'My son spent £3,160 in one game'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Now, regulating video games like alcohol may not be the best idea. We could end up in a similar state of binge drinking, except with binge playing. But perhaps some sort of preventative measure can be taken so that kids do not get sucked into these games that are, make no mistake, maliciously designed to addict and to steal money from the vulnerable. Even alcohol manufacturers don't dose their products with nicotine.
Get off it. There's a strong difference between playing a game like ''Super Mario Odyssey'' and the trash Google allows because it makes money on trickery and theft.
>Right now we have people who are facing serious problems with video games, and yet we brush them off casually and callously.
China locks up people who have ''Internet addictions''; they might find ''lies'' about political protests in China, as an example.
>I can't count the number of stories on reddit about playing video games all day and all night, at the expense of one's social life, academic success and even career.
Clearly one's career is said person's most important aspect. They could be working or participating in office politics instead of having fun.
>That's not normal behavior; it's behavior indicative of addiction and dependency. And I'm referring to adults.
Yet, nowhere in your message do you wonder why people would rather play games than do other things. You seem to think games are at fault, rather than the sorry state of society.
>Now, regulating video games like alcohol may not be the best idea.
It's important that every medium be heavily regulated, to prevent the wrong ideas from getting through.
I live this, I agree with you. An MMO was the only thing in my life I've stayed up all night for and then been able to set an alarm and wake up for after 2 hours of sleep. This was a game I committed to for 14 years. I've slept through finals, been tardy my entire life, yet for this MMO I could do anything. I was "sick" instead of seeing my girlfriend, I was otherwise occupied instead of working, or school.
I made the conscious decision years ago to never install WoW for exactly this reason. In the same way AA teaches that an alcoholic is always an alcoholic but can be sober, I choose to stay sober. I miss it. I think about it. But I have to make the active, conscious decision to 'choose life'.
I’m madaxe. I’m an addict.
I wasted 18 months of university on an MMO, 15 years ago. Cost me my social life, my girlfriend, and I found myself on academic probation.
It was absolutely insidious. I only found my way out of it by becoming a GM and then banning my own account, because even though I’d made the decision I wanted to stop, I just kept finding myself downloading and installing the client, yet again. It worked, I completed my degree, rekindled friendships. I did relapse about four years later while working a shitty boring QA job, and decided to treat the root cause, which was the shitty job, and went and started a business - and then didn’t game at all for nearly a decade.
Weirdly, my addiction and my physical running away from the environment that fostered it lead to much of the success that I have enjoyed since. It made things so intolerably bad that a ground change was mandatory.
I game again now, but it’s now on the order of about 5 hours a week on average - I’ll still occasionally spend a sleepless weekend playing something, but then I’ll go a month without. I like finite games - some adventure with an enthralling plot, and when it’s over, it’s over - or grand strategy like civ, where you master the game and move on - and frankly I find a three day deity match gruelling enough that it’ll be three months or more before I get the itch again.
I’ll never touch an MMO again - they are almost perfect and infinite skinner boxes.
I was learning and it led me to jobs and I’m grateful for that, but my memories of youth is me in a dark room in front of a big monitor and a buzzing light that never really worked right.
I have almost no other memories of it.
was it worth spending my youth so that I could be 15% more productive at some firm?
Even now I come home, kiss my gf and then sit in front of the computer to chase the next big thing, mostly because when I come home I am to tired to do anything else than just programming.
There was some research on HN where they found that programming (successful run/compilation) led to similar dopamine boosts as gambling.
My neck, back and hands all hurt, but I do what I always do.
I was in a good place in 2005, had sold my house and got voluntary redundancy from my job. But emotionally not so great. Long story short, I spent the proceeds from the house sale and redundancy on a level 85 character from every class, on both Horde and Alliance, on both Euro and US servers. I only stopped when a relationship broke up, and I finally realised that WoW wasn't helping. I logged out that day and haven't touched it since (8 years ago now).
I went through a severe clinical depression after that, though, and it took me another 5 years to get back to "normal" (whatever that is). Looking back on it, I was depressed the whole time and was using WoW as a way of surviving the depression without having to face my demons.
I think the problem of video game addiction has nothing to do with video games. Video games are a symptom, not a cause. The problem is the usual existential crisis of modern society: what is the point of our lives? I don't think we can solve this by regulating video games. In fact, I think that video games may be a useful barometer for mental health, and a lot less destructive than the other options (alcohol, drugs, sex, etc).
But I also think that's a completely different problem from the one the article is talking about, which is luring small kids into spending serious money on online games. That one we can solve with regulation.
As humans we have yet to develop ways to cope with an overabundance of mental stimulation, in much the same way that humans are still trying to figure out how best to survive in a world where food calories are no longer scarce. What we're looking at for the next decade is the obesity crisis for the brain.
This is predatory business behavior.
If something permissible could increase their user engagement but they opt not to do it for ethical reasons, they just lose share to the less ethical companies.
It's my privilege to do so on this platform.
This type of behavior is unethical which is an entirely different thing than illegal. I hope we can adjust regulations on the market to make such behavior illegal. I have this hope because I don't want to live in a society where an increasingly portion of the population is addicted.
My point wasn't that people shouldn't complain about this stuff. My point was just that businesses, by their nature, are sociopathic (regardless of whether anyone who works at them is a sociopath).
My current CEO has actually ranted about this at some length, that he'll run into people in the same game (startup founders pitching for investment or to find early customers) and some of them really do think the point of what they're doing is to get money. What is the _money_ for, idiots? Did you just really want lots of pictures of the Queen? No? Then your whole ethos is pointless busywork.
Even people who have a goal that I think is silly, like Musk's colony on Mars, at least that's actually a goal. You can look at things and say "That helps with the goal" (e.g. re-usable launch vehicle) or "That does not help" (e.g. accusing random people who disagree with you on twitter of being criminals).
If you just need to buy food and pay rent then, fine, whatever, work for the psychopath business that is just acquiring money for no discernible purpose. But if you've got to a point where you can pick, go find a business that has a purpose you at least mostly agree with.
My proviso that businesses tend to act like sociopaths _even if no one who works there is a sociopath_ is important.
Suppose I go to pick up coffee, but on the way to the stand I see a homeless man and decide he could use the money more than me, so I give him the money instead of getting coffee. Everyone wins: homeless man gets money, I get a feeling of satisfaction that is presumably better than the coffee.
Now suppose instead of getting myself coffee, I was actually getting coffee for my boss, who'd given me $5 for it. Suppose that if either I or my boss had been getting _our own_ coffee, we'd choose to give the homeless man our money instead.
The only scenario where he doesn't get our money is when I'm acting on behalf of my boss: my boss gave me a task, and I can't choose to give my boss's money away -- not even if that's what I would do in my boss's shoes, and not even if that's what my boss would do.
When I act on behalf of my boss, I'm less charitable than either of us individually.
It's not a good way for them to run a business, any business. They're failing already, get out ahead of the game.
What your coffee money analogy gets at is a culture where employees are encouraged not to do anything except tick the boxes and get through the day. The boss sent me for coffee, so the only thing I can do is go get coffee. I'm really just an over-specified delivery robot and shouldn't think about what I do, let alone why - just do it.
Boards like you've described are not providing their company with the only thing they are supposed to offer for their high salaries - direction. They're leeches. I'd like to see shareholders either embrace this, cut costs and replace such boards with just some standard paperwork saying the shareholders don't care about the big picture, so blunder along until the executives accidentally go bankrupt and too bad OR fire such inadequate boards and hire somebody who actually has opinions and acts on them for better or worse.
