It was a great workplace, but I don't think it was adding much value to the world.
The constant rationalization around the office was basically something like: "They're paying for fun, it would otherwise be drinks/movies/real gambling/etc, we're just a different medium". This, of course, completely ignored the boatload of psychological exploitation tricks that we used to keep people playing (and paying). The game mechanics were literally a rigged slot machine. The meta-game was designed to constantly tantalize you with something just out of reach. The monetization was high-pressure, time-sensitive, and used false discounts to increase value ("Get this $20.00 pack for $1.99! Only for the next 60 minutes!")
It got very draining after a while, and I'm much happier now that I've left the industry.
When I left it was Candy Crush that was the top of the field; and we were in awe. They were _always_ rewarding players, and were pushing microtransactions everywhere. It was flashy like a slot machine, and provided a constant stream of "rewards" for continued engagement.
It was a disgusting industry then; it probably still is now. I went into game dev to tell stories and explore worlds, not to sell dope.
It is quite possible to be a relatively competitive player without spending a single cent (and without needing excessive grinding to do so, or at least, no more grinding than a paying player).
This is a lot better than most mobile games (pay more or wait # hours to continue), or games with lootboxes whose results give serious competitive advantage. (There are far too many of the latter to even list.)
But I do dislike any game that depends on any form of microtransaction model. I've no real issue with meaningful DLC for single player games (i.e. the equivlent of the old expansion packs), but otherwise a game should either be a one time cost, or a simple subscription. Not some unholy hybrid of the two as has become all too common.
Fortnite's store UI is designed around limited time access panic sales.
For reference https://twitter.com/jmantheguy/status/970497516566347776?s=2...
One thing that's ironic with a lot of mainstream AAA gaming though, is that even though they aren't copying the revenue model the game design conventions still tend to focus on length of engagement and playtime. I'm sure there's a reason compelling it but I'm not sure what.
Maybe with the advent of digital purchase (and the death of selling your used copy) we’ll see a return to designing games for fun.
The people who play whole night and that are irritable and underperforming during day, who made gaming their whole life, are not playing causual games. They are playing console and pc games.
In contrast a lot of the big mobile games are barely even games. They're just AI controlling your gambled for gacha characters, which are very not cosmetic only. And the games that aren't AI controlled are still just basic turn based battle mechanics with very little strategy (and what is there is vastly less important than just getting better characters, probably by gambling).
I suspect the market of "people who play mobile games" and the market of "people who play PC games" are not even the same kinds of people, and if you tried to release the same stuff that makes money on mobile on PC, you wouldn't actually attract many new players. Likewise if the mobile market ceased to exist overnight, I doubt the players would be that attracted to many PC/console games. They're getting different things out of them.
Of course this is all just speculation, I don't really know.
Is there no Breaking Bad effect because it's all legal?
Couldn’t have been more happy to get out of casual and F2P games four years ago. I honestly thought I might be done making games after that experience.
Thankfully, between doing the indie thing for a few years and starting a new studio last year, it became clear it was the medium and not the craft that was the problem.
Do you mean to say it's specifically a mobile issue?
I don't play them though, since I know I'd spend too much money and time on objects intangible.
The thing that strikes me the most about F2P is how societally acceptible it is. The people for whom the notion of "casinos" doesn't fit their interests can now have their own preferentially targeted equivalent of a casino in their pockets at all times, branded with things like television show franchises that ground them in a sense of familiarity.
This is an accurate description. So many games where people have to pay for the chance to get something. It's even worse than actual gambling since the prize isn't even money. All people get is some numbers in a database.
Another oppressive feature found in most exploitative games is the timer. Through a timer, the progression of free players is rate-limited. There's almost always some kind of resource that's used up whenever players do anything and when they run out of it the timer reveals itself. The game refills the resource on a regular basis.
This creates habits in players. People start out playing normally and next thing they know they're setting alarms to wake them up at 3 AM to do game tasks because that's when the timer resets. This is done deliberately with the goal to increase the number of players who login every day through a mix of positive and negative reinforcement. The timed refills themselves act as a periodic reward which is simple enough. More insidious however is how usually the timers will not start counting down to the next reward until players play the game. Every second the timer is not running is wasted and delays the next reward.
