FOMO marketing, gambling mechanics, and unrepresentative ads really need to get self-regulated by the app stores, otherwise it's going to become necessary to legislate this.
F2P games need the same regulation, if not more given that kids are targeted.
Self regulation for industries does not work. On the more serious side we have Boeing, which is allowed to self regulate. We see the results.
Mobile game industry have conferences, and these conferences have talks, panels and tracks for monetization and loyalty.
Do you believe that an industry hell bent on monetization can self regulate?
Of course, not all industry players are bad. There are better, ethical brands. On the other hand, industry is so big now, The Tragedy of Commons applies to it. If some studios refrain themselves from abusing players, at least one other studio will.
In game purchases are banned. Games can't track you as heavily, so they are lighter on your device. They are some genuinely good games, and you pay with your wallet and play time.
I don't like ads and to be nudged to purchase stuff to be able to kill some time. Game developers need a roof, the ability to pay their bills and eat.
Also, it's a universal membership. macOS and iOS games are all included.
This is a common theme: Someone has a recognized gambling problem, but they don’t realize that a game like this is feeding their gambling habit.
A similar thing happens with stock trading apps like RobinHood: People who know they have a gambling addiction don’t recognize (or won’t admit) that their usage patterns are just gambling in a different format. These are the stories that end up on /r/wallstreetbets where someone traded their $30K account down to $20 through options trading before they admitted that they had a problem.
The top 1% don’t spend nearly that much. The number of people spending eye-popping amounts is relatively small. You have to get deep into the long tail before it gets into the hundreds or thousands.
Posting these numbers might have the opposite effect: Players who spend a lot of money want to be at the top of leaderboards. If they saw what the 1% were spending they might convince themselves that not only is it okay to spend that much, but that they need to spend even more.
Although I do not like F2P for all the dark patterns (which have infiltrated non-F2P as well unfortunately) if it was capped to a reasonable maximum amount a year, with no player to player trading at all, and no multiple accounts for the same store account, it might could be made to not be as predatory while still keeping it financially sustainable for the companies that produce the games.
Vegas is notorious for this: especially in the past, for a person with a healthy relationship with gambling, Vegas was a really cheap vacation. Getting there's cheap relative to getting anywhere else in North America, hotel rooms were like half what you'd pay for an equivalent room elsewhere, and a lot of the entertainment was not terribly expensive. Turns out a couple of people dropping millions justifies losing money on a lot of guests.
There are a lot of mobile games that are ad supported. What are they advertising? Other mobile games. That seems weird, you don't normally see places advertising their competitors. Then you realize that the first game effectively is acting as part of the funnel for games more optimized for separating whales from large amounts of money. Your sudoku app probably doesn't have the ability to convince people to give them $10,000, but an ad here and there might push users towards base-builders and the ilk that can.
I suspect most advertising is a whale hunting game. There's no world where I go and buy a new car because I saw a YouTube ad for one. But if showing a 10 cent ad to 100,000 people causes 1 person buy the advertiser's truck with a $10,000+ margin versus their competitors', they're in the black.
It isn’t quite the same but it’s something like, “if you aren’t paying, you’re incentivizing whales.”
Underneath all the darkness a business has to make money. People are voting with time and money that the whale strategy is optimal just like they vote with time and money that advertising is optimal.
I don’t know what to do about this all. It seems like it’s just a shitty fact of human nature.
It still shocks me how we all look for time sinks when we have so much we could be doing. I'm no better.
It was humbling to realize how warped and blind I became.
Had to google it, but the game was Game of War: Fire Age. At the time they had a gambling mechanic where you'd buy chest with say 1000 gems and, for a time, it would be guaranteed to grant you well over 1000 gems. That hooked me and I felt really smart. Then they set the real plan into action --gradually and silently nerfing the payouts. And I played right into it, spending a little more and a little more to keep up. This was 2018, or so, I think.
So, for me, it was my pride and ego combined with seeing a rise in leaderboards and esteem in my clan that hooked me.
The core game mechanic was one where everything you built up would be utterly destroyed by someone much stronger every day or two, but you'd be left with just enough that you felt like you could rebuild and get stronger. And just another IAP or two would prevent it from happening again. It would help, but it only meant that you were an even juicier target for an even bigger whale.
The game was slick, but not too slick. It had some rough UI elements which perversely made me less alert to how well-engineered the IAP psychology was.
It's the second one. Only 3.5% of players spend anything on freemium games. A significantly smaller fraction of players spend over $100.
Outside apps for accessing useful services or doing work, everything seems designed to addict, manipulate, or drain bank accounts: most games, social media doom-scrollers, payday loan in your pocket apps, crypto and stock trading apps that are built like casino games on purpose, and now sports betting.
Everything is also loaded with as much spyware as possible, and given that it's a phone and users say 'yes' to permissions it can often do very invasive things like track the user's location in real time.
You just described the work of a better half of this forum, don't expect much sympathies. Of course most will say they don't / didn't work on the evil part like it somehow actually matters.
F2P games and loot boxes are just unregulated black-box gambling. And beyond that, the people who implement dark patterns in so many things, would certainly increase their morality if they switched to building slot machines. Terrible
It's counterintuitive but the article almost reads like a promotion piece. The game is so good it can get you to spend that much money. But most gamers wouldn't fall for this would they? Maybe some of them try. If a few people hear of the game and play it because of the shocking title and curiosity that's a win.
checks his pixel 8a yep, there's no games installed here
The amount of people in both this and the reddit thread treating the poster like some minor without responsibility for their actions is pathetic.
This is a grown ass adult pissing their time and money away on mobile games. Then when they realize how totally reckless they've been, seek a f*cking refund? And people are calling for laws protecting this grown ass adult from themselves? We're clearly not talking about some eight year old people.
Quit expecting some nanny state to do your adulting for you and grow the fuck up.
I'll defer to the late George Carlin:
We already do that with lots of things, from hard drugs to prostitution to owning your own nuclear weapons. Some of us may disagree with some of those laws, but unless you're the most extreme libertarian who ever doffed a fedora, there's probably something that you'd say shouldn't be accessible to every random adult capable of poking at a phone.
