As a game developer making games that many players would call evil (IAPs, IAPs everywhere.), I tend to prefix my "what do you do?" with "Oh uh, it's not something I'd actually play, but it's called ...". Shame, really.
As a developer I put up as much resistance as possible when it feels absolutely ridiculous - when design becomes more about tricking people into accidentally doing things they didn't want to do. At one point we made the flow for connecting to Facebook pretty ambiguous, where "Skip" meant yes and "Continue" meant no. Eventually that got voted out...
I do often feel a bit conflicted, but to be honest, I don't think we're the worst within our competition (Dungeon Keeper takes that crown, now). I've been playing on our production server since launch with no cheating, and no spending, and I'm doing just fine, and get enough minutes of play time for free to keep me satisfied.
The flip side from the rage we see on things like Reddit, we do receive far more messages and comments about how much people enjoy our game than those who don't. And if people are spending money, they must actually like it, right?
Wow wow wow. That is beyond ambiguous into downright misleading. I've always stayed away from these games because I largely don't find them fun, but now I have the additional reason that they are trying to fuck me from the moment they are installed. I didn't realize it was quite that bad.
Fortunately we argued this one down before it ended up in production.
> when design becomes more about tricking people into accidentally doing things they didn't want to do.
Is that share really worth frustrating users for? Can't you find some way of incentivising sharing better?
Sounds, from what little I know, like the company could do with some long-term thinking. Some ideas for selling that:
1. Would it make sense to increase player happiness? Word of mouth and upselling comes to mind.
2. I assume the company wants to grow - wouldn't it make sense to seek a positive perception at least in game developer circles to have a larger/better hiring pool?
3. I presume you're optimising for daily revenue and daily shares, but maybe there are other relevant metrics you should keep an eye on? Like the number of people who stopped playing (maybe "haven't played in a week"), daily negative ratings vs daily total ratings, perception (sentiment analysis?) etc. Even if you're not optimising for these things, it might stop changes that trade a small increase in revenue for a huge drop in another metric during A/B testing.
Feel free to drop me an email at fhd@ubercode.de if you'd like to chat more about this, I obviously find it fascinating :)
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