California man spent $1M playing Game of War
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
My wife works at "In-Home healthcare" for the elderly community, specializing in hospice care. Because of this, she sees a lot of family members who get their parents tablets. It can be an iPad, or Android tablet. And it's used to facilitate cheap/free communication. (Don't worry, anything with app stores + in app payments are at fault, not $your_ecosystem.)
The dark side, is when they start venturing around looking for "games". Now, think of what a game was 20 and 30 years ago. We're talking arcade, Nintendo, Atari.. That sort of thing. The psychological skinner-box wasn't really created as of yet (it was, but only in arcades, and even the bad ones people stayed away from).
And then you have the "Freemium Apps". AKA money-bilking skinner boxes. Now, what makes these insidious, is the fact they ask for your credit card once, and keep it on file. Now, buying "virtual trash" is as easy as click click done. And conveniently drains your card.
And it's done so well that you think you're doing with fake play money - when it's really your real account.
My wife's already had a few clients got bit by this. It was a few thousand dollars, but enough to cause serious problems with someone who is on a fixed budget. Fortunately, the bank reversed much of it as fraudulent billing. Some of it was outside of dispute period, and was lost.
One thing that helped is switching the family member to a True Link card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Link
While not perfect, it does root out the obvious scammers and does make it much easier to push back and cancel those reccuring subscriptions that "some how" keep getting activated.
I have no affiliation with True Link, but posting it in hopes it can help someone with a similar problem.
Edit: Just now realized True Link has a YC affiliation, so maybe this is more on topic than I thought.
Or at least this used to be the situation.
> Or at least this used to be the situation.
Nope and I've never had one attached so it's definitely not a new thing either.
They do have a bit of a dark pattern to trick you into adding one when you first set up an Apple ID. IIRC, when you pick your credit card type (AmEx, VISA, etc) you can pick "No Credit Card" to skip it.
Apple is extremely negligent about demanding a credit card, when I only want "free applications". Worse yet, with their app-storification of OSX, it's absolutely horrendous. And of course, only "richies" use OSX and Apple (enter here various websites that charge more for Mac users based upon browser ident strings).
(While logged out, buy a free app, when told you need an account, click to create one from this dialogue. This allows for the option for a card-less account)
Truck drivers are some of the highest revenue players.
Heck, I have not given my credit card to my Android phone. I use SudoPay.
Imagine if you could "buy" your way to the top post, thus ensuring you get more eyeballs, and hopefully more upvotes!
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[1]: Karma crystals are the in game currency. You can buy them in blocks of prime numbers for whole numbers of actual currency.
This made me actively cringe.
This actually describes Reddit and it's advertising system pretty closely.
Ycombinator 2020 anyone?
These companies are predators.
The government restricted these machines to only 4 per shop. Apparently they print enough money that a betting shop will have 2 or 3 branches within walking distance to get around the limit.
This is along with all the other chains doing exactly the same thing. It's madness.
One of the core elements is the concept of "gacha" or probabilistic purchase, where instead of selling an item for a price, they sell a low probability of getting what you actually want for a lower price... but in the end people try over and over again and easily lose track of their purchases and end up spending more.
Some forms of gacha are no longer legal (e.g: kompu gacha), due to their exceptional ability to make people spend... last time I checked the thing was "box gacha".
Another way of making revenue is through "events", which are competitions, but their outcome is heavily influenced by how much you spend. They're basically auctions.
The thing is... in the end people don't really win. To win an event in a top grossing game you might need probably a thousand dollars. It's not worth it.
* "Gacha" is basically a mystery prize. Pay 1 token, get 1 random thing from a pool of options. Generally no published odds.
* "Kompu Gacha" is a system where you have to collect a set of specific prizes from the pool, which you can then turn in to obtain a very desirable item. Again, odds not published. And as you might expect, 1-2 of the items will be extremely rare, meaning that most people end up with an almost complete set, and a strong compulsion to open just one more prize to see if it'll complete it, but with no guarantee you'll ever complete it.
* "Box gacha" has a fixed, depleting pool of prizes with a known distribution; they come out in a nominally random order, but you can buy every prize in the pool and guarantee that you'll get the reward.
