Comment by OskarS

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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".

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.