The more I learn about making games, the more I'm realizing I also have to learn how to run a game studio. Development costs. Freelancer rates. Marketing. Monetization.

So I've been downloading games I normally wouldn't play and paying a lot more attention to how the rest of the industry makes its money. And holy shit. Mobile just makes it ridiculously obvious. Open the game, watch an ad. Start a level, watch an ad. Finish the level, watch another ad. Run out of energy? Pay. Don't want to wait three hours? Pay. Want to actually compete with the people who have been playing longer? Pay.

But it's definitely not just mobile. Free-to-play games selling every advantage they can get away with. Pay-to-win mechanics. Battle passes built around making you afraid you'll miss something. $20 skins. Cosmetics locked behind another purchase after you've already bought the game. Five different editions at launch so you have to figure out which one contains the stuff that should've just been in the game.

Maybe this shit bothers me more because I'm a Gen-X gamer. I bought Quake II, installed it, and started playing that day. That was it. id Software already had my money and I had their game. Nobody tried to sell me a skin for the railgun or asked me to buy some Strogg currency. The next time I gave them money was when The Reckoning and Ground Zero came out, because those were actual expansion packs with more game to play.

Hell, when Fallout 3 came out I was still on dial-up because DSL wasn't even available where I lived. I put the disc into my Xbox 360 and played the game. No 80GB day-one patch. No sitting there watching a progress bar for three hours. No "this game requires an Internet connection." I bought a game and got to play the damn game.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of this industry stopped asking, "How do we make a game people want to play?" Now the question seems to be, "How much money can we extract from each player?"

I understand Lonely Ranch Games needs to make money. That's part of the goal. I'd love to reach the point where I can spend my days building games instead of working a 9-to-5 making money for somebody else. And I'm not against monetization. Make a real expansion? I'll buy it. Make something genuinely cool that adds to the game? Sell it. Put an optional ad in a free game and give me something worthwhile for watching it? Fine. Developers deserve to get paid.

But there's a difference between making money because people enjoy what you created and designing the entire experience around psychological pressure, artificial scarcity, FOMO, engagement metrics, and figuring out how many more transactions you can squeeze out of somebody who already decided to play your game.

I want to make games because I'm a gamer. I want to make games I want to play. Hopefully you want to play them too. And hopefully Lonely Ranch makes enough money doing that that someday I don't need the 9-to-5 anymore.

But if getting there requires turning our players into prey?

I'll keep the day job.