Unity CEO: Gamemakers who don’t look at money early are the biggest idiots
Gamemakers 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 monetisation, makers have a better understanding of what their players want and think.
Marc Whitten, General Manager at Unity, said to PocketGamer that game makers today no longer struggle with 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 true in the smartphone game market, where tens of thousands of games are released every month.
To ensure 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 about how well the game will resonate with customers. The focus seems to be on revenues as microtransactions and less on revenues as the purchase of the game itself.
PocketGamer stated in the interview that implementing such indicators early may be criticized by some developers. “It’s a very small segment of the gaming industry that thinks that way,” Riccitiello said. “Some of these developers are my favorite people to fight with, they’re the most beautiful, purest and most brilliant people, but they’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.”
Such developers, according to the Unity CEO, stick to the old model, in which they developed a game and only then looked at monetization. “The industry divides people who hold on to that philosophy and developers who are massively embracing how to figure out what makes a product successful.”
To make Unity a growth engine with features like monetization indicators, the company recently announced a merger with ironSource. Unity pays according to The Wall Street Journal 4.4 billion dollars, converted almost 4.4 billion euros, for ironSource. The latter makes advertising software for developers that allow them to see the revenues from the software in games and other apps.
This merger was criticized, in part because ironSource used to make installCore. InstallCore allows developers to include potentially unwanted programs with 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 at the turn of the century.