Counterfeit Creative Products - Avoiding Money Wearing The Skin Of Your Work

Last month, one of the most iconic live service video games, Destiny 2, saw its final content update after a 12-year run as a franchise. This surprising decision led to a plethora of conversations, accusations, and conspiratorial theorization regarding why the choice came down to shuttering one of Sony’s largest intellectual properties indefinitely.

I bring this up not to further flex my nerdy origins, or to talk about something unrelated to the craft and meaning of writing. Quite the opposite.

I see what’s going on with Bungie and Destiny 2 as an allegory for the kinds of mistakes that studios, writers, and creatives of all kinds find themselves committing over and over again through the last few decades. As someone seeking to create, let alone proliferate, their creative works, the part of my brain obsessed with long-term thinking has been wondering: could all of this have been prevented?

In a word: yes. And I believe the problem comes down to the fact that, in our time, suits in fancy offices believe that creative products and financial products are the same thing, and that the pursuit of money is the pursuit of better creative outputs.

That is incorrect.

Creative ventures need money to survive; this much is true. However, the prioritized pursuit of money through a creative venture does not bend creative studios too far.

It breaks them entirely.

Thus, I’d rather learn, and therefore share, how any creative venture, from a massive video game studio to a solo creator, can prevent the same fate from befalling them as well.

I see the world of creative ventures producing outputs on a spectrum, with its ends being creative products and financial products. In this context, a creative product is something made for the pure expression of one’s creativity, while a financial product is something made for the sole purpose of extracting money from a customer.

To give a crude example: a pure creative product would be someone publishing their fanfiction to the Internet for anyone to see, while a pure financial product would be a scammy crypto site trying to sell you on memecoins right before their rugpull.

The honesty of the situation is that almost all creative works sit somewhere on this spectrum rather than on its ends. Many creatives, to some extent, think about how their audiences will receive their works as it relates to their income, and many businesses have to think about how to make their services palatable to people to fuel the financial engine.

It works both ways, and it should. If you enter the world of creative ventures as a business, whether solo or studio, you should be thinking about all the facets of what makes the business operate. That’s just smart.

But the problem doesn’t come from money entering the situation. As a tool, an exchange of value, money doesn’t ruin things simply by existing. It’s what it does to those with decision-making power that causes the issues, and this is the problem I believe we see not just in today’s creative landscape, but have had the displeasure to witness for at least two decades.

The issue was never that passionate creatives could get paid for their work, or that businesses have to figure out how to make their goods or services work for the market. The problem is when you take an audience you believe is captured and exploit it.

At that point, you don’t have a creative venture. You have a wolf wearing the skin of something familiar, waiting to pounce with dark patterns and unwanted changes.

From some perspectives, wearing the skin of something fun and interesting is the sensible thing to do if you have no intentions of making something fun and interesting on its own. A liar’s nature is to lie, and a lie needs to have some kernel of truth to be convincing. So, why not have your creative venture be something that looks like it’s good, and then hit your audience with the monetization overload once they’re in?

After all, the creative value of the project in this case wouldn’t exist because someone wanted to share that idea with the world. Rather, it exists solely because it’s the access pass to your wallet.

No fun or entertainment for you, no credit card for the business. So, you have to bring players, or readers, or whatever type of audience you need for your venture to your product with high quality, or the facsimile of it.

To go back to our case study, players know Bungie for their high-quality, first-person shooter (FPS) gameplay. Many critics and players cite that adding the layer of sci-fi goodness and space magic to this expertise in the FPS design space is one of the major reasons why the Destiny franchise had its appeal.

And, to be clear, Destiny started off as a well-made shooter with a clumsy story because of the way the project itself was handled by leadership and publishers. Even though those interested in the stories of their games didn’t have much to get excited about, general audiences loved the gameplay, and that was enough to solidify Destiny as an intellectual property gamers liked.

But, as time went on, those at the helm of the project would start making decisions based on the financials of the game, rather than the players:

Each of these bullet points rolled out over the course of several years. Laid out in plain text like that, and any sane person would ask, “Who would put up with this nonsense?”

Well, the answer is people who got hooked on the gameplay. Despite everything above, the game overall felt good to play, and there’s a long verification lag between when a bad decision for your audience rolls out, and when that audience gives up on you for that decision.

