It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
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It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
But nowaday, you cannot just be profitable. You gotta make your investers very happy.
"Escape from Tarkov" and "It takes two" are just some of the more noteworthy ones. There's tons more on steam.
It's just the mobile market that's screwed entirely. Which I find odd, because I'm convinced there are opportunities for games that work especially well on small screens with touchscreen (like Nintendo demonstrated half a decade before mainstream smartphones)
It’s just more optimal for Profitability to create addictive garbage like this. Blizzard has chosen to be greedy and predatory rather than trying to create art of entertainment.
You are comparing a full AAA game for PC and console made for hardcore gamers versus a mobile game with loot boxes designed to attract and exploit kids or people that addicted to this kinda crap and disguise it like a game, pretty much like slot machine do.
The reaction was a lot of angry comments about the game being locked and that it should be free-to-play, etc.
Their next games (like Mario Kart Tour) went back to the exploitative loot box model.
Anyone who describes Mario run as an “infinite runner” didn’t play it.
The math and game design are expertly crafted to make you play compulsively. They most certainly have been designed to cause psychological pain when you don’t play it you don’t pay. They are not designed to cause fun or joy.
It's just hard for me to get upset about a game that's always been a pretty skin over a blatant Skinner box.
You have these things called eternal crests which cost 160 “gems” (the real money currency). These let you run a special dungeon that guarantees a drop of a legendary gem rated between 1 and 5 stars. In fact if you fail the dungeon somehow it’ll refund the crest and let you try again.
Apparently the drop rate for the 5 star gems is 4.5%, so my napkin math works out to around $50 per 5 star legendary gem.
I can’t go back and check my math because I uninstalled the game.
I agree there.
I think my char is ~38 and I have 4 legendary gems mixed levels 2-3. I haven't and won't pay any money, but so far the game has been fun. I haven't been limited at all in my progression, in fact the game has felt too easy. Will I ever have 5x5star gems? Probably not, but I would have gotten bored way prior anyway.
I dislike F2P/micro tx games as much as anyone, but so far I haven't been limited in any way. When it does (or I get bored) I'll stop playing.
I’ve played Homeworld mobile recently. The progress is great for first 15 hours but then game drops at you timegates. Wanna spaceship strong enough for later content? You can do god know how many missions hoping you get ship design, or you can do god knows how many missions to earn money to buy that from one of factions for cash. Or you can buy credits for cash. But only on Android because game is in public beta and Apple forbids monetization in those.
And once you get the ship design, you need to mine resources for it (this is manageable) but then you need to refine those, which takes around 70h of wait, but if you have other premium currency named „adamantium”, you can cut that wait in half for 100 adamantium, then another half by another adamantium and half of that.
And then you need to build ship in shipyard which takes between 10 to 15 days, but with adamantium you can slice that time down like for refining.
Every day you can collect 100 adamantium for free and buy 1000 extra for $9.99.
It’s rumored that EA lost exclusivity on Star Wars games because of their mishandling of license and time-gating legendary Star Wars characters behind hours of gameplay (it took 42h of grind to unlock Darth Vader, but you could just pay extra on in-game roulette to unlock him sooner). This also caused uproar that reached mainstream media and commentary from members of state governments.
Without knowing how money scales in this game it's very hard to judge the 10 years / 110k figure. In D3 sometimes you're grinding exponentially for 1% or even 0.1% improvements at a time, and you don't have to.
I think the assumption that another model was even considered is what people are getting wrong. The game was made explicitly and intentionally for this p2w / gamble business model. There was never an attempt to make it anything else. Blizzard lent their IP to make a cash grab. They’re milking their IP while they can, and monitoring both back lash and revenue, and will be repeating it.
What makes you say that? I mostly play single-player games where I just buy a game and then play it. There are loads of those out there, with more released every week. Even with my underpowered Linux laptop I have plenty to choose from.
I still plays Diablo 2 and 3 quite a bit. I don’t think I’d call myself a “hardcore” player — I’m not very good — but I’m definitely in the Diablo 4 launch demographic.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Diablo Immortal as sort of a canary. I can say with absolute confidence that I won’t be buying D4 at launch if Blizzard doesn’t fix the DI mess.
Among longtime players of the franchise, I can’t imagine that I’m alone.
But I guess they're harder to find/more rare. As others mentioned, most people spend nothing to little on these "free" games, so as a no-spend gamer you can choose between 1) free, or 2) pay $10 (or whatever they charge) to play a game. Not necessarily a hard choice if the "free" game is "entertaining enough".
If you're looking for a game to play on your commute it's probably not going to work, but for at home on the couch it's great.
it doesn’t work for the developers. obviously you can play a single player video game.
Once you adjust your expectations and understand that this is a filler game before D4 you’ll see that it’s a great game that can be enjoyed for the content without paying a cent
The same could be observed of Hollywood. How much of the derivative sequels, reboots and spin-offs are driven not by a lack of creativity as is often bemoaned, but rather by a greater-than-ever desire to develop “fountains of sales” rather than one-off artistic hits?
Same can be said for software. Now it’s all SaaS where you have to pay monthly and choose from different pricing tiers or ala carte feature options to ‘win’ in a business sense.
While some businesses abuse SaaS pricing (e.g., MS office for very basic uses, acrobat pro for basic uses, etc.), I think the SaaS pricing model has aligned the interests of developers and consumers (esp. smaller devs and smaller consumers) in a way that has allowed a wider market to have access to a wider range of affordable software and ongoing support/updates than would be possible under the previous system.
There are definitely folks, often a small niche, who really just need an old version of a piece of software for one or two small functions, and maybe those folks should be built in to the SaaS pricing model somehow, but overall I think that the merits of SaaS pricing almost always outweigh the demerits by quite a bit.
Which makes for a reasonable SAAS model given changing nature of tax system.
There’s plenty of US based SAAS companies that sell to the EU without charging any tax, and vice versa.
Of course, this doesn’t scale well. But if your turnover in those regions where you haven’t implemented proper tax rules is less than 6 figures a year, and you have no presence there, you’ll probably get away with it.
As commonly practiced, if you stop subscribing, you lose all access to the software (or get bumped down to the functionality of some free version). This moves a large portion of the risk of developing a new version from the developers to the customers. If the customers don't like the new version, it's not easy for them to switch; and as commonly practiced, they often can't continue using the old version.
I do agree that the JetBrains model aligns both developer and consumer interests. JetBrains carries the risk of developing the new version. If customers don't like it, they can unsubscribe and continue using their existing software.
Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.
365 gives you $70/yr for latest version per computer.
Or, the real win, $100/year for up to 5 people. That's $20/year/person, which is cheaper than buying Office Home and Student for each person and upgrading periodically.
Fwiw, I personally have no issue with the price.
That said, I know people who do, and I have pointed them to Libre Office.
Folks who complained, but who would probably like to know about a free version (I didn’t know there was one):
- retirees on very limited income
- unemployed people
- folks of limited means who only use any of these tools 1-5 times a year, but really need the specific MS tools those 1-5 times
I will point these people to the free web app option moving forward.
I realize that the free version won’t get a lot of marketing since it produces no revenue, but it may be prudent to have an evangelist hang out in online communities of old people, caregivers, and unemployed people and keep them informed. It would help the MS image.
I realize that such a person might exist, but the relatively large number of people who complain to me about Office pricing makes me think that the word is not being spread efficiently.
You have to upgrade eventually, though. In theory, the SaaS product could be priced the same as the shrink-wrapped version, just divided by 60 months. I suspect it's more expensive, though.
All things being equal, if I ran IT, I'd rather have the SaaS model because I'll always have the latest version and not have to deal with the drama of upgrades every 5 years. I'd also prefer it as the vendor because I don't need to support multiple versions of the software long-term.
What I find really sad is that multiple games have proven that there is a middle ground and that making a f2p while making enormous amount of money is possible (League of Legend ...) and using such predatory system that are so prevalent on mobile is not the only solution.
There is probably already enough monetisation around skins in the games that they would have easily turn up a profit.
The rest is just greed and disregard for players but then when they don't care that the game is banned in two countries at launch because it violate gambling laws what else to expect ...
In fact, there are very few games that have done the f2p walk successfully, sustainably, and all of them pale in comparison to the few extraordinary exceptions.
I honestly thought it was inevitable for Blizzard to go down this route the moment I saw the revenue slides post acquisition. In that slide it showed that King’s mobile games made way more than Blizzards games. At that point, all the MBA suits in the board must have started thinking, “why go through all the hoops of making a good game when you could spend way less money and effort to milk the cash cows?”
Thus the pressure started mounting up on Blizzard to create more “efficient” games like Hearthstone and newer releases instead spending long time creating and refining a game like they have before.
Stay profitable, stay calm, stay mediocre in size => delight customers.
Greed & corporate min/maxing has failed us.
Diablo Immortal seems to do many of the same things, but just in a much more egregious way. So far I've heard a lot about how much money you can spend on the game, but not much about how bad it makes the f2p player's experience.
In Lost Ark and Genshin most players don't care that much about whales spending 10k to deal 100% extra damage because it's purely player-vs-environment and that sort of damage boost is totally excessive and unnecessary.
