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I haven't seen much of what he says in general so I don't know if he has a really antagonistic trend in his he talks.

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

There should be no monetization design in a video game. The design should be make your game good so people will buy it.

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.

Hard agree. "Monetization design" is almost universally a euphemism for casino-style addiction mechanics whose sole purpose is to habituate users to continue feeding quarters into the slot so the good feelings don't stop.

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.

If you are going to have casino monitization, it is still better to consider it earlier than try to bolt it on at the very end.

> 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.

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

In principle I don’t entirely disagree that the pendulum has swung way too far towards monetization and away from pure vision in video game design, but it’s funny you mention chefs not compromising…the restaurant business is notoriously low margin and very many new restaurants fail quickly.

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…

I'm not saying don't charge what is necessary. I'm saying monetization shouldn't be part of the experience you are creating.

If you are going to have it, still better to consider implementation and mechanics early, opposed to try to bolt it on to a mostly finished game. I would agree that intentionally planning to do the latter is idiotic.

That's the answer to the wrong question. You shouldn't even be considering adding monetization into the game. Because you are "fucking evil" if you do.

But the question in the quote was about early versus late addition.

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

Hmmm...

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.

No it's not comparable to that. Adding things to the pizza/car is a decision you make prior to using/consuming the good. I have no problem with games doing the equivalent. E.g. you purchase any DLC or costumes or cosmetics or whatever BEFORE starting the game. The evil part is making monetization part of the game. I would also find it evil for a car to suggest "Buy the vacation increased range package for 49.99$ and have 50 extra kilometers of range for the next 2 weeks", while you car battery is at 10%.

Yeah, you are right. Intrusion level is different and way more peedatory.

It doesn’t have to be “politically” correct to simply not call your critics idiots. Long long before PC was a term, it was never acceptable to use this kinda language in a business/work context. Not to mention the utter disrespect in calling someone (not the idea or criticism) a ‘fucking idiot’. Even worse when that someone is your customer.

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.

It's hard to see what else it could mean in this context. I've seen a lot of cosmetic-based monetization strategies I really have no issue with, and in general they seem like a great way to let people who really like the game choose to pay more for it. But if you're considering monetization from the beginning, doesn't that mean your core design is making a tradeoff between fun and transactability?

No, it’s not a trade off because the 2 concepts are not mutually exclusive. Through innovation they can be greater than the sum of their parts.

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

"Less politically correct"? He called his own customers "fucking idiots" for not liking what he's selling. It reminds me of impotent men who blame feminism for their lack of a sex life, it's ridiculous. Perhaps you meant "irreverent," which is a more apt description.

What's ridiculous here is what it reminds you of, which makes you look worse than him.

He's just open and honest about his thoughts and feelings about some people, but you, on the other hand, are definitely, at least, weird.

The analogy is people who blame other's reactions to them on the people themselves instead seriously contending with the claim and at least looking inward.

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.

This the worst analogy.

I haven't worked with Unity, but I'm assuming they get a percentage of the money spent through microtransactions and monetized content? They're essentially a platform, kind of like the Apple app store, and taking a cut?

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.

They don't get a cut. It's a per seat model. Everyone seems to think Unity has some incentive to push IAP and they don't.

If your game doesn't make money, your studio collapses and Unity loses a customer. They do have an incentive but it's indirect.

Reading the full quote, I would not bet on Unity even having an option of a per-seat subscription in five years. They're moving to capture a cut of every microtransaction, looking at how they speak and the acquisitions they're making.

Nah, it's just that ads are a much better growth business, and gaming ads are super profitable.

Growth is generally king for tech companies.

Huh? I'm pretty sure that unity act as an ad server, and take some money from it. As do iron source, for that matter.

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...

What is your point? My point is that they're not incentivized to push games towards abusive MTX like the parent hypothesized.

And you based that point on unity's licence being per seat, implying that they don't have a profit incentive to push for IAP/ads.

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.

What do you think the IAP incentive is for Unity? It's just one of the cross platform features they wrap. It's surfaced on the pricing page because it sells the engine but there's no monetary incentive to Unity if you use it or not.

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

So fundamentally, ad prices in the mobile game ecosystem are driven by life time value. IAP is the biggest contributer to LTV, this Unity care about this. I'd like to know which portion of their revenue is bigger, but I can guarantee that the ads business is growing faster.

It’s obvious why he would think it; it’s less obvious why he would say it.

Everything is obvious when you don't look up the underlying facts that lead to the conclusion, I guess.

