurdly easy because the story appeals to a wide variety of players. Most of which include "just give a single fast Pokemon 4 coverage moves and blast everything to pieces". Only gen 5 had a counter mechanic to this by adjusting experience to level difference.

Fire Emblem doesn't really have a grind because you fight the mobs you need during the campaign, and beyond higher difficulties the games have changed to accommodate lesser skilled players into not having to restart the entire campaign. Because it turns out, few people are looking forward to replaying 20 hours only for your 1-5 super pumped up units to not be able to beat the game (read: leaving almost all your other units underleveled or dead, no skirmishes / arena to catch up, and your remaining party can't clear the map).

Paper Mario, you can beat the entire game skipping every non-required battle and still have room to spare. Strategies are even based around keeping your HP low.

And despite not needing to grind, the former two still suffer from similar issues (beating weaker enemies with no sense of strategy to stall getting to the meat of the game). Beating required Geodude trainer number 30 with Tackle and Rock Throw may as well be grinding.

That's a good thing. Players who figure out the system "properly" shouldn't have to grind.

Ex: Atelier series generally have "alchemy engines" that create absurdly powerful creations, if you spend some time mapping out how alchemy can pass back and forth and mastering the alchemy minigame (main game??). Yeah, you can grind another +10 levels, but the game is about crafting items and rewards you with way more damage from well-crafted items (from +Quality loops) rather than from trying to bash your head against enemies for 10 hours.

The only games that seem to "force a grind" are these crappy phone-RPGs / gatchapon games, where escaping the grind literally costs money.

> Beating required Geodude trainer number 30 with Tackle and Rock Throw may as well be grinding.

A decent speedrun of Pokemon is only a couple of hours long at the most. I don't think any skilled RPG player would call any decent run of Pokemon (of any game) a "Grind".

I'll articulate what I mean, since it hasn't come across. The problem isn't with grinding itself. It's with the things associated with grinding.

Grinding itself can be immensely fun and satisfying. Doing the same repetitive, thoughtless actions to advance the game, not that fun for most. I can sink hours into Monster Hunter grinding because I'm still put on my toes with most endgame monsters. It does get annoying, but it gets annoying way later (and for different reasons, mostly).

Pokemon? Let's set aside speedrunning, since that implies I already have a strategy prior to even booting the game. You'll go through various non-random battles with trainers which have Pokemon with no random moveset whatsoever. They all have the same algorithm-determined moveset or some inferior version of it. Most of the time, they play out the exact same way they do at the current point as they did 10 levels ago. Most of these battles aren't mentally challenging past first occurrence, they just drag the game out. The clear exceptions are trainers with Pokemon you've never seen, and story-relevant trainers (hopefully not for the former reason, but for having unique movesets / themes). Remove all those trainers, and you could probably cut the level curve in half along with the playtime.

You either care enough about that padding to dump the game over it, you bite through it despite the padding, or you like the padding. But it's the same thing as grinding: it's padding. It isn't inherently necessary beyond ensuring players have garnered some experience with the battle system before giving them a larger challenge. And even there, it's entirely up to the designers to ensure previous challenges match the current state.

In my experience though, most of those trainers are easily avoidable if you don't want to deal with them.

I think that's what I'm going for. They're there as "grinds" if your the type of player who wants to capture a whole lot of experience points and/or money throughout the game. But if you're "against the grind", then you simply walk away from those trainers, and they'll never challenge you.

There's exceptions of course. You must fight the gym leaders (each with a specialization on a particular typing. Brock for Rock, Misty for Water, etc. etc., ensuring forced diversity through the game). And the Elite 4 at the end force you to fight against 4 trainers (again with elemental specialties), before facing the champion (who breaks the mold and fights with a well balanced, supported team across multiple elements/typings)

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In Sword/Shield, its an explicit strategy to run away from fights in fact. You're not really expected to fight against the most powerful Pokemon, and Poke-dolls (aka: run away from fights) are plentiful.

That’s ARPGs and JRPGs (and maybe some action RPGs), CRPGs typically don’t have any grinding.

There are some games that you want to play with your full attention, and you want it to be an intense and immersive experience.