But many games make progress feel extremely slow or otherwise aggravating to push purchases.
I haven't really heard much about where Diablo Immortal lies on that scale.
it's easier to afford ~£5 in 99p microtransactions every month for a year than it is to afford a £60 triple A
of course this isn't where the bulk of money comes from for these games (whales), but it's still a big factor
Mind you, there are some games like that (my usual routine is to go to Google Play Games, navigate to the bottom, choose "no ads" and "no in-app purchases"), but it seems that they are like 1% of the total.
If you like a specific niche subgenre, a franchise, etc. it's very likely that all games you find will be of the exploitative variety.
It's sad that I have a pocket computer with an awesome screen in my hand the whole day, and other cool features like gyroscope, GPS, etc. that can be used for gaming; and I find myself going back to my good old PC (or lately, the Steam Deck) when I want to play.
For example YouTube premium is a worse product than it could be because the entire platform has been designed with advertising and engagement in mind.
Say this as someone who just subscribed this month.
You are still subject to the game design that is made to push you towareds paying instead of focusing on making the game fun.
So, I'm not just a quitter, I ran into the trap.
Elden Ring was spectacularly well received and has sold millions of units, but it's "only" a game. There's no casino in the back, and therefore no gambling-related revenue stream.
It may not work as well or as easily, but I don't think that's the point being made.
Business models that are lower-risk and higher-return are systematically preferred by investors. Games are expensive to make. FromSoft has been successful enough to stay in business for now. They’ll always be in competition with studios that sacrifice product quality for profitability. Many studios literally cannot afford to do things their way.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/23070948/elden-ring-sales-chart-npd-...
[2] https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/06/03/diablo-immortal-gen...
Whereas the former, despite being a good game, may not provide the revenue model desired by its stakeholders.
ER impressed me so much that I bought three earlier titles from From Software, an additional $120 spent. Regrettably, you show consumer behavior like that to a mercenary games industry exec, and they'll just see "lost opportunity to put the screws to the market" and not "we should make better games."
(This is the first time that I've literally worn out a controller playing a single game).
Until it doesn't. We're not talking about the same thing here because one is a one-time payment (license) vs on-going (loot boxes / SaaS). I'm highly critical of loot box (p2p) games, but you're on-going payments do pay for content in the future. Companies who charge once have very little incentive to maintain the software (assuming it requires it to).
Let's say ER reaches 20M + 8Mx2 for it's two upcoming DLCs @ $40 each. That's $1.8B lifetime. Pretty amazing! DI would need to make $360M per year to be an equivalent business. So 800k in the first 24 hours is not too far off track to being equivalent.
Unfortunately, since investors have figured out that the subscription model extracts the most profit possible, I have a feeling we're going to be seeing more and more of that rather than a simple price increase.
Wouldn't surprise me if we even see Steam unveil something like Xbox Game Pass for their marketplace within the next few years. Maybe the worst part is the fact that you no longer actually own anything when all you're paying for is a subscription, but that's more or less how Steam already works, minus the recurring payments.
Fwiw, I would be onboard with some kind of model where one pays a small monthly (or additional fee) for continued updates. For instance, I play a few multiplayer games (overwatch, hunt showdown) and I'd be ok paying $1 a month or so to support continued updates / balancing etc. It seems like companies are missing the boat on the nominal recurring fees (vs say, the WoW level subscription of tens of dollars a month).
I worry that the pendulum will swing too far in the other direction and we'll see P2W elements, particularly in the PvE mode that eventually releases.
It does work, but not at the profit multiples that venture capitalists and private equity currently demand. Speaking of gaming overall, not iOS specifically.
I saw some reviews and write-ups saying that it would be more fun as a $10 game, but I think that's part of the problem. This is not a $10 game. It should be fully priced.
For whatever reason, proper up-front never took hold on mobile. I know Apple really pushed 99-cent apps early on, and maybe that is part of the genesis of this. It has been even harder to convince Android users to pay for apps and games. And so here we are.
I suspect it would be really hard to convince people to pay $60 for a mobile game after all these years of cheap and free games, no matter how good and how expensive it was to make. It's kind of illogical when you think about it. The latest iPhones are at least base PS4 in terms of power. The iPad Air And Pros are well beyond that.
As others have noted, there are ways to make f2p work well. You can do season passes and cosmetic stuff. You don't have to go whale hunting.
Realistically, we probably need legislation to make this kind of whale hunting illegal. We also need Apple and Google to step up and start caring about business models that support great software.
It's not just games, we aren't getting great mobile software in general -- at least not at the rate we saw with desktop computers.
Flying: VTOL VR, DCS, MS Flight Sim 2020, Ultrawings
Shooting: Onward, Pavlov, Contractors, Hot dogs horseshoes and handgrenades
Social: VRChat, Rec Room
Story/single player games: Half Life Alyx, Boneworks, Skyrim or Fallout 4
Stealth: Budget Cuts
Others: Beat saber is a must
I'd say VR is finally at the point where there are great games in most genres, and we are finally past the point where a stupid, 2 hour "experience" costs $40, in other words, most games being released for it now are not gimmicks. Honestly my recommendations are a little out of date. I've pointed out what I would consider "the classics" at this point
That model still works very well, probably as well as it ever has. But now there are also other models for your phone and computer. If people rejected them, only the "make good game, sell it" model would be left.
Basically the mechanism of incentives just works against us.
We do really need a renaissance of authentic & sustainable products which are profitable and are there to delight, not to min/max our savings.
give you the item for free or at a discount, then desperately try to enslave you to their payment model
people have been getting loans, mortgages and paying rent for centuries, but now it's moved onto phones, cars, apps, games, SAAS, free trials for streaming services, klarna, etc, etc, etc
they're all some variation on rent-seeking behaviour, they just vary in the form rent takes, and how they put the product in your hands in the first place
more modern iterations often don't forcibly take the rent, but use social pressures to coerce their userbase to the point where a % "voluntarily" pay rent. some still do forcibly take the rent.
the end result for you is a product in your hands, nearly always for cheaper than it would have been 15 years ago, but at either a lower quality, or a higher future cost
the end result for the "landlord" is almost a guarantee of projected earnings
As a different example - I'm sure it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to max out your characters and gear in Genshin Impact, but I've played very enjoyable 100h+ and it's perfectly fine even if you don't have the max ascended characters and gear, I have a feeling those are there basically for the wales to spend money on but aren't necessary for gameplay in any way(well maybe for some crazy hardcore end game content, but as always, that seems to be something 0.0001% of the playerbase enjoys).
My point is - the game can still be enjoyable and worth playing even if you can't get the endgame gear. Is that the case here? I don't know.
Most people I know who have played Diablo would tell me their rift tier, paragon level (might be a different term in English but they play in french so that's the term I know).
So for new players, it might not be that big of a deal, but for players wanting to play more Diablo the game is telling them to cough up as much as they can
Technically no but Diablo and ARPGs in general are all about items and for a very large class of players who enjoy this genre it's all about min / maxing your character, or at the very least getting improved items / skills / kill speed as you progress. Tying items into a cash shop in the way it's been done here feels really dirty, like it's going against the entire ethos of the genre.
This is partly why Path of Exile has been wildly successful for almost 10 years (it's another ARPG). Their cash shop is focused on cosmetics and quality of life improvements. You can't just buy items or things that make your character more powerful.
The only reason I bring up PoE is to demonstrate it's possible to create a long running profitable ARPG with cosmetic cash shop items in a free to play game. I do know things like stash tabs are borderline and debatably a kind of essential item but I'm ok with that, you can get very far without thinking about them and you purchase them once and you're good to go for years. It was also like $15 from what I remember, it's been a bunch of years since I played so I forgot. I do know I spent around $40-50 total on that game on various quality of life things and it felt like money well spent. I was happy to support GGG. In fact, I ran into a billing situation once and they gave me free coins to compensate a customer support pain point (which I didn't ask for) but I didn't want their work to go unpaid so I ended up purchasing more to match what they gave me.
Not nickel and diming your customers and not preying on weakness goes a long ways for building up a loyal fanbase. I haven't played PoE in years but I feel like they won me over as a customer for life. I didn't think it was possible to ruin the Diablo franchise more than the original release of Diablo III but I think Diablo Immortal may have won in that department.
I feel like people are upset about p2w mechanics in the game but at the same time say "I'm fine with cosmetic mtx" which makes the whole argument read to me as you are upset that people want to use money to win and that means they shouldn't so you will virtue signal like I care about people spending $10k. If you as an individual don't like p2w that's fine. I get that, but let's stop acting like we care about the virtues of it when kids are spending $1k on worthless Marvel skins in Fortnite or Roblox and there is little uproar about it... We just don't like going into a game where a rich person can beat us, which is understandably frustrating. The other virtue outrageous is just disingenuous imho.
- Cosmetics are a choice. They don't affect your progress in any way.
- Bought character power is not a choice. You can happily play X amount of hours but at one point you'll hit a brick wall you can't overcome without money. And no don't tell me that "eventually you will", because elementary psychology says people get discouraged and quit if their effort isn't rewarded until a certain time threshold. That time is much less than what a F2P will allow you.