Godot seems to gain popularity. Maybe it has a chance to become the choice for indies.

at the microsoft game hackathon thing in 2019 at their HQ in NYC, godot was pretty common choice. I think i saw it more than unreal actually (anecdotally, I don't know the actual aggregate). seems to be gaining popularity.

It's very easy to get into, and very light weight so I'm not surprised. I'm not sure how well it'd scale into a large team or for a commercial project, but it's gaining heaps of steam.

What's the current portability proposition of Godot? Unity and UE4 allow indies to cross-platform relatively easily.

ori runs on unity? Why don't we have a linux native build?

The vast majority of Unity/Unreal games don't have native Linux builds despite the engines ostensibly having native Linux support. Developers don't see it as worth the QA/support hassle, especially now that they can do nothing and still get Linux customers thanks to Proton.

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.

I seriously could not care less about proton, it is basically a gigantic and massive money sink hole and literaly disgusting software, actualy quite microsoft grade.

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.

Fully cross-platform for the usual suspects on desktop, mobile and web.

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...

Except that developers do not take advantage of that, and here I am reversing UE Blueprint bytecode to make games working on Wine.

I've been using Unity happily for 7+ years at this point, willfully ignoring all other engines because Unity is easy to use and has native C# support.

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.

Godot has a big 4.0 release coming up, currently on alpha 11: https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-0-alpha...

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.

Thanks for the heads up! Adding this to my learning bookmarks.

I've used Godot back when I was developing VR games. I've started out with Unity, and then switched to Godot, and never looked back. Godot makes developing games so much easier and more fun, and it's open source.

Unusual!

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.

It's an important life lesson for anyone to learn that money is not success. An artist who makes enough to live but doesn't produce works of art specifically to make money is a success. They have many things to teach you about your craft, though true you would be a fool to ask them how to get rich.

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.

Yep.

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.

he used to be pretty high up in EA. He also worked at a PE firm that especialized in media, although I think better of PE firms than most people. Point being is that I am not surprised at his revenue driven perspective.

He was president and COO from 1997 to 2004 and CEO from 2007-2013.

He's the Larry Ellison of games.

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.

As an aside, Universal Paperclips is the best clicker game I've played and has zero monetization.

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

Well, that and the fact that their rendering engine isn't really competitive with Epic, who do get it ....

I think it does do him favors.

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.

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

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.

That's just sticking your head in the sand and pretending that you can't see all of the indie devs that are wholeheartedly using microtransactions and injecting ads into their games. You can opine about how Unity should be a pure game engine for pure-hearted indie devs who make games out of passion, not filthy lucre. But that doesn't match reality, I'm afraid.

I wouldn't call these business-first, ethics-be-damned people "indies". Not because no true Scotsman, but because of how they self-identify, which from my experience tends to be temporarily embarassed CEO fatcats.

I mean, like it or not, it kinda sounds like this is the guy who should be in charge of Unity. Strong leaders are willing to tell people things they don't want to hear. Weak leaders regurgitate PR and marketing softball garbage and have no vision. To him, with all the data and knowledge he has, it's probably night and day obvious the difference in sustainability between studios that incorporate a recurring revenue model and those that don't. I don't think he's saying "no game should ever not have micro-transactions". I think he's saying "in this day an age, if you're serious about building a sustainable studio, growing to the type of success fledgling studios imagine, and leveraging the Unit platform to help you do it, you're gonna need some recurring revenue component somewhere in your portfolio and that's why we have invested in tools to make that easier for people".

Strong leaders are willing to tell people things they don't want to hear.

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.

Easy to say, for sure.

It's also pretty easy to do, actually. The not being an asshole part, anyways.

Is the dude an asshole? I don't know anything about him other than this discussion here. I'm certain most people have said something to the effect of "those people are fucking clueless" in their lives. Does that make them assholes?

Does that make them assholes?

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

We’re talking about gaming here and the fact someone said “fucking idiot.” You’ve just used asshole is your response, so collectively we should get off our high horses, and recognize that in the real world people swear constantly. It’s not even like this was laser focused at one specific person, in my opinion this title is more evil and misleading than what he said.

We haven't been talking about the mere fact of someone saying that -- but rather the context in which it was said, and to whom it was addressed.

These being very, very different things.

This guy gets it.

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

Key words are "earlier in the process".

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

Who should be in charge of Unity?

> "yes children, once you grow up you'll realize how foolish your idealism has been and you'll stuff your game full of gems you can overpay for!"

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.

He's right one should think about monetization earlier in the development process.

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.

Yes, if you go freemium, you better have the mium part figured out. But this insult clearly also extend to anyone who simply sell their games.

> As someone who has worked at a start up that really took off ... I would say you're incredibly naive

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