One of the goals for this “school year” (yeah, the kids go back to school tomorrow!) is to start writing more on my blog, rather than on LinkedIn or anywhere else that’s owned by some giant corporation. Between Twitter’s catastrophic self-inflicted implosion or Facebook’s constant privacy and ethics woes, it’s clear that even though these platforms help focus an audience and provide nice means of feedback, I want the things I make to live on a platform that I own, and not have it attract eyeballs or create value for someone else.

That’s a big theme of the last few years. Over and over again, I’ve busted my ass to make other people rich, and I’ve managed to make them very, very rich. Far richer than I’ve made myself, by many orders of magnitude. I’m really fucking good at it, and I’m not going to do it for other people from here on out, even if the consequence of that is not doing it at all.

But in any case, the point is that I’ll be writing more here, or on some more focused public-facing locale that discusses specific topics. Probably resumes, game design, and leadership. I don’t know if all three would be in the same place, but who knows.

One thing that’s been bugging me for a long time, though, is how many “old school” gamers I know who have embraced the modern business of mobile games. Pay-to-win, the never ending crush of timers and FOMO, blah blah blah. In some ways, it is what it is, and you can accept it and internalize it, or you can be someone shouting at a tidal wave. I get it. But the thing for me is that while I do think that mobile games are here to stay, I don’t have to like it, and I don’t have to spend my time making them.

In 2009, we pioneered a lot of F2P stuff with Self Aware Games. Am I proud of that? Kinda? I mean, we had to survive, and to survive, we had to try a lot of things we’d never done before. We weren’t the first to offer chips in a casino game for real money, but we pushed the boundaries in a lot of ways – some interesting, some effective, some that likely established some precedents that made the world a worse place.

For me, F2P was interesting, because it enabled live games-as-a-service, where you’re making $, which allows you to keep spending on keeping that game interesting. And creating that feedback loop, where we build stuff, we observe the players, see what’s working, and respond was always really interesting and satisfying. And for a while circa 2009-2016, which was when I stopped working on mobile games, the fact of the matter was that premium priced games were literally impossible to base a business on. Piracy rates were astronomical, and the price people expected to pay for thousands of hours of work was $1 and not a penny more.

So F2P grew out of the circumstance. And the live-ops side of things is super interesting. Still is. I think it’s one of the places where there’s still a lot of fertile ground, but so much of gaming is driven by F2P and VC backing that the push for growth-uber-alles-all-the-time leads you down some weird roads, and makes a lot of games inevitably feel more like pain that fun.

For me, there has to be a future in games as a business. Where you acquire users, and those users are “profitable” from day one. And you grow at a sustainable rate, because you’re growing only when your player base supports (or demands!) growth. Not because your VC needs you to be a $1B company in 24 months or bust. Not because the founders all wanna be part of startupland and the pseudo-“celebrity” that goes along with it. Not because you’re so steeped in the F2P pressure-oriented psychologically manipulative FOMO sea that you can’t see any other way.

I don’t know what that is (yet), but there’s something there. Maybe it’s Apple Arcade. Maybe it’s a chance to reset the business side of things as Vision Pro’s marketplace gets established. I don’t know. But I know that the F2P grind isn’t for me. Not as a player, not as a developer.