231B. DRGD2: Listening to Your Consumers, and Identifying "Ethical Debt"

Here I explain the importance of listening to your customers, identifying "Ethical Debt", and protecting investors from bad actors looking to leave you responsible for their poor decisions.

This is the second paper in my DeRisking Game Development (DRGD) series. The first paper can be found here.

I began interacting with developers fairly intensely from 2001 on, when I became a game journalist. Even before that I was very involved in a variety of projects as I was self-educating on the concept of virtual goods sales. As my long term readers know, I co-wrote the first paper on virtual goods sales with Ashley Dunn at the Los Angeles Times in April of 2000. Back then developers were trying to create subscription based worlds and the idea of selling items or even Free to Play wouldn’t become a thing for developers until the next year in 2001.

I’m of the opinion that you learn by listening, not talking, so I listed to a lot of people. Literally thousands of people a year. When I was working with a developer, I surveyed their team. When I was previewing a game, I surveyed the alpha/beta testers to see what their impressions were. When I started selling virtual goods in 1999, I always surveyed my customers to see what they liked and what they would be most motivated to pay for.

When I was writing articles for UnknownPlayer through 2005 I was highly engaged with my readership. They had a lot of opinions and I asked my readers a lot of questions. At UP we often hosted town halls for developers, for instance we hosted the first Q&A for Cryptic’s City of Heroes game prior to its launch. I remember that one in particular because CoH really nailed so many aspects of what consumers want in a game, that modern game developers can only dream of reproducing.

As I was writing this, Chris Wilson, who I have tremendous respect for, published a short video: “Don’t Survey Your Players”. Awkward. While I agree with most of what Chris says there, there are ways to survey your players that he’s not familiar with that you absolutely should do. Surveying is complicated and isn’t something you fly out of your mother’s womb knowing how to do. In an era where we hire not-nice people to tell us what ideologies to force on our players (something I absolutely don’t recommend doing), there should be room to hire people to help you do gamer-centric surveys that will ultimately improve your relationship with them.

I always established a trusted relationship with a community’s players before asking them questions. This usually involved being friendly with them, and making sure I was one of the top players. Even “whales”, who are reluctant to talk to anyone about their spending habits, would open up to me. I never suggested to players that I was related to the development team. A developer doing a survey is going to get very different results compared to a trusted fellow player. I think this is why Chris Wilson has a very different experience here, because he’s had bad experiences as a developer giving surveys to his player base.

Perhaps the most comprehensive survey I ever did was when I asked the community for the Trion World’s End of Nations game how they would like to be charged for the game. This was likely in 2011, and Pay to Win had turned off a lot of players to the idea of F2P. That thread ended up being so huge, that it had more comments than the entire rest of the EoN forums combined. I was careful not to give the players an option of not spending, and they understood that someone had to pay. This made the data really good since the players were forced to think about what would be best for them.

EoN was proposed as the spiritual successor to Nexon’s Shattered Galaxy MMORTS from 2001, which I am in the credits for. I’m also considered one of the top 3 players in SG of all time. So I had the trust of the community, and they really appreciated that I was willing to help Trion. Except that I had no relationship with Trion, they refused to talk to me, and they ended up deleting that entire thread. That’s unfortunate because it had priceless academic and commercial value. That also made me the only living record of what was written in that thread, invaluable objective survey information that no one else in the field of monetisation has.

Players were literally enthusiastic about spending on EoN, but they didn’t want P2W. At the time all F2P games were P2W and Trion planned to go F2P. So to solve that problem and give the players what they wanted, I had to invent a whole host of new technologies, which I offered to share with Trion. They refused to talk to me, and this ultimately led to EoN development being shut down since they didn’t possess the tech to build that game. That tech would end up powering World of Warships, which was and is incredibly successful.

That’s where I deployed an asymmetrical matchmaker for the first time, which solved the F2P/P2W paradox by allowing us to charge for Power without making the game P2W. It would have been difficult to come to the conclusion that I even needed to invent that if I hadn’t talked to so many players.