Now, perhaps my boss and I have an agreement such that if I see a suitably sympathetic looking homeless person, I can alter the coffee mission and give them the money instead. But the the number of potential situations that could arise exceeds the number of prior agreements we could conceivably have, and ultimately in the face of uncertainty my default position has to be 'do what the boss said'.
The scenario was between me and my boss, but the analogy is for the relationship between the board of directors and the shareholders. It's not practical for the (millions of) shareholders to communicate their specific desires in every potential circumstance to the board. The board's default mission is 'enhance shareholder wealth'. Thus _on average_ the board's decisions will probably be less charitable than those of any individual board member or individual shareholder if they weren't acting on someone else's behalf. See the Milgram experiment, for example.
The reality is that for most shareholders, the company is just an anonymous component of their retirement fund, and all they want is for it to go up. Super funds generally don't even tell you what companies you're invested in.
So the average shareholder does not want the board of directors they've never met of a company they don't even know they own to decide without consultation to give THEIR retirement money to a (figurative) homeless person who the board decided was more worthy of the shareholder's money than the shareholder. They just want their retirement fund to grow, and this is what the boards of these companies have been tasked with: if the shareholders want to be charitable, they can do that on their own.
Enhancing shareholder wealth doesn't have to be zero-sum: in a free market, transactions should be beneficial to both parties. You give customers something they want, and customers pay you for it. Everybody wins. It's up to regulators to set rules such that legal methods of enhancing shareholder wealth don't include exploitation.
Why? Because most people don't get addicted to video games, just like most people don't get addicted to alcohol. And while you might be able to chalk some of it up to addictive personalities (predispositions to addiction regardless of circumstances) I'm guessing a lot of it comes down to environment more than pure chance.
For video games, I think there are a few serious structural/societal issues leading to addiction. First and foremost is that keeping kids busy is hard, and the lowest effort way to keep some kids busy is to give them video games. Couple that with most kids not being allowed to just wander around outside anymore, and living in a car culture where they can't drive, and video games become the primary way most kids can play with other kids.
A lot of video games addict will tell you that the thing that keeps them coming back to games are usually 2-3 things: well-defined goals with clearly actionable tasks to be completed to meet those goals (getting level 99 or a specific rare item, etc.), the community aspect, and the feeling of proficiency/accomplishment. In real life, important goals are harder to meet and less well-defined, much higher stakes, and are done over the course of months/years instead of hours/days/weeks, so video games are much preferable to hitting goals in real life. Social isolation is prevalent so videogames can easily replace that. And in real life, not everybody can be a winner, yet in videogames everyone can feel like a badass for grinding out a skill requirement or getting a rare/expensive item.
So, uhh, what _do_ they get addicted to?
So it's hard to notice you're addicted until you start to explicitly avoid it and the realities of withdrawal (to the respective degree of addiction) kicks in.
This is where I think that addiction education is completely inadequate. They teach you in school that a certain percentage of people who will do drugs (or gamble, or play video games) will get addicted, like it's some random chance. It's not a random chance though. It's easy to tell people to not do drugs, or not play video games, or to ban them from doing it, but fundamentally they're just going to engage in some other destructive behaviour if they aren't given the tools and support to engage in healthy coping strategies. We need to be teaching people how to identify addictive behaviour as it starts, we need to teach people how to reach out for support and to ensure that support is available, and we need to teach people mental hygiene. We tell people to brush their teeth and wash their hands because you don't want to get sick, but we never bother to teach people how to look after their mind.
To find out how healthy the relationship with gaming is, other factors are used instead, like do the person shower, eat and don't start the day by playing instantly? There are currently science being done on this right now, I should find this.
Some kids are more prone to "get stuck" also, opening the door to an investigation into autism/asberger.
In the end kids kinda find their own way and go out and play and get bored behind a screen. Alcohol addiction and video game addiction does not work in the same way.
I'd say its a vicious circle, some are more susceptible to addictions than rest of us, and once those fall into addiction trap, its much harder to get out.
Psychological and physical dependency are two separate things. Alcohol addiction normally begins with psychological dependency and may or may not progress to a physical dependency too: https://goaskalice.columbia.edu/answered-questions/drinking-...
On the other hand, DT is the only form of withdrawal syndrome that can outright kill you, and alcohol is, generally speaking, one of the most dangerous drugs from which to withdraw.
At that level, lots of non-addiction behavior is indistinguishable.
> the root cause is underlying psychological issues that cause people to engage in self destructive reward seeking behaviour as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
That's, AFAIK from the actual research, far from true; there are complex relationships between addictive behaviors and other psychological trauma and disorders, but what you describe does not seem to be the dominant relationship. Often, behaviors where use creates a risk of addiction are sought out because they also, outside of their addictive properties, offer mitigation of adverse symptoms of the other condition. But that's not the other condition causing “self-destructive reward-seeking behavior”.
> we never bother to teach people how to look after their mind.
Sure we do, we spend lots of time doing that; the messages are mixed, conflicting, and probably of negligible value because we actually have very little solid information and lots of conflicting and unvalidated folk wisdom when it comes to preventive mental health care (self or otherwise.)
I remember first playing WoW and thinking how dumb and childish it was. Then it sucked me in and I became obsessed with it, especially PvP. It made me realize that games with cartoon graphics such as Fortnite specifically target children and young teens.
I have my password stored on the Xbox, but I've made abundantly clear that they are not able to purchase anything without consent. My kids are 10 & 12 and know it's really money and if they make even a single purchase without consent all gaming and internet privileges go away indefinitely. I get immediate receipts via text, so the ban hammer would go down quickly.
Edit, also the kids arent allowed to my phone, either. They have their own devices, and can't purchase anything on theirs (requires Mom's password). My wife likewise has her iPhone to prompt for password on purchases.
Here I am at age 35, in the midst of a mathematics degree, grinding my way through assignments that take days and days. I don't have time to play video games anymore, though I do spend a lot of time watching others on Twitch tv.
The problem is games are not regulated in the way that slot machines and fixed odds betting machines are. As a result they are free to implement tactics that would be illegal in a gambling machine. For example the way some mobile games like Candy Crush calibrate the game difficulty to match the playing style of the player and adjust the odds of winning to entice them into buying coins to 'take advantage' of some perceived opportunity that the game then adjusts itself to take away from you.
I'm not sure how to address this though. How can we appropriately regulate Candy Crush, without unintended consequences for Kerbal Space Program fro example? I'm not even necessarily against pay-to-play, after all it's just an extension of the model for coin operated arcade games.
It might be controversial to suggest this, but it seems like some people actively seek out addiction. Maybe they are missing something in their lives and see an addiction as filling it somehow. Maybe we all do that in some from or other, we just call it engagement.
There are countless studies that video games are nothing like alcohol or other addictive substances.
If you don't remove the cause of the addiction, the person will fall back or into a new one.
Granted this is a specific “track” that most are likely not going to be following, but I think some lessons apply even if you just want to improve and get a higher “Elo rating”. And there can be negative interactions, just like almost anything in this world can become unhealthy for someone. But I think the vast majority of people can interact with video games in a healthy way that helps them destress, or cope with something in life, or whatever else. Seeing the “overwhelming numbers of reddit posts” feels almost like confirmation bias, or at least just seeing something that feels like a problem when it’s likely affecting less than 0.1% of people playing video games. On the flip side I’ve read stories in the past about how video games have saved lives, because it gave people something to live for in a horrible part of their lives. And when they get to a bettering place, they’re able to interact with them in a much healthier way because they themselves are in a healthier place.