I don't know if you deliberately missed the point or you can't see something that's easy to notice.
If manipulative psychology is the issue at hand than quantitatively speaking if you spend 10k on cosmetics or 10k on p2w through manipulative psychology what is the ethical difference?
If you think I'm arguing for a side you are mistaken. I just don't think people actually care about people who are victims of this. They just don't like p2w games, and that's fine. I'm just calling a spade a spade.
Also I feel like you are going down a rabbit hole of being gated on a game from being top 10 on a leaderboard, because the story mode and making it to level 60 seem completely accessible with no money. This is kind of a crazy path to walk down especially for PC gamers, who seem to be the most outraged, where affluence is definitely an advantage even if the game isn't the one making the money off it. For instance, the difference between a refresh rate of 250hz vs 60hz on a competitive FPS game. Try and tell me there isn't an advantage between a $800 gaming rig vs a $10k gaming rig...
Of course I agree with that. I was under the impression that we're not discussing whether addiction is bad -- it's widely known that it is.
I was arguing that "Minecraft and Roblox and millions of other games feed off the weak minds of virtual cosmetic addicts" does not at all make the pay-to-win model of other games okay. Because it did seem like you went off on a whataboutism road.
That the world is screwed up doesn't mean we have to give up. We can try and improve little corners of it.
I just get this vibe that people don't think through their stance these days. They just want what they want, and use ethics to support their point when they don't really have a consistent sense of morality to speak of.
And the thing with cosmetics is that they're opt-in; whoever decides to never buy will also never be negatively affected -- which is not true for pay-to-win.
I guess that's why there's this "evilest, eviler, evil and less evil" scale of game MTX.
I personally would prefer all cosmetics be farmable but I'm okay with having those be also available for buying.
I thought it through and my stance is I do think there's a very big difference between p2w and cosmetic only cash shops from a moral stand point in the context of Diablo Immortal and PoE.
I never felt like PoE was trying to push me into buying something. The purchases I've made (0 cosmetic btw, it's been all quality of life things) were on my own terms, I didn't feel manipulated in the slightest. There was no gambling mechanic, it was a straight "I give them money and they give me stash tabs" transaction, there's no catch. I don't need to login every day to keep them, they exist until PoE decides not to run PoE anymore.
The above is a lot different than Diablo Immortal trying its hardest to convince you to buy something because it directly alters the core mechanics of an ARPG which is to make your character stronger by trying to get you to purchase items that make your character stronger. The whole system is set up to make you constantly evaluate "well, should I grind this out 8 hours a day for 4 months or spend $50 to have it in a few days?", and it's painfully obvious.
These elements are also pushed into the game's UI so it's in your face all the time. They also took it 1 step further and introduced a lot of randomness into your real money purchases and they self destruct if you stop logging into the game. I was trying to compare this to a "real life company" like a casino or car salesman but somehow even they seem better from a morality standpoint when compared directly to Diablo Immortal.
So yes, in my mind there is a big morality difference between these 2 games in how they operate their cash shop. One of them feels like inconceivably high pressure sales tactics designed to maximize profits at no cost while the other feels like a game that does everything in its power to kill you with kindness by providing value through entertainment in the game so you end up making purchases because you like the game and want to support the developers, what you get out of that is more like warm fuzzies and some quality of life enhancements (or cosmetic things if that's what you like).
That said you are addressing that you "feel" like it's not as bad. However, I would argue that PoE wouldn't be still running so successfully without whales that may or may not be victims. You are, like many sane human beings, reaping the benefits of a well funded development team by whales. Does that make it ethically right because you don't "feel" it or see it as egregiously? Should a skin ever cost $50?
Like most things you feel it when it impacts your experience, which is very clear if you aren't a spender in a p2w game. If it didn't impact your experience you don't care hence why you think one is worse than the other. It's about how you feel, and that is the problem today. It's hard to solve a problem when people are inconsistent about where they stand on an issue. Do they care about victims and these MTX tactics or do they just not like p2w games. Personally, I don't think p2w games should be illegal much like I don't think gambling should be illegal, but I do think there needs to be more regulation about predatory MTX especially in regard to children across the board.
An opinion is often based on feel. For context I've put in thousands of hours into D2 back in the day, not nearly as much into D3 and quite a lot into PoE but no where near as much as D2. With Diablo Immortal I haven't seen this type of backlash over a cash shop and how it ties into core game mechanics in my life of gaming.
I also can't speak for PoE's finances or how they remain in business. I'm sure there's whales out there but I don't consider that my business, so you are right in that their actions don't affect me. If someone wants to pay $50 for a cosmetic skin and the game makes it available then so be it, for me personally that immediately gets classified as optional so it doesn't affect my experience playing the game. I never get the urge to buy those things because I see others having it. I also don't make assumptions about why they bought it (to support the game, they have addiction problems, etc.) because that's not my battle and there's nothing I can do about that in the end anyways.
My philosophy has been to apply a pretty basic set of rules in that if a game does what I think are predatory things then I don't play it, buy it or contribute to its parent company's profits. If I like a game and it feels reasonable to me in how its priced (1 time purchase, cosmetic cash shop, etc.) then I will happily support it. Everyone's rules here are different.
Yes, at least in those types of games. Gear improvement is a big part of the game progression. Before microtransactions that just meant spending ungodly amounts of time in those games. Nowadays it means bankrupting yourself.
oh and every 15 min or so you're spammed with a notification telling you take this one is lifetime opportunity to help if only for give them your credit card! if you don't hurry you'll miss out on this offer forever.
I've played less than an hour of genshin so I can't compare it since I don't know much about it. but as someone who played other games where you might need to farm for better stuff, this is nothing like that.
It's been awhile since I played D3, but hasn't this been the model for years?
how do you upgrade your items ? by upgrading their rank and the rank of the gems they have attached to them.
so how do you do that ? well either directly pay money, or pay money for for stuff needed to to challenge elder rift so that you can drop the resources necessary. or if you really don't want to do that challenge the rift without the resources and have a really shitty drop rate of alternative resources that can be converted into runes that can be used to make said gems. that would mean that you needs months of repetitive farming.
oh an the first fixes of the paid drug is handed to you for free so that you get a taste of how great of a drug it is. then once you're dry of it they'll keep giving it you at ever decreasing doses to keep you crazed for you fix until you crack and give in.
my experiences with game is that it was enjoyable until lvl 35 which you hit in 2 days of playing and just hit an impenetrable wall at lvl 42 where it meant full time grinding or paying in order for the story to progress at an acceptable pace.
I'll just remove it from my phone or maybe play with reverse engineering it to see how hard it is to make a bot. (on the first day there was already one spamming chat)
I think games where you have an option to pay for dlc at the start screen are fine. It's being constantly pressured that I consider to be a breach of trust.
Which ones did you return? I think there are a decent number of single a developer games out there that have good progression systems. Hades, Dicey Dungeons, Golf Story...
The funny thing is the unmitigated, most pay2win version of Plants Versus Zombies 2 - the game at launch - was accidentally one of the most amazing and intense gaming experiences for people who never spent anything. For people who just really enjoyed a vastly more challenging version of PvZ.
I loved the first game but it was never a challenge, it was rare to fail a level more than once. But the levels in the second were passable if you spent zero premium currency (even not spending any of premium currency they gave you for free for logging in) - they were just very very challenging. Passing every single one required novel strategies and slowly revising, eking out a few more tiny edges each time you try, combined with absolute precision in execution, until somehow the level was passable.
I'm not actually sure every single level was passable by not even spending the currency they gave you for free, I never quite finished it, but I got through most of them! When I logged in to finish the remaining levels later, they had made them all way easier in an effort to respond to p2w criticism so I never had a chance.
It maybe not, the same way it's not necessary to own a yacht IRL to enjoy life, but why should we bring inequality in games as well?
Multiplayer games are a meritocratic dream that is probably unattainable IRL, as only the most skilled (cheaters aside) get to the top of the scoreboard.
It kills my fun to know that even this small haven of meritocracy is changing to become like the real world: the wealthy have better opportunities than I do, independently from skills or talent.
The whole feature is effectively walled off to f2pers.
I don't have too many compunctions about games whose revenue models gate the top 5% of possible progress. If Diablo 3 had a feature where you need to pay money to unlock the last 10% of each primal ancient item (so F2P would only get 90% perfect rolls), I don't think my game play experience would change in the least and I've put a lot of hours into that game.
Games should not be about wringing money out of people - but games need to get revenue somewhere. Asking everyone to pay before playing at all is not a clearly better (or more moral) system.
I know some countries banned games like this but I wonder, if these games get banned why not ban casinos too?
Clash royale is sad, becouse it is a extremely good game if it were not for the pay to win leveling mechanics. I used to play it alot but it became too frustrating meeting bad players with low ELO but high level cards that you essentially couldn't win over unless they messed up bad.
Edit: To level up all cards in Clash Royale you also have to spend a silly amount of money. Exponential costs.
Far, far, quicker to get cards to tournament standard.
