101. Terminating Games

I've designed two net billion dollar games, in just a few months. But I've probably made the industry more money by terminating games, and this skill has never been more needed than it is today.

Every time I check my feeds on YouTube I’m bombarded by some of the top influencers on YT whining about how this movie or this game should have been killed instead of developed and deployed. I usually agree with them. The price tags associated will failing to terminate a game or movie in a timely manner have been steadily inching up to a Billion USD per title.

I’m not enough of an expert on the business of making movies to predict with surgical precision if a movie will fail before it’s even been made. But I believe there are people out there who are. People who say that success can’t be predicted are selling you a lie. There’s always a number of people in any industry who can predict success or failure in their industry.

I’ve proven over and over that I have this ability in the interactive media industry. I do this by writing prediction papers where I explain why a game will be dead on arrival, often without even seeing any of the game assets in question. Other times I weigh in after a game has been deployed and explain why it is going to suffer or fail. In my Supremacy Goods paper I used 3 top games in development to explain why 2 would be huge hits and why one would be dead on arrival. In the case of Guild Wars 2, I came in after launch and did a post mortem on the game economy to explain how the game was suffering because of fundamental errors in it’s design that would be difficult to remedy.

My regular readers know all this already, and that’s part of why they put up with my eccentricity. What my readers don’t know is that killing games, in a timely manner, is probably my top interactive media skill set. It’s not the sort of brand I really want to be known for, and I don’t want developers to see my appearance in their studio as the arrival of the Grim Reaper.

That said, it’s clear that someone needs to do it and there has never been a better time than now. Some numbers might help explain how important this is:

The Math of Termination

Let’s say you spend $5M USD (a quaint amount in today’s market) on development of a sub AAA game. That’s just enough to make the game. But to actually launch a game will require marketing and user acquisition (UA). That’s going to cost you between $5M and $10M additional funds. So to just break even you might need to pull in $15M.

A good example of this would be World of Tanks Blitz, who’s development I was put in charge of in December of 2013. I had no idea I was going to be put in charge of this project. When I landed in Minsk, Belarus I was told this in front of the dev team on my first day in the studio. I had no idea prior to this. Trust me, I was the most shocked person in the studio, and the only Westerner in the studio.

I was told I could kill the project (much appreciated) and also delay the project if necessary (also much appreciated). I had the only Gen 4 ipad in the Belarus studio, they were all working on Gen 2 ipads. This was the mobile division of Wargaming’s first project. This was a very low budget project, well below $5M.

Despite some complications, and time for only 2 hours of playtesting during the design stage, I decided to launch without any delays. I could have improved the game further but I felt that it was not worth the delay and our competition in early 2014 wasn’t very serious. It was an immediate hit and it is still producing strong net positive revenue 11 years later. That game has made something over $1B over that time. If marketing was ~$50M during that span, that was 20X times the cost to make and deploy it. Most games like League of Legends or Fortnite operate on very small margins. At some point during it’s peak, LoL was making 6% more than it’s marketing cost. This small margin is actually pretty good in our industry.

2000% net margins like in World of Tanks Blitz are extremely rare. But that’s how you go from 50 employees to 4000 employees in two years. A few months later I was deployed to do the same thing on World of Warships. The design I was presented with on my arrival was going to fail so it took most of the 14 weeks I spent in Saint Petersburg to get them to completely change it. WoWs made even more money than WoTB, but it was a larger studio with a larger marketing budget so the next profit margin over those 11 years was probably less than half of 2000%. But that’s still a lot better than 6%.

Simultaneously Wargaming was making a 3rd game, World of Warplanes, in Kyiv Ukraine. The design as it was presented to me was sure to fail. But I could not safely go to Kyiv to do repairs and at the time the studio leadership there was very anti Western. So I recommended we terminate that project, which had 500 employees working on it. In the case of us not terminating WoWp, I proposed us using that as an A/B test to see how much value add my work produces by comparing the results of my projects vs the “not my project”.

That’s what we ended up doing. Minsk had perhaps 50 employees, Saint Petersburg had ~200 employees and Kyiv had ~500 employees. I correctly predicted that WoWp would crash and burn without me there. I don’t know the exact numbers but let’s assume development cost on WoWp was about $20M (still modest by today’s standards) and another $40M was spent deploying it. Since the reception was “disappointing”, that means the revenue was less than the development cost.

Just to make the math simpler, let’s assume $30M revenue (I’m being generous here) on $60M spend. That’s a -50% net revenue. That’s difficult to compare mathematically to +2000% net revenue since 2000 divided by 0 is infinity and in this context 2000 divided by a negative number would be an error. But let’s say a $30M loss vs a $1B gain. Wargaming’s total revenue (not net) as of 2024 is over $7B. These games support a lot of families and to me they are very good people despite the current geopolitical struggles. Thus I’m very proud to have had the chance to serve WG over the years.

