Unity CEO John Riccitiello had plenty of choice words when speaking about microtransactions in mobile games recently calling those who don’t prioritize monetization “fucking idiots”.
Following Unity’s partnership with ad tech firm Ironsource creators, who use the development platform to craft their games will have more options to introduce monetization. Early monetization implementation has been met with criticism from some devs, but Riccitiello believes this is a mistake.
“Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives,” Riccitiello said in an interview with PocketGamer.biz.
“It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with—they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.”
While this comment might seem brash, the former EA CEO clarified his remarks by explaining that as the gaming landscape changes developers need to adapt to find commercial success.
Riccitiello mentioned there is a divide he has noticed during his time in the industry between those who embrace the market to craft successful products and those who follow the philosophies of the artform.
“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour,” Riccitiello said. “Sometimes, you wouldn’t even notice the product difference between a massive success and tremendous fail, but for this tuning and what it does to the attrition rate. There isn’t a developer on the planet that wouldn’t want that knowledge.”
To no surprise, some developers have spoken out against Riccitiello’s comments taking to social media to air their responses.
As the gaming space has evolved microtransactions have only grown more common and seeing them factored into the early stages of development does make a lot of sense, especially in the mobile gaming space.
