Trying to ride that to the moon is a very different proposition from a B2B play where you sell some service that concretelt delivers $X/mo recurring value to each customer for a $Y/mo price tag, and X > Y, but Y - your costs still turns a healthy profit. If you do that right, everyone is winning and the economy as a whole grows, not at all the same as the zero-sum game that is soaking a few whales and ruining their lives.
Fortnite is a bit of weird backwards example because the early PvE iteration had paid lootboxes, but they were scrapped in the Battle Royale spinoff which actually got popular, and eventually removed altogether. They still do things like engineering FOMO to drive sales but ironically the games monetization was the most exploitative when nobody was playing it.
But now the siren song of lootboxes is calling to them once again... https://kotaku.com/fortnite-loot-boxes-gambling-roblox-20006...
I helped Indie Fund Hollow Knight back in the day and look a them now!
Related, I find it interesting is that gacha games seem to ahve the highest possible returns but almost none are made by western game companies.
I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable. They usually yield a “ring of fire” effect that creates a growing ring of users for a while but really you’re burning out all your core users and will implode. This is how many describe the original Zynga model.
Supercell (founded around the same time) has cultivated longterm ecosystems and IP by respecting their players.
EGG takes a similar long-term perspective.
(Sharing to help others bc I had to look it up.)