Paying customers can reset this timer at will. They are therefore able to progress at an uncapped rate. This implies the game's true form is a spending competition: the whale who gives the most money to the company for the longest time will win.
Video game addiction is already a recognized medical diagnosis. I have no doubt this trash is at least partly responsible for that. The reputation of the games industry is only gonna go downhill from there.
You can disguise negative information giving it the appearance of a usual positive one (the fake discount).
It's more a property of information than of language, or rather a property of our information processor, so lazy it doesn't check every single piece 3 times but instead rely on habit and context
There's a lot of things that fall on a spectrum, and this fact can be used to pretend that motivations are different to what they really are.
For instance, where is the line between investing and gambling? A friend of mine was looking into setting up a spreadbetting firm once, so he went talking to insiders. It turns out 90% of people lose 90% of their money in 90 days, and that's what several firms told him. But of course they don't lead with this fact, they say they're offering training videos the teach you how to invest in the market, just like proper investors. And it's not even a lie, a lot of the content makes perfect sense and would be found in any "proper" investment house. The real deal is of course that they offer a buzz from massive leverage, and everything about the UI is to make you blow yourself up.
The same story applies for social media. A place to keep in touch with your old friends is a great thing, but realistically, how often are you going to write to your classmates on a classmates-only forum? And how is classmatesforum going to make any money doing that? So we get the ML-powered feed of news/funnies/cutesies reactions that seems to be the modern social web.
They do in the UK; the first one I googled is https://pepperstone.com/en-gb/trading/spread-betting/ and it has a banner accross the top of the page (like a cookie banner, above the header) saying "Spread bets and CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 79.8% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading spread bets and CFDs with this provider.". This is typical here on sites and adverts for sites.
It's designed with childlike graphics and her followers are very young. It's marked as teen in google store.
God even the first review shows how blatant this is:
"I'm really not big on games but this game is the truth. I cant stop playing it. I go to sleep to it. Wake to it. My day is filled with ways of finding new ways to get coins and spins (mainly spins, lol)"
I'm all for legal, regulated online gambling. This not even disguised style of game should be called what it is. Some type of Pachinko in that you don't get money back but some other token. But even worse since you probably can't walk around the corner to exchange easily for real world value.
Call it gambling, verified 18+, and regulate it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moonactive...
and companies exploit these things and make tons of money, sad.
What would be more useful if they listed the expected number of loot boxes you need to buy to get an item. "2% chance" reads differently than "you'll need to buy about 50 loot boxes, on average, to get that item".
You could probably get virtually everyone by simply defining it as a game with in app purchases that provide probabilistic or in game performance improvements.
If they can sell levels but not swords nothing of value will be lost.
Yes, they would. The lottery is about giving up something of little value ($1 or $2) for some entertainment and the chance at a truly life-changing situation. I doubt anyone is unaware there's almost no chance they win, and that they're losing on every dollar they spend. Interestingly, the lottery is occasionally +EV to play.
I otherwise agree, people are bad at gambling, probabilities, and understanding the long term. I play poker, and poker players are constantly furious that their 80% favorite hand doesn't win 100% of the time. 80% feels like a lock.
Some people don't care. They want to gamble, and they have no regard for what they lose in the process. I think many humans are just wired this way, or perhaps it's cultural.
But I wouldn't bet on it.
Ten thousand years ago doing something risky might result in you going from being a male with no prospects to having a harem with 50 wives. It makes sense that when your ancestors could have made a risky gambled (say raiding the village next door), they’d go for it, much like someone will put everything on 21 Black because the payoff could be so big.
Evolution is not a god. And it does not build perfect organisms.
A RNG machine that's slightly directed towards optimal variation still spews out a bunch of rubbish
I think people at least initially have better grasps on things like 50-50 chances or 10% chances, even if other gambling fallacies kick in the more you play them.
1 in 293 million for Powerball
Just because someone wins doesn't mean it will be you
I always liked an interview by one of the designers of the game XCOM which relies heavily on showing players probabilities. Apparently behind the scenes on lower difficulties, even though they might show you 85% chance of success, they tweak it under the hood to be closer to 95% because that is where the player's emotional weighting is. They want the players to have fun and that is certainly one way to go about it.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/266891/Jake_Solomon_expl...
Wish that were true. Organizers usually take 90% of the money. Just a tiny percentage is paid out.