Anyway, this is a big rambly thing I typed on a phone, so it’s hopefully cohesive and understandable. But I felt a need to give an opposite perspective from someone who has never been able to dedicate their free time to anything for more than a week or something until I found a competitive game I wanted to make a run at getting into at least the semi-pro scene with, maybe even someday the pro scene.
EDIT: And I have a healthy life outside of the game too. I’m married with a wife who is supporting me in getting better at this game, I hold the job making the vast majority of our money, have a healthy relationship with family on both my and her side, have good friends, help around the house, etc. I’m not just sitting in a dark parents basement playing games all day. But I do put a lot of hours into it because it’s whats necessary to get better, and maybe I’m choosing to trade that time for some other thing, but it’s a choice I’ve consciously made for improvement, much like someone here might make that choice to build a product. I shouldn’t be “shamed” for building one skill while someone doing almost exactly the same thing but in an “approved” arena is lauded.
But having a Skinner box and other psychological tricks that empty your wallet is a serious problem. An addicting game that doesn't extract money wastes your time, granted, but an addicting game that extracts money can leave you homeless, without a job and on the street.
Equating the two is like saying - all drugs are the same when one drug can leave you with a slight migraine while other kills if you take a mg more than the recommended dose.
I completely agree that some methods uses by game companies are dubious at best, and can ruin lives. However, I don't think that game companies are to blame.
> Equating the two is like saying - all drugs are the same when one drug can leave you with a slight migraine while other kills if you take a mg more than the recommended dose.
All addictions are not equally destructive. But, all addictions can be destructive depending on the individual.
Many other companies are using similar tactics in other areas than video games. People obsessively use Facebook/Instagram to the point of depression and suicide, are they to blame? Are McDonald's commercials to blame for obesity and heart disease?
Where does it end? Are we saying that the average person has no control, and can't think for themselves? I think it's easy to play the victim card, but hard to actually deal with the core issues that lead you there.
No, not AAA exclusively. But there is a certain set of games that relies on these tricks.
See https://youtu.be/xNjI03CGkb4
> Are McDonald's commercials to blame for obesity and heart disease?
Did McDonalds create a "Diabetes increases sales" video? Because AAA and mobile games did.
The video linked is just one person in the industry. I'm sure you could find 100 videos on seductive advertising to get people to spend money on other stuff. I'm not sure your point here.
Any other company could still be using those tactics without publishing a video about it.
If I go to McDonald's website right now, I can find a position open for "Us Marketing, Consumer Insights Associate". One of the responsibilities:
* Develop, manage and execute consumer insights plan to understand trends, consumer attitudes and behaviors, key functional and emotional requirements, consumption occasions, and translate those learnings into insights to be used as foundations to drive future growth
And some requirements:
* Strong understanding of behavioral science standard methodologies
* MBA (preferred), Marketing Research or related field (e.g. Psychology, Anthropology, Behavioral/Cognitive Science, Statistics) or Strategy.
So they are to study consumers and their behaviors, then to use that to drive business growth. They also clearly want someone who understands human behavior, presumably so they can leverage that to get people to spend more money.
One of many. This isn't about advertising. It's about triggering a basic randomized rewards impulse and exploiting it for money.
It's essentially a Dark Pattern that is used to drain your wallet. Except that Dark Pattern reinforces gambling addiction.
That said, I do think marketing as is, is a horribly unethical psychology/social research at best. So your point, further reinforces my view.
I'm not saying it's not useful, but so were Mengele's cliffnotes.
The common thread in all these stories was "a kid spends a bunch of money, parent asks for a refund, is told no". But consider if the law says that digital goods such as this must be refunded on demand unless you can prove the purchaser wasn't a child. (If you want to really drive the point home, add a penalty clause for abuse, so you have to refund 150% of the total if there's evidence of any attempt to target minors, hide the charges, dark patterns, etc.)
If Apple becomes statutorily required to refund the money, they'll get very good very quickly at kicking bad actors off their platform.
This shouldn't be a system where parents try and protect themselves and their children and scummy vendors try and exploit them; it should be a shystem where Apple (and the other platforms and market operators) try to protect themselves and scummy vendors try and exploit them. Leave liability with the people most able to protect themselves, not the least able.
I don't think bans or treating games like drugs is needed; if you remove the financial incentive of being abusive, you'll stop the abuse.
I was 14 before I was given access to a credit card.. and was given a dire warning about when it could and should be used.
If parents can't lock out purchases so they have to physically approve each purchase, then yes, they should be able to get refunds and penalties... But if they give their children the password to buy/download apps unsupervised, they need to understand the consequences (and really, how the heck do you not realize that unlimited purchasing power on an app store is a possibility?)
The first story in this article is about a kid with "the mental development of a 7 year old"... Well.... I wouldn't give MY 7 year old a credit card! Supervise your children! If it's too much work to monitor their purchases and approve each one, complain to the platform for more control. It would take Apple, Google, Steam, etc. <120 hours of work to implement a "Monthly budget" system if people demanded it.
Btw, how do you miss that 3,200 pounds is spent over 3-4 months, if that clears out your bank account? I'd agree that 14 days is a bit short for a refund period, but asking for 4 months to return digital goods that have been thoroughly used by that point..... might as well shut down all the game studios...
Or if the legal system assigned liability to them until they did. :)
Ironically Apple used to have this feature, but removed it when they added the Family Sharing "ask parent for approval" feature.
https://9to5mac.com/2016/04/14/apple-to-end-itunes-allowance...
Further reading on the topic can be found by researching, 'friendly fraud'.
Easiest present day solution, use one time burner cards or set limit cards.
http://privacy.com , no fees, works within the USA, similar services throughout the world.
I'm also aware that if you err on the side of protecting children when it comes to disputes with bottom feeders like Supercell and King their ilk, the collateral damage will mean we have fewer companies like Supercell. I consider that a feature, not a bug. :)
A few people getting refunds for gems for a shitty mobile game they don't 100% deserve is a price I'm happy to pay. Business models are not inherently viable, and as a society, we don't need to protect this one.
We don't NEED to find the right set of laws to let abusive freemium games survive while also protecting the vulnerable, because only one of those two conflicting goals is actually desirable.
A friend of mine had his kid use his iPhone's hotspot and got a $800 bill connecting it to his tablet to watch movies while on vacation. Is this the phone companies fault because the person let his kid know his iPhone password?
After it continually happened to people roaming, the EU by law instated a cap where the operators need to request an SMS confirmation once the overages hit a certain cost.
For domestic data, I can't remember the last time I saw a plan that didn't just cap your speeds once you hit your data cap.
The gaming community often lambast companies like EA etc for loot boxes ("surprise mechanics"), which is definitely a problem that needs to go away, but from this article I suspect there's a lot of examples of absolute bottom of the barrel shovelware on the app stores that's raking it in from accidental purchases from children or vulnerable adults.
I remember Apple saying they were putting together some sort of curated program for high quality games, maybe with a subscription model. Which is cool and everything but creating a two-tier system doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Maybe any transaction should have a 2FA style system where the cardholder need to explicitly approve it through their phone. Or maybe a daily spending cap or something like that
It does - at least on Apple devices, IAP need to be authenticated with a physical interaction, and Touch/Face ID.
