They’re Killing The Soul of Gaming, And Devs Are FURIOUS About It

it's time to talk about what you could consider the battle for the heart of gaming because i think we see the heart of gaming being eroded as time goes on right we see all the [ __ ] that happens we can have all these discussions about oh this is predatory that's predatory but there's the other discussion of guess what it's just not fun and it's not good for us the people who play video games and we often hear things from developers from media from press today it goes straight to the very top to one of the most powerful and influential people in this industry it is none other than ceo of unity unity is one of the largest game engines the big two you have unity you have unreal john ricatello is this man he previously was the ceo of electronic arts and that does kind of include in around the time where let's just say they got a few fun little rewards for not being particularly popular so when this man calls the sorts of people who make the games that we want to make quote effing idiots that actually matters because unity's not just about building games unity is also deeply ingrained with the likes of monetization as i think it's quite well pointed out here do you really want to build your game without any monetization features like a [ __ ] idiot yes i am one and here's a crazy thing this is new data that's came out from the analytics firm sensor tower i know this particular one is for mobile that's not material to today's discussion but it is riot games now riot games generally are not particularly evil with their microtransactions they're not pulling a diablo mortal they're not doing gacha games in 16 months they've got 800 and something million that's barely any money compared to what gacha can pull in on a daily basis compared to what fifa ultimate team from electronic arts is able to pull in so when the head of it unity is calling people effing idiots i think you know how some of the biggest players in the industry want to move things and of course in the case of unity it's where their shareholders want things to go because unity doesn't just make some money via you know you buying a license no there's the license fees for your games the ongoing money they make if you are making money via their ads platform because this one runs deep and so too will your benefits from this now would you like to save money access more content and be more secure because if you do today's sponsor nordvpn.com forward slash bellator news does just that and it's available at my link with an exclusive deal and a 30-day money-back guarantee so nord it's a vpn lets you browse the web from anywhere as if you're anywhere and that lets you do a lot i regularly use it to access region restricted content on the hellscape that is streaming services and recently via the excellent tom scott i learned that you can even use nordvpn to avoid being price gouged by car rental companies saved him hundreds of pounds they also of course keep you private your isp will not know what 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stock deal and it was designed to bring the advertising technology and experience of iron source to unity so why is john calling people idiots this has got something to do with it of course unity has in fact been doing quite a lot of m a activity sync such weta digital yeah the peter jackson one zeva dynamics parsec interesting and they say that iron source's suite of tools and uh solutions provide the you know the majority of the world's top games and many non-gaming apps with monetization marketing analytics and discovery capabilities yada yada yada yada not the most exciting thing but here's the thing uh unity actually generates quote more than half of its revenue with its operate solutions division which provides ad placement and the like follow the money and as much as there are frustrating things that happen from epic games i don't know this stinks more and there's a reason why a lot of unity developers are frankly furious and they are fed up with what unity is doing because this is just the first in a long line of [ __ ] frankly because this press statement makes it really really damn clear what if that process was no longer first create then monetize okay so what if we decided to um actually not do first create then monetized for our game oh that means that suddenly we're slicing our game up into bits and doing [ __ ] with you well maybe we're putting ads in it maybe maybe it's a gacha game somehow but that's the [ __ ] that they want what if creators had an engine for live games that by default enabled them to gain early indicators of success for their games through user acquisition of their prototype and gave them a feedback loop to improve their games based on real player interactions as early in the process as possible okay yeah user testing that's good [ __ ] but if you remember the video that we just put up i know not many of you watched it but seriously it is about important [ __ ] and that [ __ ] stinks that bad stuff in that video they now want that to be more integrated into the engine that is perhaps making the majority of indie games that are there and many triple a's as well so they say unity iron sources combined offerings will uniquely position the combined company as blah blah blah the only game creation and growth platform for creators and as a part of this big old media tour john ricatello and the svp and general manager of unity create did an interview with pocket gamer with pocket gamer [ __ ] a gamer big players in of course that side of the industry and when