Not killing WoWp, but successfully predicting how much it would cost the company to not kill it, probably made me a lot of enemies in the company. There was no happy path that would not ultimately lead to my being terminated. I was well aware of this. I just committed to helping WG as much as I could with the limited time I had. I’m sure the situation was especially painful for WG leadership as they had beloved employees in both Russia and Ukraine during the Crimean war.

Killing Civilization Games

What ultimately inspired me to enter economics was a game called Civilization (1991) by Sid Meier and his team at MicroProse which would form Firaxis in 1996. In my earlier career I would say that half of what I knew about economics I learned playing Civilization. I play some version of Civilization pretty much every week or even every day for the last 34 years.

Am I a Civilization fanboi? Hell yes I am! Do I think Sid Meier is the greatest game developer in the history of Earth? Damn straight! In 2013 I would get a chance to meet Mr. Meier in person and he thanked me for helping him on his two games before I had a chance to say anything. That event is still at the very top of my Bucket List with a check mark through it. Earlier in my life I never would have imagined getting the chance to help Sid on a Civ game, much less two of them! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In 2011 a producer at Firaxis noticed me surveying his Civ World players on their forums. He thought this was odd and asked me what I was up to. I explained that I was a game economist and I was asking the players what they liked or didn’t like about various features. To his credit he asked me the correct question: “Do you know what is wrong with our game?”. I answered Yes. He than asked me “Can you that up for me?” I was thrilled of course, and was happy to do a freebie to get my foot in the door.

So explained that of the four minigames in CivWorld, the food game had cumulative effects and the other 3 had additive effects. This meant that you could always win the game by focusing on food. This was an obvious game breaking design error that would be difficult but not impossible to fix. The other big problem was that they were using a Pay to Win monetisation model in a competitive skill based team game. That was going to be much harder to fix. Apparently they hired someone straight out of college with no game dev experience to do their monetisation. Probably the usual nepotism hire.

The combination of these two serious errors meant that it would likely be cheaper to kill the game than to fix it. This is what they did. So I take credit for killing CivWorld, and I did it for free! By not losing money there, they could put the money into another project that would be revenue generating.

Which, they did. But they didn’t tell me what for a while. Some months later I was called by them and they asked if I could help with another project. I of course said yes, but I was going to charge them this time. The project ended up being Civilization Online. This was a very ambitious 3D open world Civ MMOG. The sort of thing I still dream about making. I flew out to Novato (2K headquarters) several times. The first time I asked them if they had a GDD (Game Design Document). They seemed relieved that I asked this, and handed me a 1000 page GDD. They were relieved because no one at 2K wanted to read it and they were overjoyed that I had volunteered!

I got to work and started building the economy and business model for the game. This is still one of my most ambitious designs, with a 4 interlinked world economies that players progressively transition through. The next GDD they sent me was 1400 pages after my revisions. The problem came when the developers flew out to Novato from Korea to meet with me. They had no problem being in the 2K studio, but they made it clear they did not want a Westerner in their studio.

This sort of racism really shocked me but I had never been to South Korea so I didn’t know this was normal. According to the wiki, 44% of Koreans had extreme racism sentiments during that period. The team, which was XLGames, not Firaxis, knew they could not build the game without my tech. But they told me straight up that they wanted to use my tech, take credit for it, and not mention me anywhere in the credits. While this is pretty normal in the industry apparently, I told 2K that for me to play ball I would want a 4% first cut of revenue on the project. I knew this would never happen and I also knew they would not make the game without me, so I knew I was killing Civilization Online. You’ve probably never even heard of the game.

XLGames would soon launch ArchAge, which had some really novel economic elements unlike anything ever used in Korean games before. I would suggest that’s because they didn’t come from Korea…

I haven’t worked with 2K since then, but I’m proud to have had the chance to help them. I’m sure I saved them at least hundreds of millions of dollars which they put into the very successful XCOM reboot and other projects.

Killing Civilization VII

If you guessed that this is all a long winded way of my sneaking up to the idea that the recently released Civilization VII game needs to die, then you must know me pretty well.

With CivWorld and Civilization Online, I could have saved those projects if I had been included earlier. With CivWorld, they didn’t know who I was in 2011. In 2012 they waited too long to make the decision to involve me. Irreversible decisions had already been made. For Civ VII, it’s possible that no one at 2K knows me given how top secret my work was and how high turnover is in the industry. Or maybe they think I only work on online games. Whatever the circumstances, I’m here to provide another unpaid post mortem just as I did with CivWorld.