Buying a skin in a game feels good in the moment, but doesn’t translate into meaning like earning a fancy-looking set through effort does. Rotation events every three months feel like interesting things are developing around you, but it doesn’t feel the same as an experience that’s been curated over years for your entertainment.

Ultimately, that’s the core issue: polish and dopamine can be bought with a big team of developers and artists, but something that is great only persists because it was built to do so. The live service model, as we’ve seen in Destiny and other games, has ephemerality built into their design, all to chase as many dollars as possible.

That’s why Destiny started off as something transgenerational, and now runs the risk of fading forever into obscurity.

Since no one wants to fade away, it’s best to learn from the mistakes of others when we can. When I think about how to prevent this type of problem, I come to the realization that there needs to be some sort of checklist or framework in mind about how decisions can shift from short-term to long-term thinking.

To me, I believe creatives can stand to benefit by thinking about the financial decisions they need to make about their works through what I call the “Three-Gate Test”.

It’s composed of three lenses you view these decisions through: Necessity, Craft, and Audience.

Most times, it seems businesses will tell themselves a decision made in favor of finances rather than creative greatness needs to be done because it is necessary for the survival of the project. A certain feature, monetization path, or similar facet needs alteration so the business can make more money.

Honest question: when does a business not need more money? Point to a specific figure or number that universally satisfies all people, in all places, and at all times.

The fact that we can’t is telling, and also why this lens is the first gate.

If you can’t express an honest reason as to why this decision needs to be made, then it’s hard to read the decision as anything other than a cash grab. Make a decision through that lens often enough, and even your once-ardent defenders will start to see through the deception you’re weaving.

Necessity is a value that should be applied to emergencies and priorities. In creative works, money cannot be the priority, and therefore cannot be the inspiration for claiming something is necessary.

The next gate is through the lens of the craft itself. If work goes into your creative venture, will that work exist to scaffold the venture, or serve the longevity of the work itself? Or will this decision act as a hollowing-out of the intellectual property for the sake of a quick dollar?

There’s a common accusation thrown at Bungie over the years that paid expansions featured powerful weapons partly to entice players to buy said expansions. In other creative ventures, we see things like crossovers and overlicensing of IPs to generate non-creative venture revenue for the creative business.

All these practices against craft do is reduce the perceivable value of what you make. If your creative venture can be easily found elsewhere, or can be replaced by something else that you make months from now, why would someone familiar with your game stick around for it?

The constant treadmill we see in games, or the repeated exposure to certain IPs due to liberal licensing, causes these creative projects to lose their luster over time. Making the decision, conscious or not, to remove the allure of your ventures doesn’t make sense for longevity’s sake.

Finally, the last gate, and assuredly the trickiest to land well: audience. The last, but not least, gate to good decision-making for your creative venture is whether the audience’s long-term enjoyment of the decision is served by the outcomes of those decisions, or if this decision is meant to exploit a short-term impulse.

The fact of the matter is that, once someone has purchased from you once, they are significantly more likely to do so again. Rather than upsetting your audience, and therefore your warmest audience, the smarter business decision is to do right by those folks and see that your venture maintains what your audience is clamoring for from your work.

It will be tricky to balance what these folks want with what needs to be done to allow the work to survive in the long term, as sometimes, your audience does say that it wants the short-term blast over the long-term slow burn.

Overall, good risks can upset fans and pay off, while a gradual degradation always leads to stagnation, or worse. I know which outcome I’d recommend for you.

The decisions made through the Three-Gates Test allow you to create something that treats your audience well, aligns with your venture’s, your audience’s, and your personal tastes, and creates great financial outcomes, even if it would be slower than otherwise possible with more underhanded tactics. Failing one of the gates means that, no matter what, all other gates fail, because each succeeding gate relies on the previous to be true.

If a financial decision isn’t necessary, it can hurt your craft and your audience. If a decision that takes your project and does something unnecessarily flippant with it, your audience won’t trust you. Each gate relies on the previous one to be met with honesty and integrity.

The same can be said of how these gates prevent issues with your project’s approach to finances as it relates to your balance sheet. Too many times, the outcome I have seen with decisions not passing this framework is that it leads to the assumption that a new peak is a new baseline.

The incentive structures for businesses often favor that line of thinking, though. Executives and founders see most of their compensation come from profit sharing rather than a direct salary, so they have financial incentive to try and maintain a new peak for as long as possible. If you can’t recreate the lightning in a bottle that gave you that peak, it makes sense why someone would force in a subpar design choice for a creative project to try and squeeze more money out of it.