Games don’t have to prompt for confirmation to spend proprietary fake money. This removes an opportunity to reconsider a purchase, and dramatically increases the chance of accidental spending. And without a dollar value that players can easily reason about, it’s easy to not realize how much you’re spending. “35 crystal whatzits? Um, okay, that doesn’t sound like much.” Never mind the fact that you actually have to buy at least 50 whatzits to have 35, because the next lowest option is to buy 25.
I don’t have any data on this, but I’d be willing to bet that revenues from in-app purchases went through the roof when someone had the bright idea to switch to an in-game currency (and, eventually, multiple currencies).
https://www.barclaycard.co.uk/business/news-and-insights/wha...
>single transactions must be less than €30, up to a maximum of €100 or five transactions
It's the "or" there that I don't quite understand. Does this mean that any 5 transactions can be made without 2FA as long as their cumulative total is less than €100? If so, does the system ask for 2FA after surpassing the €100 limit? Or does this mean that 5 transactions can be made as long as each is under €30?
While probably helpful to families and individuals who face these sorts of issues, the explanation of the law could certainly be clearer here...
Although society would probably benefit from similar caps in casinos, and I doubt that regulation will ever arrive be legislated.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45652429
Obviously there are ways to cirumvent that but it seemed to help him.
I suspect it's harder to block these in app purchases at the bank level though, unless everything goes through Apple/Google pay and you block at that level
https://www.verspiel-nicht-dein-leben.de/spielsucht/spielers...
It's a blocklist that all licensed gambling companies in Sweden are required to respect. You add yourself to the list for a certain amount of time, and can't unblock yourself until that time has expired.
The government also set a maximum amount of 4 video game slots machines per store, causing the number of stores to go up by 3 or 4x meaning that after self excluding from one place, you will still walk past many others as you go about your routine. Thankfully this is now being rolled back, as they have set a maximum stake that means most of these stores will have to close down.
Why not just have a second signer to increase a cap?
I think Apple would be well served by limiting in app purchases to either 200$ over the lifetime of app or 20$ per month. That would get rid of most bad press without costing them much. They could even then allow specific exceptions on a case by case basis.
So a net gain for everyone, then.
I’ve had apple devices for years, and I’ve gone in and manually enabled the ability to in-app purchase less than a half a dozen times.
(This, and similar restrictions are buried in the screen time settings, in “content and privacy restrictions”)
Surely their definition is not too far from that of gambling or the mechanics of the circuits activated by gambling/surprises, within the mind.
It's strange then that most of these games aren't that interesting. Who are the players of these that make up the new class of gamers?
It would seem that the payers are the exploitable - those able to be swindled with casino mechanisms.
As an ex- free-to-play game developer and one who believes regulation often does more harm to consumers than good, I'd like to see something done. I'm just at a loss for what would work.
I've tried looking for games I could buy outright. Try finding a game without ads or in app purchases. It is extremely difficult to search by those criteria.
Indiscriminate third party advertising and freemium games are going to cause significant long-term harm to mobile gaming, and possibly also to society as a whole.
There's still some games out there that use IAP in small doses (<10 total) to sell reasonably sized chunks of content, but they don't make the money that freemium games do.
(My own device operates on the same rules as my kids - no third party advertising, no freemium IAP stuff. There's really nothing to miss in that space anyway…)
Not all are IAP free, but it seems most of them are.
The money you use is never much, but that is just part of the design to make you throw out even more -- a few cents here a few cents there and suddenly a sizable amount builds up.
Now I am 33 and have a bit of experience with addiction. That helps identifying these traps -- Dopamine kicks are always the same, chemically induced or by stimulating your brain with rewarding gameplay. But to be sure, would I have been born 20 years later, I would definitely be hooked on that particular game and still throwing money out for -- not much but a faster reward-cycle.
Do you think that's an inherently bad thing? Maybe it was for you at the time but I feel like the ability to reliably turn money into entertainment (in this case "a faster reward-cycle") is a great thing to have available to people who already have their basic needs met.
>> I feel like the ability to reliably turn money into entertainment (...) is a great thing to have
Yes, definitely. Each and every person can use (or learn to use) these games responsibly -- Not only games -- books, videos you name it -- like most people here I have a steam account, amazon prime, audible and a few other amenities where I wouldn't use my money in a compulsory manner. But a lot of free-to-play games have these little tweaks, that make it so very easy to spend money and don't even think twice about it. The occasional invite to start a transaction, placed at strategic "blockers" where you'll otherwise have to wait for 24h to advance can already be enough.
The crucial thing is to know about these mechanisms and have some sense of introspection into ones own behavior -- these skills can be learned.
EDIT: After I read some of the other responses and thought about it -- it is also important for us all, to acknowledge that some of these mechanisms do work like drugs -- neurochmically. And like with drugs prohibitions are counterproductive -- but a good effort in regulation might be a good step forward -- I've read very good examples in the other parts of this thread regarding a step like this.
This issue isn’t really the money -> gratification conversion, it’s the addictive nature of the process. If I’ve done everything I can to addict you to my product (to remove your ability to decide for yourself)... I’m in a morally bad area.
I’m of the opinion that some of these addictive response patterns should be banned from games flat-out, whether or not there’s a direct connection to someone’s line of credit.
If heroine were free, it would still be a problem for those addicted to it, if not for very long. (Although no one would have a financial incentive to get other people hooked, so it’s an interesting thought experiment as to whether use would increase or decrease).
The result -- fewer heroine addicts, fewer drug-related crime, less active criminal underworld (because of lower drug-related income).
An adult discourse and proper handling of addiction and substance abuse not only helps the addicts, but the whole society.
Giving away the addictive thing you still have to pay the societal cost of having people addicted to it. Switzerland handles this is a very admirable way and they have excellent outcomes, due to treating addiction as a disease rather than an individual moral failing.
I don't see why substance abuse in particular should get a super-special treatment in our discourse on human addiction-related behavior.
If it's destroying your ability to function in society, and something that you might want to drop the habit of, we should support our fellow people in doing it. If that is gambling, video-games, porn, they all activate similar dopamine related effects. Heroine and other opiates are super-effective at this, but it is still the same pathway being activated.
Secondly, the developers now have incentives to make you spend as much as possible, which is why you'll frequently see psychological tricks to move you in that direction.
Even if the developers were completely earnest, the rewards cycle will cause craving for mire rewards and will easily keep one glued to the game longer than intended.
If I need to exert willpower to use a service "responsibly" while the service actually makes its money from people using it irresponsibly, the service probably shouldn't be used in the first place.
In times passed we had a limited supply of literature, music, games, even god forbid, TV and movies. But these days we can put those on mediums that practically never degrade, and the rate of production has gone through the roof, and the producers of many of those goods are either dead and gone or there is no way to get money to them for their work, and we have the technical means to get them to whoever could want them at an almost zero marginal cost.
In that environment, a population that clocks time mindlessly feeding dollars to another party looks pretty sick. Which is, it would be my contention, is exactly what they are.
It is essentially the same as the old and uneducated who pump billions of dollars through the mindless gambling machines in my country. Not a image of humanity anyone would talk about with anything approaching pride/respect. Frankly, we should be ashamed...
It's just one data point, but my mother-in-law, who's in her late 60's, plays a lot of free games. She did an audit of her spending last year and discovered she'd spent over $500 in Candy Crush (I think that was the game). She complained to them and they gave her a partial refund, though to my knowledge she continues to play the game. I would bet a lot of these players are less tech savvy older folks.
The consumer is not always right....
I don't agree though that there's only up-front payment or freemium options on the table, nor do I agree that consumers wouldn't accept up-front payment if that was really on the table.