they're thinking you know you're thinking about oh you're unity you want to make some money yeah pocket gamer mobile that is the place to go john riccitalo devs who shun monetization are pure brilliant and [ __ ] idiots hmm now john will have some choice words for this publication that we will get to soon so he was speaking with the editor of pocketgamer about this it's basically regarding developers who are not comfortable around integrating monetization into the game development pipeline at the early stages and if just so you know how to parse that that means game developers who make games for you and me sorts of games we want to play and he says that oh ferrari and some high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives it's a very small portion of the industry that works that way and some of those people are my favorite in the world to fight with they're the most beautiful and pure brilliant people they're also some of the biggest [ __ ] idiots well actually john i think ferrari do pretty well for themselves and are you basically just saying that we should have mass commoditized piece of [ __ ] games you're saying we should have junk food fast food games is that not what we think when every single game just has you being a freaking plankto ball falling down the thing just going into some form of mtx is that really it job of course that's what john wants because he's of course the ceo of unity and that's where they're going to be getting their money from that's the plan that's why they did this merger he says you know he's been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody getting to the gray hair and all that and yes fair enough he has been there for a while and he does say that the idea of developers making a game and just you know away it goes he says that is you know it's a philosophy baked into a lot of the art forms and the medium it's something he's respectful of he knows the dedication he knows the care but this industry divides people between those who still hold that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product successful product may not be a good game you know steak the crypto gambling platform successful product bad thing for planet earth bad thing for this planet and the people who live on it therefore [ __ ] it that's the kind of [ __ ] that they're going to want what is your favorite game look like if it is developed with monetization from the very very very beginning in the more deep way that these guys are going to want considering that so much of this stuff is going on on mobile does it look more like diablo immortal or does it look less like diablo mortal obviously it looks more like diablo mortal and here's something i love now you i think you should be offended by this because honestly i felt offended by this i think it offends our intelligence i've seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour sometimes you wouldn't even notice the product difference between a massive success and a tremendous fail but for this tuning and what it does to attrition rate there isn't a developer on the planet who wouldn't want that knowledge in a way yeah but if this is in the context of monetization first then what we basically have is the phenomenon of mobile games that decide to basically just continually edge their customer on to the next spend and the next spent and the next spend so effectively developers who make games that we love who are more concerned with craft and monetization are reduced to as he puts it a minority the old crowd the people who are going to just die off and not exist anymore and you know in spite of them being brilliant they're still [ __ ] idiots and what's concerning especially about how he seems to think of the customers that it's all about these tightly developed compulsion loops that make games a success that's a key word for use your brain's psychology against you as i would put it best games just brilliant and yeah they will fine-tune to have their second to second minute to minute hour-to-hour gameplay to be good yes you do want that to be fine-tuned but in this context ultimately it means that unity understands what sorts of things actually do convert and i think as you can imagine yeah there you go man [ __ ] unity that is from the developer of celeste and towerfall pretty major pretty major person in the indie scene i think we could all agree and then there's that unity seems to be moving away from the part of the games market that actually got them going because unity always used to be about the dem making it more democratized more people can access gaming because oh you can just get unity for free and it's you know super good licensing terms and all of that stuff so here's the sad thing they actually announced a playable game sample project called gagaya now kagaya would be made using their own tools and you could basically download it and you could basically use it as a living resource to you know to start and to just continue through game development these things are awesome especially for a newer person to actually go in dissect the project learn some stuff about the engine all of that and a lot of people looked at this and thought oh look at that they are refocusing on core game development because people had seen the ad stuff and a few other things and unity chasing the other markets the game engines could be used for and i think the original crowd who really got behind that engine in the early days started to feel a bit left out and a lot of you could say well just go to unreal well there are differences with unreal i mean one thing you know