[tfgg]

There was a great comment recently about "social" game developers being like heroin dealers who don't use their own product and look down on their customers, and "traditional" game developers being like cannabis dealers who are happy to smoke it with the customer.

[stickydink]

We don't look down on our customers at all. But certainly, those in-charge of design don't care where the line is. If the change is a net profit increase (almost exclusively, we go on insider's reports from other studios on how their changes worked out) we do it.

As a developer I put up as much resistance as possible when it feels absolutely ridiculous - when design becomes more about tricking people into accidentally doing things they didn't want to do. At one point we made the flow for connecting to Facebook pretty ambiguous, where "Skip" meant yes and "Continue" meant no. Eventually that got voted out...

I do often feel a bit conflicted, but to be honest, I don't think we're the worst within our competition (Dungeon Keeper takes that crown, now). I've been playing on our production server since launch with no cheating, and no spending, and I'm doing just fine, and get enough minutes of play time for free to keep me satisfied.

The flip side from the rage we see on things like Reddit, we do receive far more messages and comments about how much people enjoy our game than those who don't. And if people are spending money, they must actually like it, right?

[fhd2]

If your company is doing things you don't agree with morally, I believe it's your responsibility to do something about it. Sounds to me like you do to some degree, IMO that's something to be proud of.

> when design becomes more about tricking people into accidentally doing things they didn't want to do.

Is that share really worth frustrating users for? Can't you find some way of incentivising sharing better?

Sounds, from what little I know, like the company could do with some long-term thinking. Some ideas for selling that:

1. Would it make sense to increase player happiness? Word of mouth and upselling comes to mind.

2. I assume the company wants to grow - wouldn't it make sense to seek a positive perception at least in game developer circles to have a larger/better hiring pool?

3. I presume you're optimising for daily revenue and daily shares, but maybe there are other relevant metrics you should keep an eye on? Like the number of people who stopped playing (maybe "haven't played in a week"), daily negative ratings vs daily total ratings, perception (sentiment analysis?) etc. Even if you're not optimising for these things, it might stop changes that trade a small increase in revenue for a huge drop in another metric during A/B testing.

Feel free to drop me an email at [e-mail] if you'd like to chat more about this, I obviously find it fascinating :)

[Benvie]

At one point we made the flow for connecting to Facebook pretty ambiguous, where "Skip" meant yes and "Continue" meant no.

Wow wow wow. That is beyond ambiguous into downright misleading. I've always stayed away from these games because I largely don't find them fun, but now I have the additional reason that they are trying to fuck me from the moment they are installed. I didn't realize it was quite that bad.

[stickydink]

This one was proposed because a competitor was doing the exact same thing, and we knew from someone inside that it boosted registration by ~25%. Seems quite a lot of people don't really think, "Why did Facebook appear?".

Fortunately we argued this one down before it ended up in production.