Also in 2011 the Firaxis team noticed me surveying their players in the forums for their CivWorld game. They were like “Who is that person?” So they asked me, which was the proper way to approach me. It’s much better than just banning people that might be able to save your project, out of some sense of xenophobia. They asked me if I knew what was wrong with their game. I said “Yes”. They asked me if I would tell them, and I agreed to write it up and give it to them the next day.

This was similar to how I gave the solution set to save CCP’s Eve Online game economy the first week after their launch in 2003. I would go on to work on both CivWorld and Civilization Online. I got to meet Sid, and he thanked me for my help, which made me melt into a puddle. Unfortunately, decisions had been made on both projects before my arrival that were catastrophic and that could not realistically be undone. But, at least I saved Take 2 quite a lot of money by killing those projects, money that went to their XCOM reboot which was quite successful.

DeRisking is what I do, and I’m willing to kill a game in my all time favorite franchise in order to protect investors.

Game Developers Don’t Play as Much as You’d Think

I was really fortunate to start in journalism and QA in the industry before developing a bunch of unique technologies and leap frogging to the other side of the development hierarchy. The need for those technologies was made clear from 12+ years of surveying players. One of the most interesting things I learned from approaching gaming from the player side and then from the developer side is that developers are really busy making games. Sometimes so busy that they have to “crunch”.

They don’t really have much time to play their own games. When they do, they usually are just focusing on the part they worked on, and not the overall experience. Playing through a game, especially a good game, can take hundreds of hours. After a major patch, you have to repeat that to see if it is working. Because of that hierarchy, the top people on the team often don’t have close relationships with their QA department. Also, some things (like meta design in my case) might be invisible to the QA team so they might not catch game breaking imperfections.

In a perfect world, everyone would have ample time to test. But even then, this can be harder than it sounds. When I was relocated to the UK to help a team with famous founders, I really took ownership over the design. I went through the game and found some serious systemic problems. I submitted these to the team. But instead of asking me how to fix the problems, the existing design team decided I was creating too much work for them. So they united to get me fired. Then the investors who funded the game based on my participation pulled the plug. My participation DeRisked their investment and got them to spend millions of dollars. With my disappearance, the risk became unacceptable. 125 people lost their jobs.

Thus doing “the right thing” can still work out poorly and isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Hiring consultants to fill these gaps can be very useful. In theory the “DEI” hires that come in to make games more politically correct could be very useful. It’s unfortunate that some of the most unethical people in the industry have gravitated to these roles and are causing great mischief. These people don’t survey the player community before making recommendations. They know better than the players what the players want so they don’t have to listen to anyone. This creates a taint that can affect even well qualified and responsible consultants who become guilty by association.

What I’m getting at here is that someone needs to talk to the community, and regularly. This is especially true once an alpha is out and feedback is available. Ideally that person should be “undercover” and trusted in the player community, while not being seen as a developer. Players act differently around developers just like paid movie/game critics act differently when reviewing movies/games from major studios (*cough* Mix Tape...).

Where Chris Wilson is right is that you shouldn’t let your players tell you what to do. You know better what the costs are for various features, and how practical they are to implement. You also hopefully know what features might conflict with other features before you actually set about building them. Not identifying those conflicts is one of those tragic things that shouldn’t happen, but still does all too often.

Regulation, Legislation, Blurring and Ethical Debt

Blurring is when you do illegal and unethical things in your games that a lawyer can twist into a “grey zone” of legality because the real-space laws were not written to include online content. Or, with a very small alteration that might be difficult in real space but possible in virtual space, put one toe outside the legal framework of prohibition.

In 2009 Mark Pincus admitted that ““I funded the company myself, but I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away.” That company was Zynga. Him and his lead designer Roger Dickey intensely promoted and charged for classes on how to teach “Fun Pain” to an entire generation of game designers. This was the concept that while many will just quit, a significant number of vulnerable gamers will cough up money if you harm them sufficiently in your game. Major companies were paying hefty tuition to send their designers to these classes to learn this marvelous new design method. Fun Pain became normalized.

Major companies like Valve (CS2: gambling) and Roblox (child labor, sub minimum wage payments) made billions by blurring and now are subject to potentially tens of billions of dollars in what I call “Ethical Debt”. This is similar to Tech Debt where a studio can use AI to write damaged code, then have to spend more than it would have cost to start over from scratch to repair that code.