But there are also games that you want to play 'in the background' while having a discord conversation about something else. It's fun and simple, and doesn't come with stakes.

Some analogies to this are throwing a ball back and forth in the yard. Or having a show play in the background. It's comforting.

'Grinding' doesn't have to be bad if it's in that context

Yes, it is bad. Crack cocaine has a really tight compulsion loop, for example.

https://levelskip.com/how-to/Skinners-Box-and-Video-Games

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

There will soon be a market for pre-microtransactions games.

Also: I used to hate on the casino industry for using the term “gaming” to euphemistically refer to gambling, but now they’re not so different so I’ll let them have that one.

I'd argue there already is -- what's currently called "indies". IMO the greater threat is the "compulsion loop". Plenty of excellent games, both historical and modern, are content to challenge the player without much in the way of enticement. But in this late year, we're having to contend with things like Vampire Survivors [0], which, while being microtransaction-free, is fun, straightforward, and takes inspiration from video lottery terminals. Yes, really! Its creator, Luca Galante [1]:

>“Slot games are very simple,” he tells The Verge. “All the player has to do is press one button, and the game designers have to find a way to push the player to press that button. [The player] is actually spending money every time they press it, and because of that, there’s a huge attention to detail on the sounds, the animations, and the sequences, because you have so few elements to work with. Basically, [the designers] try to maximize the importance and impact those elements have on the player. I just absorbed that knowledge basically just by being in the industry. And so when making a game, I have automatically applied it to what [I’ve been] doing.”

>That’s all reflected in Vampire Survivors. Starting a game immediately drops you into the action, and the only controls to think about are moving your character and picking upgrades. You don’t even need to press a button to use your weapons. The charming retro graphics feel like they’re ripped straight from a long-forgotten Super Nintendo Castlevania game, and you’ll hear a delightful chime every time you pick up one of the countless experience gems. Opening treasure chests seems to intentionally create the feeling that you’re pulling a slot machine; pixelated weapons stream by on ribbons of color as coins fly everywhere, all backed by a catchy jingle. (If you get lucky and find a chest with five items, there are actually fireworks.)

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/19/22941145/vampire-survivor...

Of course, but in non-Skinner-box-speak, we call that the "gameplay". Refactoring an old concept like "gameplay" to wield the tools of war usually associated with gambling -- that's the crux of the matter. That's what I and the root-level commenter fear.

Vampire Survivors itself isn't the problem -- it costs $3, and doesn't require any more (non-temporal) investment, neither microtransactions nor additional quarters. But it's a harbinger of things to come. Remember horse armour, and how harmless it was?

Or a game that is engaging and doesn’t fall into the trap of making the player non-productively frustrated or bored.

It’s really hard for me to play video games at all because of my ADHD and so I feel it so hard when games fail to get this right because it makes them basically unplayable; I can’t “power through” the luls.

Games like Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Slay the Spire, Binding of Issac, Don’t Starve all are A++ because they either have tight game loops with lots of variety or they make it so the player always always has something meaningful to do.

More concisely, why excuse shittiness with historical precedent?

I'm speaking specifically to your criticism of Vampire Survivors, which as you said doesn't have microtransactions. I'm strongly opposed to the use of "compulsion loops" to generate revenue via microtransactions.

Even in F2P games, there's a huge chunk of gamers that take pride in "I've never bought anything in this game". I think culturally "whales" are frowned upon, even though they (sadly) make up the vast majority of F2P games profits.

When guy's like this CEO talk about monetization btw, IMO a lot of these methods are really shady, because the vast majority of profits come from a very small minority that are unable to exercise self control around these "compulsion loops." On the surface, "if you don't want to pay for it you don't have to" seems friendly enough, but when you realize that essentially all the profits are coming from people that have (arguably) an addiction, it feels a bit gross. Not that all monetization is bad. I don't have a problem with like, selling hats or outfits or things that don't affect gameplay, but when your gameplay is designed to open peoples wallets... it's a bit of a grey area IMO.

On the other hand, if I buy a hat I like in Team Fortess, like, I might buy more hats in the future but there's no particular incentive for me to do so.

