“We Own You” – Confessions of an Anonymous Free to Play Producer
toucharcade.com
toucharcade.com
Obviously virtual slot machines aren't good for players, for the gaming ecosystem or the software ecosystem. Virtual slot machines are proof positive that they exploit people psychologically, since there's absolutely no rational reason to play a zero-payout gambling game. More importantly, these apps make up 1/11th of the top 200 grossing on the App Store, sucking money and talent out of riskier and more rewarding pursuits.
It's unfair though to look at what the producer describes and say free to play gaming is this huge existential crisis of conscious. Anything near the end (i.e., end user) of the value chain is going to be dealing with people's demographics, their wants and needs, etc. Of course game developers are interested in their player's features, no more differently than stores use loyalty cards, magazines survey their readership, etc.
There's a consequence to what you're saying: The only honest work doesn't deal with the end user. Maybe if you're building database testing tools you're doing a total social positive. Well, we can't all work for infrastructure companies messing around with Haskell libraries all day.
Who do you think is using all those elegant hierarchies, those pickaxes in the app goldrush? The producer says they integrate forty SDKs! That's forty different tech startups, some of them with billion dollar valuations.
What created AWS? The intensive, pathological tracking of people's preferences in book buying. What created all of Google's server infrastructure? The intensive tracking of people's searches. I'm not saying forfeit your values or principals. But the alternatives to free to play gaming are just less obviously exploitative.
Honest work is software which doesn't violate the customer's rights and privacy. There's no bonus points for merely not breaking the law and I can guarantee you that this producer is breaking the law big time in the EU. There's always the choice of selling software for money, but you and many other producers have given up your morals a long time ago in exchange for IAP and ad dollars, so you're blind when it comes to recognizing them.
There are many companies in this world, some will succeed, a lot won't. If the alternative is having human beings treated like rats in a maze, it would be better for society that those startups creating SDKs would simply die.
> You want to put a stop to this? Stop playing free games. Buy a game for 4.99 or 9.99.
No. The only solution is to stop playing games that exploit people's privacy in such a way. No matter what you pay for them.
What about people who can't tell how bad they're being exploited? Well, for starters, paying 4.99 is not going to suddenly make them able to tell. Surely paying may make them believe the game is more honourable, but that's really the same spiel all over again, is it not?
No it's much simpler. Just get your games from a company in a jurisdiction where this shit is illegal. Like in the EU.
Just like people are sometimes wary of certain foreign brand electronics having cheaper chips or whatnot in them, now you know what US-based game companies are legally allowed to do to their users. And the lengths they will go to do it.
> We don’t want to be making games like this, and we don’t want another meeting about retention, cohorts or churn.
And please. "Look at what you made us do!", have some personal responsibility.
thank you.
That answers one question I had. How to target the whales. I remember one free-to-play pay-to-win game I played where they had a promotion to get a random chance of getting a new OP character. On the first day, one player had 9 maxed out. The forums calculated the player likely spent somewhere between $30-50K to get them. I then realized how big a deal "whales" are in games. A big enough whale can employ a dev for a year.
~75% of revenue from ~2% of users, broken down in all sorts of interesting ways.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/emily_greer/dont-call-them-whales-...
"Facebook is going gangbusters because of ads for free-to-play games, developers are excited about the chance to cash in via Facebook ads, Google and Twitter are trying to mimic Facebook’s success, and Google and especially Apple are hanging their app store hats on the amount of revenue generated by in-app purchases.
In other words, billions of dollars in cold hard cash, and 20x that in valuations are ultimately dependent on a relatively small number of people who just can’t stop playing Candy Crush Saga."
Maybe for a few minutes. I like to think I'm good at analysing game mechanics, as a long time gamer and sometimes amateur game designer. So I mostly avoid F2P games. The tactics are repulsive to my tastes, and I can smell them from a mile away. When there's a choice between struggling to meet a challenge by improving my skill, or paying my way though, my inclination is to take a 3rd choice: stop playing this and do something else. So I much prefer paying up front for a game. I'm old-school that way.
Maybe this option is viable, as a 'serious' gaming hobbyist, only temporarily. But right now, the best games (in my genres of choice) are sold on the traditional purchase model. They are PC and console games.
Generally, I don't like 'endless' games; I prefer a game to have an ending: I play it, experience it 'fully', finish it, then move on to something else.
(But... just to undermine everything I've stated above, I am playing Pac Man 256. It has good gamefeel. I'll play it until I get all the powerups, perhaps. No interest in high-scores...)
tl;dr: IMO F2P games are inferior instances of the artform. Be cool like me and play superior PC and console games.
Also, Jonathan Blow has some interesting points to make on how the payment form of games (and entertainment in general) affects their structure/quality. This is the one where he talks about addictive mobile Skinner box games [x]
There may be benefits for AAA gamers to these games that collect/analyze massive amounts of data - I wouldn't be surprised if some of this analysis leads studios to stumble across really engaging/fun patterns that are applicable to AAA games. As an example, I've heard discussion of how analytics has raised game "shininess" (basically making every screen tap/game interaction viscerally satisfying) to the level of an artform - I'm assuming that this has led to knowhow that EA/Blizzard/Rockstar have gone on to apply to some degree in $60 box games.
