How a game reaches a player, pays for itself and makes money — without illusions. The fight for visibility (distribution and marketing), the hit-driven math of studios (budgets, burn/runway, org shapes), the monetization spectrum from ethical to predatory, and the deep unit economics of F2P. The thread through all of it: this is a hit-driven business built on the attention economy, where the bottleneck is discovery rather than production, and where ethical and profitable are aligned, not opposed.