Addiction generally requires a couple things IMO:

- The product/substance needs to provide some sort of short term relief or benefit

- The short term relief or benefit becomes more expensive over time and less satisfying

- The higher the usage, the more invested or dependent the person becomes

If you spend like $1000 upgrading your base in Clash of Clans, then you're certainly invested and likely to spend more in the future. The benefits also start to dwindle -- you have to spend more for the same effect (ie, upgrades get more expensive/time consuming)

On the other hand, if you buy a hat for $5, none of the above applies. Maybe you're a little more invested in the game but that's about it. And well, if you were buying a hat, you're probably already pretty invested.

All other F2P games progress to the point that they require you to pay to proceed either by making your progress slow down to near-zero and/or forcing you to grind for hours to move forward even a tiny bit. No, it's not "The game is just harder", they specifically make the game too hard at a certain point to force you into paying. It's a really ingenious system where they will let you get quite far in the game before they turn the screws, when you think "Well I have played X hours, I can spend $Y on this powerup". PvZ2 is a good example of this. EA absolutely ruined the PvZ franchise (they even went back and screwed up PvZ1, adding ads/IAP even if you bought the game previously) with their greed.

F2P/IAP game developers have perverse incentives to milk you for all you're worth and no matter how "pure"/"moral" they think they want to be. The siren call of money will always lead them to ruin games and make them effectively P2W, even if subconsciously. It's simply too easy to do, just bump the boss HP up by a factor of 10, make this part of the level near-impossible without a powerup, etc.

Apple Arcade helps will some of this but the catalogue is limited (though there are some real gems in there, some of which are games that were F2P/P2W initially). I've found Apple's "Games you might like" or "Based on your downloads" to actually be surprisingly good. I just have to filter them out if they have "bad" IAPs.

It's also especially annoying when searching for jobs in games, and these ruddy e-gambling companies keep popping up on searches, because "gaming".

It's already too late to get into the hobby of collecting retro games/hardware. eBay prices have been shooting upwards for a good few years already.

Thankfully, the classics are well-preserved via emulation (and in some cases, FPGA recreations of older hardware). But there's an ever-increasing number of games that simply aren't able to be preserved due having no access to server-side components, and many others lost from the early days of mobile gaming (e.g. 32-bit iOS games from before F2P took over), with no way to run them on modern hardware and no emulation solutions yet, even if the games themselves have survived somewhere.

I don't get what Mr Riccitiello is on about. Clay is a great way to sketch car ideas.

Mike Morhaime of Blizzard fame sees indie games as a space where the small guys can try out games that have never been made before. What is the unity CEO pushing for? Cookie cutter games?

There is a GDC lecture from way back in 2017-2018, where one man did his thesis on what motivates people in video games. When people see the 'victory screen' or story cutscene or audiovisual reward feedback for an action, what are they responding to deep down inside?

He did a metastudy of 70-something studies on this topic and they barely agreed on anything. Nobody really has a firm answer for why people are motivated to play video games and you end up with a lot of handwaving around dopamine.

Why is Mr Riccitielo still pushing compulsion loops like we should be yanking players into addiction? Games are so much more than that. See the recent Ocarina Of Time beta showcase at GDQ.

Not cookie cutter. Cookie clicker.

Does Unity take a cut of any microtransactions run through their ecosystem?

The message seems to be clear: Unity is for people who want to make games that make money, not for indies who want to create for the love of craft.

Edit to add: This rings true even when you decide "not a priority this time", that's still thinking it through

No, Minecraft has been monetized for a while: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/catalog

That said, I've found it on the inoffensive side. It's got a plug on the title screen but my kids zip past it easily enough. Most of what you can buy involves a reasonable amount of work, they're not selling slight retexturings for $25. They've given away enough free stuff (of substance!) that I don't even feel bad that the free stuff is to remind you the market exists. No lootboxes.

“It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.”

“But this industry divides people between those who still hold to that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product. And I don’t know a successful artist anywhere that doesn’t care about what their player thinks. This is where this cycle of feedback comes back, and they can choose to ignore it. But to choose to not know it at all is not a great call.”