Once you start to look around, you'll see the mechanic and variations on it everywhere. McDonald's runs a popular Monopoly game that's a pretty classic kompu gacha. Tons of modern computer/console games have some form of loot crate which works like that. One I've been seeing a lot is multiple currency tiers, where an easy/free currency can purchase draws from a low value prize pool, and a harder/cash currency can purchase draws from a high value prize pool. Another trick is to have an armour set that works really well together, where most pieces can be obtained (with effort) for free, but one piece can basically only be obtained as a rare prize that costs cash per draw. You grind out getting most of the armour, then realise it's mostly useless without the helm of power (or whatever), and so you buy just one prize draw to see if you get lucky and complete the set so all your work wasn't for nothing. And then one more draw. Good way of drawing in "gamers" who might resist a cruder form.
Even Overwatch has it: During their periodic holidays, there's a new loot crate which you can earn via playing games (very slowly) or purchase for cash. The new loot crates have a chance of containing new cosmetic items (costumes, emotes) that are only available during the holiday. And that's the only way to get the items, and the holiday only comes up once a year. So if you really, really want the new Mercy costume, you'll end up buying packs of crates and opening them in the hope that this batch will have the costume. Or this one. Or the next one. Anecdotally, most people end up paying way more for the items they want than they would have if they were just listed in a store for dollars. (There's zero play to win in Overwatch; it's just cosmetic. But it's still a bit sleezy.)
As for links, maybe:
http://www.serkantoto.com/2012/11/01/kompu-gacha-package-box...
http://www.serkantoto.com/2016/03/14/gacha-monetization-japa...
People buying the sticker packs have no way to work out the probability of getting the sticker they want, nor of working out how many packs they should expect to buy to complete the collection.
Things like The Coupon Collector's Problem are out of reach mathematically for most people.
The way Lego sells minifigs is really unpleasant. For 16 different figures you expect to buy 55 different packs.
As soon as I see "grind or PAY for this one rare object to complete the set", I'm outta there. Holiday / time limited specials are just as damning.
I understand companies' need for revenue, just never that way with me. Happy to pay for an app or even a low monthly subscription for something I REALLY like and doesn't charge extra.
And they often come with people spending hundreds of dollars on rare cards or buying whole boxes on the assumption there's at least one ultra rare one per box.
For me, at least, back when I played Magic, I never ever opened a pack in the hope of getting a card; what I would do is open a pack in the hopes of getting stuff to trade for the card.
In addition, the distribution of value from a pack of Magic cards was pretty even. If you opened 3-4 packs, you would be very unlikely to get the rare card you wanted, but you'd be quite likely to get cards you could trade. There's also published data on rarity and distributions.
Ultimately, I think the kompu gacha systems work by exploiting the sunk cost fallacy. You've already spent $X on prizes, but it's worthless because you don't have the one ultra-rare one you need. But if you spend another $Y, you have a chance of making the earlier investment valuable.
With Magic, typically, after you spend $X on cards you have less than $X worth of cards, but not a lot less. If you don't get the one ultra-rare one, you still have, worst case, a bunch of junk rares and some decent uncommons you could trade or, worst case, sell to a dealer. And, crucially, the previous investment doesn't become more valuable if you finally do get the ultra-rare.
...that being said, a huge, huge part of the money the companies behind them earn is because of the random nature of the packs. So...I guess I'd grade it as mildly exploitive, perhaps, but only mildly. :)
However sometimes you can get an estimation of an odd, usually represented through "rarity". e.g: "Super Rare" cards and such translate into an specific probability range.
Back in my MtG days probabilistic purchases were called booster packs. How far does the similarity between those concepts actually go?
However now gacha is regulated in Japan and labeling needs to be accurate. Probabilities themselves are not disclosed though.
When will regulations catch up with this sort of thing? Do Apple/Google have a moral responsibility here? Apple expressly forbids gambling apps, but this is essentially a slot machine with a different mechanic. Apple (not as familiar with Google) have done a great job on iOS giving parents the options to restrict their children making unauthorised purchases, but the settings aren't hugely discoverable.
In this day and age, do we need to consider a digital restraining order that allows a spouse or close family member to block or limit digital addicts? Do Apple or Google have a duty of care here or does it rest with law makers? The concerning part is that these purchases are invisible. If I buy a $1 million boat, others will see that and can intervene. But digital purchases can rack up silently and cause massive damage without anyone realising.
I'm really not sure where I stand on the issue. One side of me says that "it's his money, he can do what he wants" whereas the other side says that society should protect it's weakest, and this man clearly has a gambling problem.
