How Free to Play Video Games are Forced to Make Addicts

TL;DR

• This piece was informed by conversations with multiple growth practitioners in video game companies. 
• Free to Play video game companies, by the structure of their market, are faced with the choice to either A) create addictive products that rob a select group of users large amounts of funds, or B) exit the business entirely.
• This is because their model doesn’t work at all without “whales”—high spenders that are manipulated through product design.
• This isn’t just limited to free-to-play video games. All companies land somewhere on the spectrum of harm. As each of us grow our companies, we must ask ourselves how we are causing hurt and if that tradeoff is justifiable.

Walking into the office, you would have no idea that the company was being held hostage by their business model. This was a top-three mobile gaming company in the U.S., just on the verge of releasing their newest game, with multiple major hits under their belt. The receptionist greeting me at the front desk matched her glaringly yellow company shirt with an equally incandescent, aggressively white-toothed smile. To her left and right sat fishbowls filled to the brim with strawberry flavored Laffy Taffy. Beyond her, workers lounged in bean bag chairs, chatting amicably with colleagues. My Midwestern sentimentality for everything pleasant buzzed. Not an inkling of the interview I was headed into that would end up testing my Minnesota Nice politeness to its extreme.

The position I was being recruited for was a “Strategy and Growth Manager.” Note: I am aware that the title is a Frankenstein’s monster of corporate gobbledygook that means absolutely nothing. My whole career has been spent in generically named roles like this, but in cavemen speak, when you hire me it is to “make company more money faster please.” It is a good career and one that has kept me intellectually engaged.

There is a downside to this type of job. My mandate is to make revenue go up and to the right, in whatever manner is most effective. Most of the time that isn’t a huge issue! My hometurf of B2B software isn’t all that world-changing and is delightfully dull. However, in the business of this game studio, you are dealing with individual consumer’s very limited time, attention, and money. When this happens, things tend to go… wonky. Individual wellbeing may be considered by management but is never an incentivized outcome.