Like Voltaire said: "Lotteries are a tax on stupidity"
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/05/how-voiltair...
I've only been in one lottery and I was forced to enter against my wishes - that was the draft/conscription which, unfortunately, I did win - along with many others.
If I've an interest in lotteries/gambling then it's to question why I'm so disinterested in the subject compared to others. I've not been able to answer that adequately.
It is expected that that one or two dollars is more likely to result in a life changing situation if saved and properly invested - this is difficult in the modern world since a lot of large institutions are out to short-change the little guys but it still remains true.
I can easily see the value proposition of regular casino gambling - you're slowly losing money for the experience - but for the lottery your money is being transformed into a ticket that is, essentially, worthless.
I am strongly morally opposed to the lottery as a form of government income supplement since spending on lotteries tends to be weighted toward lower income and is extracting revenue from those less able to bear it. Lotteries are an extremely regressive tax.
That all said I think the EV of a lottery ticket is probably quite a bit higher than Starbucks and those sell gangbusters. A lot of our society is oriented toward exploiting addiction.
Mobile gaming is disgusting. And the few good developers that make good "traditional" games don't make enough money to keep developing.
So either you did f2p, or you paid $50 and got a full game, or some linear combination of both.
I liked that game and paid $50 for it.
I never did spend any money on it though.
this misses the core issue. a game like path of exile is completely playable for free - and they release new content quarterly and yearly (again, for free). a game like Raid Shadow Legends is not - you very rapidly hit a paywall and it would take years of free play to acquire power equivalent to spending $100.
the exploitative nature is pay to win, where youre simply playing a different game unless you spend money.
Say you can buy max-level weapons/characters/whatever for a defined price. The meta rapidly breaks down to "this is the highest yield of power per dollar" and "the optimal build costs exactly USD 1143.76."
It's not compelling for new players to say "I know that I'm going to eventually spend eleven hundred bucks if I love this game." You can't dangle the chance of getting a super-powered item on that first 99 cent lootbox to get someone on the IAP treadmill. I'd expect the game design itself would have to feature hard breakpoints to trigger a purchase/hundred hour grind moment.
And then, how do you convince the whales to pony up 5 and 6 figures once they possess an optimal build? Fashion and equivalent power churn only goes so far.
If we're counting on adults "knowing better" which makes it okay to play these games while the industry profits on precisely those adults that don't then there's a problem.
For example, I always felt that League of Legends had a good F2P-with-purchases model. There are a lot of characters you can play as, but you have to either unlock them by playing or pay a couple dollars to unlock one. But the more expensive characters aren't necessarily more powerful, they're typically just newer, and it doesn't take much play to unlock a character.
Once a character is unlocked, there are skins you can purchases with money, but they're purely cosmetic.
Yep, I've pasted that link in the past. It's now a proper classic.
Meanwhile ads displayed in the app offer me “real money” and “millions each month” playing cards or by “putting my finance at risk” or playing similar addictive games.
(Yes, I paid for the game but there are ads for extra scores)
- Upton Sinclair
The idea that you can engineer yourself an addictive game is a silly concept.
That games en masse are evolving for maximal "addictiveness" is unquestionable, but has entirely different implications.
If you look only at examples of successful things and say "it is addictive" but don't look at the same principles as applied to failed examples of the same thing, then you're being intellectually lazy.
In order to establish some facet as "addictive" it needs to work both ways, otherwise you're just using "addictive" as a synonym for "successful" -- Edison's light bulb was "addictive" and people were "addicted" to Pullman cars. But you get to carry all the negative connotations of "addictive"; you're trying to let the informal do all the work while positing nonsensical equivalences.
The rebuttal was: "this is literally what casinos do"
The rebuttal to that was: "well, some casinos fail"
Which isn't really a point. Some casinos fail, that doesn't show that they don't optimize for addiction. It just indicates that optimizing for addiction is necessary but not sufficient for a casino to maintain solvency.
I read it as pointing out that success isn't guaranteed with an addictive game model.
I did not read it as saying that some games don't or cant optimize for addictiveness.
I believe this statement can be applied to the vast majority of jobs, or capitalistic endeavors in general. Not to defend them in any sort of way, as I abhor these practices, but I think we should acknowledge that reality (and perhaps work our way out of it, somehow)