In the UK every bookmaker will have an app, and there are plenty of real-money casino and bingo apps available.
Of course, the difference here, is that the UK's gambling companies operate in a highly regulated environment. You can put in place deposit limits instantly that then take a week or more to lift, you can self-exclude (ban yourself from the bookmaker), and these are the measures the firms have put in themselves, the regulator is there to basically make sure they're following consistent rules and treating players fairly.
Money laundering regulations, appropriate licensing, etc. also all add up. The general view is that people should be free to gamble, but also have a regulatory framework to remove criminal elements and ensure players are treated fairly. It helps that the government gets to tax proceeds as well - an issue causing real headaches as they've become as addicted to the in-store FOBTs income as much as bookmaker shareholders have.
I've thought for a while that there was going to come a time when spending caps were likely going to be needed for in-game assets. But then, where do you draw the line? You could easily argue that webcam sites are potentially as addictive, exploitative and potentially have the same game behaviour that is so dangerous here.
I guess my question boils down to this: betting on horses and playing a casino slot machine are recognised as gambling and regulated as such. How, when and should apps like Game of War be considered in the same category?
Usually people don't group those because you're paying money for the former up front, but the mechanics are the same.
Personally I see two potential criteria of separation.
1) to what extent does paying money increase my chance of 'winning'
2) To what extent does not paying money make the game less fun.
As long as I can have fun with just the base game and have a reasonable chance of 'winning' then I'm not too bothered. But once they start to make the base game more boring or unreasonably hard to 'force' people to upgrade then it starts to become an issue.
How much fun needs to be allowed with the base game before it's considered intentionally boring (across different player preferences and genres).
What constitutes a "reasonable chance of winning" when you consider the varying skill levels of players
Is real money a substitute for skill at whatever decisions the game asks you to make? If so, you're being scammed.
Content expansions in AAA games are obviously not substitutes for skill.
Nor are cosmetic customization options like skins or accessories.
Cards in virtual card games like Hearthstone get a bit more interesting to analyze. There are better and worse decks, and it takes the right cards to build better decks. Spending money is a much faster way to get the right cards than doing daily quests. But there are two factors that keep Hearthstone out of scam territory. First, someone can get any card they want without spending money, and if they're really good in drafts, they can even do it relatively quickly. So, the more skill you have, the less spending money helps you. Second, there's a maximum that spending money can help you. Once you have the decks you want, whether you win or not comes down to skill (and some luck) in the exact same way as everyone else. You get no advantages over someone who built the deck they want without spending money.
So yeah, there's a simple framework to apply to make these decisions. Where's the slippery slope?
In these mobile IAP-fests you can unlock anything with "enough play" and beat most challenges with "enough skill" but the idea is "enough play" is supposed to be so much that if you committed to it, you'd have better luck working a job to just pay for the items you unlock. And there's no difference between items earned and bought, just a difference in expected quantity one has access to. So those games pass both tests you mention.
You end up needing to add more and more constraints to have a framework that works on multiple genres and eventually you'll find you're making exclusions that aren't really fair.
I'm not sure it's gambling, even if the same receptors are being tickled. It definitely is an addiction, but I think it affects people who are 'collectors'. Maybe 20 years ago they would have got their fix of completeness by stamp collecting, or beanie babies. And I'm sure even then there were people who would happily pay through the nose just to complete a collection.
I see part of the problem originating from iOS users themselves. For some reason, a large number of people seemed to think it shocking that somebody would charge a few bucks for a game, even if it was clearly something you could have paid ten times the price for on a console a couple of years earlier.
So the games companies had to release free-to-play games, and realised to make money they had to target completists, and now we find ourselves with games that are essentially crippled after the first few levels; impossible to win through skill/practise, and only by buying new items can you hope to get any further.
A point of clarification:
It wasn't his money, it was his employer's money which he was already stealing. While the game certainly rewards spenders and that sort of business model raises some ethical questions, to say this guy has a problem seems off the mark just because he didn't spend 1 million of his own, hard-earned dollars, he spent 1 million stolen dollars that he likely would've stolen anyway and spent on something else equally unfulfilling. He didn't have a value attachment to the money because it wasn't his, so spending it on something dumb like this game wasn't difficult.
I feel like it's similar to one time when I got $100 in game credits for Origin and blew it all on Mass Effect 3 weapons packs. Normally I wouldn't spend that money but it was a gift and I didn't want anything else Origin offered at the time. No value connection beyond the sentimental, so spending it in a silly way didn't feel strange to me.
