How Free to Play Video Games are Forced to Make Addicts

I’m not going to pretend like video games are paragons of ethical design either. All of the above taken to the extreme leads to design choices intentionally meant to get people hooked. But the reality is that healthcare companies are competing with video games when it comes to attention, lifestyle choices, and allocation of time.

Gaming is a hits-driven business, where the biggest productions cost hundreds of millions of dollars and need to find a way to recoup their sizable investments. As a result, the companies behind these massive games look for as many ways as possible to mitigate risk, either by copying popular trends (like the battle royale craze of the late 2010s) o... See more

As a consequence, we see, in the F2P market, exactly what you'd expect to see: F2P games typically have a lifespan of a year or less. They grow, they pull in money, the audience starts to decline, and at some point the operator concludes that life-time value (LTV) is now less that cost of user acquisition (COA), pull the plug on marketing, and the ... See more

As the world shifts to more digital competition, one of the most powerful long-term advantages is addiction. For businesses, this means that services that can grab and hold consumers’ attention for longer will be rewarded. For consumers, it means that we will have to be ruthless in our relationship with technology. Business best practices are not e... See more

And if nearly the entire audience who is playing the game is only there to make money, as soon as the earning possibilities go away so too does the audience, and then the game rapidly falls apart.

Player retention in gaming is everything. Despite this, publishers optimize for company profit at the cost of player value and well-being. They are able to do this due to their end-to-end ownership and control over the development, distribution, and management of games.