The Trap

Thirty years in the industry, and why I did it anyway

May 04, 2026

In 2015 I defended the F2P model using the industry’s own vocabulary. In 2017 I called myself a parasite. This is what happened in between.
The dirtiest secret in the industry: everyone knows these are addiction machines. The career-limiting move is saying it out loud.
The model is broken. I accept that. I’d still tell a junior producer to take the job.
Part four of a four-part series on the F2P trap.

If you’ve read parts one through three, you’ve seen the evidence. The science behind Skinner box mechanics and variable reinforcement. The whale economy where 5% of players fund 65% of revenue. The FTC settlements totalling billions. The regulatory wave crossing continents. The self-regulation theatre that failed by every measure the industry’s own trade body set.

Now read this again:

‘I don’t make Skinner Boxes. I do use reward schedules in an attempt habitualize behaviour as a tactic, but main difference is my players are not confined and focused on the reinforcement apparatus. They have free will and lots of distractions. The cleverest engagement gag cannot trick a player into doing something that is not fun or lacks anticipation of a reward.’

I wrote that in April 2015. I was a producer at a free-to-play studio in Toronto. I’d spent the previous three years studying the psychology of compulsion, reading books on applied behavioural economics, deconstructing competitor games, and building pitch decks with core loop diagrams showing sources and sinks. The whiteboard scenes in ‘Freemium Isn’t Free’ hit too close to home because I had stood in front of actual whiteboards making those exact presentations, with real data instead of Canadough.

I wrote that post for my friends. The ones who stayed in console and PC development, making what the industry quietly calls ‘real games’. I felt them judging me. Hedonic adaptation, appointment sessions, operant conditioning: that vocabulary was a performance of expertise designed to make my work look legitimate to the people whose opinion mattered to me. I wanted to be seen as someone who understood the craft at a level most people didn’t.

Two years later, Facebook surfaced the post as a memory. I shared it with a new caption:

‘Damn, I was really drinking the coolaid back then justifying my parasitic profession of making free to play “games”. At least I became a very good parasite.’

The question this series has been building toward: what happened in between?

It started in 2012 at Fuse Powered Games. The free-to-play gold rush was underway and Smurfs’ Village had written the template: place buildings, wait for them to produce currency, collect rewards, reinvest. Optional purchases to skip the wait. That loop, simple as it looked, became the foundation for an entire genre. I played Smurfs’ Village for hundreds of hours. I was a grinder and a payer, studying the compulsion from the inside while it worked on me.

I read Nicholas Lovell’s Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, with its chapters on operant conditioning and whale economics. I read Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design, about how slot machines engineer the ‘machine zone’ of repetitive play. The appendices of both books took me deeper into academic papers on variable reinforcement and dopamine regulation. I was assembling the same reading list a regulator would use to build a prosecution, and I was using it to build pitch decks.

I thought this was my ticket to a life-changing cheque. I became a student of the craft. I did extensive research. I was obsessed.

We produced Universal Movie Tycoon. Kingdom Vail. Zoo Country. Duck Dynasty. I pitched and built more that never got past soft launch. None of those games hit the revenue targets. I assumed I hadn’t cracked the formula yet. The next one would work.

Then I worked at studios where the formula had been cracked. At Product Madness and Zynga, I worked on games that made hundreds of millions of dollars. The model, when it works, works at a scale that makes every justification easier to maintain and every doubt easier to shelve. When the numbers are that big, the room stops asking whether the design is ethical and starts asking how to do more of it. Over twenty free-to-play games across my career. Some failed. Some made fortunes. The ones that made fortunes used every mechanic the South Park episode described.

Then the money people arrived.

When acquisition costs were modest, it was just producers and developers trying to figure out the model. There was room to tell yourself this was craft. You were a student of the game. But as the stakes grew, the investors showed up. Then the product managers. Then the data scientists. The language in the room changed. It stopped being about making a game that worked and started being about optimising a revenue instrument. The moment the data scientists walked into the meeting, I stopped being the expert. I became the content wrapper for their monetisation model.

All the executives saw was dollar signs. There was big money on the line and we all wanted a piece. I kept doubling down. But the distance between what I told myself I was doing (making games) and what I was actually doing (building systems designed to extract money from compulsive behaviour) got harder to maintain with each project that shipped.

I read the revenue reports. I data-mined for whales. I have family members who have had gambling problems, and I knew there were players of my game spending $1,000 a day. I didn’t picture a nameless data point. I pictured a specific person. Someone I knew. Sitting at a screen, doing the same thing my family member did at a betting terminal, except my name was on the product.

There’s a moment I think about more than any other.

I was honest in the office. Too honest, apparently. I said out loud what I’d come to believe: that we did not make games. We made addiction machines.

A boss I hold in high regard pulled me aside. The conversation was not about ethics. It was career advice. Saying things like that around the office was self-limiting and not a good look.

The problem was never the addiction machines. The problem was naming them.

This is the dirtiest secret in the industry, and nobody talks about it. In every top-grossing studio, in every monetisation meeting, in every room where the core loop diagrams go up on the whiteboard, people know. The producers know. The designers know. The data scientists definitely know. The first rule of the addiction machine is that you don’t call it an addiction machine. You call it engagement. You call it retention. You call it live ops. You call it player lifetime value. You never call it what it is, because calling it what it is ends the conversation, and ending the conversation is a career-limiting move.

My boss was right, by the way. It was career-limiting. I don’t hold it against them. They were trying to protect me. That’s what the trap looks like from the inside: the people who care about you telling you to stop saying the thing that’s true.

So here’s where I’ve landed after thirty years.

The model is broken. I accept that. The science from part two confirms it. The regulatory wave from part three confirms it. My own experience confirms it.

I also don’t hide my past. I’m proud of the games I worked on. People fed their families. I got to travel the world. I worked with talented people who brought genuine craft to the UI design, the content, the production pipelines, the shipping discipline. The work had value. I separate the craft from the model. I can be proud of the work without endorsing the system it sat inside.

But I don’t pretend that separation is comfortable.

The 2015 post was me performing expertise to an audience that mattered to me, using vocabulary borrowed from the very research that now underpins FTC enforcement actions. The 2017 post was me dropping the performance. The industry hadn’t changed between those two dates. I had. I’d seen enough revenue reports, sat in enough meetings, built enough core loops, data-mined enough whales. I stopped being able to maintain the distinction between what I said I was doing and what I was actually doing.

The question I get asked now, by mentees and junior producers who read the GPA blog, is whether ethical free-to-play is possible. Whether you can build a F2P game without the predatory mechanics. Whether there’s a clean version of the model.

I don’t have a good answer. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the model, as it exists, is broken. That doesn’t mean every F2P game is evil. It means the economic structure rewards the worst version of itself, and the further you go toward the money, the more the worst version wins.

The question I get asked even more often is simpler. A junior producer, or someone looking to break in, wants to know: I’ve been offered a role on a F2P mobile game. Should I take it?

Given today’s industry, with the layoffs, the studio closures, the thousands of experienced people looking for work, I am compelled to say: take it. Break in any way you can. But know that mobile is a specific subset and it is hard to pivot to AAA. I have mentees in that boat right now.

Take the job. Learn the craft. Understand the systems. Go in with your eyes open about what you’re building. And if one day a boss pulls you aside and tells you to stop saying the quiet part out loud, know that you’re not wrong. You’re just inside the trap.

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