Why I Hate Fortnite
The Game Was So Close To Getting It All Right. Except for One Thing.
Fortnite didn’t think of the children. Or maybe they did.
I have tried playing Fortnite. I always wanted to like it. It has some super cool ideas. I love that the gameplay piece is free. You can play the game for free.
But it costs money to develop, right? We have to pay the people who created it.
Monetization
So they sell upgrades to the skins. They make the experience of the game slightly different. I never cared much for the skins. I am all about the gameplay. You know who is obsessed with the skins? My nine-year-old.
Not only do they sell upgrades to the skins, they feature them! They mark them as limited time only. They force people into a quick choice. Why should we lock a digital item in time like that? It is trying to model the aspects of a physical item as a digital representation. How so?
Money + Time
Money was created as a way to protect people from future loss of value. Buy low, sell high. We want to sell things when they hit their maximum value. For physical items, this is when they are first produced. They depreciate in time. Think about driving a new car off the lot. That is depreciation as a big example.
Digital items though, they appreciate in value. There is a simple reason for this. You create something once, and you can sell it an infinite number of times. Therefore, right now, Epic is constantly creating digital assets that do nothing but collect value (and money) over time. That is where they launched the masterstroke. They applied the lessons of human psychology.
Act Fast! Limited Time Offer!
They told people that they wanted these digital assets. They needed them. But act now! Limited time offer! All of the snake oil salesman tactics we love to hate. There is a reason that people do that though. It works. Even when you know it works, it will still work on you.
We are all human and there are some universal truths about our behaviors. We can prey on them or we can educate people and rise above some of our natural instincts. Do you want to know why we have a huge increase in mental illness issues?
As It Stands
We have a bunch of companies screwing with people’s minds in order to make money. They are built off of psychological studies focused on influencing human behavior. Then we focused on making money. We need to back up and slow down.
Let’s think about what we are doing. Then we can adjust our behaviors. The first is programming people for money. That needs to stop immediately. Money is not what we think it is anymore. Do you know the age range that is easiest to program? It’s kids. Definitely kids.
Watch how advertising can affect kids. They don’t have the mental shields in place to protect themselves at all. Adults usually have some protections in place. Even then, though, there are lots of competing forces battering at all of our mental shields. It wears us down. It breaks through. It influences. It changes.
Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?
We are changing kids’ behaviors with our actions. We are changing adults too, although not as badly. I speak as someone who was recently under this spell. I have seen the changes I have made in my life over the past decade. I now understand why I made the changes I did. It was because of the internet.
We have to realize the difference between pre-computer money and post-computer money. There was a drastic shift in the economy. Money is infinite now. Therefore, hoarding no longer makes sense.
Your future will be secure. Everyone’s will. We just have to stop holding on to stuff. The concepts of time, money, and value are all screwed up right now. They used to be closely related. This is no longer the case.
Please Stop Programming Us
The problem with Fortnite (and games that use similar models) is that they end up reinforcing weird understandings of what money, time, and value really mean. As a parent, I have seen first hand what it does to a kid. I think Fortnite was close to being a great game. They just have to stop programming their users.
This isn’t limited to Fortnite, either. There are so many companies that try to program their users in order to make money. Anything to make the users perform some action. Advertising. That is wrong and we need to stop doing it. We need to ask users what they want. Then we can tailor the experience to the user instead of the other way around. Be humane in your development.
I am available for free consulting if you want to talk about how to humanely monetize your app or service. Programming the user is never the way. Sign up for my mailing list below if you are interested in talking to me.