It costs 10 gems to play a challenge and you can buy 500 gems for 5$ so that's 50 challenges, say you get at least 7 games per challenge so 350 games for 5$ where only skill matters. I'd say that's not exploitative.
Of course if you care about your rank and having a Big Number in a silly mobile game then yes you either have to play a lot or pay a lot of money.
My secondary clash account is staying as Level 1, ie with no upgraded cards at all, and I regularly beat level 10/11 players.
If you're addicted to spending money online irresponsibly I doubt there is any law that will protect you, there's millions of ways to spend money to get gratification online.
These games are explicitly designed to prey on people prone to gambling-like addictions.
I'm also for legalizing all drugs but that's another discussion
If it was, do you think it would stop them?
you could argue they provided entertainment in return.
I played a wee bit and it didn't seem that bad. You can pay to upgrade your gear, but that seems entirely pointless in an ARPG. The whole game is a grind to get better gear! Once you actually have perfect gear, why keep playing?
My issue with the game is that it lacks depth after having spent far too much time playing Path of Exile. There aren't that many possible builds, and the game basically tells you exactly how to build if you want to do PvP or PvE. As far as I can tell, those builds are the meta ones, so the designers are forcing the meta.
But as a game to run in and kill some monsters without thinking too much, it seems fine. Which makes sense since it's a mobile game.
Edit: Or right now since it's early you can out-skill other people while they're figuring it out and soon the people who spend more will have both skill and raw power and will dominate
Does it suck that you can pay to get stronger and make the game unfair? Yep, but I'm not convinced it matters if you're playing casually. None of the pay to win stuff changes the game play drastically. You're only really increasing the amount of damage you do, it's not like Path of Exile where some of the really rare items can enable a new type of build or trading card games where certain cards let you build different decks with different playstyles.
Personally, I see no incentive to buy anything. I can clear a level 12 challenge rift, grind slowly and slowly clear higher level ones. Or I could spend a bunch of money and get to do level 20 challenge rifts or whatever. At which point you hit the wall and either pay money or keep grinding. But since the game is all about grinding, why pay to skip forward and grind more?
If I go against a player two levels ahead of me, I can be pretty much sure that he bought his deck and since he's going against me not some higher rank I know I have chance of winning if I can outwit materially stronger opponent.
When I'm going against someone with lower level then I can be sure that this guy has very carefully crafted deck and is a very skilled player.
The problem starts when it's unregulated and you are tricking kids, or people who are not educated about probability, into spending their money in casinos, and use dozens of psychological tricks to do so and obfuscate purchases. Just like it's easy for kids to get addicted to social media like Instagram, it's easy and dangerous to get addicted to gambling (especially when you see your friends or popular streamers doing it). I believe all of these games should be 18+, at the very least, and come with a big warning sign.
The problem with gambling is that it taps into the dopamine system in ways that people are not aware of, even if they know about probabilities.
The effect is cumulative, and the more the person gambles, the more they will gamble, take risks, create unbalance and spend money.
Now, just like with anything related to dopamine, many people will only have a mild effect. E.G: I've played dota for a while, and never went into full spending mode.
Like you, I think it's ok to gamble once in a while, to pay for the game. After all, it's fun, and the game provides pleasurable moments, but does cost a lot of resources to develop. It's fair to give money to the company making it: after all, other games may be paid up to $60, DLC not included, while free to play are always up to date.
Yet, it's very difficult to evaluate if the tactics used by the game for gambling are twisted or not, and if the game target is going to be abused or not.
For this reason, I do think they should be heavily regulated, not just about the age, but about the nature, and intensity, or the gambling mechanism in place.
The only solution to me is legal regulation, companies won’t listen as it brings money and most people like to play them. Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.
I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally and that other big countries will follow (like Korea, Japan and USA) to stop this trend and force designer to find better mechanics.
Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy. Nowadays with all the free services, it’s harder to make users pay for something they can get for « free » elsewhere. So it’s a complicated issue.
The problem with battle passes is that they rely on you having a massive player base, and require an incredible amount of effort to develop and keep running. For a game like diablo that's clearly not a problem but for anything that's not a top 10 game on their platform it is
> I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally
I don't think this (specific) categorization is necessarily the right approach. The problematic part with casino style games and gambling in general is that cashing out provides a real money incentive, which is not present here. Calling these games gambling is kind of like calling piracy theft - the intention is right but there's an important difference. We haven't got a category for them yet.
> Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy.
On one level yes. On the other, f2p games are popular for a reason. Excellent games providing a social experience has a network effect, and if your conversion rate is 2% you don't succeed as a game by monetising better, you succeed by increasing your audience. A f2p game could be a profitable game if the active playerbase all paid $2-3 each but the _second_ you introduce a barrier there you lose many players who won't pay, their friends who might pay etc etc.
> So it’s a complicated issue.
Amen to that.
Banning games like this will only drive the whales into black markets, which are more expensive, more dangerous, and benefit criminal enterprises by definition.
Many of the deaths from heroin, for example, are due to contamination with fentanyl (which boosts the potency). A company who was liable to their customers (ie: not a criminal enterprise) would be much less incentivized to lace their product, and if they did, there would be someone to prosecute instead of an entire black market to wag a finger at.
Anyways, I agree, this is an extremely exploitative design. What I don't agree on is using legal regulation to shape society into something moral. Historically, that's only made things worse.
Basically you have a bad habit not that far off from smoking cigarettes that will probably eventually lead to dangerous overspending the first time you have an economic downturn at the same time as emotional stress. Despite such games being in general tasteless and boring you have convinced yourself its "fun" because you have trained your brain to release dopamine when you do it and can't tell the difference being joy and dopamine the same way a crack addict can't tell the difference between chemical stimulation and actual joy.
Those gambling games are extremely overpriced in comparison!
But they still make that money. Guess how: By addiction, and other psychological tricks to make the price seem OKisch, even it's absolutely not.
Even the most expensive game productions could make a good revenue back than just by charging a one time fee of $40 to $60.
Now with those gambling games they made $100 a month on you… Continuously.
The whole business model is a ripoff, clearly immoral, and should get banned completely ASAP.
I don't see the difference. Whether I pay a "subscription fee" of $100 per month or I buy two new games per month, why does it matter? Why do you think that buying two games a month is necessarily more fun than paying a subscription fee for the same 2-3 games? For me it isn't, and there aren't even enough games I would be interested in buying in the first place.
I don't mind casinos in Vegas but I would mind if grocery store around the corner was replaced with small, low quality casino.
Most people who talk about this tend to have no idea what laws already cover gambling.
I think that, in this case, loot boxes should be treated like slot machines as far as minimum payout goes; in Nevada (for example) this is minimum 75% by law- meaning that the house must ultimately return 75% of the value it takes in as winnings to its gamblers.
As these systems are effectively slot machines (put coin in, pull handle, get box), not much more needs to be done other than applying the law as written.
It might be tricky to establish a dollar value for the digital assets paid out, and would add overhead to assets distributed in this manner (how one would put a price on "asset that changes the way the game works" is, of course, an open question), but provided it's done properly should clamp down significantly on the anti-consumer aspects of these practices- which is, I suspect, the real reason everyone complains about this in the first place.
But that's false, on its face in fact- there was development and artist time involved in every step of the process, and that time has a value (and an auditable one, at that).
So now that we know what the value is, taking into account that the house can only pay out in those assets, we can in effect determine a maximum profit per asset (as far as the house-player transaction is concerned)- casinos close their doors when the house is no longer able to pay out, and it's no different here.
People don't seem to have a problem with this even though a minority of their games are ultimately slot machines (the simplest of which is the "time the light" game, but the coin stackers count as this as well given that they're literally right out of real casinos).
Interestingly, the fact that D&B lets you combine winnings with cash to simply buy prizes outright arguably puts them under the 'gambling' line from a legal standpoint (it works if the tokens have "no value", which is how arcades generally do it for this specific reason- combining points with your leftover cash makes this fig leaf vanish), but the fact that they let you do that in the first place is also a pro-consumer move.
But if you can exchange tokens for prizes, clearly the tokens do have value. 1 token = piece of bubble gum, 10 tokens = keychain, 5000 tokens = fluffy unicorn. Etc.
Basically, I don't see why the fig leaf would work in the first place...
So while things have value, anchoring that value to a dollar amount is a different story.
Nit:
> Must be 18 or over to enter the premises. Persons under the age of 18 may only enter the premises with a guardian who is at least 25 years of age. Each guardian may bring no more than 6 underage persons into the premises.
- Blizzards slew of beloved franchises makes it easy to entrap nostalgia addicted masses to a number of pay to win clones. Or slowly implement these types of features into existing games.
- Half of the assets are from a 10 year old prequel. This game was cheap to make and will have an insanely high profit margin. Leading to perpetuation of this model.
- Scummy mobile pay to win is already accepted as the standard for mobile. With a desktop port, Blizzard can expand that complacency to further markets.
- Pay to Win models incentivize paid content over legitimate, engaging content. I.e. story, character models and gameplay will deteriorate overtime in favor of producing content that turns profit.
This is inevitable though.
