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Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

> It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc.

The difference is that in the PC games you can mostly ignore these and you still have a game you play, where skill and work is challenged and rewarded.

The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. You get a lot of smoke and mirrors on top of this - an artistic theme, social media integrations, ranks, titles, events, etc, but again the big difference is that there is no gameplay.

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> The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more.

This is a point-for-point description of one of the most popular "game" types in Las Vegas.

At this point, I consider the majority of the mobile gaming space to be indistinguishable from a casino.

- Pretty flashing lights and bings? Check

- Keep feeding it money to be entertained at a constant rate? Check (or else it will taper off to nothing/degrade down to "not fun")

I would make a more complete comment, but I can't be bothered to spend the time at the moment. This comment would get so little points this deep in the thread tree. Wait, that almost sounds familiar...

Yet in real life games like Genshin Impact implement most of the techniques you find morally wrong yet the game has actual gameplay and most people playing it have no problem with it.

Real life is more complex than the binary way of thinking you propose, and games often implement these techniques with valid reasons behind it other than simply making money or exploiting people. The problem is people acting poorly, and not the techniques in and of themselves.

Interesting. Can you name some valid, non-monetary reasons to have lootboxes?

In the same way that randomness in a roguelite leads to you feeling really good when you find an item that is cool and that you didn't expect to get, you have that same mechanic taking place when you either save enough in-game currency or use real money to buy a new lootbox and get a new item/character.

It's a different mode of accessing gameplay that is random, and just like in a game that abuses this mechanic to keep people playing for hundreds of hours (roguelites), these mobile games also do that, except with the possibility of paying real life money.

What you described is a planned dopamine release you have to pay for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have lootboxes, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for monetary reasons.

Well, anything that involves a monetary exchange can be described as "for monetary reasons". I explained to you that a non-monetary reason is similar to the reasoning behind similar mechanics in roguelites, which generally do not ask the player for payment.

I can even make the same argument you made instead about roguelites: "What you described is planned dopamine release you have to wait for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have RNG, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for nefarious reasons such as extending the amount of time people play your game for."

Yet roguelites are not seen as morally wrong at all. Why? They're both using the same mechanic, except one lets you pay to skip the RNG-gating.

No roguelike ever had a locked chest that wasn't meant to be open. Lootboxes aren't meant to be open unless you pay.

Plenty of roguelikes or roguelites have locked chests that can only be opened after you play for an arbitrarily long amount of time. That is the same as a lootbox in a game that lets you buy lootboxes with in-game currency at a slower rate than if you paid for them, such as the example I gave with Genshin Impact, where you can open lootboxes while paying nothing but the game is also structured to incentivize you to pay.

Games that are designed to suck hundreds of hours of your time and cause addiction are nearly as bad as games designed to tempt minors and vulnerable people into gambling. I'm not sure why you're bringing up the former as a defense of the latter.

I bring it up because the majority of people who have a problem with mobile games do not have a problem with roguelites. Either you have a problem with both or with none. I'm firmly in the none camp, it seems like you're in the both camp. Either way, singling out mobile games like the text in Godot's documentation did is a mistake.

No that's you putting words into my or OP's mouth.

I don't have a problem with roguelikes, but I do have a problem with mobile games.

One is optimized to provide gameplay experience and fun, the other one is to extract as much money as humanly possible from their users.

The fact that they might use some of the same building blocks doesn't mean that end result is similar.

Just like playing poker and uno might use some similar mechanics (cards) that doesn't make them equal games. One is regulated the other one isnt.

Or you throwing dice in monopoly and craps

>One is optimized to provide gameplay experience and fun

It's not though, it's RNG-gating content and therefore not really optimize to provide gameplay experience and fun, it's hiding gameplay behind RNG, just like it happens with lootboxes. You happen to not be bothered by this fact because you enjoy the good feelings that come with finding new and unexpected items, but understand that the same feeling exists with the lootbox system, it just asks for money instead of time (which you have to spend to explore all the content when a game is RNG-gated).

