Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill | Hacker News Reader

Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill

bbc.co.uk

42 pointspmoriarty41 comments

> But he says he's amazed that in a game designed to be played by children it would even be possible to spend thousands of pounds across a thousand transactions over the course of just a few weeks.

These games are designed around this. The dark patterns are intentional.

> "We encourage parents to review their payment settings on third-party services, such as Google Play, as they typically have an option to require a password for each purchase made and/or to prevent any information from being saved in browser settings that could allow them to be reused."

Then you blame the parents for being scammed.

A friend, who worked at a famous mobile/Fb gaming company, once told me his company would, sometimes, assign an engineer for an individual user or just few users. High spending users.

"whales" is the free-to-p(l)ay/ freemium games industry term for this sort of power user, who will spend vastly more than the average user and carries the lions share of the profit for the developer.

It's the app's fault they were scammed, I think this is more a case of pointing out that there are ways of mitigating this through the app store. Whether that's enough though is another question entirely.

Maybe require all apps to have a built in spending limit and an affirmative act per app to raise it with a mandatory password prompt and click on an emailed link to verify.

Make it up to $50 one time or greater than $100 in one calendar month. Given how people actually spend 99% of people will never see such a prompt and virtually everyone that hits it will be one of these people who is being scammed out of their money inadvertently by their kids.

While we are at it we could simply ban all games designed to appeal to the scratch ticket mentality and nothing of value will have been lost.

While that's a good idea it will never happen, since it's diametral to the interest of the app stores, which is to make as much money as possible.

Of course, if the abuse gets too bad there will be regulatory backlash.

It's not just the app stores. Facebook used to call it "friendly fraud" when they billed someone thousands because an obfuscated transaction occurred each time a kid pressed a button.

> One deposition shows Facebook employees were reluctant to reduce this "friendly fraud" because it would likely also reduce the company's overall revenue.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2019/01/25/facebook-tu...

Which of course is the same reason why android and ios will never show you data on how often you use your phone and allow you to send less time on your phone...

They don't want kids sending thousands of dollars. It is bad PR for pocket change for them. They already have options in the OS to prevent this. They just need to change the defaults and a few additional features.

Both iOS(Screen Time)[1] and Android(Digital Wellbeing)[2] show how much you use your phone and let you set limits for smartphone usage. 1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208982 2. https://wellbeing.google/

Is a reasonable spending limit set by default?

Being a long time Elder Scrolls fan, I was disappointed yesterday upon trying out Elder Scrolls Online for the first time. The constant stream of reminders and up-front placement of things to spend money on is extremely immersion-breaking. I'm going to put more hours into it just to see if there really is a hidden kernel of fun in there, but so far it hasn't done anything to hide the fact that it's a brazen cash-grab wearing TES clothing. I really don't mind paying for quality games and DLCs, but in ESO, doing anything except for failing basically requires sending a stream of cash to Zenimax. :/

There won’t be any fun hidden in there. Once a game developer passes the barrier of accepting cash for progress it won’t be balanced in any way that makes it fun to play.

Not always, due to shutdown I revived my old WoW account, and the latest content is far more engaging for me than the original content. But that's a game you're already expected to pay monthly.

Well, I had been looking at joining that. I was afraid it would be something like this though, thanks for the warning.

How can a game developer ethically justify a $4500 price tag for a game?

Yes, we can put in limits on spending, but let’s say we didn’t, does that mean a game could be worth that much money? Ever?

The industry actually has a term for people who spend compulsively like that. They literally call them "Whales"

And it all started with a Horse Armor.

Yep the industry took an arrow to the knee.

You were downvoted because you referenced the wrong game. ;P

Maybe it passed into Oblivion ;)

Devil's advocate: It's not 4500$, but a lot of microtransactions. A lot of mobiles games make most of their money on "Whales" that represent less than 1% of their playerbase.

That doesn't make this pricing model any more ethical.

To Roblox's credit however, they did refund the money when asked.

No one putting gun to their head to cough up $4500. They are paying because of their own weakness or maybe because of market forces as they can't get their fix elsewhere.

I can easily justify it ethically as "it's what my offering is valued by market". All my engineering education skills have not gone waste, those sleepless nights, missed dates - all paid off finally!

Revs up Lamborghini bought on installment paid with $4500 check

They are paying because app stores are allowing "authorize one payment" to mean "unlimited transactions are authorized". This is fraud, which is why Apple had to settle a class action for the exact same problem. Relying on a password, pin or parental control to prevent unauthorized purchases is irrelevant since in their absence, fraud is still illegal.

https://www.macworld.com/article/2029384/apple-to-settle-law...

I think there are basically four categories of big spenders:

(1) People who don't understand that they are spending actual money. Kids can fall into this category. Also people who are confused by an intentionally obfuscated user interface.

(2) People who are spending someone else's money, so they don't care. Kids can also fall into this category. (And when they do they may pretend they are in category 1.)

(3) People who can't afford it but have some kind of compulsive shopping disorder, addiction to the game or spending, etc. (People in this category might pretend they are category 1, i.e. request a refund and blame it on children who might even be fictional.)