Either way, it's a shame and a waste of a lot of really great IP that will be buried alive when the coffin that is Blizzard is lowered into the ground.
You can look at plenty of games that have lived for a long time on this:
- Supercell games (Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, Hay Day, etc.)
- Genshin Impact
- Heartstone and Magic Arena
- Rainbow 6 The Division (most profitable Ubisoft game)
My point isn't that these sorts of games aren't profitable - it's that they should have spun up a new studio with a new name instead of lighting the good will of a 25+ year IP that's held so dearly on fire.
I wonder if milking the company's reputation like this perhaps actually is the most optimal strategy for Blizzard. Innovation requires investment and luck, and it can create a great reputation for a brand. Once you have that reputation though, perhaps it's not rational to try your luck again. Maybe the expectation value is highest if you just sell out.
It's not just Blizzard, see e.g. the twelfth installment of Assassin's Creed or the eighteenth installment of Call of Duty. For that matter, it's not even just video games. Look at the tenth Fast & Furious movie or the fifteenth iPhone that are coming out soon, and will surely sell like crazy, even though they'll probably not be very innovative.
Add on top of that the company culture, sexual harassment scandals, all of the significant employees leaving, the Blizzard everyone knew is long gone. Gamers have moved past Blizzard, new gamers don't care about their games, so the only thing they have left is the IP to milk nostalgia from, which is why they finally started to make remakes of Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2.
While Overwatch may not have achieved it's lofty ambitions, it's still extremely well-regarded [0], had 50 million players (which is quite impressive given that it's not free-to-play) and has grossed over $1 billion. It arguably brought the modern hero shooter genre to mainstream popularity and caused a flood of similar games to follow it. You're right, nowadays there are more popular games in that genre, but at the time it was quite a novel concept.
Since you said 10 years since the last 'decent' game from Blizzard, I assume you referred to Diablo 3. I wonder, by what metric is Diablo 3 a decent game and Overwatch isn't?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...
Keep in mind that the profitability of the game is also a result of it being a paid game that also has microtransactions, and even then the gaming market has grown so much that a competitor like Apex is close to making 1 billion a year in comparison.
Why is everybody so irrational on hackernews now.
I'm not a team player when it comes to games and the whole raid thing just didn't work for me as such.
I guess I was using it wrong. To me it was just a fancy chatbox with some busywork though I did like some of the druid questlines.
("It's not because it's called «RPG» that it's similar to Baldur's Gate" learning moment...)
Not to bash you in particular, but it always amazes me that people can judge a game's pacing and monetization without including the endgame (if it even had a start or middle in the first place; endgame can be a nebulous concept). As the game ages, that is what the majority of players will be doing for the majority of the time and that's where the game will reveal it's true colors.
In my most recent memory, this happened with New World and its lack of endgame content at release. People defended the game as fun then most apparently quit in the levels 20-30 range because they realized the game was nothing but the same anemic game loop.
Now it's down from 900k peak players to 22k peak players, which may be a nice number for some games, but it is already deader than some older MMOs with no signs of player growth (according to Steam Charts).
*Diablo Immortal: Activision Blizzard's Latest Scam The Jimquisition* :
That bad, eh?
Of course you may have the self control to pull out when you notice it becoming less fun but that's not easy for everyone which is why this model is quite predatory.
What games are above this average?
This was true for earlier games that have been burned to the ground at that point.
From the arricle:
> As of right now, F2P players cannot earn top-rated Legendary Games, which are only available via some of the game's monetization options
Which of the current major mobile gacha games does have this kind of exclusive pay-only items mechanics ?
I think the part that's a relatively recent phenomenon is that games are designed with "free play" as an afterthought or even the game designed to push you away from it, instead of "free play" being the main design focus.
The standards for the two are quite different.
The flip side is, no matter how the general public criticize or hate it, it works and at times, more profitable than most startups nowadays.
The game was delayed for more than one whole year as they try to fix things up, 110k is probably an optimized figure.
That say, the game is enjoyable better than most mobile rpg but brings nothing new to the table. I would prefer it to be a pay once and for expansion though.
Of which presumably at least 10 are excellent, so think I shall pass on this slot machine game and play something else.
What I found so far.. speedhack, insta-ability spam, immortality(hehe).
Looking for force-invite into party and drop exploit. So far nothing. Pouring more hours into this, let's see on twitch ;-)
Also the always online DRM requirement has been creeping up, since having the game servers mandatorily under the full control of the company makes some of these mitigations easier.
While launching the game for the first time:
1) No sound!
2) Forced subtitles.
3) Visible tearing in the video because of a lack of vsync.
4) Two tracking and notification permission prompts, including one that lies to you: “Your game is better if we can target ads”.
5) Obnoxious tutorial that takes control away from the player. (If an adult spoke like this to me in real life I would slap them for their insolent patronising!)
6) Forced updates.
7) Etc…
At this point I deleted then game because I don’t want to be gamed by a mega corp. I’m not a money bag to be tracked and siphoned.
You're not only playing a modern Blizzard game, but a mobile one. This should go without saying. :p
>Two tracking and notification permission prompts
Is one of those the face tracking they put in there to satisfy Chinese government regulations?
1. Ok, maybe a bug.
2. Given that is a mobile game and most people will no have the volume up, it is ok to have subtitles. Not to mention that games that start with subtitles are more accessible and the majority of players actually don't mind them and find them useful.
3. Fair, but given that this is a mobile game, V-sync can be a problem for lower end devices too.
4. False? I cleared the first mission and had no prompt for that and has not requested tracking at all. Android.
5. The hell you talking about? When you start you get a small cut scene and are given full control when they drop you off the ship.
6. The game is mostly online for what I can tell so updates are a given (and you can download areas separately)
Example: every time I use Google maps it asks me to turn on location tracking, many people never encounter this because they leave location tracking on.
The game literally removes the controls while you're being told how they work. They vanish. You can't do anything but sit there patiently while a game character lectures you about how a joystick works.
What next? "To use a key on your keyboard, apply sufficient downwards pressure that you hear a 'click'. Do this now!"
It's patronising to a level that I feel insulted and leave the game immediately.
Compare to the height of the PC game era -- which Blizzard games used to be the epitome of -- you get "dropped" into the game and you learn through discovery instead of an unskippable presentation.
The intro of Half Life is a classic example of how to do this well. This is the opposite of that.
Game company does something shitty > You all still buy it anyway like good little sheep > Repeat...
Source: I had to credit card charge back sim city 5 in 2013 and never dealt with this joke company again.
example:
1. free-to-play: $100/year.
2. other: 10×purchase price/year. For a $50 game the maximum spending is $500 per year.
This would not set hard limit. It would only mandate up-front investment related to the amount of in-game spending. A Whale who spends $10k a year would have to pay $1k to get started.
I think this would effectively kill addictive impulse for people who can't afford it. At the same time it allows games to create expensive games.
F2P/mobile games are monetized through Wales, but they're only willing to spend if there's enough incentive (e.g. prestige). That's not given if there's no F2P player base, because the base game would be too expensive.
IMHO the best way to go about is to vote with your wallet. There are plenty of worthwhile games where you don't have to be a whale to be successful.
It's more likely that when incentives change, the whole customer base changes.
The current system of preying whales to pay for games has negative externalities for gamer's who don't have addiction. Playing is cheaper, but people play less games because addictive spending mechanics is affecting where the game development money goes.
Regulation would create incentives to make games that are expensive because they are so good.
It's not about the VPN, it's the payment method and App store setup that determines if you can install the game. Regulation does not have to be watertight. It just needs to work well enough to drastically reduce harm.
Lost Ark is in the top 3 of all games played on Steam and has been since it released this February. The game was 3 years old when it launched in NA/EU though - it had been out for 3 years in South Korea, 2 years in Russia and Japan. This is a game that ended up being very popular, but if nobody had bought the NA/EU publishing rights then the only way to play it would've been to play on the Russian, Japanese or Korean servers.
It's pretty normal for online games that come from Asia to not cater to the western market. I don't see why they wouldn't do this even more if we get additional regulations on games. And even when they do cater to the western market the priority is going to be North America, not Europe. Europe's almost always second class in these. (And when these games are brought over they're often Americanized/localized.)
PS Lost Ark is banned in Netherlands and Belgium too.
The idea of such regulation is to stimulate the business to move back to normal models.
In the Netherlands this is already working, Diablo immortal is not available there. It's a small market but once the whole EU does it they won't have a choice but to come up with something more reasonable. Win-win.
It would be nice if simply pricing out poor addicts worked as a deterrent, but it just doesn’t. We see this in sports betting all the time, young men are committing suicide in England after getting in too deep on the betting apps.
These are gamers... We've been trained to bypass arbitrary obstacles in the easiest way since birth.
People underestmate the UA costs on these games. It can cost >$10 to get a single player into the game through advertising. So right off the bat you need to make $10 back per player to make a profit. Say 95% dont spend anything, so then you need $200 off each paying player to cover the costs of acquiring everyone else. Thats why this situation has evolved and why the games build themselves around the whales.
Of course games do get some players for free via app store discovery but predonminatly it's through advertising.