Now if we come across some minor CEO who gets bankrupted by one of these games...that's something more in line with what you're talking about.
Thinking about it I wonder how they expect games to report this information when it is most likely have 2 or 3 different data sets in the wild with different drop rates. A company could mis-lead customers by displaying the percentages for one data set with favourable odds when in reality they are in a bucket with much worse odds.
Source : http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-12-09-china-force...
Sometimes the game UX presents probabilities in a misleading way... such showing the card being taken from a deck. However if it was probabilistically accurate, the deck shown in the UX would have probably 10000 cards in it.
Ask your girlfriend where, if at all, she draws the moral line.
I'm not a saint but I wouldn't be able to justify that to myself.
It's not moral to dictate how another's earnings should be spent. That's the opposite of moral.
I would certainly intervene if my loved ones became addicts. I'd also interven if it indirectly affected me (e.g. higher crime, more homelessness, loss of property value, etc).
That 5K/month could be 0.01% of their income
50k a month is plenty to be able to effort this.
Heck i know a few twitch.tv streamers that makes that much money
I remember reading somewhere (maybe even here on HN!) that a lot of the big spenders actually cannot afford it and aren't wealthy. I think it was in a recent article about the shady tactics the developers of these pseudo-games employ. Note: the same can be said about good old-fashioned gambling indeed.
Back when I used to play LOL alot (3-4 games/day), I spend probably 200-300$ on skins. Not because it made the game better or that I derived that value from the skin, but because I valued the game and wanted to support it.
Obviously ripping off your employer to the extent of $4.8m is a bad idea, but if you've earned the money, why not?
This touches on several related questions, none of which have clear right answers. Who is at "fault" in addiction: the addict, the dealer, or both? If both, in what proportion? Is "gaming addiction" as dangerous / harmful as substance addiction? What constitutes harm to others, and how much harm needs to occur to deserve intervention? (For instance: some argue that the purchase of luxury diamonds causes harm halfway around the world where they're mined, to take one of the "harmless" examples listed above.)
In other words: I'd say it's very difficult to make categorical statements about the "rightness" of complete economic freedom to do what you want with your money. We prohibit all kinds of purchases, services, etc. based on prevailing answers to questions like those above, and those prevailing answers inevitably change over time. (They also vary wildly between countries, states, or even cities.)
"one person who can afford this level of spending could easily encourage less well-heeled players to spend similar amounts, which in turn could easily harm those players' families."
Not everyone can afford gym, golf course membership, owning race horse etc., but more affluent people still do that, does that encourage other people to spend more as well? Maybe, but a sane man chooses his hobbies according to amount of money he has to spare.
"This touches on several related questions, none of which have clear right answers. Who is at "fault" in addiction: the addict, the dealer, or both?"
In my opinion, it's the addict. Addiction, first of all, is inability to control ones impulses, urges and overall lack of will to make rational decisions. We should have learned from "war on drugs" that controlling availability of addictives is not a solution and, arguably, makes problem even worse.
"What constitutes harm to others, and how much harm needs to occur to deserve intervention?"
We have criminal laws to deal with harming others: stealing, robbing, blackmailing etc. and spending legally earned money doesn't fall under any of these.
"For instance: some argue that the purchase of luxury diamonds causes harm halfway around the world where they're mined, to take one of the "harmless" examples listed above."
This is very specific, out of context problem, but it should be dealt at its roots (the country they are mined) and/or forbidding trading of such goods internationally by treaties (like ivory). Buying diamond itself doesn't hurt anyone directly.
To sum up, we shouldn't ban something, just because there's a small group of people that abuse it. We should treat these rare cases when addiction reaches out of control levels just like any other disorder, because such people will find a way into problem anyway.
I could afford to spend, say, $2k/yr on my skiing hobby. It wouldn't be that hard to do: modern equipment, frequent trips to expensive mountains, things of that nature add up in a hurry. I'd probably enjoy it more that way, and I'd certainly get to do it more often.
Instead, I use a decade-old pair of skis that I received as a gift, with a third-hand pair of boots that's literally from the 1980s, and warm outerwear that probably cost a total of $300 in various outlet stores over the past eight years. I go 2-3 weekends a year, to relatively inexpensive mountains, and my amortized annual expenditure comes in at under $500 (including a reasonable price estimate and amortization schedule for the skis). Why? The marginal benefit just isn't worth it.
