torstai 28. marraskuuta 2013

gaming or gaming?

Here's an interesting tidbit I read a few days ago. I'm quoting the text in full from Notzed's blog here:

Is it gaming or gaming?

The other big thing to come to light is the attempt to push the revenue model up significantly higher than the selling-disks model will ever be able to provide.

Here in Australia 'gaming' generally refers not to computer games, but to the computerised gambling industry. An awful lot about the intended revenue models (and mobile/tablet 'free to play games' in general) share a lot with this despicable industry which prays on people psychologically to fleece them of their cash. Even the words being thrown around like 'whales' come from directly that industry.

And gaming is big money compared to the computer game industry.

Unfortunately it seems 'computer games' are going to be headed at least in some part toward this gambling revenue model; anywhere there is this much money to be had it will be sought out actively. Companies that don't embrace it will be fighting for the scraps but hopefully they'll be able to survive and hopefully this is just a passing fad (or gets regulated out of the market).

This suddenly made a lot of sense to me. This past autumn I have followed the game industry events in europe, especially the UK. The trend seems to be that the gambling industry is developing ties with computer game companies. I wondered why those loathsome fuckers are accepted in the gaming events at all but now it's pretty obvious really. The mechanisms of gambling seem to be infiltrating the proper games industry as well.

Cannot say i'm really looking forward to a more complete amalgamation of gambling and gaming. I think that conditioning people to be more accepting towards an industry who's line of business is of basically ripping people off and creating an impression of 'It could be you!'. And the house always wins. What's next, gambling Mario now with crackwhores for kids?

The pay-to-win models work tho. And as a game producer I could reason that we're only supplying a demand. Just like your local meth dealer does. Supply and demand, It's business baby!

I wonder how much the expectation of multi-billion exits affects us startups. If you don't proclaim intentions of making a huge amount of revenue, you are not going to get funded. I think Notzed's observation about companies who are not comfortable with heroin-dealer tactics of ripping people off are accurate. You are left to fight for the scraps.

Our vision is not of pay-to-win or endless IAP's to keep up. The point of Hoodownr is to bring people together. Once purchased, it's yours to enjoy forever. There will be no ads for the most lucrative fields of ad revenue, gambling and pornography. In fact, there will be no ads at all. We feel people get bombed with enough advertisement propaganda already.

In the current state of affairs, I think this is the only sensible way for us and our players. If you're a die hard F2P proponent, think again. Think of all the ad crap that you've been force fed and the gambling-derived business models behind the attractive package. Time to uninstall some software guys.

Sami
Hastur





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