We don't know what kind of games would replace these malevolent business models. We might get new kind of games and companies. Maybe less flashy, but more fun to play and better game mechanics.
If some business model provides no value, it is not a viable businesd model.
The rest os society shouldn't be taking a hit to make some business work artificially
In the Netherlands there's already laws around this kind of business model, requiring the company to specify win chances and other things. The publisher has decided not to release Diablo immortal there for this reason.
If more countries follow suit they'll have no option but to just go back to regular business models.
What are they supposed to do? Just pick away at rifts for free to build up their legendary gem count like secondary citizens? Are they supposed to ONLY use the crests from the battlepass as if this is some kind of subscription based game? What if they want to work tirelessly day and night to grind legendaries to make their character more powerful but don’t have as much money as the next guy? Shouldn’t the government step in?
Even though I am refusing to spend money for gems, there is effectively always a “look at me” notification on the screen reminding me that the store is open. They’re gaming the fact that we have all been trained through habit to check those notifications, and it is really effective.
Obviously they also need to make the game fun enough so new players come and are converted to whales.
Are there any resources that show player churn?
Blizzard allready has/had Hearthstone that was very expensive (500 dollars per quarter to have most cards), but Im not sure if this didnt kill the game for 'average' players.
This shit should have been regulated 10 years ago already
PC gaming is becoming infected too
It's very sad
Yet another company i will boycott
For me, Blizzard has always been the WarCraft 1-2 and StarCraft 1-2 company. Never liked the rest of their output over the years.
That said, it's a shame the company has been reduced to a gambling shop. Sign of the times, I guess. The writing was on the wall 10 years ago but I am no longer scared about my hobby. So what if the big guys all do lootboxes. Don't buy from them.
Activision used to have stellar catalogue 15 years ago. Now look at them. It's all junk
When I was a gamer during the Quaje2 era, my “addiction” was in trying to be the best.
Immediately after school, I would practice various maps to understand their jumping kinetics and would spend time studying and understanding all the weapon shots/kill zones to the pixel level.
No money was spent on the ‘addiction for excellence’.
These days, I actually miss this type of addiction, the one where you want to excel at a skill-based game. (Mostly a matter of not having time)
Yes there are loot box games and so on, but in reality they're a small subset. Admittedly if you primarily play mobile games then that subset is quite large.
Stick with console/PC, be suspicious of free to play and you'll be fine.
First it was the lootboxes that became widespread:
~2010 Steam Team Fortress 2, later Counter Strike
2012 EA's Mass Effect 3
2014 Call of Duty and Battlefield
2016 Overwatch
After that it seemed lootboxes were everywhere. In 2017 there was some backlash for EA's Star Wars game and they removed lootboxes, but it did not change the situation overall.
Then in 2020 western gamers were exposed to gacha mechanics with the release of Genshin Impact, where you "roll" with special currency for weapons and characters that you can't get otherwise. And this currency is either bought with real money or VERY slowly accumulated by playing game. The game is free to play otherwise.
In february this year there was a western release of Lost Ark - MMO ARPG(genre similar to Diablo) that involves probabilistic gear upgrades where you either play weeks to months to fully upgrade it, or drop hundreds to thousands of dollars on upgrade materials, game itself is free to play. It was backed by Amazon and promoted by huge Twitch events.
Both Genshin Impact and Lost Ark have very impressive amount of content, beautiful visuals, music - all while being free to play. Could these games be made and succeed without gambling mechanics? I don't know. My experience with Genshin has been that I got a lot more out of it in terms of fun per money spent than out of most from what I buy on Steam sales - which I play for few hours and forget.
I think the regulations about these kinds of games should at the very least require devs to: - State all the probabilities - Define a guarantee or a "pity": at which attempt will you succeed with 100% probability.
Then for each desired outcome, e.g. fully upgrading weapon, there should be displayed an expected and maximum "price", preferably in real currency. This would at least help the adults to moderate their spending. And as for children, yeah, these games should be 18+, I don't believe a child can handle the urge to spend in these games.
Some of those games that you mentioned only contained cosmetic items in the lootboxes.
Gamers as a community have a much more visceral reaction to paying for power in the game, compared to paying for cosmetics.
If that amount of gear were resellable in a marketplace then some of the moral arguments are empty. And I bet it wouldn’t be an astronomical amount because there is a random loot box/gambling/prize factor in acquiring gear in that game.
It doesn’t matter the technology behind a marketplace, SQL+CRUD and CC payments or blockchain+NFT, it’s tracking a receipt of purchase on digital items. Some would argue that blockchain is a stupid choice of technology but I would counter that the tech world has taken tech and bent it into a different purpose than intended with much success. For example, a documentation technology and protocol (HTML and HTTP) was intended for scientists to link documents to each other. We’ve taken that and bent it into complete client/server applications.
[1] https://thinkcomputers.org/odds-of-gaming-earning-you-money/
Yes. Look up “gacha games” [0] for the broader category. One very successful and very rich version of this genre is “genshin impact”
> And can "winning" result in a financial reward
In this case, no, not currently. People tend to structure competitive scenes around games without these mechanics but it could be done by the company developing the game. People are playing for the satisfaction of winning rare items or beating other people on a leaderboard.
Gacha games are mostly card-puller games. You pay $X for X pulls, with more expensive packages giving more pulls with a supposed higher success rate of 'winning' (getting a good/rare pull).
They use hidden weights, as well as max item rolls per day. This means that to keep items rare via artificial scarcity they will only allow so many of those cards to be pulled per X hours/days/whatever but they don't tell you this anywhere. So if that new hot card that just dropped is up for grabs, you buy 10 pulls. But you don't know that it's already been pulled X times by other people, so you have literally no chance to 'win'. So those pulls will be wasted.
The companies always lie about chances to win, the pulls are insane, you can see streamers do massive pulls, the numbers are sometimes out there, just community gathered.
A real life example is one of those light-roulette machines at arcaded where you slam the button to stop the spinning light. The only actual chance you have to win is after $X has been spent on the machine, before that threshold has been met winning is impossible, stopping the light at the correct spot won't matter it will simply roll to the next losing light. Or claw machines are the same and will only actually close enough to grab a toy after $X has been spent.
Gambling is one thing but these skinner boxes masquerading as games are pure evil as they change the rules constantly and make winning downright impossible.
This is why I’ve always been a bit surprised developers haven’t done more to get ahead of these kinds of issues with responsible disclosures and transparency, because it seems to be just inviting regulation. I honestly don’t think most F2P games pull the kinds of slimy tricks you’re accusing them of (most just use simple loot tables and RNG), but there’s nothing holding them accountable to say they can’t because everything is opaque.
I played some when they first dropped and the android playstore options were limited. You could see the bullshit weights first-hand if you had enough free pulls. Again, this, along with streamers doing massive pulls, and community-gathered spreadhseets are where I get my information, not from the game page that says '1 in 100 chance of legendary pull!' because, again, it's always been bullshit.
A lot of the outrage comes from the fact that 1. Diablo is originally a PC-based IP with a PC gamer fanbase, and PC gamers are used to different monetization schemes and generally don't play mobile games. Even without the gambling mechanics, there already was a huge backlash about Blizzard making a mobile Diablo game 2. Diablo is a "western" IP where such monetization schemes are less common and the penetration of PC players is higher compared to other parts of the world where mobile game penetration is higher.
> And can "winning" result in a financial reward
Generally speaking, no. There are no competitions for these kind of games. The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless.
Interesting. Why would the publisher have such a ToS? Just so they monopolize the revenue from in-game sales? Or is it more altruistic, like preventing new players having an unfair advantage? I would have thought encouraging a secondary market in their game would actually attract players.
In D3, you could buy equipment directly from the RMAH. This undermined core gameplay mechanisms since any loot you were likely to find would be inferior to whatever was available for pennies in the store. So why bother running the dungeons at all?
In DI, you don't buy gear directly with money. Instead, you buy access to dungeons with guaranteed drops of high level items which are statistically infeasible to obtain any other way. But this still lends plausible deniability: you're not buying your gear, you're just buying a spin at the (very weighted) wheel.
Sometimes though, companies seem to learn from their mistakes on these. EA went from a straight awful company to producing one of my favorite games, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, with no forced multiplayer, no microtransactions, no DLC, just a great game out of the box. So although Blizzard franchises are certainly hurting right now, sometimes the night is darkest just before the dawn, so to speak.
The fact that you can max out in Diablo Immortal, and so cheaply, shows Blizzard still hasn't learned what F2P is all about. They are listening too much to their Gamer customers who are a microscopic piece of their TAM and unlikely to source many whales. Whales are incredibly wealthy people for whom $110k is weekend fun money. Gamers are a cohort that like to brag about fun hours per dollar. They're budget customers.
Blizzard thinks that you make console & PC games on mobile and you make mobile money. A lot of game companies from the before-mobile-times think this is a formula. And their customers egg them on. But if you build the mobile game those customers want, you will lose money at worst and leave money on the table at best. Talking 90% of the money still on the table.
