What a tool.
Mmmmm, the “compusion loop”. Remind me not to buy anything he’s had his mitts on.
I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour.
If you’re not a greedy psicopath *, you’re an idiot,
* Redundancy purely for effect
This is what Unity needs… More thought nuggets from EA leadership, known for making their company one of the most hated in the industry.
Take away the hyperbolic language, and he is correct. You need to think about how you are going to monetize your game while you are designing it, not afterwards. That does not mean you have to deploy any particular form of monetization, but if you don’t design with your monetization plan in mind, you are not going to make it very far.
I mean, the traditional model of buying a discrete product once and owning it, and that’s the revenue stream, that’s a monetization strategy. It worked for quite a while; it doesn’t work any more, for most devs. We bitch and moan all the time about how monetization decisions clash with gameplay, atmosphere, enjoyment, and all that, and the way to avoid those problems is to build the game from the ground up with everything integrated into a seamless experience. That’s the message I’d take from this. You can, sure, take it as “robber baron says rob MOAR!” but I think at face value behind the drama he is making a vital point about the modern game industry.
Take away the hyperbole and all I still see is a complete tool.
Sadly, he can be a tool and still have a good point. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I mean perhaps in your mind that’s a meaningful difference and one you can separate out but it’s not for me because this is the same guy who the day before announced the purchase of IronSource.
Are you saying that devs need to plan DLC in advance, or in order for a game to be financially successful devs need to shift to subscription/cosmetics/pay to win?
You’re right, this is true.
I guess I long for the days of monetization of a game being simply
Make fun game → sell lots of copies
Really? It’s an uphill battle, sure, but so is mobile free-to-play (unless you already have the money to dominate user acquisition), games-as-a-service, and AAA with microtransactions (unless you’re a well-established franchise). None of these are close to a guarantee, and the big swings with potential big payoffs also come with big risk. There isn’t one right business model, there’s the best business model for your game.
So yeah, if you want to sell your game, you’re better off if you’re thinking from the beginning about how you’re going to do that. If that’s all Riccitiello is saying, then ho-hum, that’s obvious. But he’s actually selling a particular strategy that seems to have to do with early access, monetized and ad-driven. That’s fine for some games, but a creator that isn’t interested in RIccitielo’s product isn’t a fucking idiot.
https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1547676251912974338
I bet Kenney does pretty well for himself off donations.
Absolutely true. What I’m reacting to is what I see a lot, not necessarily or particularly here, but in a lot of parts of the gaming world, which is this idea that any consideration of how you are going to actually make money on a game is antithetical to the creative process. That, I think, though not really idiotic is short-sighted. And, if you know that the game you are working on is going to be monetized in specific ways, not considering that in your design and creative process seems to be unwise.
I agree that one size does not fit all, but for many major, AAA type releases, it sure seems as if the traditional model of monetizing off of one sale per customer, one time, is no longer viable. And even the DLC model requires you to consider that part of the equation as you are making the game, lest the DLC be either disconnected from the core experience or the core experience get truncated.
And yeah the way this guy made his point is execrable, and offensive to many developers.
I get that, but I don’t have a dog in that fight, and while I recognize his name I don’t have any real interest in him or his career shenanigans. Or in those of Unity, but if I did, I could definitely see how I might feel differently.
Plan in advance, that’s all. As in, you can’t design it without thinking about it along the way, if you want it to work.
Are you sure that’s not just the particular bloc of indies who aren’t really looking for financial stability or success? Because there are quite a few of those, and that’s totally fine for them. I bet pretty much any developer that is looking to make a living wage off their work and who has control over business decisions is almost always going to evaluate their business model. It doesn’t mean they’ll make wise choices, but they’re worried about it!
Arguably that’s only because they keep making them bigger and more expensive. I mean, I get it: Maybe they think that if the new Assassin’s Creed doesn’t look like the best thing gamers have ever seen that they’ll lose market share to God of War or whatever, and maybe they’re right. But why use them as the “general rule” for anything? AAAs are a small fraction of the games being produced, and of the games that are succeeding.
Anyway, I’m not trying to argue with what you’ve said, just adding some color to it, from my perspective in the industry.
Why do they just not raise the price of games? As far as I can remember, the top tier of game prices, in general, has been $60. It has been this way for decades. It would seem reasonable to raise prices to at least account for inflation.
The market has increased enough that instead of selling 100,000 units of a game in 1990 you’d sell 1,000,000 in 2022. I looked for some graphs/data to support this but really all I could find was for sales of consoles and the ubiquitous NES only sold 61milion units while the Switch and PS4 sold over 100million each.
Again, just pulling a theory out of my arse, but it makes sense.
Edit to finish my thought, lol.
So your income from 10X as many games is still more even though the prices/costs are roughly the same (I’m assuming costs of creation of a game is adjusted for inflation).
That and so much more competition keeps the prices around $60-70 baseline (though to get a ‘full’ game including a Season of DLC now runs close to $100 or more-see newer AC games)
Mostly it’s my students in our game studio, a bunch of very smart, very capable young creative people who often go on to jobs at the industry’s big players (one of my recent former students for instance is now a 3D artist at Blizzard, stuff like that). They all want/need to make a living making games, and many are not thrilled with the current monetization trends, yet it is hard to get them to see that thinking about those things early on can give them some control over how the monetization plays out. I am sure there are plenty of devs whose priorities and circumstances allow them a lot of leeway in what they do, though.
I think it’s like a lot of things, where most of what is sold/done comes from one area of the industry, but most of the impact and publicity and critical masses of users is centered on another area. In this case, AAA games still have a disproportionate footprint in the marketplace, largely due to that critical mass. A big game can carve out a player base big enough on its own to be economically important, while the same level of impact is only possible for smaller titles if you aggregate a bunch of them, and that’s not as significant to the money game at least in the short run. Well, that’s my take on it, which of course could be well off base!
Oh, I get it. I am no expert either on this stuff. I personally hate the monetization trends going on, GaaS, constant drip-feeds of DLC, all that. Putting on my pragmatist hat, though, I think anyone going into this industry needs to deeply consider this part of the equation, whatever choice they make, and I can’t hold it against most of them if they decide to go with what is financially smarter. After all, it’s not my dime, and I don’t have an actual right to any specific type of game monetization I suppose.
This part is definitely not true. Games cost a lot more to produce these days, in large part because teams have grown in size significantly.
Ya, that seems correct. I guess that even with costs of AAA games ballooning the increase in market size and thus sales must make up for it. And the addition of an income tail due to DLC or other monetization.