Shutting down a game ‘poisons the ocean’
When developers shut down a game, they “poison the ocean” for committed players, according to Playdom’s senior game designer, Greg Costikyan. Speaking at Casual Connect in San Francisco today,…
Two things:
- You can’t refer to any segment of your player population as “whales” and then say that you pedagogically “love” them. Emotions and feelings have no place in business transactions and making video games is NOT A CON.
- The fact that we’re using works like “developing emotional attachments” to (games) seems like a bad attempt at masking addiction. I’d be mindful of that moving forward.
We all want to make a living making video games but I think we need to make sure we are appropriately balancing the steps we’re willing to take to get there. Why not just make great games?