Blizzard's biggest problem is perhaps that their IP appeals only to Gamers, who as a culture resist F2P business models (budget customers.) This article is one such example, meant to stoke outrage within that group. The people who are going to spend $110k on Diablo Immortal don't read Gamer media, or even consider themselves Gamers. They've never been on Twitch and they don't have Steam accounts. Gamers think they are the center of the gaming universe but mobile gaming audiences have turned them into a niche audience in less than a decade.
I think Blizzard should give up at this point and keep making games mech-aesthetically tailored for the budget Gamer audience. Blizzard and Gamers alike think WoW was a huge gaming phenomenon but on the mobile scale it registers somewhere around Subway Surfers. Blizzard IP does not splash with mobile audiences. When a Gamer brand enters the mobile market it's akin to releasing a video game movie in theaters. Diablo Immortal is a lot closer to Mario Bros Movie than Sonic Movie in that analogy.
Maybe Blizzard's reputation has been so tarnished that even that is not enough and they need to forgo any mechanism that can be remotely considered giving paying customer advantages.
The thing is Activision has already successfully brought its flagship title Call of Duty to the mobile with only cosmetic store and making banks with it. So I disagree with you that Blizzard will be leaving money on the table by following that route.
It would be interested to see how well Diablo Immortal is going to do considering how much bad press it gets. Like you said the mobile gaming population is so much bigger than the PC one, but I question if the former are really immune to the opinions from YouTuber, social media and word of mouth from their friends.
Primarily because you are correct.
I think a nice addition at the bottom would be the addendum, "if the goal is maximise profit at all costs and there is no regard for their customer-base beyond how effectively they can be exploited."
And this trade is arguably worse overall for society than P2W using money. In that, you are producing something of value for society to get that money; in grind-to-win, you are producing nothing of value for society (and the game company gets no compensation as a result.)
The cost of a grindy game can be shockingly high, if you bother to compute the value of the time you are spending on it. That you find the grind tolerable doesn't reduce this cost.
So any game that includes this sort of transactional mechanic has a strong perverse incentive to waste your time.
When I played D3 I actually played solo most of the time, really only competing against myself and enjoying the game. One time someone gave me a weapon that let me one shot everything and it honestly ruined the game for me. I deleted and started over because for me the fun is in the journey.
1) If the journey have enough content to sustain a huge grinding time, it's ok. 2) If you can make it expensive without making mandatory (to buy), it's ok. 3) If you build a legit character buying or farming and it can be evaluated at 100k USD, it's pretty awesome! (Check MIR 4 Top Characters Price)
But if you play a blizzard game, with no NFT (or Open marketplace) and being treated as criminal if you sell the product of your farming/grinding time, it's pretty fucked up.
https://www.mmobomb.com/news/player-spent-3-5-million-lineag...
- DLCs are not microtransactions but they must add either new features or narratives.
Why is it ok for narrative content to be considered a DLC but cosmetic content to be considered microtransactions?
To clarify, the 2 criterions should be 'best practices' and not hard enforceable rules. However, games that don't adhere to the best practice should have the stigma associated with the ratings M or AO. An adult should be capable of judging the poor value of microtransactions and have the choice to suffer the consequences of consensual decisions at their own expense.
What makes you think that it's children being exploited and not adults? I've worked on a few f2p multiplayer games and the player bases are usually older than you are implying. It's not 12 year olds using their parents credit cards the vast majority of the time (and when it is, its rare enough that there's a news story about it).
Every new game from the last five years has been a disaster in one way or the other. They are even managing to slowly kill their never-ending holy cow: World of Warcraft.
Still, we must consider that growth is what a company is after, and that growth happens at the margin, not the core.
So the players who are "paying what they want (mostly zero)" aren't getting a normal but free Diablo game, they are getting version of that game balanced and prioritized around the whales that /will/ be spending the money. The actual customers.
I'd rather pay than "free-ride", because I don't want incessant popups telling me how how I can skip the grind (that is tuned to irritate me) by buying a gems with my credit card.
I'm not as valuable to Blizzard/Activision/NetEase with my one-time-purchase though, and they know it.
For me personally, it represents the fact that the company is actively working against my best interests, and that feels bad. Additionally, completely selfishly, it makes me sad to see games that I would otherwise enjoy be distorted by this sort of monetization.
1. Put the game down when you get hard time-gated
2. Don't do PvP
3. Especially with a leaderboard feature
4. Especially in grouped content
I'm sure it's a good game up until the PMs and behavioral psychologists decide you're invested enough to put up with time-walls.
There's an interesting amount of misinformation regarding MTX in Diablo Immortal. But the TL;DR is that the significant gameplay advantages from MTX only really apply at higher Paragon levels, requiring hundreds of hours to hit. The primary way of increasing power before that is the same as it was in any Diablo; get better gear, which can't be accelerated by MTX at all.
Hitting lv. 60/completing the main story content is very easy and does not benefit much even if you did spend money to get 5-star Legendary Gems (although there are level gates once you hit lv. 35; daily quests provide the best way to get around those, those aren't paywalls). That takes about 20 hours, which is good value for a free game even if you bounce off.
It needs a review like this: https://youtu.be/GpdoBwezFVA
I consider the Twitch gift sub market. And I consider that weird crypto game Axie Infinity. It seems we are only considering the purchasing power of whales that want to flex. What about whales that want to collaborate. Whales that want to demonstrate their generosity.
I remember a reddit post about a guy who had a rich friend that would constantly take him on wild adventures that the poorer friend couldn't afford. The rich guy didn't care about spending the money and the poor guy was good company.
I think an interesting monetization mechanic would be a game where the pay-to-win aspect was in the recruitment and outfitting of other players. So as a poor player I could have the opportunity to earn high-level gear based on the spending of a whale whose campaign I was joining.
For instance I don't think I would ever spend 30 dollars on a bottle of wine to drink at dinner, but I could pay 50 or 60 to buy a bottle of wine as a special gift to a friend.
Unclear how successful it would be.
> spending of a whale whose campaign I was joining.
Also, for me very punishing mechanics with high risk, high reward games have had an underserved market place. I love pking on a variety of different MMO's and sometimes when you are pking in max gear you are risking 10g's IRL. Full Torva on runescape is 6g's and once you add up the rest of the rings and amulets, you can easily be risking $15,000.00 IRL money.
However, there is no benefit to anyone besides yourself. Clans are 'superficial' as there is no real 'shared loot' system, clan building requirements outside 'daily's', but being the biggest clan doesn't give you 'benefits' outside a few dailys and some xp.
So I was buying and deploying these things over and over again just so my wife and kids in the area could have more fun. I specifically remember we attended a wedding at Disney World and my wife (girlfriend at the time) couldn't move around because of a recent surgery (I pushed her around Disney World in a wheelchair the whole time), so me buying those things let her capture Pokemon from our hotel room, and I could see a bunch of other people in the area playing as well. I hope I helped several kids enjoy playing the game more during that time.
I'd love more games to have something similar. If something only benefits me in a game I don't feel too motivated to buy it, as I can usually just deal without and progress slower, of just play a different game altogether.
It doesn't have to be specific to your physical region (although I think that helps, it was cool to think I was helping people near me), but maybe just where you're at within a game world, or something.
While I personally don't like it, because it feels like I'm getting an unfinished game if I don't spend a lot, I'm sure that there are many that enjoy this model and don't mind it at all.
And at the end of the day, these people that spend more money are actually the ones that feed the developers~
As soon as player-vs-player is introduced, f2p players become part of the "experience" for the whale players.
If that sounds appealing to you, but you're scared of getting arrested, you can just develop "free to play" games instead.
Interesting to see how ridiculous an amount it is though.
More countries need to adopt similar laws.
I am addicted to Dota2. Good game. I spent little money on it. I play for more than 3000 hours. I wish I didn't.
If you can make money, you MUST make it.
Someday I hope we find some way as a society to give value to other things. Its not really working out.
It would be great if we could stop spreading this misunderstanding. Fiduciary duty is a duty not to deliberately destroy shareholder value. Basically you can't set it on fire or loot it. It is not and has never been a duty to do absolutely anything anyone can possibly conceive of that will enrich the shareholders. Leaders are free morally and legally free to consider intangible factors that bear on the long term health and viability of the company and indeed do so every day.
This. Otherwise Apple and Disney would be forced to sell porn. But they don't because of their moral (one could argue prude) stance which makes less money for the investor.
Also the PR storm of such a reversal would significantly damage their stock prices. More importantly, stockholders suing either company to force them to reverse the policy would be an even bigger story.
It's not a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as possible, it's to maximize value for shareholders which means stock price rivals revenue.
Like the PR storm from searching the customer's device for evidence of illegal material they could pass on to the police?
> stockholders suing either company
What would be the basis for the lawsuit, prudishness is not codified in law.
You just got to look at a company like Boeing and how it changed over the years. The fiduciary duty of the directors didn’t change; but the directors certainly did.
Larry Fink disagrees, and companies like Exxon have learned that not only is it not the only option, it's not an option at all. In fact, it's to the point that politicians like Mike Pence are talking about the big bad shareholders terrorizing companies.
> If you can make money, you MUST make it.
This is a common sentiment at all levels. Who wants to do good if they can make 3 times as much helping big tech sell ads?