Your dislike of one over the other is arbitrary and unreasonable, which is fine. But if you're going to ascribe moral value to things I'm not going to take you seriously because it's clear you haven't thought about it enough.

But it's not gating content. You still go forward, whatever you get or don't get.

It just means that most of your runs will be different. And will enable you to do different things (maybe you get staff of freezing and freeze the lake, or maybe levitating boots and walk on water .)

Non of that gates you, just provides flavor, and different runs.

Sure some things are better and some things are worse, but my fondest memories is getting a win with hilariously bad drops.

In mobile games you cant proceed, until you buy crystals, or wait down the increasingly long timer, or simply can't kill a boss without a powerup from cash store.

When it comes to compulsive gambling, the monetary risk is an integral part. People who suffer from it get their fix not by winning but by putting things on the line. This is why gambling is almost universally regulated, and yahtzee is not. It's mind poison for some people.

Saying that "time" is a currency sounds good on paper, but in this case it doesn't work. Those whales that spend tens of thousands of dollars on loot boxes would not have spent an equal amount of time otherwise.

It's predatory, and it's bad.

"Either way, singling out mobile games like the text in Godot's documentation did is a mistake."

You're right, console and desktop games that do that are also a problem.

I've read the entire comment chain and the myopic focus on roguelites makes me feel like there's something that isn't being said.

Roguelites are designed for huge replayability so of course there's an element of randomness and difficulty in place of pure linear progression. Personally I don't see exploitative gambling/addiction mechanics in a game like Spelunky or Risk of Rain or Dead Cells.

It's utterly disingenuous to put these on the same level of cynical mobile titles that rub their exploitation in your face and continually blueball you with arrays of counters, timeout mechanics, fake currencies (backed by real money), and loot boxes. It's absurd to draw equivalence to the practice of exploiting 'whales' and young children, to squeeze as much money out of them as possible.

If Spelunky or some other roguelite had a mobile version that monetized every element of gameplay and made it 'freemium' then it would be another scummy mobile game, and would warrant the comparison. But not until then.

So you would equate a digital blackjack game without real money involved to actual casino blackjack? I don't know if it's an expression in english, but it seems to be a case of "degrees in hell". Contributing to video game addiction isn't great, but intentionally siphoning money out of the wallets of whales is downright evil.

> Plenty of roguelikes or roguelites have locked chests that can only be opened after you play for an arbitrarily long amount of time.

I am pretty sure that I have seen no such thing in Nethack, nor would I expect to see it in Rogue - the "rogue" part of "roguelike". Lootboxing roguelikes/lites are a subset of the genre, so it's not fair to use the entire genre as a defense of this practice.

Because, in the end, you end up paying real money, and not only that, you have mechanics that are designed around making that choice as tempting as possible, while attempting to masquerade as something harmless.

In a roguelite you end up paying real time, and not only that, you have mechanics that are designed around making spending that time as tempting as possible, while attempting to masquerade as something harmless.

> you have mechanics that are designed around making spending that time as tempting as possible

Citation needed. Old rougelikes/rougelites are designed to optimise for subjective fun, which naturally translates to more time spent. If something is fun, it's obvious that people will keep playing for longer. What's wrong is using dirty psychological tricks to bypass that and go directly for increasing the time spent on the game.

My argument is that roguelites are fundamentally using a psychological trick via RNG-gating content to make people play the game for a longer amount of time. That's built into the genre. And that this trick is the same as the one used by lootboxes. People have a problem with one and not with the other for very complicated reasons, but they're fundamentally the same, and thus it's a mistake to single out one and not the other.

I think there's a fundamental difference: pay-to-progress games have a strong incentive to make progressing without paying as painful as possible. Getting people hooked is just a means to get them paying. Games with long progression paths have an incentive to keep that process as interesting is possible, otherwise people will just stop playing (and along the way the player is having fun).