I realize Sid Meier likely had nothing to do with VII, but just the same… please forgive me for what I am about to say.

I can tell that the designers are quite talented. I can tell that years have been spent on the project, and a lot of money has been sunk into it. I realize that this project could make or break one of the most beloved franchises in gaming history.

How to say this as delicately as I can? Civilization is, at its heart, an economic game. I often point out that the modern real world economy is built on the design proposed by Adam Smith in 1775’s The Wealth of Nations. The problem with modern economics, and perhaps one of the biggest problems with the modern world, is that you can’t improve it without messing with the original design. This is especially true if you don’t want anyone to know what a horrible person the original designer was. If our real world economy had been designed by Sid Meier, not Adam Smith, the world would be a much better place.

But this inability to change things without upsetting people can make real change impossible. I can see this written all over the design of Civ VII. The designers were given permission to do some radical stuff, but at the same time they were given some constraints to work within that created an unsolvable dilemma.

Religion was always going to be a difficult subject, especially in modern times. But (without going into detail) the current implementation is horrible beyond repair. The designers went to extreme lengths to make it have as little as possible to do with religion. If I designed this, I would rip off all 4 of my limbs, and then kill myself. Somehow.

Combat in the game leads to cities being captured, and this is one of the victory conditions. But if you capture as many cities as you are asked to then you go over the city limit and your cities revolt. If you reject a city your only option is to “sack” the city and you get a permanent malus in every battle with every other civilization for the entire game for every city you sack.

In almost every game system the player is punished for doing what they are told to do. This is because the developers (and they have said this publicly) have made players actually finishing the game a requirement. Because apparently most Civ players, despite having played Civ VI for years, have never finished a game of Civ VI. It’s just too painful to do the whole game.

So the designers split the game into 3 “Ages” and make you finish the game THREE TIMES in order to finish the game. This was their solution. Really.

But they don’t want you to finish the game too quickly because they set up a meta game system where you get credit for completing the game several times. This is intended as a “retention system” which is a bit out of place because this isn’t a Game as a Service. Right? Right guys? You seem a bit confused.

So they really DON’T want you to finish the game, at least not too quickly. I’m having deja vue from the designers over at Griding Gear Games on Path of Exile 2. Please, for the love of whatever ideology you guys follow, please try to decide what game you want to build and why before you make it.

I could go into extreme detail on all the design problems but I don’t want to write a 200 page paper here. At least not without getting paid. You get ranted on for free. My hand is shaking over here as I resist the urge to write a book on Harriet Tubman as the leader of the USA. It’s like they knew or secretly wished this would be the last Civilization game and wanted to divide their community as much as possible so that they could blame racists and toxic gamers, not horrible design, on the demise of the franchise.

If you want to learn how to make a Civilization type game that can be completed by a regular human player in a reasonable number of hours, and actually have fun doing it, go play Zephon. Proxy Studios may need a bigger budget and their design is still a bit rough, but they actually make 4X games that are fun to play and watch and that you want to finish. Just try to play Zephon to the end of a game, and try to play Civilization VII to the end of a game (with 3 Ages) and tell me you actually enjoyed the Civ experience. I do it out of loyalty, but I can’t say I enjoyed it.

Please, please. I’m begging you. Seriously. If you ever plan to make another Civ game and think you need to make it a GaaS or you need to honestly reboot the franchise, give me a call. I might even help you for free just so I don’t have to go through the pain of seeing you do this again. It’s bad enough that I had to watch Star Wars die. My heart can’t take this.

Or just acquire Proxy Studios (aptly named in this context) and give them 100 times their budget and see what they can do? I’d play whatever they make next.

Their games are so fun to watch that they even have a spectator mode built right in.

I’ve heard some of your largest YouTube influencers say “well, even Civ V/VI needed 2 years to work out their kinks”. That’s not the best advertising having your influencers make these sorts of apologies. But having worked on 2 Civ games, I can tell you that the problems you have won’t get fixed in 2 years. Even the first Civ game (1991) modelled global warming well. Because Sid designed it. I can understand if you don’t want to touch that hot potato. But then who’s idea was Harriet Tubman? If you like heroic partisans and want a distraction from your design problems, then sell a DLC with the Israel and Palestine nations playable. Then you can retire and say smugly that it wasn’t your work that killed the franchise.

Again, I get that the designers are pretty good at what they do. The problem is all of the design constraints and external ideological influences create an impossible nexus of blech. You have to do a better job of challenging those constraints before you start. The same advice I had to give to Grinding Gear Games on POE 2. It couldn’t hurt to also make “the game is fun to play” and “the mechanics aren’t hopelessly complicated” as goals if you intend to appeal to a wider audience and have some hope to sell more DLCs based on the “success” of this title.