Comment by jayd16
3 years ago
That's nice and all but it'll be the last thing your studio does if you didn't think about monetization. Why is "have a business model" so controversial?
3 years ago
That's nice and all but it'll be the last thing your studio does if you didn't think about monetization. Why is "have a business model" so controversial?
> Why is "have a business model" so controversial?
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.
Figuring out if you can sell your game for $1 or $10 is thinking about monetization. Understanding the market is important.
>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...
'Monetisation' as used in modern days refers exclusively to abusive tactics, or so it seems. Figuring out what you can sell your game for is just 'figuring out what you can sell your game for'.
Sure, and likewise, there's thinking about whether or not you're going to be a $1 title, a $10 title, a $30 title, or a free-to-play with cosmetic mtx/expansion mtx/quality-of-life mtx/power mtx.
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.
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because often the people emphasizing business models are insufferable sociopaths that have no interest in making quality products; they'd sell you a fart if they could get away with it... there is healthy space between, but the loudest people in business set a poor stage for the industry and it's so off-putting that many people would rather not think about it at all
cognitive dissonance between loving free market capitalism and having values that the market doesn’t recognize