Still, with so many game out every day, it's also hard to keep track of everything. I should engage with my family (children and wife), do sport, work, learn to improve and be more efficient, see my friends, keep a healthy diet and sleep 10h every night... That's without speaking of the need to publish to be seen and heard.

So no, I won't engage with all the small games. No one will.

That said, this is not the only way to make a living as a game developer and I'm happy to pay up front for a game that provides the full richness of the experience to all players.

Is it though? Yes, it did sell the most copies of any game ever, but how are you justifying to call it "the most valuable"?

― Upton Sinclair

Art is an end in itself. Not everything that takes work needs to make needs to be immediately converted into money.

Sure the concepts are also relevant / informative. However the impact is pro-bias, shaming people who don't think like he does.

It deserves a sincere apology.

But the context of the question was moving monetization earlier in the development process. This is something that winds up feeling very broken in most games. You can tell when the game is a fleshed out around a scaffold of "how can we extract payment" and it always feels lame. In fact, some of my favorite games are the opposite - the core gameplay is built out, and then the monetization is added as a cosmetic store.

The solution to that is to git gud and build a game that's actually enjoyable to play, not wireheading players with dirty tactics.

I don't advocate for killing this new gaming industry, just as I don't advocate for killing the more traditional gambling industry, but both need much stricter supervision than most markets because they attack a weak point in human psychology, and taken too far, they harm humanity more than they generate value.

In the end any "distortion" of the market requires a strong justification, but I think the justifications used against the gambling industry have always been pretty compelling, and they appear to apply just as well to modern games industry techniques.

Another way to put it is that the "value to society" of modern games techniques contains a negative externality: damage to the players comparable to that of gambling addictions. You could solve it with the equivalent of a carbon tax, though defining the cost of different tactics feels impossible, so I'd argue that the traditional gambling restrictions are a better fit (illegal in many places, illegal for children, legal limits, requiring various warnings and protections to discourage extreme behaviours, high taxes, etc).

Many families play boardgames with their children at home. Fewer visit blackjack tables. I think theres a fair argument that these broadly match the different financial strategies in the games industry. How much of this behaviour is parental wisdom and how much is limited accessibility thanks to legal restrictions is a hard question to answer, but I have a suspicion that the world would be a worse place with unrestricted gambling. But kids _do_ sit at home opening lootboxes as their parents watch tv, I'm not sure if the effects are much different.

I'm sick and tired of dark patterns winding their tentacles into every aspect of our digital lives - it's tiring, and predatory on the little self-control and attention that I have remaining. We didn't need casino-isation of our games before, so we don't need it now.

However, there's what the market will bear, and what the market can be coerced into paying. The latter is definitely more money than the former. The point at which you step into a game and then are psychologically manipulated into spending more than you otherwise would have, that isn't right. Building out gameplay loops that are only fun if you fork over more cash after you've invested considerable time into the application and leveraging the sunk cost fallacy to pull more cash out of your user, do you really respect your consumer at that point, or their wallet?

People are free to build what they want. I'm allowed to call it gross. I'm also allowed to say that those gameplay mechanics feel broken and not fun.

Run a thought experiment next time you play a game. If money was no object, and you were able to pay the developer the average value of their customer (total revenue divided by their total downloads), and in return, all purchase screens are removed, would that game be even more fun? In my experience, they'd usually wind up being a husk, a very generic, boring gameplay loop with nothing enticing. That's how you know that the enticement is actually manipulation.

If you could somehow turn back the clock, you could go back to this tolerable trade-off, but you never twice step into the same river. The only options available now are to either find another set of parameters of capitalism enabling this trade-off, or to avoid most mainstream gaming.

vv bingo

I am far from advocating for a minor reform. MTX, subscriptions, and basically anything designed to extract money from a customer's pocket after a one-time initial purchase should be very heavily restricted. "Compulsion loops" and dirty tricks used to create artificial addiction should be made outright illegal. In effect, companies that rely on these techniques to survive would struggle, but IMO nothing of value would be lost. Short of establishing a parallel system of funding video game development (such as patronage), that's all we can do.

