The dark side of monetization and Wargaming

For this chat, I spoke with Ramin Shokrizade, game economist and former employee of Wargaming.net, about the history of Wargaming.net and how the company he worked for and had so much respect for, went to the dark side of monetization and free-to-play design. He also spoke about how the company treated him from when he began to when he was fired, and how this has also impacted Chris Taylor of Total Annihilation fame.

We also spoke about how the dam is starting to break for other companies in terms of company culture and their reliance on dark side monetization strategies, such as Blizzard.

These are the design articles Ramin talked about:

• Next Generation Monetization
• Group Monetization
• The Great Game Dev Correction
• F2P Force Wars
• Monetizing Children
• One of the early pieces about Wargaming trying to do things right