I use these two examples because they are seen as commercial success cases that investors would want to get in on. This creates incredible pressure to have other developers copy those examples. I know this first hand as investors tried to get me to copy Roblox.

The Western gaming industry has been operating for over 15 years on the assumption that they can legally delay regulators indefinitely and thus never fear being held accountable for their bad actions. That was almost true but a suite of extremely tough regulations are just about to be deployed in the EU. Players have not waited and have begun organising and boycotting against games that use “Dark Patterns” or unwanted ideology. Perhaps most troubling for game developers is that other lawyers have taken note of this Ethical Debt and are now suing developers for millions or even billions of dollars. An entire cottage industry has formed to help lawyers identify Ethical Debt used by companies they want to target for litigation, such as fairpatterns.ai.

On February 25th, 2026 New York state attorney Letitia James sued Valve for illegal gambling in Counter Strike 2 (CS2). She’s seeking several billion dollars in damages. As the penalties are linked to the total assets being gambled, Valve then patched their game to destroy half the value of those assets within days. This resulted in about three BILLION dollars of additional damages to gamers, who are essentially investors. Lawyers are now running design decisions at Valve. Note that this is just New York. There are 49 other states in the USA.

Major social media platforms are similarly being successfully sued for various forms of blurring and public harm, which ultimately can result in tens of billions of dollars in damages. The largest companies in the world are losing these lawsuits. Lawyers smell blood as this is one of the most lucrative scenarios in the world for litigation.

Just as developer lawyers can Blur their products by placing them slightly outside of existing legal frameworks, other lawyers can unBlur these products by finding ways to apply existing laws to them. Meta and Google were successfully sued by applying existing defective product laws against them. The use of DataDD and DopaDD can cause consumer harm when misused by bad actors, as it was in this case. I discussed DataDD and DopaDD in the previous paper in this series.

I introduced the concept of Dopamine Driven Design (DopaDD) in my 2013 Game Dosing paper where I explained how to do it properly. I also explained that it can harm consumers if misused. I then testified before the ICPEN later that year that DopaDD would soon become pervasive in game dev and social media (which it did) and that it would be misused by bad actors (which it was) in the absence of regulation.

I then was double confirmed for a lecture and a round table at the 2014 GDC to discuss looming regulatory efforts and why we should support them. Both were cancelled without explanation a week before GDC. I would continue to write at Gamasutra until 2017 when I got censored after correctly predicting the current game development collapse. Both GDC and Gamasutra (now Game Developer) are owned by Informa PLC. Deplatforming me may have delayed the international regulatory process, but it couldn’t stop lawyers from bringing civil litigation against bad actors using DataDD and DopaDD to knowingly harm consumers.

As an investor you may have noticed that many of the world’s top game publishers have been sold in the last year, at fire sale prices. That’s because the leaders and lawyers of those companies know the cost of their accumulated Ethical Debt, and want to unload their assets on unsuspecting investors before those lawsuits arrive. That way they don’t have to disclose their Ethical Debt, and how these companies ultimately will have negative value.

Then there’s #stopkillinggames. This is a grass roots consumer movement, and I trace it’s origins all the way back to 2001 when I disclosed and doxxed Blacksnow Interactive (BSI) when I was a gaming journalist. That led to the Blacksnow Interactive vs. Mythic lawsuit in early 2002, which I covered extensively at the time. Ultimately it was decided that game developers owned all the assets in their games. At the time I got involved to protect gamers and developers from a malicious hacker group. But over time bad actors in game dev moved to say that their games were not products, but services. Then they started forcing online connections, but would then disconnect their “service” at will, not providing the product/service that gamers had paid for. The movement is gaining widespread support including in California and likely will result in at least hundreds of millions of dollars of additional Ethical Debt to the industry.

The point I’m getting to is that while previous generations of investors seemed to see Blurring as a good thing for them, that era is over. Supporting ethical developers, who listen to and respect their players, is where the smart money is going. Do your homework, specifically ask potential partners about current or possible Ethical Debt, and how they plan to avoid any and all regulatory and litigation exposure.

