Or, you know, invested in building games where people retrospectively assess their time spent with the game as enriching rather than exploitative.
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
The same reason that a restaurant that charged you for water, more if it's cold or hot outside, by the second for the time you spent inside it, an extra gratuity if you used the restroom, more if you sat at a 4-person, instead of a 2-person table, had rolling ads in a tablet implanted into your table (That you could pay to turn off), etc, etc would be panned.
Even if the food was fine, and the overall cost were similar/lower than its neighbours. Capitalism is dehumanizing, and people don't want to engage with microtransactions in the middle of having their meal.
There's a qualitative difference between dealing with someone who figures out how to provide a good service, and then get paid for it, and dealing with someone who figures out how to get paid, and then tries to build a good service around it. The latter tends to look like that restaurant - an utter shit-show, and many people won't really care that you have a three-star Michelin chef making the pasta.
Also, in gaming, the bar from your competitors is high. There are a lot of excellent titles that provide a lot of entertainment without having predatory monetization. If your title does, it'll get panned. (If it doesn't, it'll still get panned for the monetization it does have, but hey, gamers are entitled.)
There's also monetization that crosses straight into gambling (loot boxes of various flavours) - or, alternatively - the apocryphal tale of two cowboys who pay eachother to eat cow patties (designing the game around whales trying to outspend eachother). These are very profitable, if shitty business models, and one should probably be regulated down[1], while the other can't scale - it's limited by the number of whales in the ocean.
[1] There are a few reasonable restrictions to it, that could be introduced - requiring all purchases to be fiat-denominated, as opposed to in a smorgasbord of in-game currencies, and requiring odds & costs to be shown[2] (again, fiat-denominated).
[2] If people want to spend $5,000 gambling for a hat that has an expected cost of $2,000, they are free to do it, but they should be aware of the odds.
>There's a qualitative difference between dealing with someone who figures out how to provide a good service, and then get paid for it, and dealing with someone who figures out how to get paid, and then tries to build a good service around it.
On another note, it's funny to see HN understand that when Google does it, it's borrowed time but scrambling to cram in monetization after you launch a game is the smart way to do it...
You need to have a business model, and the model needs to be complementary to what you are building. The pushback isn't to that, the pushback is when the business model is predatory, and drives the design.
The complaints are at best projection of general sentiment from an industry trend.