Unity CEO: Game makers who don’t look at money early are the biggest idiots
Game makers who don’t look at how to monetize early in the development process are “some of the biggest fucking idiots,” according to Unity CEO John Riccitiello. Riccitiello states that thanks to monetization, makers have a better understanding of what their players want and think.
Marc Whitten, General Manager at Unity, said to PocketGamer that game makers nowadays no longer struggle with the question of whether their game idea is interesting enough, but whether that idea can rise above the noise of other games and find ‘the right customers and players’. This would be especially the case in the smartphone games market, where tens of thousands of games are released every month.
To ensure that such games stand out from the crowd, Whitten wants to add ‘monetization indicators’ within game engine Unity that can give game makers feedback early in the development process on how well the game will resonate with customers. The focus seems to be on revenues such as microtransactions and less on revenues such as the purchase of the game itself.
PocketGamer stated in the interview that early implementation of such indicators can be criticized by some developers. “It’s a very small part of the gaming industry that thinks that way,” Riccitiello said. “Some of these developers are my favorite people to fight with, they are the most beautiful, purest and most brilliant people, but they are also some of the biggest fucking idiots.”
According to the Unity CEO, such developers stick to the old model, in which they developed a game and only then looked at monetization. “The industry divides people who hold onto that philosophy and developers who are massively embracing how to figure out what makes a product successful.”
To turn Unity into a growth engine with features such as monetization indicators, the company recently announced to merge with ironSource. Unity pays according to The Wall Street Journal 4.4 billion dollars, the equivalent of almost 4.4 billion euros, for ironSource. The latter makes advertising software for developers that allows them to see the revenue from the software in games and other apps.
This merger was criticized in part because ironSource made installCore in the past. installCore allows developers to include potentially unwanted programs in the installation process, writes PC Gamer. Unity is a game engine that can be used for PC, console and smartphone games. Riccitiello was CEO of Electronic Arts around the turn of the century.