There are very few makers of online games that can answer these questions honestly. The vast majority of indie work currently is directed at making offline single player content that is not subject to arbitrary deletion. The real money is still going to be in online Games as a Service, but only for responsible and prepared developers.

Listen to the Science

Almost all developers still make what they want to make and build out from there. This is an archaic approach. We are at the point scientifically where we can specifically identify the primary physiological needs of consumers that can be met with interactive media. As I first wrote in 2014 when this technology was first under development, we had the ability to modify the physiology of players engaging with our games.

This put us in a similar scenario that the makers of cigarettes faced in the 1960s when they discovered they could modify the physiology of smokers. As I described in The Rise of Game Neuroeconomics, and in various lectures, the company that discovered this first ended up dominating the world-wide market. They also kept that secret and did a lot of harm to consumers. But we can similarly use science in ways that help consumers while also having them far prefer our products.

Just as in the 1960s, making our games automatically successful because they match the physiological needs of our players deliberately, instead of by accident, will ultimately be the way all games are made in the near future. You can already see that major social media platforms Meta and Google got sued in the last few months by doing exactly what I suggested to regulators in 2013 was going to happen: Secretly and knowingly using DopaDD to harm and manipulate consumers. That’s going to be another very expensive multi billion dollar Ethical Debt. But clearly they would not have done that, and risked all that Ethical Debt, if it didn’t work as I described in my 2013 Game Dosing paper.

It is possible to correctly deploy this technology that Meta, Google, and others fumbled. I’ve been doing it since 2014. I published How to Make Healthy Games in 2018 and did a small world lecture tour to promote the tech. Because I helped the EU write the Digital Fairness Act, way back in 2013, all of my applications meet all future regulatory requirements with little or no modification. Any future regulation of this technology would be welcomed as it would raise the cost to new competitors and favor incumbent first adopters. It would also prevent unfair competition from bad actors who went the path of Big Tobacco, Meta, Google, and many others.

Next steps in developing the tech that I started in 2014 would be much cheaper and faster to deploy than they were back then as related technology has advanced considerably.

Final Advice to Investors

Bad actors in game development have accumulated a lot of Ethical and Tech Debt that has led to the unprecedented 44% layoffs of employees in game dev in the West. This has also hurt investors. Most seem to have moved to AI development, which is also a technology stuffed with all sorts of risk and Ethical/Tech Debt. Again, those developers don’t want to disclose their liabilities, painting a rosy picture.

The upside is that a lot of extremely well qualified developers are currently unemployed and hungry for work at discount prices. Many want to do ethical work, but were not allowed to by their previous employers. So they have started indie studios where they can make quality innovative games without harming anyone or inviting future litigation/regulation.

Consumer demand for games has not diminished at all. But consumers are becoming much more educated and organised around identifying “Dark Patterns” that might harm them. Games tend to be “recession resistant” because as the world-wide economy tanks (this is happening in real time now), people need entertainment products that will lower their stress at a modest price. Games are perfect for this.

The current environment with a cheap and highly trained labor pool, skyrocketing consumer demand, and an emerging regulatory framework that makes games safer for consumers creates the potential for a new gaming renaissance. A lot of innovation will be required to adapt to this new environment, but the payoffs for those that nail it will be enormous.

But as I always say, games are made by investors, not developers. I’ve been educating both for the last 15 years in my published papers, but here I’m focused on the investor side of that equation. I want to protect investors and consumers. Get educated, and learn what’s possible without drifting into questionable territory. Pitches that don’t mention regulation, AI pushback by consumers, or any application of science should raise red flags. You are getting pitched for a game from the old paradigm. Learn about the next paradigm in game development and get in at the start of the next big thing.

It is inevitable that what Meta and Google fumbled, will be done properly in the near future. The tech is there, that’s why Meta and Google did what they did, they just chose unwise shortcuts. Right on schedule actually, since I warned the regulators for 80+ countries it was in the pipe in my testimony to the ICPEN in 2013. I didn’t trust them to do it the right way, which was the accurate call. But someone will, the cat is out of the bag due to all the courtroom discovery. Big money is waiting for those that deploy it wisely.