uh unity and c-sharp i think that's going to be a good bit more accessible than kind of your equivalent over in in some parts of unreal land and also yes there are things that unreal does significantly better than unity there's also things that unity does better than unreal they are two different products after all but the sad thing is oh just uh shortly later they canceled it yeah they canceled it and of course this was following concerns about the project when unity announced a four percent reduction in their staff without any warning which then is quite funny because then of course the iron source merger uh does come in i suppose it wasn't all stock based deal but i think you can understand that it's not a pretty good look for people who make unity or use unity to make you know real games not thinly veiled cash extraction machines and i think this puts it well wait what unity is merging with the company best known for its malware delivery system so popular that its own it has its own entry and virus total was blacklisted on windows by microsoft and was used to spread fake flash installers through the equifax site yeah of course then john decides to just say clickbait out of context deeply sorry if what i said offended any game dev absolutely love the people that make games creative hard work and if you're to steal man his position you know you could say it's a term of endearment like you know oh you know that person they're brilliant they're creative they work so hard ah such a [ __ ] idiot and that could almost be a term of endearment you know it's like they're an idiot because they're doing it the hard way but it's implicitly virtuous that they are doing it the hard way i think that's how you could steal man uh what john said there but given the broader context about monetization i don't really feel that that holds water as much so yeah ricotta does throw pocket gamer under the bus um and you know so let's see how did he because dev's hush on monetization are pure brilliant and [ __ ] idiots that's an accurate summary of what he said those are three things that he said about them and he said that all you know very short order so yeah and i think something put well by freya here is john i hope you mean it unity's roots are in working within indie devs so the pivot to the automotive industry and film which yep that's one of the ways that unity has moved of course unreal engine has also moved into i know at least the film world a lot of things like say if you've enjoyed the mandalorian well unreal engine runs that indeed soon we plan to be using unreal engine to do visual effects work yeah it's awesome for that and it makes sense that these engines are moving into these places because the technology developed for video games has got awesome great uses outside of the video games context i mean hey there there's [ __ ] made for nasa that then trickles down to the rest of us it's it's not a perfect example but you get my point but the focus on exploitative money-making because i think uh well that's how a lot of that goes and shutting down gagaya and firing everyone involved doesn't exactly feel great to us and this is when john kind of realizes oh oh [ __ ] i'm the ceo of an engine best known for indie game development at least best known by customers who generally won't be that aware of the automotive and uh you know film uses so of course he does what all people do and they need to say sorry they take a screenshot and they send a tweet he says i want to talk about what i said in the interview in my follow-up tweet i'm gonna start with an apology my word choice was crude i'm sorry i'm listening i will do better what i can do perhaps is provide more on what i was thinking when i did the interview what i would have said if i had taken greater care first i have great respect for game developers the work they do is amazing their creativity can be incredible whether on aaa console mobile or indie game designed to be played by millions or a creative project a game made for the sheer joy of it second one thing i have seen is that most game devs work incredibly hard and want people to play their game to enjoy it and when appropriate for players to engage deeply for the game devs i have worked most closely with there is an anxiety about whether players will fall in love with their game or appreciate all the work and love that went into making it that's absolutely true and you should absolutely test your game test your game with its audience we use a platform that was created by i'm actually friends with ours who are in the same same startup incubator as us called testify and their stuff's awesome there's other ways to do qa other ways to do user testing we released a demo on steam we got fantastic feedback from that it was almost universally positive in the actual game experience itself which i think to us shows that if we actually put our game towards its target market people who will generally like that kind of thing seems like they'll think it's a pretty damn good entry in that and that is brilliant news for us and relieves a lot of that anxiety but i mean that's pretty different from how things were framed initially in that discussion of iron source and what they're providing third sometimes all a game developer wants is to have a handful of friends enjoy the game art for art's sake art for friends others want player dollars to you know to buy the game or game items so they can make a living both of these motivations are noble see that's that's an interesting thing yeah you want to get money back from the thing that you're making now mo noble okay