190C. Forever Games: Production and Economics
Current production infrastructure in AAA is not sufficient for Forever Game development. It's not even adequate for GaaS production. Here I explain why and what needs to be modified.
You can find the first paper in this series here, on Finite Games, and the second paper defining Forever Games and their design here.
All games used to be Finite Games. The introduction of Ultimate Online (1997), Everquest (1999), and World of Warcraft (2004) proved that persistent online worlds were a viable business model. Perhaps even a superior business model. One of the most compelling aspects of these new games was that they had organically user created game economies. Players wanted what other players had and they paid each other for those goods, typically on eBay back then. I was one of those sellers and that’s how I made my living in those early years.
That economic activity was not being tapped by developers, and was even seen as a threat. So Blizzard made these sales forbidden in their 2004 WoW EULA. Other devs soon fell in line. That put me out of business but unethical sellers continued. That underground economy became so large that Goldman Sachs sent Steve Bannon to oversee it. The presence of “gold farmers” harmed the play experience for gamers, so in 2005 I began developing the counter tech to stop this trade. I was told such tech was impossible, and that industry-wide belief is why no one else attempted to do this.
I succeeded and in 2009 Professor Mike Zyda authenticated the achievement and notified Blizzard leadership. Dr. Zyda is the founder of the USC Gamepipe Lab which supplies key personnel to Blizzard and the wider AAA industry. I’ve met with Blizzard four times between 2009 and 2018. At no time have they indicated that they wanted to solve their game economic issues and profit from them.
Instead they moved to make important game assets “account bound”. This means they could not be traded and dropped out of the player economy. The end result was an intentional destruction by the developer of the game economy, with the intent to replace player to player trade with one way trade from the developer to players, captive transactions that only had the possibility of earning power for the developer. We now affectionately refer to these sales as “microtransactions”. Micro is a bit of a cynical term when you consider these can cost as much as $40,000 USD. For one cosmetic.
This transition to microtransactions benefitted developers at the expense of player agency and enjoyment. Other developers followed suit again. There is this intense “monkey see, monkey do” mentality in game dev. Thus modern online games are more expensive and lower value to players than they were 25 years ago. Technology didn’t degrade product quality/value, leadership choose to degrade product quality. Even Asmongold, who built his career on WoW does not play it anymore because of how much the experience has cratered, especially with the microtransactions.
Perhaps a major reason why developers did not adopt the tech that I introduced in 2009, that would have benefited both players and developers, was the rising influence of Zynga led by Mike Pincus. By June of 2009 their Farmville game had 10 million daily active users, and this was 4 months before my tech was authenticated and Blizzard was notified. Zynga became an intensely shiny object for AAA.
In 2009 Mike Pincus was quoted as saying he did “every horrible thing in the book” to boost revenue in building Zynga. But it worked. Then lead designer Roger Dickey began selling the secrets to “Fun Pain” used by Zynga in 2011, which is what got my attention. This was in line with Pincus’ world view that included harming anyone if it benefitted the developer. Part of why it worked was because Mark Zuckerberg viewed the relationship between him and Pincus as synergistic.
It would not be until 2011 that Zuck would realize the relationship was parasitic. That’s also the year that Take Two asked me to analyse Zynga to see if they could copy their methods or even acquire them. The result was Zynga Analysis. It took me 2 days of research and 2 days of writing. I successfully predicted the end of the Zynga business model and the company overvaluation. I was the only one to publish such a prediction and the later Zynga IPO was an historic bloodbath for investors who did not read my paper.
The reason I bring this up is because when investors wanted to know why Zynga was so profitable, Pincus could not be truthful. That would have prevented him from cashing out on the IPO. So instead of saying that he was getting over a billion free daily notifications on the back of Facebook (which was seriously threatening the FB business model) he instead said his secret was “data collection”. I have an analogy that I use to explain what happened here and how it changed industry infrastructure for decades to come.
