The BBC has an article with Sid Meier, where he talks about the current development in the games industry. The views in the article probably come due to the recent increase in the monetisation in this industry, not only with in-app purchases and micro-transactions, but also with the recent NFT hype. He also talks about the rise of online casinos and how many people in Italy are now turning to casinos that are built into games in the form of micro-transactions. According to Stranieri.com, Italy’s leading gambling informational resource, more than 40% of new games launched in Italy have some kind of gambling component to them, whether it be slots or games of chance.
Firaxis has gladly never said anything about the latter, and we are very happy about it.

An excerpt from the article:
“Sid Meier says that if major companies continue to focus on ways like this to monetise gaming, they risk losing the audience: “People can assume that a game is going to be fun and what it needs for success are more cinematics or monetisation or whatever – but if the core just is not there with good gameplay, then it won’t work.

“In a sense gameplay is cheap… The game design part is critical and crucial but doesn’t require a cast of thousands in the way some of the other aspects do. So it’s perhaps easy to overlook how important the investment in game design and gameplay is.””

Read the whole article here: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60304123

Discuss this article in our forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/bbc-sid-meier-warns-the-games-industry-about-monetisation.675634/

(The image of Sid Meier is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, and is taken from here).

The Telegraph has published an article two days ago, probably also related to Sid’s birthday, about his story and the experiences with Civilization. They talk about how Sid himself started up in gaming, the relationship to education, and development rules like the 1/3rd rule: 1/3rd keep, 1/3rd improve, 1/3rd new.

An excerpt:

“Can Civ games – which feature numerous leaders from human history including Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abu Bakr, and Mahatma Gandhi – serve an educational purpose? Meier, who studied history and computer science at the University of Michigan, likes to think so. He says that Civ may have even helped to “legitimise” gaming as an intellectual pursuit. “I mean, I’m remembering back 30 years ago, and it wasn’t considered all that good an idea to play games. People would say, ‘Oh you’re wasting your time playing those games, can’t you do something useful?’ But that has really turned around today, where I think it is a reputable and worthwhile use of time. It might even prepare you for a career in the wonderful world of the gaming industry, whether that’s as a designer, or an artist, or as a journalist.”

Meier is on a roll and becomes more animated. “Where parents used to think it was a waste of time for kids to play video games,” he says, “now they might think this is an opportunity for their son or daughter [to learn something]. Kids can amaze their parents with things that they know about Caesar, or Gandhi, or Genghis Khan.””

The full article is available here (but saldy behind a paywall).