Consumers paid up front for games on the Gameboy and other handheld devices, and they paid enough to keep that industry alive right up until mobile games took over.
Any expectations consumers have right now that mobile games should be free is on the publishers, not the consumers - and while consumers are enabling and supporting the freemium casino model, I don't think that us humans in aggregate have as much freedom of choice as we like to believe.
Regulation is the only way out of this bind, but with the continued rise of neoliberalism that's just not going to happen.
Seems to me like a chicken and egg problem where the entrenched nature of freemium games create a consumer expectation that games should be free up-front, causing consumers to avoid up-front payment, which causes up-front payment models to be less successful, which further entrenches the freemium game model, etc.
I agree with you on principle that it's up to publishers to make the effort to change this model, but I don't see how that could happen without some external nudging to overcome the market forces at work.
Apple and Google care about the attractiveness of the platform. They want you to buy the phone with the impression that apps are included for free.
Regulate children's games such that they must have a minimum price (eg. $4.99) and contain no microtransactions.
The same could be done with pornography: require $4.99/month as the minimum charge, paid via credit card, to access, and DNS ban all sites which do not acquiesce.
On mobile this isn’t true. I worry that now that Nintendo has gotten a taste of the F2P riches via Fire Emblem Heroes these ideas will seep into other parts of the business.
Most dont earn money. It is winner takes all market.
> Who are the players of these that make up the new class of gamers?
I am. A while ago I ditched "traditional" games entirely and are not coming back, ever. I played only mobile games after. Through it is less so now, I did not ditched them and are willing to continue playing them (unlike traditional that I have decided to not play again).
It's much easier to make a pay to win game, so I could try a few times more than by trying to make a good game off the bat.
People just don't like to pay money up front, so getting them to start for free and then adding in the paid features to skip past your intentional delays is a pretty strong tactic to get people to pay when they otherwise wouldn't. I just refuse to do it because I find it unethical.
Would give parents a rough idea of how exploitive a game's online currency system is.
Virtual currencies are a scam on its own, but even games without them can be exploitative. The monetization of games has become so frequent, that's it's basically accepted as something ordinary. I've noticed that some developers don't even bother creating a currency anymore, you just get the Playstore € prompt for the item you want to buy.
Most free games are built on the premise that it's never-ending or always expanding. Either you can upgrade to infinity or keep playing, because they keep adding new content. I don't think I've ever stumbled upon a game where you have limited things to buy.
The only solution I see, which is just plain unrealistic, is to put IAP apps into a seperate category. I've started doing this, by not downloading apps that have the "Includes IAP" and I'm pretty satisfied. I don't think any game/app should be qualified as FREE, if half of it is locked behind a paywall.
I think this would benefit the game ecosystem greatly, because the effects of a relatively small proportion of the audience dropping 80-90+% of revenue really distorts game design to try to capture this upper end.
There really should be freemium games that advertise a monthly ceiling on possible spend as a feature to attract customers who are wary of pay-to-win gaming or exploitative models.
I'm fine with having a free game using an IAP to unlock full functionality, or to have a small! series of IAPs for it.
I think there's also a viable model for subscription gaming, mobile MMOs are plausible.
Requiring that all apps indicate their (enforced) maximum monthly and lifetime spend limits would work very well for me. An app with a $20 lifetime limit is a try-before-you-buy app, and one with a $20 monthly limit is a subscription app. One with "Unlimited" for monthly is a freemium casino, and is much more easily avoided.
I see Game A and notice the maximum cost of play is, let's imagine, $30. I can then tap and see the base game costs $10 and there's some additional content I can buy. If I bought everything possible I'm out $30.
Next I see Game B. I can immediately tell that they'd willing take my entire life savings for some stupid candy-themed puzzle game and pass on it.
It is a free service. If the parents in the article used a service like that then all of their spending problems would be solved because junior couldn't charge the card any further. All additional transactions would simply be declined.
The article talks about government regulation, but the government honestly has better things to worry about than what junior is spending on apps. People simply need to use the existing services, like privacy.com, to control their spending.
If you trust your kid with your bank account and get burned.. isn't that kind of on you?
There is no way to distinguish between an adult and a kid with their parents' credentials.
If the precedent gets set that you can buy in-game currency and then reverse the charge on the grounds that that was your friend's kid, not you, what will happen?
All I see is that it becomes tougher to offer games that are monetized in this style, which seems like a positive effect. So assigning responsibility to the parent doesn't seem that important to me.
I think they’d start asking for the police report in that case, or telling you to call your CC company to report the unauthorized transactions.
Adult who realize what they are doing and want to stop cold turkey doing it? Fine with me as well.
Why, for example, can you as a parent not set an (even global) spending limit on in app purchases?
Why can't you disable in-app purchases per app?
I think the answer to those sorts of questions is pretty easy to come up with. Lot's of things could technically be done that would make it easier for parents to manage this stuff, but it's not going to happen without a push from somewhere because every barrier you put in place will reduce revenue somewhere.
Disable unauthed purchases if a kid plays with your device.
banks need to make that easier. essentially, if we even want to allow children sto spend money online, we need to start handling allowances online too. automatically transfer $10 every week to my sons account, for example.
However, Starcraft 2 is complete and been this way since the inception. They added microtransactions years after the full release, and they all boil down to cosmetics and other completely optional and non-necessary things, like skins and banners, i.e. cosmetics. Something for hardcore fans to buy in order to support their game, but absolutely non-essential for the actual full experience. And I am saying that as someone who hasn't spent a single dime on Starcraft 2, aside from buying the full game on release (+the expansions that came out years later) and putting hundreds of hours into it.
Young consumers of all sorts are participants in a war many of them don't even realize exists. A war in which their opposition are marketing professionals, trained in psychology in universities to trick and exploit children. Against this, a lot of kids don't stand a chance. And it seems the marketers sleep at night by blaming the parents for failing to protect their children from predators like themselves, or by making what they (mistakenly) believe to be favorable analogies to other predatory industries targeting children, such as "collectable card games" or 900 number "video game tip lines."
For centuries, it's been trivially possible for parents to manage their children's access to funds. Nineteenth century homesteaders could send their kids off to market with appropriate funds to buy what they needed. Now all of a sudden this doesn't work and kids by default have access to near infinite (at their scales) lines of credit because of internet purchasing.
Why is this burden suddenly on the parents? Why can't app vendors (and in particular their middlemen who manage the purchases) make even a minimal effort at not having this system be broken by default?
Huh? The old model is working just as well as ever. Why would you give your kid your credit card? Have them make their internet purchases with a gift card, the non-insane way.
>Why can't app vendors (and in particular their middlemen who manage the purchases) make even a minimal effort at not having this system be broken by default?
Apple put an effort into making it all locked behind a simple menu setting, which to me looks about as functional and non-broken as it can get. I don't know what more can one expect from a company, aside from being able to read the mind of whoever is using the device at the moment and automatically adjust permissions based on that.
It's not simple, on iPad anyway. There are various layers of menus and options and some aren't as 'blanket' on/off as they appear
looks about as functional and non-broken as it can get
iPads, at least, can't even accurately track usage time in their own device. We've got time limits set on overall device usage time and specific app times, and it's woefully inaccurate, and that function is part of the same 'device control' app / settings area that looks after lock-down settings for in-app payments and new app installations etc.
That's why I've removed any credit card details from the Apple account.