Back in the early 1990s I was teaching and practicing physical therapy in California. I had the honor of working with one of the original coaches/trainers for the USA Olympic bodybuilding team from 1968. This was the year that they started using anabolic steroids: testosterone and growth hormone. People were shocked how big our guys were but they couldn’t tell the press the truth. Instead they just came up with the cover story that they “did a lot of isometrics”. Of course very few people knew what that was back then or today. But it basically means holding a contraction without moving. It’s the lowest possible quality of exercise.
But people all over the world fell for it.
Even today there are still some (uneducated) trainers teaching this in gyms. Almost 60 years later! The Russian team made it obvious with a “more is better” approach in 1972, especially with the bearded track ladies that were twice the size of the “natural” ladies. But the USA secret never got out.
This is what Pincus did, and it worked. People wanted to believe because he was offering a magic solution to success. Just collect more data and your business will excel. Pincus knew his business was about to collapse so he promoted that narrative and cashed out at the IPO. Now in 2025, people still believe this! They may not know where the story came from, but they hear it so much that it must be true. This is what we call colloquial knowledge, second hand knowledge you got without formal education. It’s a real problem in medicine as you don’t want people drinking bleach to get rid of illness, even though they heard that from many sources. I trained and certified over 500 personal trainers and dangerous activities that were passed on from person to person in gyms were a constant thing I had to combat.
Pincus would go on to cash out again in 2022 with Take Two (I was not consulted that time) for an estimated total wealth of $1.4 billion dollars for Pincus.
The reason I give all that background is that the moves towards microtransactions and data collection didn’t benefit consumers. They were not asked for by consumers. If they benefited anyone (and I could make the case that they did not), then it was developers. But benefiting the seller at the cost of the buyer is a short term gain and long term loss even for the seller. It’s a total loss for the consumer. I warned about this clearly in 2017 when I predicted the current industry contraction and explained in detail why it had to happen. I didn’t use the term “Correction” lightly in the title.
I’m sure I upset a lot of data-philes with that paper, and it didn’t help that I was right. I don’t write papers like Data Implosion or this paper to be right. I write them to assist gaming industry leadership in making profitable decisions that benefit the entire ecosystem. Following my advice leads to more jobs and happier consumers.
What Needs to Change?
If the industry wants to win back consumers, they need to refocus on meeting the needs of consumers. AAA especially needs to abandon this unscientific microtransaction and data spying mumbo jumbo that consumers are pushing back against. Regulatory changes are being generated by consumer angst, not from regulators. Regulators don’t waste their time on things that are unneeded. In our fast changing world, they are always 10 years behind and have to carefully triage what needs the most immediate attention.
Currently our GaaS production pipelines are set up to generate minimally interesting designs with pretty graphics. That’s because graphics are relatively cheap to outsource and can be created quickly. Now with AI that’s even cheaper and faster. Instead of design being focused on gameplay and progression (the things that consumers care about) what design that is being done is primarily focused on the microtransaction store and funnelling players into it repeatedly. Not only is this unwanted by players, but it is also immersion breaking.
It’s no accident that Asmongold killed his character by jumping off the top of the mast of a ship after looking at the Assassin’s Creed: Shadows microtransaction store. And never logged in again. Millions of his followers watched this and got the message.
The message AAA sends to gamers is that they create microtransaction funnels. Players and a constant stream of cosmetics goes in one end and money comes out the other. To gamers, this is about as appetizing as being strapped to a fire ant hill.
Players are demanding a full reset, and are communicating with their wallets. They are buying Finite Games. Indies are benefiting by providing exactly that. AAA seems to be “resetting” by just laying off their employees. That’s not a plan, that’s a reaction based in desperation. The industry got here, with no plan for the future, for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been providing verifiable plans since 2009. I’m a big believer in consent culture. Do what you want (hopefully it’s something ethical/legal). But I would love to see a Plan, something based on science ideally, so that our industry can move forward and continue growing/rehiring.
