Allow me to translate (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, July 07, 2020, 09:26 (1383 days ago) @ Claude Errera
edited by Cody Miller, Tuesday, July 07, 2020, 09:30

Move on to the second part, though. "nobody would want to pay money to avoid playing it to get the cosmetics." We've had this conversation, many times. You're wrong. There are lots of people, for lots of reasons, who might choose to pay money instead of playing a game - even a game they enjoy playing! We all make value judgements on a regular basis, and sometimes, the same comparison comes up differently for one single person! Sometimes you want chocolate, sometimes you want vanilla!

Of course they enjoy playing the game… If they didn't, they wouldn't have the game in their console at all. So that's the trick. You make a game that's fun to play, but you add little annoyances. Frictions if you will. Frictions that could easily be designed out. I might say, 'enjoy' playing Crash Team Racing, but not grinding races away mindlessly to slowly earn currency to buy a cosmetic. The solution isn't to let me pay the bypass the grind. The solution is not including the grind in the first place.

And yes there isn't a universal standard of fun… which is why "fun as possible" to me means the best good faith effort a developer can make. As soon as you intentionally design frictions, that good faith is gone, but not if you say, have certain levels that are weaker than others. A lot of people did not like the Library, but Bungie wasn't intentionally trying to add a boring level. But a friction is a deliberate decision to add an annoyance to a game.