That said I do wish there was an easier way to say "don't ever save my card info" It's clearly a dark pattern, and I routinely get furious about the loopholes I have to jump through .
What's happened is that the default mode for usage has changed from "Here's a dollar for candy" to "Here's access to the family fortune". And that's bad. And it's not the fault of Ernesto's parents, it's the fault of the technology vendors.
I set up my brothers’ account like this and he used it until he was around 14/15 and old enough to know the consequences of spending all your money. Then we linked it up to _his_ debit card. We allowed for something like £10 a month on the App Store, and about £100 a year on the Xbox store with the gift card method.
The limit of the budget taught him not to spend all his money at once or he would have none left. But a lot of parents seem to think these companies should do the parenting for them because they can’t be bothered.
When you add multiple devices/platforms/app stores it becomes a lot more difficult. Sure it is a relatively seamless experience on one platform, but not all of them. Additionally, parents who didn't grow up with cellphones don't even think about this stuff until it happens. It isn't common sense for them.
Worse, all it takes is one mistake on one device to open up a whole can of financial woe when it comes to a child on a device.
Thankfully I receive a notification email for activity on the account, so I was able to go through the non-obvious method of unsubscribing before the "three-day free trial" expired when the charges would have started.
The device was setup to require a password for in-app purchases. They even need a password to install new, free apps. I've since locked down the devices even harder, having looked up various guides on all the various settings that need to be changed from their very open defaults.
I've also removed credit card details from the shared family account - which can't be done from the device itself, only via the online account management tool.
I still don't know how those subscriptions got through, but they did.
Thanks for the reminder though, I'm going to check through those settings again, just to make sure they're still tight, and haven't been re-opened by a software update or other "insecure by default" situation.
I can't imagine how far outside 'normal' this level of IT device maintenance is for regular folk.
Disagree on the basis that neither "Screen Time" nor "Content & Privacy Restrictions" are terms that imply having anything to do with spending money.
They could have a top-level settings item called "Parental Controls" and they choose not to.
"I gave my child my wallet and he spent all the money in it!!!"
duh?
This problem needs to be solved in both ends.
IMO there needs to be a more rigorous opt-in process for different types of apps. You can opt in for automatic purchases for utility type apps but not for game purchases for example and it needs to be off by default. There also needs to be ways for people to get their money back in certain situations. If a child has a cognitive disability of some kind then holding them accountable seems kind of exploitative. Parents can prove these things with documentation and if proven the money should be refunded.
Not defending any particular app's behaviour. Without any first hand knowledge, I certainly believe that there are scummy games out there using dubious methods to get people to rack up IAP.
But the digital world? Come right up little johnny!
Maybe the model needs to change to force digital currency purchases to happen outside of the game? That way the purchase is divorced from the play and the parents can still retain control.
Or maybe accounts need to be set up in “child mode” by default, which caps spending at $50/month?
Or maybe the game rating agencies can be made to mark all games with micro transactions as Mature (since they basically need an adult present at all times to make decisions about the game)
Because that is the purpose of a smartphone - to funnel the user's money to the true owners of the phone. Any barriers to that must be removed.
The article said it was a 22 year old with cerebral palsy using his own account (presumably his own credit card).
I have less sympathy for the high-school and college kids who did this.
Much like a three-years-old should not have an ability to light matches, or push a screwdriver into a power socket, or operate a chainsaw.
It sounds like many games are set up to 1) encourage you to enter account information at some point and 2) not make it obvious when you are going to spend more "real" money.
Obviously these situations could be avoided in various ways, but I think it's being pretty hard on parents of young kids to blame them entirely for "falling for" scenarios that are pretty dodgy. Especially if you are a) a technologist of some sort and b) don't have kids, I would really think carefully before deciding the parents are 100% at fault.
I see how being a parent of a young and active kid can be exasperating. But, if anything, it should increase the level of healthy paranoia :)
Am I the only one that is impressed by a 3 year old knowing how to use a credit card online. I have trouble, at times, getting all 16 digits correct--depending on the past week's workload.
> It was on his own phone and he managed to [...] enter his own children's bank card details and buy lots of in-game items.
> It turned out my wife had left herself logged into Google Play on her old phone that she'd given to our youngest daughter.
[1] I'm not sure if this is a cultural thing. At least in my coutry almost no one has a credit card (it's more common to use debit cards + virtual credit cards) so I find the concept of "giving your CC to your child" really weird.
I was inspired by this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ
I always had multiple accounts but this vid and a discussion with friends (bankers and accountants) helped us all develop (each his own) 7 (or more) accounts setup. Imagine a "Dave Ramsey envelope system", but online.
With debit you spend the money you own.
With credit you take debt. On every single payment. You are taking debt. Only at the end of the month you pay your debt.
If you spent too much, (by accident) you now have to pay overdraft interest.
With debit you spend the actual money you own.
If a purchase (fraudulent or not) exceeds your current balance, the payment won’t process.
But that is a good thing.
You shouldn’t be buying things you don’t have the money for anyway...
>But that is a good thing.
In case of fraud that's a bad thing because your cash flow is now screwed until the dispute's resolved. What do you do if you have $1000 in the bank, you get a fraudulent charge for $600, and this months rent of $800 is coming up?
I've never come close to spending near my limit, so I don't know about an overdraft fee. I assumed it would decline further payments.
My credit card gives me reward points for money spent on it. Having a credit card that I keep paid helps my credit score.
I make some tiny amount of interest on the money in my account each month. I might as well collect that before parting with the money. And it's not like credit card debt accrues daily.
The concept just seems to bizzare as someone who has grown up with their country specific bank cards - getting a credit card or even a visa/mastercard debit card is something fairly unusual.
I do realize you american people have to build a credit score and there's cashback schemes. Very different cultures I guess
Presence and pin? How does that work online? Even if it's pin only, aren't you still screwed if you get phished?
Not good security is it? They can take their time to scan/photograph the cards etc, while in Europe the card's details are for seconds and right in front of you.
Debit Card = money in the bank.
I am not trashing the credit industry, but when they give me 1% and I give them 24%...
And in the UK I do get a refund for fraudulent purchases (e.g. someone copied my card details from a store and made some purchases of women's shoes from somewhere in the UK I have never veen) - NatWest flagged it, alerted me, refunded me.
with that restriction in place, 2 or 3 accounts is manageable, but 7 almost impossible.
ideally the bank should allow to split your account into sub-accounts. so that nominally (for tax and monitoring purposes) you still have one account, but for money management purposes you have multiple.
To take the credit card is easy .. no Pin code .. nothing does protect the card ..
These systems are set up so you really don’t have much choice, though. My son will come to me and say, “Dad, I have some money from Grandma, can I use it to buy willywhacker 2 for my iPod?” I’ll say, “sure” - then he’ll hand me the $5 he got from Grandma and I’ll type my credit card number into wherever the game expects it to be and try to check the “don’t remember this card for future use” check box (if it’s there and if the game actually honors it). My kids are really good about asking before they make purchases, but a lot of these apps are designed to trick you - that’s how they make profits.
In the third world you always to watch yourself so you don't hurt, scammed or abused with little recourse. So being curious, doing something different or challenging the status quo becomes a liability. Eventually there isn't much development at all, only corruption and people knowing their place.
When you buy something in a store with cash in person, after having it shown by an employee, you can still in most cases return the thing at your will. But when some clicks a button moving a few bytes with a digital payment that in reality costs nothing, there is of course nothing that can be done. This industry is just increasingly rubbish.