(4) People rich enough that they will feel no ill effect from dropping $1,000+ on something of little value.

Whales are, at least theoretically, presumed to be category 4. There really isn't too much of an ethical problem IMHO with category 4.

The real ethical problem comes from the fact that you don't truly know which category the user is in.

Anyway, I think you are talking about category 1 and the person you replied to is talking about category 4.

If #4 actually existed platforms and developers would put real prices in the games instead of obfuscate the transactions and currencies. This would make them the same as every online and brick-and-mortar shop, where children and adults alike are not inadvertently spending thousands of dollars stemming from a single small purchase but may do so with explicit consent.

There are definitely millions of #1 though, we know this because Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google have all been sued for the sheer volume of #1s they allowed/enabled to be defrauded.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/09/googl...

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/01/apple...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-classaction-idUS...

https://www.ftcadlaw.com/ftc-scores-big-win-against-amazon-i...

I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or serious.

I’ll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/2luhwy3KAE0

Did you forget to end your comment with a "/s"?

Dad can provide a minor credit card/debit card, they are very popular these days with spend limit. Many platforms allow you to set spend limit.

It's also possible to turn on a heater and forget to turn it off by a minor and accure mega electricity bill and same is true if your data is being charged per unit data consumed by your internet provider. In none of those cases, refund would be provided.

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t spend 5000 dollars by leaving my heating on the wrong setting for a month, unless the heater was set to turn my house to plasma... In the case of data plans, I don’t think the default should be to allow people to spend exorbitant amounts of money on overage fees without at least letting them know what’s going on. I knew a person who ended up with a 10k phone bill a few years ago roaming because they didn’t understand how roaming data costs worked. It’s obviously a dark pattern, and should require a certain level of opt in.

> It's also possible to turn on a heater and forget to turn it off by a minor and accure mega electricity bill

A heater has not been psychologically engineered to incite minors to turn it on.

Enticing makes you happy, inciting makes you angry. Both persuade you do to something.

>A heater has not been psychologically engineered

Maybe not your heater, but have you seen my Monster-Barbecue-Grill??

Typically if it is accidental and a one off you do get a refund on those in my experience. Utilities all have bill shock policies.

> Typically if it is accidental and a one off you do get a refund on those in my experience. Utilities all have bill shock policies.

Sure, but the real money comes from the non-shocking (while still exorbitant) bills.

I mean, let's say that you sign up your card for your daughter, expecting to be billed once 4.99.

Next month you discover you were billed 49.99 instead, as after the initial 4.99 there are another 9 similar bills, one very three days or so.

My guess is that you would call it a (modest) one-time loss, cancel whatever can be canceled, learn your lesson and get along.

But there will be hundreds, thousands of dads falling in the same trap (as it is a trap) that will do the same.

Anecdata (reversed), my mom a few years ago needed to get some hearing aids, they are a fairly recent model that can connect to the phone via bluetooth. Her phone at the time was not a smartphone, so we bought a new smartphone with the right bluetooth release/version.

She had a pre-paid contract with a very low fee for calls but an exorbitant one for internet connection, to make it short, she usually got along with 50 Euros every two month or so.

Surely it was an overlook by the telephone guys and by myself to not check the (several year old) contract at the light of the possible internet activity on the new phone.

Needless to say, in two day she was out of credit, no problem, we made a new contract, for more or less the same monthy fee with a free 2 or 4 GB internet traffic allotment, and went away with a net loss of some 25/30 Euro.

It’s not the app stores fault, but I think the App Store could start throwing up notifications if you go from spending 0 to 500 in a small period of time.

That is crazy how the girl managed to spend THAT much in a period of a month.

>That is crazy how the girl managed to spend THAT much in a period of a month.

If you think about it, it's not that hard if she keeps getting queues to spend more without any track of how much she spent.

Hell when I was a kid and internet was paid by the hour, we got a lot of months with spending out of control and big bills for our standards, because you lose track of time/spend.

I bet the game doesn't tell "You've spent X so far!".

Such apps are designed precisely for that.

Hopefully some EU country will label such behaviors as gaming addiction, and make stores have triggers to control such behavior.

Happens on xbox/ps too. The best way to handle it is to explain to your children how it works and educate them. I allow mine to spend money on Fortnite skins because they know what they are getting and what it is costing. Their cousin, I recently found out, spent £400 on Roblox tat after taking their parents credit card. Now the excuse can never be I didn't know, which is what their cousin said, even though she had taken the card and used the details, as opposed to it already being registered and the child just clicking 'buy' with no awareness.

Don’t let the app stores off the hook. They collect 30% and dictate tons of less meaningful design choices. They could make this go away. But then Apple would have to explain to it’s shareholders how a majority of it’s services revenue is actually generated by gambling addicts and children.

Do the app developers or store have any legal ground to stand on when charges are being made by an unauthorized minor?

That no damage was done since they refunded the charges (or rather, that they have already granted the relief that would be sought in a hypothetical lawsuit case).

They can do that do this because it doesn't actually cost them anything to provide the digital "goods" that are being purchased; and not every parent notices. Their defense in the cases where the parent doesn't notice is that the plaintiff must be be aware they were wronged in order to file suit.

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