well noble that starts to get quite interesting because if your game is full of predatory monetization right if it's got diablo mortal like things okay so it is a is it a noble thing to provide income for the people in your company yes it is absolutely um i mean more importantly it's like it is just good business it's the thing that you should be bloody well doing um but game items because you can't sell game items in a noble way i think most of what riot games does is actually fair enough what blizzard well still does even though they don't support the game anymore with uh you know with heroes of the storm right it's like that's fine those are good examples of free to play and as i covered the very top of the video they definitely do not convert as well as gacha or i'm sure as well as immortal will so that's kind of rough at least on a per user basis so i don't know in-game items that depends on how noble it is i'm happy to buy your dlc you start doing loot boxes that have got player power in them well that's not noble anymore because you're preying on the same psychological motivation that you know the gambling is is kind of rooted on and then i suppose i do get that feeling of right so john are you okay if somebody uses iron source to finally finally manipulate their loot boxes to finally tune their loot boxes get the most money out of people before they notice i mean i don't know man that's not particularly noble to me fourth what i was trying to say and clearly failed at saying is that there are better ways for game developers to get an early read and what players think of their game to learn from that feedback and the developer wants to adjust the game based on that feedback it's a choice to listen and act or just to listen again both very valid choices if i've been smarter in my words i would have said just this we are working to provide developers with tools so they can better understand what their players think and it is up to them to act or not based on this feedback cool that definitely would have been a more okay statement i think there's still people who then look at uh you know look where the revenue is coming through and they think well okay if we follow the money is there a conflict of interest are you because of where the money is and you're a big publicly traded company so you you know you feel like you really do have to do things to get that stock up well are you gonna are you gonna really focus on the scroungy little indies or you're gonna focus on the stuff that's bringing in the ad box i mean i don't know but i think when the system works as intended it's probably not good for the indie games so he clearly regrets this that's fair he does i genuinely really do think that he does especially because it's bad pr he has to come into work in the morning and in his head will be the knowledge that all of his colleagues are thinking john i used twitter last night and i saw what they said about you and us this feels bad so it's a massive pr headache for the company it also is you know a real shitty thing uh for his peers and he is clearly expressing that there's a lot of use cases for unity that not all of them are profit-driven that's absolutely true i think there is just a lot of discontent uh within parts of the developer community in unity and with gagaya going the job cuts iron source a lot of people are worried now it is tricky because if you look at like the the gadot is it gadot godot like that's an engine there are other engines out there um but you know are they going to be as fully featured are they going to have as robust support perhaps not there actually are not that many mega robust production randy uh you know engines out there and with unity i mean people have been developing unity for years so there is the skill there is the talent 2021 they claim to have 61 of the industry i just wonder where that's uh where that's going to go the starter was all about democratizing game of development and they have done a really great job at that i don't know though when the future comes and it's about money and now they're a publicly traded company and we know what sort of thing that can mean suppose it makes us all a bit worried doesn't it and i suppose it's tricky as developers too i mean a lot of the custom technology the custom things that we have made to make our pipeline be successful they're on the unity engine and it's going to be like that for the developers of many of the games that you play unity still is going to make a lot of sense for us unreal just does not make sense for the sorts of games that we'll be making in the future but certainly you look at this and you think wow we feel like you are one of the only decent production ready options for us and it certainly makes it feel pretty shitty when this stuff goes on and when the money is more going towards the likes of iron source so let me know what you think about this if you're a gamer developer too let us i mean let me know what the thoughts have been at your studio we'd love to hear of course if you want to support us and also get great deal some handy stuff could even save you some dollar check out north thanks to nord for sponsoring today's video sponsors really do help to make this whole shindig so much more possible okay let me know what you think hope you enjoyed this see you next time you

Channel: Bellular News

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Keywords: bellular, bellulargaming, bellular news, game industry, industry news, videogames, gaming news, game news

Id: Rg6FbN_BqM4

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022