Don't click this, don't open that e-mail and don't answer the phone. You don't know who it is from or who it is going to. Don't have that password, don't type it there, don't have it too long and don't make it too short. We can automate your job, but not authentication. Don't publish that, don't vote like this and don't live here. Know your place.
(At least my banks haven't offered virtual cards for many years).
Better financial tools/primitives would have gone a long way to prevent the issue in the article which most Americans don't have. I shouldn't need my bank to hopefully create a "virtual card" feature (it doesn't). It should've been ubiquitous 20+ years ago.
This is one reason I use Paypal: I can see a list of organizations authorized to take money out of my account. My bank account and credit cards? I have no fucking idea who might show up next month. Maybe that thing I "canceled" on their website four months ago?
Or I use bitcoin because it's basically cash.
Everything old is new again ...
Apple has since relaxed this requirement, but it is like running a gaultlet to do something like remove your credit card from your account. There are also self-serving weirdnesses - somehow you can set up a child to "request a purchase" from a parent, but you can't set this up if they are 18 with a family account.
FIFA, specifically, is not a mobile phone game. It's a console game with gambling-alike microtransactions.
For example art. 19 Swiss Civil Code (https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19070042/...) says: «[...] may only enter into obligations [...] with the consent of their legal representative.»
In other words, children can only «buy» things if parents don't object.
However I can imagine that it is sometimes simply impossible to get the monay back. National law as empty words.
I get instant purchase notifications on my bank cards; it's really good to know exactly when they get used.
Gambling is also banned for everyone in many states, not just children, as the damage to society of allowing enterprises to prey on addictive personality types and create misery is recognized.
These laws need to be applied to online games as well.
However, you could also argue that it's the equivalent of buying a pack of Pokémon cards, baseball cards, etc. - which are not regulated.
My intuition tells me that given the addictiveness and how this disproportionately affects the most vulnerable members of society, the practice should be regulated much more tightly. Also, given that these are digital goods, a more relaxed "return" policy shouldn't harm any company that is offering in-app purchases in a good-faith / non-exploitative manner.
You can literally use your phone and google/apple account as a credit card nowadays. It's irresponsible to just hand that to a child. Ignorance is not an excuse. (that said, of course there should be consumer protections in place to limit the damage)
iOS, as an example, does have the ability to disable in-app purchases using the "Content & Privacy Restrictions" settings, but unless you dig through the device settings and found them (under "Screen Time" no less) then you would not know that those options exist. Given the obscure naming reducing the chance of them ever being found, they had might as well not exist.
Apple could do things to improve this. They could clearly ask about parental controls up-front during the device initial setup, they could clearly place them at the top-level of the Settings app and label them "Parental Controls", they could even include a bit of paper in the box or some printed text on the packaging that explains where to find those options.
They do none of those things.
Edit: these developers know damn well if their target demo is children, and they know damn well that the phenomenon of children running up huge debts without the informed consent of their parents is all too common. They know what they're doing; they can't plead ignorance. At best they are self-deluded, but it's more likely they are morally corrupt. Blinded by their love for money, totally indifferent to the suffering their business model causes.
It's absolutely revolting, and so is anybody defending it by implicitly asserting that it's okay for developers to exploit children if their parents happen to be careless or neglectful. "The parents are to blame for allowing it" does not absolve the developers who knowingly profit from it. Should it be legal for me to sell cigarettes to a child if their parents were foolish enough to give the child a credit card? Of course not, fuck off with that shit.
One (game dev) would have to be very much full of it, to assume this is legit. And, that they never responded to the parents tells it all.
With the money spent by a child, there should be no way to enforce the bill. Here in Germany, children cannot do business transactions which exceed the range of typical pocket money, so we are talking a few dollars here. Any business larger than that would require the parents to agree to be valid. Invalid transactions can be reversed.
And when pointing out towards parents negligence: keep in mind that there are no multiple accounts on iOS devices and there are good reasons to spend money to buy apps on a device. Of course, with enough understanding of the technology, parents would set it up so that the password is required for every purchase. The question is, is this a reasonable request for non-tech parents?
So if Apple wants to be in a position of morale, as they pitch themselves, they should put reasonable limits to in-app purchases, especially towards these games.
Wait, why the fuck does a 12 year old child have a bank card?
Sadly these app publishers take advantage while these kids are still learning. The boy probably would never have spent £700 on the game if that had to be spent upfront. "Microtransactions" in games can't die soon enough.
Cash? You don't need a debit/credit card to pay for things. You can buy iTunes/Google gift cards with cash if you want funds for your account.
I don't see why one cannot give one to a kid with - say - 100 Euro initial credit on it, and let him/her do whatever he/she wants with the money.
Then manage it the same way as it was once with the (usually here weekly) "allowance", crediting on it something weekly or monthly.
I'll confess that my weekly allowance as a kid was 5.000 lire, i.e. roughly 2.5 Euro, which should say something on both my age and the effects of inflation ...
Many people bring up the positivity of quitting, or minimizing, social media. The same thing could be extended to gaming.
I have quit social media, only using twitter to follow my interests, and quit gaming back in high school. Both of which took many, many weeks away from my life.
I am amazed at how much time I have outside of work compared to my peers that are hooked on social media or gaming!
All that being said, neither are evil, and both can be fun, but for many people they silently rob you of precious time, and peace.
It helps to view things not on a micro, hours per day, scale, but on a lifetime scale. 2 hours gaming daily, 5 times a week, from age 10-30 is well over a YEAR of your life! Now consider the binge gaming phases of life and it certainly takes a lot shorter of a time to hit 1 year.
The comments section of Hacker News is social media.
The actual purchase of system currency can be controlled while allowing the dependent to make their own choices on how to spend it.
Give me a game where I can play it and GM it in such a way that if I make Joe Blow look like a star, I can trade him for an actual star and repeat the process until I have the dream team I want or whatever without spending money, I'll buy the game again. The last Madden I bought was the one with Gronkowski in the opening animation and was just disgusted with the "fun" mode being weighted heavily against you just playing and having fun.
As someone who's never touched the sports games who grew up on old non-internet consoles that you can't replay the same thing is utter madness. You can't use the same player over in another attempt??? Do you run out of players?
From there, you can do little skill things for points which can be turned in for either more cards or contracts. These are mostly skill drill type things and not really "I'm playing a football game as my team vs the Bears" or something though there are some. Don't know if the events refresh so you can unlock more points as I only played a few weeks. So there's the no pay options of keeping things going as far as I could tell.
One week I got a Greg Olsen card as part of some event promo thing. Worked very well as a tight end in Ultimate Team. A week or two later it was around Super Bowl or something and received Dak Prescott. So solid passing tandem. Then, after a few games, contracts are coming up. At first it was Dak and it cost a lot to keep him. Then, I had burned so many on him that I didn't have many left for whoever it was that was my DE (it was a moderately good stats guy. Not great, but serviceable). So I lose him and the second string guy takes his spot. After a few more games, another boot falls and more attrition. Lost Greg Olsen because I was a few contracts short and just quit because it was basically a team of second string players by then.
Dunno, I'm all for a GM/player hybrid mode, but I'd rather feel like I'm gaining something when losing something on the GM end.
The cool part of doing that is that I ask her to convince me why she needs those credits, what she will use them for, doing that I can understand what she does in the game and see if it fit her. Another side of those games is that they have a social side and you can interact with other kids, so it's important to know that and make sure your kid understands that not everybody can be nice on a social network.
In the end, I don't understand a parent that gives that power to their children...