And yes, the games market was smaller back then. Yet, it still produced quality games. So we need to cut back those actors who grew big by employing toxic product techniques, not "solutions for growing the game industry beyond its current size".

exactly (tho I wouldn't say in parallel)

>Please don't completely edit your comment after someone replies, it makes it hard to keep track of the discussion.

HN disables replies, or I expanded what I wrote as you were writing yours - I'll just disengage instead, bye

Besides, people seem to call "capitalism" a set of laws and regulations that are good for current large capital holders, and freely extracting money from people if you have superior psycho/marketing and lawyer power. But there is a vast, vast space of possible regulatory conditions that would still be essentially capitalist in how economy functions.

There's more reasons for a game to exist besides making big bucks.

So careful what you ask for. Even an indie developer needs to pay bills and put food on the table somehow. Very very few game developers got rich developing games, in most of the studios burnout and attrition because of the extremely toxic work environments are common too.

That doesn't mean that stuffing ads, subscriptions and microtransactions everywhere is the only way forward. However, saying that "there's more reasons for a game to exist besides making big bucks." sounds like you are suggesting that the developer of the next Call of Duty sequel should be working those 60-80 hour weeks only for their personal enjoyment from delivering something for the gamer to play (and then loudly complain online and demand this or that - or else!) and sense of dedication to their fanbase.

That really doesn't work like that.

However they eventually added overpowered weapons that could only be unlocked via expensive rng loot boxes and that's when I stopped playing.

I question this premise. Do people demand the production values of AAA games, or are they just used to expecting it? I remember reading some article about how much more expensive it is to build photorealistic games now that you need to add so many more details to everything, and it makes sense. Maybe the fix is not to keep the current unsustainable system, but to readjust people's expectations and downgrade production budgets. Indie games are already doing this, because they cannot compete on production value.

Well, look at what sells most e.g. on Steam or Epic's store, etc.

No, those aren't indies with "Minecraft" or "Nintendo" graphics. Ultimately it doesn't matter at all whether people "demand it" or "are used to expecting it" when it is what they are putting their money into.

And it isn't for lack of other choices.

Isn't he advocating a longer rewarding sequence instead of a quick cash grab every couple minutes?

    Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the “machine zone,” in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and “ambience management,” player tracking and cash access systems—all designed to meet the market’s desire for maximum “time on device.” Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers’ everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two.

There's a ton of crossover in these fields between people who designed gambling machines for Los Vegas and then got in on the ground floor of the big mobile gaming boom.

The most profitable franchises have not done this. It's all timesinks, pay-to-win, and microtransactions.

I mean sure, game addiction is a thing, but I remember people shovelling coins into arcade machines. PTW and micro transactions are just the modern equivalent. Nobody's holding a gun to these people's heads.

If you ask me indie and art games are in a renaissance period. It's amazing how many cool games from small dev teams there are on the App Store and Steam. If bored housewives prefer PTW crap, well, they'd probably just be spending it on bingo or scratch cards instead. It's really just mass market casual entertainment moving out of newsagents and bingo halls and on to smartphones, but it's always been there.

I can get only marginally more joy from getting the exact five-star gacha draw I want than I get from a Slay the Spire rare card draw that is just the card this run needs, but the former may be several multiples of the price of the latter's entire purchase price.

Just a personal anecdote, I used to work on a F2P game years ago before I knew these things. Once, I wrote a visual effect for some dragons that players had to pay for which used some pretty fancy shader code. As a consequence of said fancy shader code, some low-end devices with poor ES2 standard support didn't run the shader properly. One day, we had a crazy lady drive to our office across interstate lines, about a 16 hour drive, and she threw a tantrum because she thought that we had "scammed" her out of getting the visual effect she paid for (I guess she was older and didn't realize it was just a bug). Some people get way too invested in this stuff, and as moral human beings we have to be mindful of that and not just blame the crazy person.

People in Venezuela were forced to play RuneScape in order to make money for quite a few years. Prior to that in China, people were forced to play world of warcraft to farm gold to make money. I don't think it's just a first world problem.

Hades, It takes two are two of the recent game of the year winners that wholesale rejected exploitative monetization