A few weeks ago, the MOP writers were sitting around in Discord avoiding work when the subject of a certain industry website’s known pay-for-play proclivities came up. Don’t worry, it’s not an MMO site, but it definitely made me mope out loud that I wish I just didn’t know some things about our industry. It takes so much of the fun out of gaming.
“Put all the sausage back,” I wailed. “I didn’t really want to know.”
So that’s what we’re talking about in this week’s Massively Overthinking. It doesn’t have to be a deep dark secret; just a little peek behind the curtain that sours the whole experience. Let’s discuss the things we wish we didn’t know about the MMO industry.
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): I have a list:
- Gaming industry executives are not all failson idiots, but many of them are totally faking expertise and wisdom that they lack, so expecting savvy long-term business moves out of them is like walking away from your The Sims 4 game and hoping the puddin-faced idiots don’t burn down the house while you’re not looking. Worse, there’s very little comeuppance for terrible corporate decisions at the top or toxic behavior at the bottom. Somebody always rehires these folks.
- “Make a good game and it will succeed” has always been a lie people tell themselves because we want to believe the industry isn’t fickle, short-sighted, stupid, and greedy. We want to believe in a fair meritocracy because we want to sleep at night, but there isn’t one. Counterintuitively, quality does not beget success, even if most success includes at least some quality, which means that teams that go out and pour their hearts into games fail all the time.
- Every decent-sized live-service studio has people whose whole job is to milk whales. You have been warned.
- The constant deluge of gambling-related gaming email and requests for blatantly illegal undisclosed sponsorship crap we get is unreal. I would hardly believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes for the last 15 years. Obviously we don’t do them, and I don’t really believe most legitimate gaming websites do either. (Believe it or not, most people who work in games journalism suffer the low pay and abuse because they love the genres and the writing, not to sell their soul for a couple hundred bucks.) But these scum outfits wouldn’t bother spamming about it if it didn’t work on somebody, which is beyond depressing.
Some of these are facetious, I suppose; I know it’s better to know than not know. I need to know; it’s our job to know and to journalism our way through the muck accordingly. But sometimes I still miss the bliss of not knowing.
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog): It’s been more common knowledge more and more these days, but man do I wish I could put knowledge of how much impact investor boards and public trading have on gaming out of my brain and toss it into a fierce gale to sail away.
I don’t know that I would fully get away from this information, to be fair, and the past two years and change have just made it all way more brutal for the industry so that makes it rise to the fore, but like… it was so much nicer to believe – however foolishly – that studios were trying to make games that they wanted to play and not to appease a ravenous band of Tasmanian devils in business suits.
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog): Honestly, the biggest thing I wish I didn’t know was how atrocious some companies are behind the scenes. That’s not to say that I don’t want to know that, say, Riot and Blizzard were gigantic hotbeds of sexual harassment because learning that was true and it’s important to know that. Rather, I wish that it weren’t true in the first place. I would rather know that companies were doing awful things behind the scenes because that is important information when it comes to deciding which companies I give my personal time and attention to, but I would prefer that so many companies weren’t doing awful things behind the scenes in the first place. It makes me even more thankful for places that do seem to genuinely be filled with passionate people doing their best, at least.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): It’s a small thing, but I really don’t want to hear anything that ruins the little illusions that make our characters look like they’re in a world and interacting with it normally. Don’t point out hitboxes or fake landscape or abstract combat numbers or anything like that. Once you know how the magic trick is done, it ceases to be magic.
Sam Kash (@samkash@mastodon.social): I wish I didn’t know how often game companies and their leads held back or didn’t answer interview questions. Before working for MOP, I never even thought about it or questioned the interviews I read online. Whether it was about MMOs or anything else, I’d just read it and appreciate it for what it seemed to be. Now I know how often they will ask for some things to stay off the record.
Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!