Think back to that list of decisions made by Bungie over the years I laid out. Here’s when each of those decisions rolled out to players:

It took four years for Bungie to go from the paid expansions and their cosmetic store to also introducing seasonal battle passes, paid access to previously free content, and the removal of the promise that you would keep the content you paid for.

Those aren’t decisions made to make the game better. They exist to make the game more lucrative for the studio, or to maintain some of the highs they had seen in previous years.

This is why I think the engine that best governs the Three-Gates Test mindset is to be evaluating your project not from its peaks and your desire to maintain those peaks, but instead its baseline.

“What does this project truly need financially to keep moving forward each year?” The answer to that question will guide those decisions.

A common business practice for growth is to take excess profits and reinvest them back into the business. This is the classic way in which companies grow: someone makes something valuable, they use the created value to bring on more people to make more of the valuable thing, and then grow into other ventures.

When Destiny saw its heights come, Bungie invested that money into making sure they could maintain their project while also trying to develop new ideas. Unfortunately, the only one that stuck around inside of Bungie itself was Marathon.

I saw “unfortunately” because, in my assessment, Marathon is a creative project no one asked for, and has little interest in. It’s failed to maintain its user base since it came out, which is a death knell for a live service game, something you would think the studio behind a previously prolific live service game would know.

Honestly, I think the game was doomed from the start. It came out to a market already cold to the extraction shooter genre (a genre of shooter games where you enter an arena, face off against the game and other players for loot, and try to survive to the end of the level without dying to keep your fancy new loot). The game took an IP known for old-school, shooter-based storytelling and removed the narrative aspects from the core gameplay loop.

Neither of those decisions seems logical from my perspective, but from the perspective of “we have this IP and this genre is popular right now, let’s capitalize on this,” it makes more sense. It’s incredibly short-sighted, but it makes sense in that framework.

I say it’s shortsighted because the decisions failed at the first gate. This wasn’t necessary for Bungie to do, but it wanted to add another game into its library, and thought that following a trend would be the play. The game not landing with its own players, let alone a potential outside audience, was the expected result from failing to understand that point.

So if the Three-Gate Test exists to preserve the integrity of the creative venture, what is there to help with the financial side of things? It’d be imbalanced to leave that idea before you without pairing it with something to balance the books, as it were.

This section doesn’t have a fancy name, mostly because I am not a financial person. I have a good head for numbers, and a lot of caution in my heart from watching creatives stumble with money so many times before.

So, my recommendation: commit to a plan for excesses before they ever happen. Don’t force yourself to come up with a course of action if your project takes off more than you expect, but instead decide how much will be reinvested, how much goes to reward yourself, and so on.

I haven’t executed this sort of thing with money before, but I follow a similar principle in my daily life. I don’t ask myself what I want to do each day; I preplan my days and do what my calendar tells me to do. It’s telling myself what to do from the past based on what I believe is best for my future.

It sounds simple, but that’s what makes it hard. People believe that money complicates things, but money is a tool, not a force. People’s emotions, thoughts, and values around money make far more messes than a stack of dollars ever could on its own.

Regardless, for the solo creator or small team just starting out, I think this is what to keep in mind:

Basically, think longer than anyone else so you can be around longer than anyone else.

I think Bungie designed Destiny to be a transgenerational property, akin to Halo before it. It took the concepts developed from the classic sci-fi shooter and added enough twists and new elements to create something that could appeal to a wide range of folks without feeling bland or generic.

But, as it can do, money complicated the issue. Improperly planning for dips in popularity, as always happens with live service games, caused the leadership to impose stricter monetization requirements on developers, leading to things that many in the industry critiqued, all to funnel that money into a project that doesn’t have an obvious future, yet is the only thing receiving active development today.

I doubt many creatives reading this will ever see the levels of success that Bungie did, because so few projects do. But I believe that looking to those that came before, looking at their mistakes, and learning from those is how the next batch of creatives can prepare themselves for the off-chance it happens to us.

So, don’t think about this piece as anti-Bungie, or anything of the sort. This was a case study, meant to teach us creatives, the kinds of folks that provably struggle with sudden financial decisions, how we can better prepare for a future where our level of success outstrips our wildest dreams and create not just entertainment or expression, but legacy.