How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (2017)
&gt; The designers of free-to-play games, by using an intermittent variable to dole out small prizes, found that they could keep players engaged—and spending—for longer.<p>I&#x27;m really glad the article also touches on the loot-box phenomenon. I think it&#x27;s by far the worst thing to ever happen to game design.<p>It&#x27;s exploitative in the same way that gambling in general is exploitative, but isn&#x27;t bound by the tight legal restrictions that prevent gambling companies from targeting children who might be most vulnerable to these exploitative tactics and more likely to fall into a vicious cycle of addiction early in life, which can have dramatic, literally life-changing consequences.<p>That said, I can&#x27;t really deny either that at least part of this trend is self-inflicted on the part of the gaming community at large. Gamers have all but collectively rejected the subscription model where we pay for the games we play on a recurring basis. For games like MMOs that require ongoing funding to develop new content in order for the community around it to thrive, what other funding models outside of the freemium model do designers really have?<p>The DLC&#x2F;expansion pack model also worked adequately for some time, and still does for games that involve mostly episodic experiences, but not so much for games that have living worlds and require ongoing development of new content and incur ongoing infrastructure costs. It also comes with similar problems as the model of paying for software upgrades, because developer incentives and users&#x27; needs can become misaligned. Oftentimes in this model, bug fixes and quality of life improvements get sidelined in favor of more content&#x2F;features, and the community becomes fractured across expansion packs, undermining the natural network effects that these kinds of games inherently tend to create.<p>It&#x27;s also really difficult to fault freemium games for using exploitative tactics that target players who do end up paying to pay more, when the distribution of people who actually pay for things in these games is often so wildly unevenly distributed that the top percentage of paying players often account for a disproportionate percentage of overall revenue, while the vast majority of overall player-base pay absolutely nothing, and those who do so often wear it as badge of pride, no less.<p>I&#x27;ve always wanted to build a game myself, but I could never figure out how to align my own need for ongoing revenue to support the development of a game that I might love and end up wanting to keep working on indefinitely, with that of a gaming community that has soundly rejected any funding model that makes it possible to achieve that without resorting to tactics I&#x27;d rather not stoop to.