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Comment by ghostcluster | Hacker News Reader

The entire mobile app store economy needs major regulation. The platform operators have shown they are willing to allow hugely profitable apps whose business models prey on gambling tendencies in children and they will look the other way, while bragging about their curation of their stores in some cases. It's shameful hypocrisy.

The entire industry knows this is going on. Parents have complained for years, but nothing's changed.

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> gambling tendencies in children

I believe adults are the real whales they're after. Most children have no way to pay for virtual goods. It's adults who even know they are gambling, but they enjoy it just like adults enjoy gambling in a casino.

I think you're right, but there's also a decent amount of stories involving a kid with their parents credit card and the parent not noticing the kid was running up a huge balance until their bill came. But yeah, those are realistically pro ably exceptional cases.

Those super-rare cases are something the press can write about. Nobody would read a headline titled "A 40-year old man spent $500 on virtual in-game stuff". Now, just replace 40YO man with a 10YO kid and you have a story.

The mere fact that we aren't swamped with such stories (I can recall reading maybe 4-5 over the past 5 years) confirms that it's really, really rare thing to happen.

I don't think it's a super-rare case, but more towards the norm. Here's Jack Black opining about how his son racked up a $3k bill on in app purchases in a game clearly targeted at kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y4YSpF6d6w

It would be very difficult for a kid to rack up a huge bill on his parents credit card buying virtual items. The majority of websites which offer these items will have purchase limits in place. The limits will gradually increase over time depending on purchase frequency and monthly volume.

There would be no way for a kid to just show up with a credit card and make an out-of-character purchase of $1k+. This is especially true for games with tradeable items. This is true for the same reason that you can't just show up and buy BTC with a Credit Card. Fraud would be rampant.

> apps whose business models prey on gambling tendencies in children

Then it should be the parents' responsibility to educate their children, and not give them a device with a credit/debit card attached to the logged account.

>Then it should be the parents' responsibility to educate their children, and not give them a device with a credit/debit card attached to the logged account.

That won't be enough for many, including the Belgian government, apparently. Even adults are not responsible enough, it would seem, to handle credit or debit cards.

So if we assume gambling should be regulated, and that pay-to-play loot boxes are gambling...

Why haven’t the licensed gambling venues (casinos, lotto, and what have you) pressured the regulators to stop the unlicensed gambling? Or have they and I’m not aware / the regulator is dragging its feet?

Do the licensed gambling entities not perceive this as a threat? Or has gambling revenue increase overall because these games / apps basically groom young people in to being habitual gamblers as they age?

> "Do the licensed gambling entities not perceive this as a threat? Or has gambling revenue increase overall because these games / apps basically groom young people in to being habitual gamblers as they age?"

Probably a little of column A, a little of column B. The kids gambling with these games aren't potential customers for casinos since they're underage, but the habits they form as children may translate into willingness to gamble as adults. Maybe those kids-turned-adults will continue to gamble with video games instead of casinos, but I'd wager those casinos expect it to be a net positive for them overall. After all casinos offer "perks" that video games can't; free drinks, buffets, etc..

Presumably because the regulator has nothing to do with the issue before a court determines that loot box providers fall under their jurisdiction.

That's just being pedantic. Swap out "pressured the regulators" with "lobby the lawmakers" and his question is perfectly valid. Let's not pretend large corporations like casinos can't throw their weight around politically.

I bet it's somehow not on their radar. Because they have done this in the past. They shut down online poker in the US in 2011 by paying off a couple Senators to attach the ban into a Port Security act, which most legislators didn't want to not pass as they don't want to appear weak on security (also they probably didn't read the whole act).

My Dad's a great poker player and his secondary source of income vanished overnight. He still complains about it.

https://medium.com/@bostonirishblog/the-simple-science-behin...

I'm still annoyed. It really clamped down on the culture.

it needs what is called a 'purge', most games are blatant ripoff's that should not even be allowed on the store. google doesn't even provide a way to locate the most recent additions of games, so how the heck do folks even have a 'fighting' chance of getting recognized or finding that 'treasure'. at minimum, they should allow viewing of all recently added games and start purging games from the app store. after 1 year, charge the developer money to retain their status, you just can't leave games on their 'foreever' especially when they are crappy knockoffs.

Mobile app stores are shovelware galore. Admission standards are in the toilet and they're flooded with thousands upon thousands of reskinned garbage "games" that frequently rely on superficial similarities to smash hit games in order to confuse users so they buy them, or at least launch to view ads. Reskinning is a whole industry, with people capable of launching several "games" every single day.

We developers are to be blamed for this.

When Apple had long and thoightful review practices we treated them as the business murderers. And yet here we are asking exactly for their long and painful review process to have a comeback.

What is your suggestion? I am all for the Play store way of working; cheap to get your software out there. But indeed that made it a complete mess like you say, so my thinking is that there needs to be a more advanced way of sorting and searching (this is Google right?) to a) not only favor the most popular games b) to let the crapware sink to the bottom. For now this tagging is probably a human process which is why it will never happen as it needs to be humans employed by google not just users; users are not very good at this. Most I know do not see the difference between the real game and the knockoff so they vote positive. I would think some nlp/ml could pick up likely knockoffs fast and penalize them; they need something in the name and graphics to make users recognize it. I would be against barriers of admission, more for better filtering and search. Not sure why the search is so bad... I search google.com and then click to the play store for the best results; that seems so backwards...

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