All the games start as fun and innocent. It's when the child get past level twenty that the difficulty kicks in. You have to pay to make any significant progress. Most kids don't know any better, all they do is press the button to progress. The parents don't know any better, all they did was give the phone to their restless child.
The game developer however, designed it specifically to trick both parent and child.
Now, yes, the ESRB ratings are not anything to stake your life on, but they do give parents and organizations something to go off. Does the ESRB have massive problems? Yes, of course. Do mobile games need to have some sort of rating system? I'd think that most people would say something would be really nice
Perhaps the ESRB, or an expanded board of a similar nature, should expand their mission to not only rate the content in a mobile game but also should give card-holders a better idea of what the gaming market's financial risks are?
It's definitely similar but the difference could be important.
I feel like the real problem here is how these games link up to a payment method that isn't actually intended to be used for the game. Unlinking them from each other should go a long way to resolve these "my child spent a lot of money because I gave them access to all my money" problems.
If you're in the industry and making money from IAPs, especially from lootbox IAPs, the one thing you need to know is that governments are coming for you.
If you're Apple or Google taking 30% of those IAPs (and also not paying much tax) then government is coming after that money.
If you're a publisher selling games for children, marketed to children, with hundreds or thousands of dollars of IAPs then governments are coming after you too.
Articles like this are a clear and simple warning: fix your shit, sort out sensible industry self-regulation, or face EU wide regulation.
We have plenty of examples to prove that the EU or individual governments are not afraid of bringing in fierce regulation.
I'm looking forward to Apple Arcade as we'll finally have a curated collection of trusted Games we can access with a single subscription so game developers are compensated and they can just focus on creating good content/game play instead of tweaking their games with Dark UX patterns to maximize IAP's.
If merchant-initiated transactions are desirable (e.g. for periodic payments), why there is no explicit confirmation for number and size of allowed transactions per time period for given merchant, like it is standard for regular direct debit bank transactions?
However, they spend millions constantly promoting any number of gambling apps disguised as games to children. Not just on the Internet, but on daytime TV, where you get a commercial break every 5-10 minutes. I have no idea how they get away with it - the "Regulator" must be asleep.
That said, if your kid steals your credit card and spends a bunch of money on it, the issue isn't the game, it's that your kid is stealing from you. If he/she stole your credit card and bought clothes at the mall, you wouldn't blame the clothing store...
I'm quite sure the rules say something like this, but I'm not a lawyer and have not looked it up again:
1. Find out the business address of that company, preferably one in your country if there are multiple options.
2. Write a letter in Word where you say you want to revert the orders <list of date, object, price>.
3. Print, sign, then photograph that letter with your phone (which adds a date to the photo).
4. Go to your town's post office and tell them you want to send this letter in a way that the receiver needs to sign for that and you want to get back that signature.
5. Wait for the signature.
6. If nothing happens besides the signature, write them an email adding all the details and the photos of the signature and the letter.
7. If still nothing happens on your bank account, and the sum is over 500€ or similar go with all the documents to a court and request they help you get the money back. Not sure if other countries but in my country for 45€ they will send a specially colored letter to the company claiming the payment and threatening a lawsuit.
8. Check the times here, but when they are up and nothing happened go with all these things to a lawyer and he will probably sue for you. In most countries losing such a lawsuit is path that might end up bringing the CEO into jail (not directly, but it certainly is on the table as possibility at this point), so the chances are super high that at this point they will send the money or declare bankruptcy. In case of bankruptcy your lawyer knows how to continue.
There's no need for reminders, warnings, etc. All that might end up you being behind your deadlines. Print a paper letter, sign it, and send it in a way that can prove reception.
A professional company with good intent will also not feel threatened by you doing the right thing according to law. So don't be afraid to be perceived as unfriendly. The only people who will claim unfriendliness here either have no idea what they are doing or are using your shame against you in the hopes that you do mistakes.
When the choice is either be out of business or homeless, what would you do?
Prepaid cards maaaybbbee.
This could just be something you enable/disable in game with a PIN. I don't know, anything would be nice. With no protection, you get the idea this is exactly what publishers want to happen.
What parents aren't aware of is the fact that game companies except the developers employ professional PhD psychologists to take advantage of people - mostly kids.
Other than Minecraft, not so much these days. So I stick with older. Less to "gamify my wallet"
Instead of these or really any other sane constraints, we’ve somehow made it worse by now preferring subscriptions!!! And even more offensive, these recurring charges are allowed to be very high. And as if that weren’t rewarding enough for scammers, it can be far more frequent than one would normally expect (e.g. weekly instead of monthly). Like, REALLY!?!?
i'd go with a monthly limit. one that doesn't break the bank, but one that also isn't to low to make it not worth it for the game developer.
how about $10 per day and $50 per month?
then you can spend your weekends playing away and buying to your hearts content. and if you instead do that every day, well then, you are going to have to ask yourself: home come that at the end of the money, there is so much month left over?
another measure would be the cost of a pack of cigarettes. at what point does smoking affect you financially? i think there may be studies for that. that same number ought to apply to games.
now there is still the problem of multiple games. so maybe another cap for overall spending. but that is trickier. how does that cap distinguish game spending vs using an app to buy groceries online?
Even just a setting or prompt when first opening an app:
"Dont allow in app purchases for this app to exceed $XXX (per day, per week, lifetime)"
so obviously I gave him full control over "his entire savings"
Problem solved.
But in my "old man yells at cloud" state of mind, I don't want him to grow up on gaming of today.
He's not yet old enough to play video games, but when he is I'm inspired to implement something similar to what's outlined here: https://medium.com/message/playing-with-my-son-e5226ff0a7c3
TL:DR Start his gaming journey at the beginning of the gaming industry (i.e. Pong, Pac-Man) in the hope that exposure to what gaming used to be like will "inoculate" him against what gaming is like today.
Yeah, you have to skip some of the big names and a lot of the mobile space, but that still leaves a lot of great stuff out there. While letting them experience a ton of classics certainly isn't a bad idea, it also isn't the only way to avoid predatory monetization.
What else would you realistically have done with it? Everyone likes to imagine that the would have spent it on improving practices like learning a second language and a musical instrument, but would you really have done those things or found another distraction?
1) You allowed your son with the cognitive ability of a 7 year old, access to £3 grand.. I'm going out on a limb here, but I don't think that was wise. I'm unable to even imagine "the correct" way you were wanting your son to use that money. Shorting Symantec?
2) Your 16 year old stole £2k of your money (and then your daughter bailed you out?). Looking for a bright side, it wasn't opiates... and your student daughter already appears to have overcome genetics/environment to get her shit together.
3) "We are technically savvy" (I already know you're not.. but pray continue) - Oh your 12 year old spent the money you gave him access to from his own bank account.. Well I think lessons have been learnt on all sides here - and if you don't think it's his fault, chuck him another £700 and see what happens. I have some lovely magical-beans I'll cut you in on, for his email address.
4) "My 11-year-old daughter has spent over £100 of my money in a day downloading apps that are the same." Well that's a curious statement. Most stores would say "you already own this".. she was creating new accounts for the thrill of a fresh download? I can't help but feel despite your aforementioned tech-savvy swagger - you have no f'in idea what happened even as you spoke to the reporter. Still I'm completely reassured that you've now given her a PS3 where "No fraud, no online grooming and no bullying"... Three horrible things, but does most definitely have an online store, which is the single problematic thing you mentioned.
Oh I'm losing the will to live now.. and feeling increasingly misanthropic, so I'll stop.