This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
A few weeks ago I took part in a contest inside a fitness game. A acquaintance had told me about it — a friend of a friend. The prize was a trip to the Maldives for two, for whoever topped the leaderboard. To earn points you had to work out every day in front of your phone camera. Each session gave you the right to open a gacha, and the gacha decided how many points you received. With a bit of luck you could shoot straight to the top of the rankings in one go.
There were over a hundred of us. Then the problems started. The system rewarded people who brought in new sign-ups, and fake accounts started sprouting up in clusters, which the developers had to delete by hand. More than anything else, new rules began appearing — rules that hadn’t been announced at the start. One of them said something like: post a video on Instagram and you instantly get a hundred points. I’m not on Instagram. I read that and thought it was rubbish, that my goal had just moved a long way further away through no fault of my own. I quit.
The original idea behind that game wasn’t bad. You work out (which is good for you), you film yourself, you earn something. The way the contest was handled killed it within days.
The contract with players
Yesterday I was reading a piece by a video game economist. He made one simple, sound point: the way a game asks you for money is a kind of contract. You sign it when you start playing. If the other party rewrites the terms halfway through, the contract is broken — and so is the trust. My contest had a different kind of contract, about acquisition rather than monetisation. But the principle is the same.
The rest of that article, in all honesty, convinced me far less. The author described secret experiments run on millions of players, jaw-dropping figures that nobody had ever verified, a theory that supposedly explains everything. The further I read, the more it felt like the convoluted language was there to paper over the cracks in the writer’s argument. I’ll take the contract idea and leave the rest where it is.
A feeling about new models
The industry needs new ways to get noticed and get paid. The models that dominate free-to-play today — especially the 4X games coming out of Asia like Whiteout Survival — work extremely well on the numbers. The engine is social pressure: you join an alliance, others are counting on you, and to avoid letting the team down you keep spending. The problem is who’s actually footing the bill. Very often it’s people with serious dependency issues, and a model built around them isn’t something I’m proud of.
A few years back, during a rough patch at work, I got hooked on Heroes of the Storm. I used to play it with an acquaintance and we had a great time. It worked because it was skill-based: a team that was losing could turn the game around through ability, by capitalising on the other side’s mistakes. That unexpected epic win did me good, at a time when not much else was going right. In 4X games that feeling simply doesn’t exist. What counts there is time and money, and pressing the same button for weeks on end.
A healthier model is possible. In the short term it brings in less, because it deliberately lets go of the players who spend compulsively. Over the long term it’s a different story: player trust, word of mouth, the desire to come back the following year. I don’t have hard evidence for this, and I’m wary of anyone who claims they do. I have a gut feeling, and that’s a different thing.
Choose a model you can actually sustain
There’s one last piece, and it concerns those of us who make games. A sophisticated monetisation model requires people who know how to run it: balancing economies, moderating communities, keeping servers up, producing content without let-up. If those people aren’t on the team, the ambitious model won’t deliver more revenue. It’ll just deliver more ways to get things wrong.
Better to choose something simple and do it well. And to treat the people playing as someone you’ve made a pact with, not as a target to keep hitting until they give in.