Philosophy #2: On The Ethical Use of Data and Operating with Character vs. Cruelty
Philosophy Friday returns, yes we made another one!
I really didn’t know what to expect when I was first writing about the ethical use of data in the gaming industry:
Completely disregarding the potential for popularity, I actually first became interested in writing on the topic because:
#1. I felt some of the outrage expressed in various public and private channels was a bit over the top especially on a relative basis to some of the other data ethics issues happening in our industry that are actually current, and
#2. I thought it’d be fun to poke fun at game company execs and how many of them would no longer be able to form opinions on games if they were to lose access to market intelligence data such as from App Annie.
After starting to write on the topic, however, I realized that there was much greater depth in what I was covering and more investigation revealed a lot of additional considerations I had never even thought about.
Yes, you should read it!
Also, come on people… this App Annie stuff from like 2018 and earlier is not only dated but App Annie has already fixed their issues.
Although I thought it’d be a very niche post, it wound up being one of the most read… well at least since the switchover to Substack. This indicated to me that the topic of data integrity and ethics is much more top of mind than I had originally imagined.
In response to some requests to follow up, we decided to address this topic in the 2nd episode of our Philosophy Friday series that Brett Nowak and I started. One of our good friends Lars Doucet also had some thoughts on this topic and so I’d like to present the 2nd episode of Philosophy Friday:
On Character vs. Cruelty
It was January 10, 2007, and as a die-hard Cal football fan, I felt sick to my stomach…
On that day, Stanford announced their new football coach Jim Harbaugh. I knew Harbaugh was an incredible coach and that his hiring would represent a major power shift in Pac-10 football at the time.
Despite my negative feelings about Stanford, from that day I followed Jim Harbaugh and studied his approach and his philosophies.
One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned and adapted into my own set of core business philosophies was a lesson he taught about how to win.
To his Stanford football team he had taught:
We’re going to win with character but we’re also going to win with cruelty.
This is a philosophy I also now teach at my own games company:
For many start-ups and one of the key distinctions between companies that succeed in “Zero to One” environments boils down to this issue. Does the company, and the leadership team, have the will to do whatever it takes to win? Cruelty.
For my own company, we will do whatever it takes to win, but we also draw the line at character. We are “character” first, cruelty second, but we absolutely don’t forget about cruelty. It’s also important to note that these 2 concepts are not mutually exclusive. In fact, more often than not they are complements.
For many companies, the path to winning focuses not so much on cruelty, but more so on taking the easy path. This is often the path absent character. The easy path is more often about taking shortcuts to try to cheat a win rather than doing things via the hard path to earn a win.
Even worse are the companies that costume-dress their companies professing character, while really acting with a complete disregard for it.
The Data Wars of 2021
Over the past year, I spoke and wrote about the coming “Data Wars of 2021.” A few examples:
Ad Tech + Game Studios | The BIG Dangers from Applovin, Zynga, and More Coming! (GameMakers YouTube)
TWIG #120 (DOF Podcast)
SSB9: Zynga's Q1 Results w/ Special Guest Host Matthew Kanterman of Bloomberg Intelligence! (Super Stonk Bros Video)
I am AppLovin! Behind the Company Acquiring MZ (Medium post)
A few of my comments from TWIG #120:
With M&A drying up, Zynga now is looking to basically follow AppLovin’s path and become more vertically integrated.
This announcement really makes the Rollic acquisition make a lot more sense now. They were buying inventory for their upcoming ad network. Hence, this must’ve been in the planning for a while.
The problem with this model as we’ve stated on multiple occasions in the past though is that it is extremely fraught with conflict of interest and the potential to do bad things with the data from their customers on behalf of their own interests on the game studio side.
So, for many of you who have listened or read my material via newsletters, I have been warning about this for a while and have been foreshadowing these kinds of activities in what I called The Data Wars of 2021.
Just to be clear, I’m not making any value judgments regarding Zynga. They literally haven’t done anything wrong yet on the issues I raised. I am however submitting that not only Zynga but a number of companies will likely face decisions of character as our industry finds itself embroiled in a number of structural changes.
In many situations, companies will be faced with strategic decisions around data usage and sharing that will have ethical and potentially profound business implications.
Therefore, a number of game industry ecosystem players (e.g., vertically integrated ad networks + game studios, ad mediation/bidding platforms, SDK ad networks, VCs, game publishers + investors, game stores, and more) will need to make decisions on taking the path of character or to choose the dark side of the force.
We’re here now and I had already envisioned many companies that will have to draw a line around where they stand. We are seeing the dynamics of “character” decisions being made in real-time.
The big question now is: How will companies choose?
Will companies in the name of “cruelty” or doing whatever it takes to win, abandon character or will they choose the more difficult path?
Stay tuned as the Data Wars of 2021 continue to push forward…
Also, we got an Ad Monetization talk coming up this week that you definitely do not want to miss if you want to hear more about the implications of data ethics and data sharing.
The Future of Philosophy Friday
Thanks to everyone who DM’ed me with really encouraging feedback about Philosophy Friday #1 on How To Be a Great PM!
To be honest, I personally thought we were going to upset a lot of folks.. and maybe we did but more of you (I hope) found that episode very useful. In fact, I’ve never gotten so many messages of encouragement and support even at the very height of doing the This Week In Games podcast. Hence the percentage of positive messages we got is literally an order of magnitude+ higher than anything I’ve ever published.
Shout out to Brett for founding this series with me!
Please bear with us as we’re likely gonna try a bunch of stuff and hopefully we can create content that people both enjoy and find useful. For us, we’re just trying to wind down towards the end of the week and have a fun but meaningful conversation.
In the spirit of trying new things, I’ll also be publishing the upcoming week’s Philosophy Friday recording to the GameMakers podcast first.
Here’s the upcoming episode:
🎧 Listen to Philosophy Friday #3: Zero to One vs. 1 to N PMs on
If you have comments or thoughts let me know and I’m hoping to integrate any (if we get any) when I “officially” publish with newsletter and video the following Friday.