Comment by chomp
3 years ago
Yeah, this is gross. He has a point that when you are selling a game, you're in it for a non-zero amount of profit, so you do have to think about compulsion and keeping people coming back to the game - if people aren't drawn back over multiple sessions then they're going to walk away thinking they spent money for 2 minutes of playtime and they'll be upset.
But the context of the question was moving monetization earlier in the development process. This is something that winds up feeling very broken in most games. You can tell when the game is a fleshed out around a scaffold of "how can we extract payment" and it always feels lame. In fact, some of my favorite games are the opposite - the core gameplay is built out, and then the monetization is added as a cosmetic store.
> if people aren't drawn back over multiple sessions then they're going to walk away thinking they spent money for 2 minutes of playtime and they'll be upset
The solution to that is to git gud and build a game that's actually enjoyable to play, not wireheading players with dirty tactics.
are you suggesting that game dev labor should be valued by society in other ways than via the market? the market finds that this type of monetization is more profitable. why does HN turn anti-capitalism when it comes to games?
The way the psychology of gambling has entered the games industry has indeed produced more money, but at the same kind of costs that the gambling industry has always created.
I don't advocate for killing this new gaming industry, just as I don't advocate for killing the more traditional gambling industry, but both need much stricter supervision than most markets because they attack a weak point in human psychology, and taken too far, they harm humanity more than they generate value.
In the end any "distortion" of the market requires a strong justification, but I think the justifications used against the gambling industry have always been pretty compelling, and they appear to apply just as well to modern games industry techniques.
Another way to put it is that the "value to society" of modern games techniques contains a negative externality: damage to the players comparable to that of gambling addictions. You could solve it with the equivalent of a carbon tax, though defining the cost of different tactics feels impossible, so I'd argue that the traditional gambling restrictions are a better fit (illegal in many places, illegal for children, legal limits, requiring various warnings and protections to discourage extreme behaviours, high taxes, etc).
Many families play boardgames with their children at home. Fewer visit blackjack tables. I think theres a fair argument that these broadly match the different financial strategies in the games industry. How much of this behaviour is parental wisdom and how much is limited accessibility thanks to legal restrictions is a hard question to answer, but I have a suspicion that the world would be a worse place with unrestricted gambling. But kids _do_ sit at home opening lootboxes as their parents watch tv, I'm not sure if the effects are much different.
In all honesty, I would advocate for killing this "new gaming industry" in its entirety. We already invented gambling, and it's called "gambling".
I'm sick and tired of dark patterns winding their tentacles into every aspect of our digital lives - it's tiring, and predatory on the little self-control and attention that I have remaining. We didn't need casino-isation of our games before, so we don't need it now.
Not anti-capitalist, quite the contrary, you deserve to be compensated for the fruits of your labor at a rate that the market will bear.
However, there's what the market will bear, and what the market can be coerced into paying. The latter is definitely more money than the former. The point at which you step into a game and then are psychologically manipulated into spending more than you otherwise would have, that isn't right. Building out gameplay loops that are only fun if you fork over more cash after you've invested considerable time into the application and leveraging the sunk cost fallacy to pull more cash out of your user, do you really respect your consumer at that point, or their wallet?
People are free to build what they want. I'm allowed to call it gross. I'm also allowed to say that those gameplay mechanics feel broken and not fun.
Run a thought experiment next time you play a game. If money was no object, and you were able to pay the developer the average value of their customer (total revenue divided by their total downloads), and in return, all purchase screens are removed, would that game be even more fun? In my experience, they'd usually wind up being a husk, a very generic, boring gameplay loop with nothing enticing. That's how you know that the enticement is actually manipulation.
I agree the market isn’t aligned with fun or respect for consumers
Because it's common consensus that capitalism went way too far with games. Microtransactions and/or ads and dark patterns are endemic, diminishing enjoyment of games and unduly robbing people of attention/money. Online activation is a thing. And it's not that it's "fine not to do these things", because there are so many offenders, both high and low-profile, that it seems "all right" to do these things to developers who are still on the fence, which poisons the pool even more than it already is.
are you saying that capitalism innately has a good solution for games, but that it became slightly ill and can be reformed back to excellence? seems odd to promote “capitalism, but not like this”
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Capitalism is one of the words that are so general and used for so many phenomena it often becomes useless in a conversation. One can think some market behavior is unethical and to be opposed by individual action, but not see an acceptable political way to remedy this. I don't generally subscribe to this type of thinking, but it is a position. People also tend to see production of culture as something that should be different from producing/selling cars or potatoes.
Besides, people seem to call "capitalism" a set of laws and regulations that are good for current large capital holders, and freely extracting money from people if you have superior psycho/marketing and lawyer power. But there is a vast, vast space of possible regulatory conditions that would still be essentially capitalist in how economy functions.
For the same reason people turn anti-capitalism when it comes to art and music.
There's more reasons for a game to exist besides making big bucks.
The problem is that those AAA games people demand are not possible to make without those big bucks. People demand to be paid and that work does cost a ton of money.
So careful what you ask for. Even an indie developer needs to pay bills and put food on the table somehow. Very very few game developers got rich developing games, in most of the studios burnout and attrition because of the extremely toxic work environments are common too.
That doesn't mean that stuffing ads, subscriptions and microtransactions everywhere is the only way forward. However, saying that "there's more reasons for a game to exist besides making big bucks." sounds like you are suggesting that the developer of the next Call of Duty sequel should be working those 60-80 hour weeks only for their personal enjoyment from delivering something for the gamer to play (and then loudly complain online and demand this or that - or else!) and sense of dedication to their fanbase.
That really doesn't work like that.
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I agree and hope it would provoke wider reflection beyond how it affects the HN crowd on their couches