217. Millions Read My 2017 Prediction of "The Great Game Dev Correction"
Why did I risk my career to make such a dire prediction? How did the industry react? Who was pulling the strings? Why are they still not able to course correct? How long will you be out of a job?
Six Years After Moneyball, July 25th 2017
For years I had been tracking, analysing, and reporting on the rise of Data in game development. I quickly identified the movie “Moneyball” as the source of this new craze. Advance to July 25th, 2017, and I published Six Years After Moneyball, to date still the most comprehensive paper on the influence this movie had on game development.
That paper started like this:
On September 19th, 2011 the one movie that affected my career more than any other was released: Moneyball. It blew me away! To put it most simply, it showed how math and data could transform business success. Sixteen days later, Steve Jobs died. I really looked up to Mr. Jobs and this was a period of great reflection for me.
A month later on December 16th, the historically catastrophic Zynga IPO happened. Probably aided by the hype around Moneyball, the leaders of Zynga touted their company as “revolutionized by data science”. Investors were falling all over themselves to grab a piece of this and trusted media sources were completely on board. When tragedy struck, I remember shocked investors asking “why didn’t anyone see this coming?” on the Forbes website. So I published a link to Zynga Analysis [6P.] in the thread on Forbes and it became clear that one person had indeed predicted the Zynga collapse in detail months before. Was this luck? Psychic ability? The author described in detail what was going on inside the company without being inside the company. Events that hadn’t even happened yet were detailed.
This is important because it is an example of predictive analysis and in this case was potentially worth billions of dollars if utilized at the time it was written. This is the same sort of predictive analysis described in Moneyball.
In that paper, which has aged very well (I strongly recommend reading the entire paper), I went on to explain that Moneyball, despite being both entertaining and inspirational, was misleading. All qualified data scientists know that to get the results described in Moneyball you need to pair a data analyst with an appropriate domain expert. I assumed this wasn’t explained in the movie just to lower production cost.
But like a complete idiot, the answer was staring at me and I completely missed it.
Recognise that guy talking to Brad Pitt? Yup, that’s Bobby Kotick. Perhaps the most influential man in gaming. Who knew just enough about data to be dangerous to himself and everyone that listened to him. Which was every leader in AAA. The same person who triggered multiple walkouts at the Blizzard campus because of his alleged mishandling of years of sexual misconduct at the company, going back to at least 2018.
It turns out that not only did Bobby and Uncle Jeff have a lot in common, but they were best of “friends” going back to at least 2012 and hung out at each other’s houses at night plotting the future of the gaming industry:
How the Data Implosion Will Trigger the Great Game Dev Correction, August 29th, 2017
I spent the next month pondering the consequences of the misuse of data in game development. Then it hit me, something was very wrong. I checked and rechecked my numbers and functions and they were all going to zero. The methods we were using to “boost revenue” using data would, over time, cause a catastrophic collapse in revenue. This in turn would trigger massive layoffs.
I went to press with my Data Implosion paper, knowing that if I was wrong, it could be the end of my journalism career. I also knew that if I was right, it could be the end of my journalism AND game development career. I had millions of readers, including most of the West’s game developers. There would be nowhere to hide if I was wrong or right.
The industry was laying off creatives and spending that money to hire data analysts (which can be trained in 6 weeks or less) who cost at least twice as much. Over time the effect would be to raise the price of games, and lower their quality. I don’t think you needed to be a math genius to see how that would turn out. Games would lose value against competing forms of media and consumers would lose enthusiasm for games. Then they would lose interest all together if the methodology continued.
In 2017 I had hoped that the desire to make money and be successful would be enough to cause AAA leaders to reconsider their bad decisions. But like all of you, I had no way of knowing that Bobby and Uncle Jeff were calling the shots in the industry by then, if not all the way back in 2012.
The Never Before Revealed Secret of the World’s Fastest Woman, October 4th 2017
This was my next paper at Gamasutra, and my first attempt to explain how oxytocin could be used to make a new generation of higher performing games. I was attempting to chart an offramp path for gaming industry leadership, away from the Data Implosion.