Everything starts with a Plan. Ideally a very well considered and thought out Plan. Then you need designers to translate that Plan into the schematic for a product. Unfortunately, we’ve trained people to design Microtransaction stores. We took the best makers of Finite Games like Bioware and made them produce GaaS with catastrophic results. These are two very different skill sets, and GaaS as it is applied today in AAA is stillborn. That’s not the fault of the concept of GaaS, it’s due to a total mismatch between the consumer demand for online games and what developers are delivering and why.
If you want to create a great online MMO at the lowest possible cost, you create a robust design team and give them time to lock down the design. As elements are locked in, you send those elements to production. If everyone knows what they are building and why, morale is high. Production time and costs are minimized. Leaks and opportunities for IP theft are also minimized.
The Plan I have for Forever Games is not the only way to Plan this. For me, this seems like the most efficient way to do that and I made that case over the body of my published papers. Under my plan, there are no microtransactions. Microtransactions were introduced to prevent player to player economies from forming. You don’t need them if you don’t have a player to player economy. You also don’t need them if you have a functioning attack resistant player economy, which you might need my help with if you want to go that route. It’s not essential for making a Forever Game, and it would be smarter to get at least one built out and generating revenue before trying to get fancy.
Once you have a design in place and you green light it, a team should be able to complete a market-ready game in one year. Two years tops if it is your first one and you are making something high budget. But if you build this or any online game properly, it should not take long to build it and costs are going to be relatively low.
Beyond the initial efficiencies, a cyclical game gives you time to improve the product with additional content over time while still being revenue generating with what you started with. Since players are retained instead of constantly churning, you save on user acquisition costs and enjoy additional organic installs. Here you aren’t making content for a battle pass or microtransaction store. All those things are gone and don’t have to be created or supported. You just have to build new content. You know, the stuff your players actually want.
This keeps players excited about starting a new cycle even as they are enjoying their current one. As you could have 10 or eventually 100+ servers going simultaneously, cycles could start every day or two. Thus cycles are running in parallel, possibly with different content and rules sets. This gives you an opportunity to A/B test your content and rules sets in a way that actually benefits you and your players. This is where your reduced-size data team should be focused. Unpopular rules sets can be abandoned and popular ones can be expanded.
Your designers are retained and mature as they create new content for upcoming cycles. Your entire production chain is similarly engaged and becomes more efficient and confident over time. No more cyclical layoffs as projects finish, which destroys your most precious assets. That would be your skilled workers and the relationships they build between each other. With a Forever Game, it doesn’t “finish”. Ideally, your employees leave the project when they die of old age or retire. Kind of like they used to in previous centuries. Or so I’m told, I’ve never personally experienced that.
Of course with AI, you may only have time to get one generation (20 years) in before life and business changes a lot. Having an enthusiastic and loyal community of players is going to make your business more resistant to whatever comes, and being first in gives you tremendous market power. Blizzard was able to fend off all competitors with World of Warcraft because once it got big it was just too expensive to challenge with new products. You saw the same thing happen with World of Tanks and World of Warships.
None of those products can compete with a Forever game. All of those legacy games, including the ones I designed, will be rendered obsolete by newer more efficient games that better meet the needs of consumers.
A final note about monetisation. When you have a solid Plan for Asymmetry, you can have players at different power levels without it being unfair. That means you can offer different levels of subscriptions with different prices. That allows you to tap into critical discriminatory pricing to capture as much of a consumer’s budget as possible. But the whole thing is solid state, and the business model is almost zero maintenance. Imagine how much money and stress that saves you? Even legacy subscription models out perform microtransactions, because 100% of players spending is better than 5%. When you allow multi tiered subs with some several times the cost of the most basic sub, now you are crushing it on revenue generation.
The focus turns to content creation and marketing. You want to hire Keanu Reaves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Mariah Carey? Your return on your marketing budget will be better when people enjoy the game. Your celebrities might actually become customers.
Forever Games, at least the way I present them, are a new game dev paradigm. I welcome questions on how to do it or how it works. You know where to find me. I’ve been here for 25 years, and I’d like to think I will be here another 25 years. I don’t do crunch anymore, but I’m running faster now than I was 25 years ago.