Video URL: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025766/1-500-Slot-Machines-Walk

Discussion: Issue #23

Quality is overrated. Disheartened by all of the noise in the mobile ecosystem, speakers Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott set out to determine the lowest bar for success on App Stores. They flooded the market with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games, got 1.6 million installs, made money (!!), received some very strange emails, made it big in Iran, and garnered a stupefying number of good reviews on Google Play. They even enlisted the talents of an honest-to-God MIT statistician.Take a fantastic tour of the weird, dark underbelly of the mobile app market. Marvel as the speakers share their experience with pushing the limits of automation as well as the rate limits of every public API under the sun. Silently judge the questionable ethics of their enterprise. By the end, you may be reconsidering your life choices as Alex and Ziba debate the merits of quantity over quality.

Our notes:

• It was just an incredibly fun presentation.
• It’s at the same time amazing and frightening to see how mass-produced these worlds are.
• It’s the equivalent of mass-produced crap novelty gadgets that flood the markets all the time (goo, fidget spinners and others)
• On the other hand, this is product design and the purest level: you don’t waste any time producing the stuff, you just have an idea and test and iterate on it in the most bare-bones way possible.
• …but if this is our profession at the purest, I don’t want to live in this world.

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