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Ubisoft Insider Alleges That Company Wants Steam To Remove Concurrent Player Counts To Hide Its Failures (fandompulse.substack.com)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago

Yeah, product managers and executives will never find a performance metric they won't immediately pollute. They seem totally immune to the idea that once you start trying to directly impact them, they lose all meaning.

When I was interviewing for my first job in the video games industry, I came across an anecdote that spelled the whole thing out to me. Some game team discovered that players who completed their tutorial in under X amount of minutes (let's say 10, to have a concrete number to play with) where significantly more likely to make an in-game purchase (I worked in mobile gaming). So, the team was instructed to reduce the length of the tutorial so that almost anyone could complete it in 10 minutes or less.

Weirdly enough, this did not work.

Decision makers who "use data" to "drive decisions" seem to totally lack the ability to consider what the data means, who their customers are, or why people behave in the ways that they do. It's exhausting.