What Makes a Game Fun? Balancing Revenue and Player Experience

I've been making games again lately.

More precisely, I'm in the middle of organizing the design document to build one.

I defined the concept I wanted, found reference materials, analyzed them, and studied how they were received and evaluated in the market.

Today, we held a meeting based on everything I'd compiled so far.

According to my analysis, the more we examined the reference titles from our last meeting, the more weaknesses emerged in our design.

One title had 2 million downloads, but its Revenue Per Download (RPD) was roughly 30x lower than the comparison group. Content consumption was too fast, and the churn rate was significantly high.

I classified this type of game as "not fun."

But paradoxically, when I reconsidered, between those two games, I personally found the flawed one more appealing and entertaining than the one that earned more money.

Until my team members brought it up in the planning meeting, I had concluded this game wasn't fun.

When you actually visit game studios, it's common to see dev teams, art teams, and planning/marketing teams arguing intensely with each other.

They have different values and standards.

Generally, programmers tend to focus on fun, artists on emotion and empathy, and the monetization division on revenue.

And when these perspectives combine well, the result is the games we all enjoy playing.

But when did this happen to me? The person who used to make games for fun had disappeared, and today I was awkwardly judging fun solely through revenue reports.

And I was pathetically insisting my argument was correct. It was truly embarrassing.

So I thought about it.

What is fun?
What kind of fun do I want to give gamers?

After much deliberation, I reached a conclusion:
"Let's make a game that people want to play regardless of what mood they're in!"

Finally, I'll wrap up this post with a question I asked a famous game designer in a lecture hall in Busan — and the crystal-clear answer I had forgotten:

Question: I want to make a fun game but I'm worried it won't make money.

Answer: If the game is fun, it will absolutely make money.