Let's be specific. I extolled the superiority of AAA. (Edit: I admit I wasn't specific before. I said PC and console, and the 'best' games.) I don't think Metal Gear Solid 5 or Bloodborne mine my data and try to sell me endless IAP trinkets.
But I did give my the PlayStation service access to my Facebook and Twitter to I could post screenshots. So maybe they're already doing datamining there, and it's only a matter of time before everything goes totally corrupt and shit.
But it's a totally different economic model. £40-50 per game. For the time being, I reckon I'm safe.
And that's ignoring MMOs. I don't think anyone can say WoW isn't "AAA".
But there's less of an incentive to mine data and go whale-hunting when you are paid up a flat fee (whether up front, or regular subscription) by your customers.
Of course, it's all software and can change at any moment.
Imagine that you lament on Twitter "I just don't time to play X as much as I'd like!" and then someone else pops up and asks "oh, have you fought Y? Did you find [unique drop] yet?" Then next time you're in the game, you get that special drop.
All of it appears to be unconnected and random but odds are you'll go back to that person to celebrate and be hooked again.
(This is an off the cuff scenario, the actual scenarios are probably way more mature.)
In all those years - none. Not even close. Best notifications from Google Now is occasional weather reminders (because, duh, after an year they noticed I check them almost daily), which is very far from being useful. Steam - the platform that should know my gaming habits - had almost never offered me games that I was interested in (although "item from your wishlist is on sale now" surely worked). Music stores don't have a single clue of what I like and what I don't and all they do is some awfully rough genre matching which is nearly disappointing.
So, companies - gaming or else - surely have tons of data but I somewhat doubt they can use it any meaningfully, at least from consumer perspective (but hey, If they don't make me open the wallet and don't advertise them - it doesn't work for them too, right?) Wonder if the companies are somewhat hyping themselves on importance of this data and how it helps them, than it really does.
We are not the targets. I would doubt someone here ever spent $10k-$50k on a free to play game. And I believe they know it.
The interesting part of the article was where they specifically targeted one of their whales. They found out which American football teams he liked and introduced in app items that matched those colors so he would buy them.
Casinos are well known to get as much information about their players as possible, and to get their high rollers to keep coming back.
Retail stores have done the same. (See How target figured out a girl was pregnant [1]).
With technology providing more and more information and indirect insight into our lives, it's only a matter of time until everybody does the same. The only way to prevent it (as best as possible) is simply to not play/not link to facebook/etc.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...
Hypothetically (but I've seen it in action): I don't necessarily sign up for the players club yet, I walk in and walk up to 3 machines and put a dollar in. Lose -> lose -> minor win. Then I say "oooo I'm going to keep playing with this money!" then I end up losing more than I originally had on hand.
I guess it could be as simple as they're watching you but it's got to be fairly easy to automate. "Hmm this guy weighed 215.3lbs when he came in, that's guy id 1528." then just have a small window. I'm sure there are other 215lb people there but it's not that vital... lol Anyone have any insight as to whether or not I'm just insane?
Changing the odds of the machine is a ton of work.
Oh, that's illegal :-)
It's easy to weigh a few pounds differently between waking up and going to sleep. Much of that is lost through breathing.
Besides all of that, we're talking about within a few hours here not day to day. I just mean to give the person that beginners luck then drive them to keep playing. Obviously the accuracy wouldn't be all that vital but it could save the casino a lot of money if they're keeping track of that kind of stuff even if they only have a 50% accuracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis#Biometric_identi...
Which is why it is illegal in the EU.
“And if you are a whale, we take Facebook stalking to a whole new level. You spend enough money, we will friend you. Not officially, but with a fake account. Maybe it’s a hot girl who shows too much cleavage?”
Why would people friend random accounts of people they don't know?
We have browser ad-blockers; I want something that works system-wide.
AdAway is a hostsfile-based system-wide domain blocker.
I recently learned of uBlock Origin, a browser plugin. Its author calls it an HTML firewall. This is the sort of functionality I think is ideal: it blocks tracking by default, by preventing connections to a list of ad servers, but is fully customisable.
http://cydia.saurik.com/package/com.saurik.privacy/
These days many casual gaming companies have rolled their own analytics which can't be effectively blocked without rendering the game inoperable.
That said, this guy is hamming it up a bit and conflating the practices of his own company with the entire industry.
I think it routes traffic through their servers, so you have to trust them with your traffic.
I'm assuming the reference is to literally targeting a single person, but how much money can they make selling the 'whale' these additional IAP items, compared to the effort involved in having to research him and create them?
There are people out there who have a lot more money than us, and are willing to spend it to be entertained. For a lot of games, their idea of a "whale" is someone who spends a couple hundred bucks a month on swag; at that level it's not worth trying to target individual buyers. For some games, though, it's someone who they can get to spend $50,000 on a set of vanity items. If someone is already dropping thousands of dollars on your game, that suggests it might be profitable to have someone gather info on them and see if they have a passion you can target. And often, you can create a whole class of "premium" items for very little work, just slapping a custom skin and a +5% bonus on top of a pre-existing game object.
[0] Descent. http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php to set up the originals; http://descendentstudios.com/ for the upcoming prequel
Talking about other humans in such a disassociated way. At least one armed bandits in vegas don't create fake facebook profiles for some scheme to extract more money from you.
(A few years ago, someone said that social game developers are like heroin dealers and regular game developers are like weed dealers. It's a very apt comparison)