Unity CEO John Riccitiello has said that if you’re not thinking about monetisation during your creative process, you’re a “fucking idiot.”
The comments came in an interview with our friends at pocketgamer.biz just after it was confirmed that Unity and IronSource are to merge.
When Riccitiello was asked about some of the heat Unity and IronSource has received around the idea of including monetisation earlier in the development process, Riccitiello responded:
“Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives. It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.”
“I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that,” he continued. “It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.”
“But this industry divides people between those who still hold to that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product. And I don’t know a successful artist anywhere that doesn’t care about what their player thinks. This is where this cycle of feedback comes back, and they can choose to ignore it. But to choose to not know it at all is not a great call.”
“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour. Sometimes, you wouldn’t even notice the product difference between a massive success and tremendous fail, but for this tuning and what it does to the attrition rate. There isn’t a developer on the planet that wouldn’t want that knowledge.”
The Unity and IronSource merger was announced yesterday, a deal that values the latter company at $4.4bn.