Now, obviously, "worth it" is subjective. Buying a new pair of ski boots for the coming season won't directly impact my retirement or anything like that. Indeed, there isn't a single concrete thing that it would trade off against. When I break it down, though, I decide the work I did for that money is worth more than my benefit from the new boots. In that case, better to hold onto the money in case a better opportunity comes along.
I'm not wealthy but I'm better off than I was 10 years ago - I certainly spend on things I'd find laughable to spend on back then. Yet my financial thinking hasn't changed, just the marginal utility. I don't know how old you are, but if you're in your 20's and in the same field most of us here are, I suspect you will go through the same process.
My (not) buying decisions can be roughly grouped into two categories: "will the goods be more valuable to me than the freedom to spend that money on something different?" and "can I afford to spend that money not only once, but can I afford to make a habit out of that kind of spending?". Cutting down on a luxury is much harder than never starting.
Forget retirement. If you enjoy skiing, why wouldn't you buy a pair of excellent ski boots? Luxury items can be awesome.
Now, usually, they build some sort cult around them in forums and that validates their weird spending behavior and makes them feel good.
Then, people that spend a lot of money and do not win, get angry and retaliate trying to get refunds.
I think that this activity should be regulated more. Allowing this type of excess is a disservice to society.
This is a whole other level though.
I'm grateful I'm not in that world. It reminds me of Donald Trump. Relentless hypocrisy, no shame, and the entire thing coupled with the grand illusion of success.
And stop calling these "games" they're not! They're real-money auctions to have your name at the top of some silly todo list.
lol
Talking Tom's Gold Run is a fun little endless runner. It's well made. My kid enjoys it. There's an IAP to turn off most ads, and because we play the app a lot I bought that, and some other bits and bobs. But I was looking at the IAPs and I have no idea how much I'd have to spend if I wanted to unlock everything - all the courses, all the characters, everything. The most expensive IAP is £79, and that wouldn't come close to unlocking everything.
I don't think you have to buy anything, I think you could just grind the game to complete it with play not pay.
Blizzard and Wizards of the Sword coast, despite getting into similar mechanics as F2P games, are still companies that largely extract value from customers as a byproduct of providing them with fun experiences. Companies like that in the article are different, usually extracting value by producing thinly-veiled gambling experiences that prey on the fallacies in our internal reward systems.
Both kinds of companies have access to the same tools and tricks to manipulate our reward systems. But how we play depends on the intention.
Almost none of them would be able to play the game at their level while also paying for their working tools. But, somehow, they are shown as examples to players without these connections...
If I can give an advice to anyone willing to play somewhat competitive magic without mortgaging their house, play block pauper magic.
At least for the ycombinator crowd, the lesson learned should be how to design such a game assuming your morals allow it. I briefly considered writing a parody that openly abused you for spending money in game. BROADCAST: "Hey everyone, this idiot just spent $10 on some bits on a server in California!" But yeah I would feel bad even making money from that game, and it seemed like a lot of work for something that would probably net $35.
I haven't played M:TG in over decade, but at least then it was standard 'ante up' a card before each game that you would lose if you lost.
Just googled it and the last card to even have an ante-impacting ability was printed in 1996. Seems it stuck around as an optional rule but wasn't common in my experience, probably because tournaments always skipped it.
A full edition set costing in the thousands, and there being 3-4 sets per year, the price to compete is fairly high.
I played it briefly and was lucky enough to stumble across a clan of people who were spending money left and right. I never did so it took me a while to figure out each "gift" I was getting was tied to someone spending up to $100. At one point I received twenty rapid fire gifts in a row as someone spent $2,000 and then lamented "my wife is going to kill me" in chat.
Slot machines bore me so once it was clear any advancement would require months of waiting or spending money I quit rather than be a drag on the clan of people who were happily spending $250-$500 month on the game.
Good day in Smolensk. Try playing in Russian unwinable casino
> Since I was a child, I've always loved a good story.
> I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves,
> to fix what was broken in us and to help us become the
> people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth.
> I always thought I could play some small part in that
> grand tradition.
It's funny how people from the same background, class and culture are capable of both creating a beautiful, if slightly pessimistic, story and a ruthless exploitation machine. In both cases they do it for money, both are profitable, and yet the effect is very different.