If your company is doing things you don't agree with morally, I believe it's your responsibility to do something about it. Sounds to me like you do to some degree, IMO that's something to be proud of.
> when design becomes more about tricking people into accidentally doing things they didn't want to do.
Is that share really worth frustrating users for? Can't you find some way of incentivising sharing better?
Sounds, from what little I know, like the company could do with some long-term thinking. Some ideas for selling that:
1. Would it make sense to increase player happiness? Word of mouth and upselling comes to mind.
2. I assume the company wants to grow - wouldn't it make sense to seek a positive perception at least in game developer circles to have a larger/better hiring pool?
3. I presume you're optimising for daily revenue and daily shares, but maybe there are other relevant metrics you should keep an eye on? Like the number of people who stopped playing (maybe "haven't played in a week"), daily negative ratings vs daily total ratings, perception (sentiment analysis?) etc. Even if you're not optimising for these things, it might stop changes that trade a small increase in revenue for a huge drop in another metric during A/B testing.
Feel free to drop me an email at fhd@ubercode.de if you'd like to chat more about this, I obviously find it fascinating :)
> when design becomes more about tricking people into accidentally doing things they didn't want to do.
Is that share really worth frustrating users for? Can't you find some way of incentivising sharing better?
Sounds, from what little I know, like the company could do with some long-term thinking. Some ideas for selling that:
1. Would it make sense to increase player happiness? Word of mouth and upselling comes to mind.
2. I assume the company wants to grow - wouldn't it make sense to seek a positive perception at least in game developer circles to have a larger/better hiring pool?
3. I presume you're optimising for daily revenue and daily shares, but maybe there are other relevant metrics you should keep an eye on? Like the number of people who stopped playing (maybe "haven't played in a week"), daily negative ratings vs daily total ratings, perception (sentiment analysis?) etc. Even if you're not optimising for these things, it might stop changes that trade a small increase in revenue for a huge drop in another metric during A/B testing.
Feel free to drop me an email at fhd@ubercode.de if you'd like to chat more about this, I obviously find it fascinating :)