But a strange thing happened. The editor at Gamasutra censored my paper. 100% censored. Visitors to Gamasutra could not read it unless they already had a link to it from somewhere else. I was a featured writer at Gamasutra, nothing like this had ever happened before. The editor refused to explain the action to me. We had a heated discussion over it. Today, looking back, it’s clear that this paper wasn’t the problem. The previous paper was the problem. Someone high up called or emailed the editor and he was going to do exactly as he was told.
The Future of F2P: The Force Wars, December 4th, 2017
I wrote Force Wars after it became clear that the industry was not only doubling down on consumer hostile methodologies, but that it appeared to be acting like a monolith. By this I mean it was acting as a coordinated single entity. This implied some high level collusion. I assumed this was coming from the ESA but now it seems possible it could have been from Bobby and his allies in The Club.
The EU seems to have reacted strongly to what I called “Dark Side Technologies” in Force Wars. They changed the name slightly to obfuscate the source by calling this “Dark Patterns”. Combatting Dark Patterns is the primary theme in the coming Digital Fairness Act.
Commercially, another way of describing a monolith is an oligarchy. With all AAA companies joining the oligarchy, there was no possibility of any company acting independently to seek advantage over the others by better serving public demand. This is the point of an oligarchy, to reduce the costs of innovation and competition. Thus by the time I wrote Force Wars the “Great Game Dev Correction” seemed inevitable.
The Correction started about 6 years after I wrote Data Implosion (about 2 years ago). Many were hoping the dip was cyclical but I’ve been writing furiously on substack about how this is a systemic crash and giving instructions on how to recover. Now the rest of the industry seems to be on board with the idea that this is either systemic, or one heck of a large cycle. It’s not a cycle. The Faerie Game Mother is not going to fly down from the sky to rescue us. We have to do that ourselves.
How Do we Recover?
Now that the industry is in the middle of a death bed revelation, my respected peers and a number of people I’ve never heard of have come out of the woodwork to recommend things they are good at to solve the crash. Some of these ideas are helpful, and we need all the experts we can muster.
Generally these come in the form of minor tweaks to existing systems. The problems I identified in Data Implosion and my various papers on oxytocin are fundamental to the systems we depend on to provide pleasure to our gaming customers. Those systems won’t be fixed by minor tweaks, they are going to require a massive overhaul at this point.
The only good news here is that a massive overhaul typically means a lot of firing and hiring. We’ve already done the firing, though we seem to have fired the useful people and kept all the obsolete people. So we still need more firing I’m afraid.
As I see it, the two massive systemic errors are:
Data Misuse and Dark Patterns. The use of data to manipulate consumers and raise prices are both Dark Patterns but they are so critical (and described in Data Implosion) that I mention them separately for emphasis. We need to learn how to use data appropriately, or minimize our use of it. That means using it to inform our decisions, not to manipulate consumers. As far as all the other Dark Patterns, the industry needs to stop fighting regulators and start cooperating with regulators. Regulators are activated due to consumer complaints, you can’t get rid of them without getting rid of your consumers. The end result will be much better for all of us if the gaming industry is voluntarily involved. Uncle Jeff is not going to return from Hell to save us, we have to save ourselves. Of course leadership fired everyone that was pro-consumer years ago, so some hiring will be necessary.
Dopamine Flooding is Dead, Time to Pivot. The threat of Dopamine flooding and adaptation that I warned about in 2018 in The Physiology of Gaming was confirmed by research in 2024 with the discovery of the D2-Oxy receptor heterocomplex. The bad news is that all the games you optimized for dopamine delivery will perform worse every year, automatically. Those games are “dead men walking”. Not because the games are bad, but because they made our gamers sick from dopamine intolerance. More dopamine just makes that worse. The good news is that the 2024 research lights up the path to our redemption. I explained the situation in detail a few months ago in my paper How Microscopic Receptors can Make or Break Your Game. You will have to hire people who can help you make either oxytocin based games, or games that use a hybrid Dopamine/Oxytocin hybrid delivery system. “Friendslop” games are far out-performing their budgets because they all are in one of those two groups. Of course with expertise and larger budgets, we can do much better. This is a paradigm shift, like moving from internal combustion to electric engines.