Also, I've not come across many roguelites which have a strong RNG component in their progression path. Roguelites are inherently random but their progression mechanics are generally quite regular on any given playthrough. All the ones I've played you progress quite linearly just by playing the game, not grinding for a chance to process. The worst I've heard of is one FTL's ship unlocks which involves getting two or three good rolls in a playthrough, which players (mostly 100% speedrunners) do complain about. Certainly nothing to the level of what is very common in lootboxes (where a massive grind for a less than 1 in 100 chance is common).

>I think there's a fundamental difference: pay-to-progress games have a strong incentive to make progressing without paying as painful as possible. Getting people hooked is just a means to get them paying.

Games with RNG-gated content have a strong incentive to make progressing take as much time as possible, because the more time it takes the more people play the game, and the more people play the game the more they'll naturally advertise it to their friends.

>Games with long progression paths have an incentive to keep that process as interesting is possible, otherwise people will just stop playing (and along the way the player is having fun).

Games that ask for money also have an incentive to keep that process as interesting as possible, otherwise people will also stop playing. Just because you're asking for people to spend money it doesn't mean that you can magically make a shit game.

> Games that ask for money also have an incentive to keep that process as interesting as possible, otherwise people will also stop playing. Just because you're asking for people to spend money it doesn't mean that you can magically make a shit game.

They have an incentive to make the path where you're paying as interesting as possible, and make the path where you're not as painful/boring as possible (while dangling the idea of the interesting bits in front of you)

You have just described gambling exactly. The problem is, in most places it's illegal for minors to gamble and it's likely that the majority of Genshin Impacts players are minors.

Genshin Impact is notorious for preying on it's users and monetizing everything they possibly can. The only difference from other similarly monetized games is that they included an actual fun game - although they stole plenty of assets and animations apparently, e.g. from Niers Automata (ironic because that game is the epitome of a game that was clearly made with love and has no microtransactions).

Genshin Impact is an example of a game where the gameplay is intrinsically designed to facilitate the monetization though - it's taking what would be perfectly alright gameplay, and making it _really shitty_, so they can monetize.

A Genshin Impact that cost full price but had no 'original resin' garbage, no running the same boss a dozen times (but only 4 times a day unless you pay!) to 'ascend' a character, that didn't gate most of the actually effective characters behind gacha pulls, might actually be a decent game. Probably wouldn't have made as much money though.

Clearly most people aren't bothered by it as it's an extremely popular game that has remained popular months after release. If it was just a quick low quality cash grab people would have moved on, but they haven't. So you have to come to terms with the fact that reality is rejecting your particular perspective on the issue.

How do you know people haven't moved on? Have you got Genshin Impact analytics that the rest of us don't? It's free and getting lots of installs as you'd expect - how do you know if people are sticking with it?

It's a perfectly fine game for the first quite-a-few-hours and then suddenly turns into an appalling grindfest (and yes, the 'quality' is clearly front-loaded, the game drops off a cliff once you get to Liyue)

Does it seem like a game that's consistently getting millions of views on videos about each update is experiencing some kind of serious decline in popularity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrH9vMZBwAk

That isn't a clear cut answer to the game being played, they can play it and not be happy with some of the games practices, we really don't know unless a study is done.

Anecdotally All of my friends who play games hate microtransactions and loot boxes. Some don't care if it's only cosmetic though.

It sounds like you're saying something that's popular can't be bad?

If something is consistently popular it means enough people like it or aren't bothered by it enough to be a problem. The popularity of these games that you really don't like is a signal that your view of the world in regards to this issue is lacking and incomplete.

This only follows if the playerbase are expected to have full knowledge of the dark patterns at play but don't care about them. It's more likely they have no objection because they aren't aware.

Popularity doesn't mean that it's good or that the monetization is reasonable. I happen to have seen sales figures for one of the top slot machine apps on one of the major mobile app stores and their revenue was as good or better than GI.

Most people who attend casinos aren’t bothered by gambling mechanics either. Says nothing for the quality of gambling as gaming, though.

Again, you took the time to find the games that allow you to do this and then just say every free mobile game employs the model you don't like

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