Last updated: February 2026

I made a vow early in my career. Then the industry evolved, and I had to figure out what my principles actually meant when tested against reality.

The Line I Drew, Then Had to Cross

I made a vow early in my career. Then the industry evolved, and I had to figure out what my principles actually meant when tested against reality.

The VIP Call That Changed Everything

I joined Zynga in 2014 and spent my first few years working on match-3 puzzle games. Honest work, genuinely fun products. I remember feeling, in some quiet corner of my brain, like I had landed on the right side of the monetization debate. I wasn't building slot mechanics. I wasn't in that world.

This was the mid-2010s, when Western studios were aggressively importing gacha and slot mechanics from Japan and scaling them fast. Most players didn't even have a name for what they were spending money on yet. The studios certainly did.

One day I sat in on a VIP player call for one of our slot-style games. These calls were meant to celebrate top spenders, make them feel seen and valued. At some point the conversation turned to this particular player's spending. The number was staggering. Millions of dollars. I sat very still and did the mental math on what that meant relative to a normal person's life. Later I found out they made around $60,000 a year.

The call ended. Everyone moved on. I couldn't.

I wasn't even on that team. But I was part of the same company, the same ecosystem, the same industry optimizing every mechanic to extract more from people least equipped to say no. Variable-ratio reinforcement, unpredictable payouts, the same psychology that makes slot machines so difficult to walk away from. We knew exactly what we were doing.

That day I made myself a promise. I would never work on a slot game.

The Promise That Felt Like Enough

For a while, the promise was easy to keep. I moved into different product work, different game types, and told myself I had drawn my line.

But I was fooling myself about what the line actually meant. A vow to avoid slot games in a moment when slots were the thing I could see most clearly is not a principle. It's a reaction. I was navigating by what was visible from where I stood in 2014, not by any deeper clarity about what I valued. The promise felt principled because I was young enough in my career to confuse "I won't do the obvious bad thing" with "I know what I stand for."

I didn't. Not yet.

Then the Industry Moved

Gacha spread everywhere. What started as a mechanic in Japanese mobile games became the dominant monetization model across free-to-play. Randomized reward pulls, limited banners, variable drop rates. The psychological machinery was the same as what I had seen on that VIP call, just dressed up in fantasy characters and progression systems.

And eventually I took a senior role where gacha was central to the product. My earlier vow offered no guidance. Slot games were not on the table. Gacha was. What did I actually believe?

The ethical tensions were real. When platforms tailor drop rates to individual spending profiles, two players pulling on the same banner can face completely different odds. That is not chance. That is targeting. As the WHO formally recognized gaming disorder as a behavioral addiction, the industry's pursuit of revenue was increasingly colliding with a genuine duty of care, especially toward younger players.

I had to decide what I stood for now that the lines had blurred.

What Haas Gave Me

I went back to school for my MBA at Haas while still working in the industry. What it gave me was language for something I had been wrestling with since that VIP call. The framing that unlocked it was simple: ethics in business is not about refusing to operate in imperfect systems. It is about the choices you make within them, and being honest with yourself about why you are making them.

I had been asking the wrong question. I kept asking whether gacha was ethical, as if that were a binary that could be settled once. The more useful question was whether I was being ethical in how I built it.

That shift moved me from a defensive posture to an active one. Not a wall to keep me out of certain rooms, but a foundation I could carry with me everywhere.

What I Actually Stand For

I am not a purist. I build monetization systems for a living and I intend to keep doing it. Free-to-play games are structurally dependent on a small percentage of players subsidizing the experience for everyone else, and randomized reward systems are the most efficient mechanism the industry has found to serve that model. Arguing against gacha entirely is arguing against the business model itself.

But there is a meaningful difference between a gacha system designed to give players genuine agency and one designed to exploit the psychology of people least equipped to say no. That difference lives in the decisions product leaders make every day.

Pity systems with hard ceilings are non-negotiable for me. Guarantee the top reward within a defined number of pulls. It transforms gacha from an open-ended gamble into something expensive but bounded. Players should know, before they spend, exactly what their worst case looks like.

Drop rates belong in front of players before they spend, not buried in a FAQ. In the store. Before the purchase. In plain language. If you are not comfortable with a player fully understanding the odds before they commit, that discomfort is telling you something. Listen to it.

Dynamic odds targeting based on spend profiles is a line I will not cross. Two players pulling on the same banner should face the same odds. Personalized drop rates that adjust based on spending history are not optimization. They are exploitation. I have been in rooms where this was framed as personalization and presented as a business win. I pushed back every time.

Minors are a protected class, not a revenue segment. Age-gated purchases, spending limits for verified minors, no escalating prompts. This is not a regulatory checkbox. It is the floor.

None of these came from a framework I found in a report. They came from years of sitting with the tension between what the business wanted and what I could defend, in a meeting, to a colleague, to myself at the end of a long day.

What the Vow Actually Meant

The promise I made after that VIP call was not wrong. It was just incomplete.

Staying away from slot games was a symptom of a value I hadn't yet found language for: I did not want to build systems designed to extract money from people by eroding their ability to stop. That was the actual principle. The slot game prohibition was just the only expression of it I could articulate in 2014.

By the time I got to senior roles, I had something more useful than a list of things I wouldn't do. I had a set of commitments I could build with.

Every leader in games will face their own version of that VIP call. A mechanic that works too well. A spending pattern that makes you pause mid-review. A number that stops feeling abstract. When that happens, the question is not whether the system is ethical in the aggregate. The question is what you choose to do next, and whether you have done enough work ahead of time to know what you actually stand for.

That work is worth doing. It is the difference between a vow that holds and one that was never really tested.