Common myth but utterly false:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
I mean I don't think I even need to give examples of corporations breaking the law because they thought they could get away with it. Corporations, like any group of people, can fail to see the big picture. Short term profits for the risk of a big slap on the wrist is a gamble a lot of companies take.
1 - some children have no parents
2 - we have data to prove that parents don't know what their children do online, and never did. This is a complete fabrication
3 - children do have access to creditcards, both legally from the age of 14 or 16 depending on jurisdiction, and illegally
4 - there are many non-credit-card ways of paying for ingame items, including crypto
Anyway, given your views, I presume you are in favour of legalising cocaine and other drugs? Otherwise this whole line of argument would be hypocritical.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-p...
It has always had the gambling element though. While doing Meph runs I came to the conclusion that I wasn't playing because I was having fun, I was playing for the thrill of the loot drop rng.
Diablo III made it even easier to get all the set gear (I have several sets on Switch and I only play casually) and it became about designing builds around gear that could survive the highest torment difficulties.
Other games like Borderlands with similar item systems also don't rely on the player getting the absolute best gear to progress either.
These pay-to-play games on the other hand, force you to hand over cash to progress and the fun often stops if you try to play for free.
The stance of NL and belgium of just banning all games that have gambling elements, is truly the only path forward. There will be no self-regulation. The studios have to be stopped from selling to care anymore.
Banning rarely accomplishes anything, it just moves one appearance of the problem out of sight for a period of time.
Is it useless to ban children from using cocaine and rocket-propelled grenade launchers in the US just because they’re not banned in Somalia?
I don't think it affects the point you're making, I just thought it might be interesting to share.
[0] https://otbfirearms.com/airtronics-llc-rpg-live-dd-modernize...
If there is worthwhile money to be made they'll already be going to those countries regardless what countries with regulation do.
They could just block the EU region and publish to other countries instead. Plenty of games, especially from Asia, already block all EU countries from playing. Usually they're looking to sell a license or don't know how to enter the market. Nevertheless, they are absolutely willing to block the EU region.
I see so many Europeans repeating the line that if Europe regulates X together, then companies will have to care, because they can't ignore the European market. This might be true in other industries, but it's not true in gaming. I would even say that it's more common for the European market to be treated as second class than not when it comes to online games.
Also, it's not about the children. Children don't make their own money - they only have money that parents give them. Even if these games banned children from playing them, a lot of the people complaining about it still wouldn't stop. The problem for them is that they can't make their friends stop playing these games, so they want the government to stop them instead.
I don't like when games monetize stuff like Diablo Immortal does. I hate it. But I'm certain that when legislation does arrive it'll be broad enough that other stuff gets caught up in it and the people advocating for it will just shrug their shoulders and go "lol i didn't care about games anyway".
> They will just move on to countries with less regulation, which usually means poorer countries with less educated people. You can probably see where this is going.
Great - they've moved on from my country because of the ban.
> Banning rarely accomplishes anything, it just moves one appearance of the problem out of sight for a period of time.
Just above you told me what it was accomplishing. And if it "just moves one appearance of [capitalism making it so that businesses have desirable incentives that would make them willing to literally instill gambling problems in children] out of sight for a period of time" then also GREAT! That's what the legislation was FOR.
If the legislation stops working, we can discuss again then.
* According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.
* The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent."
* Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.
This is #3, a threat that any type of action will harm poor people.
> Banning rarely accomplishes anything, it just moves one appearance of the problem out of sight for a period of time.
This is #2, futility in its widest sense. Not just this ban won't work, no bans work!
If the ban is easy to enforce I do not think this is true. IMO it is when the ban is next to impossible to enforce when the crime just shifts (drugs, for instance)
This knee-jerk application of libertarian ideology makes even less sense in this situation than usual. The gaming industry is dependent on improving computer hardware hardware, in-game sales rely on consumers with at least a certain degree of expendable capital. The core markets will always be countries that are well off, companies cant 'just go elsewhere' without significantly sacrificing their potential income.
Also you do realise that the wealth of a country does not correlate directly to it's levels of education?
Edit: Not any more. Even Algeria finally got their show together in 2021.
It's obnoxious how unpopular points get censored around here.
FromSoftware is another bastion of hope. The popularity of Elden Ring is no coincidence.
BTW gamer community is fucked up and people will judge each other on every single detail so you are not far off.
All the games are ad free and IAP free.
Even with Amazon Kids, though, the games are still their free to play selves without purchases, so I still see these games where dopamine hits (get coins!) are a main mechanic :(
[1]: Niantic for Pokémon Go, DeNA for Mario Kart Tour.
[2]: Nintendo is bound to have the final say.
[3]: For now?
The idea of self-regulation is a lie told by corporations who don’t want regulation.
Corporations will do literally anything to maximize their profits.
Is it impossible to imagine the industry creating a similar system around online transactions or gambling?
An incognito screenshot of Twitch I captured just now https://i.imgur.com/fgXDAHB.png - The biggest streamer on the platform is currently streaming real money (crypto) online Slots gambling to 100k+ viewers, and a second streamer in the top 5 category is also streaming Slots.
Supposedly these streamers make millions per month from these gaming sponsorships to pretend to lose their own money in order to convince their already primed audience to become addicts to these same sites.
Children brought up on gaming have been conditioned into becoming the perfect audience for unregulated crypto gambling companies to advertise to and ruin their lives
Most of this stuff is actually worse than casinos. Casinos have a social component, employ people, and are often at least a little regulated so that the odds can’t be absolutely 100% toward the house. Also you win actual money not a virtual game item.
Your approach reminded me of a joke:
Three statisticians go deer hunting with bows and arrows. They spot a big buck and take aim. One shoots and his arrow flies off three meters to the right. The second shoots and his arrow flies off three meters to the left. The third statistician jumps up and down, yelling "We got him! We got him!"
I have the same feeling towards the stock market. Sure, it can be well researched information on the stock in question, but it's all a bet your interpretation of that stock is right.
Maybe some of that is available now with crypto? Index funds? But with how heavily the bigger cryptocurrencies are price-correlated, I don't think you get good intra-asset diversification benefits.
Personally within my asset allocation, crypto is a tiny fraction of a percent.
It means that you, the user, don't get to play the games you want to play or it will have no effect. Publishers will figure out ways around it and you're never going to stamp it out as long as there is demand for it.
I don't like Diablo Immortal's monetization, so I don't play it. I suggest everyone else should do the exact same thing. If you're a parent then you should forbid your kid from playing games like that too.
Getting lawmakers involved in regular video games is just going to end in disaster. They're not exactly known for making sensible laws or even understanding the subject matter.
The fact that the Belgian and Dutch governments label these predatory microtransaction schemes as gambling, shows that they understand the subject matter perfectly fine.
Yes, you and I can sensibly choose not to play those games or spend money on them. But lots of people can't. That's why laws regulating gambling exist.
Nobody is saying that you can't play these games. Those gaming companies just have to accept that their products are a form of gambling and will be regulated and taxed as such.
The Dutch and Belgian government quite literally are saying that you can't though. Of course, in practice it just means Dutch and Belgian players will pretend they're from another European country via VPN.
>Those gaming companies just have to accept that their products are a form of gambling and will be regulated and taxed as such.
I'm not sure if you're saying this in bad faith, are ignorant of gambling laws or truly believe this. If you were to regulate video games with gambling laws then that video game ceases to exist.
Nobody can afford to publish even a remotely complex game while following gambling regulations, because every single country makes their own rules on that. You would essentially be creating a game for one country only. And at that point why bother? Just push out another actual slotmachine. You cut development costs by multiple orders of magnitude and increase accessibility of the game.
Of course, in practice the countries that regulate it would just be banned. And the players would play the game via VPN.
Also, what I'm saying is that when dozens of countries come up with new rules some of them are going to do something stupid with them. You're asking for legally mandated region locks in gaming.
Just to be clear, I don't like these games either. I hate that game companies do this.
My problem with this is that ultimately it ends up limiting my choices because I happen to live in Europe. I can choose not to play games that I think are trying to take too much advantage of me (or complain about ones that try to), but it's much more difficult to play a game that isn't permitted to be playable in my region.
I am a Dutch player who played D1, D2, D3. I won't play Diablo Immortal. First of all the condescending comment about phones as well as the launch of D3 which made whatever this game is quite sour. Then they made it a reskin by NetEase; it only uses Blizzard IP it isn't developed by Blizzard. Then they made it P2W, as this item proves.
> I'm not sure if you're saying this in bad faith, are ignorant of gambling laws or truly believe this. If you were to regulate video games with gambling laws then that video game ceases to exist.
Of course they can work around it by not having P2W. Its that simple, really. How about make a damn good game and sell it?
I can only hope more countries start regulating crap like this, as should happen with ML/AI ('algorithms') as well.
Because the average player is not going to pay $100 for a game. Also, now you're lumping P2W and gambling together.
But all of this is beside the point. If you do not like games like this then you shouldn't play them. I want to still be able to play the games I choose. I don't need the government to try to "protect me" from this.
Do I like that games do this? No, but I can always choose not to play them. If people chose to not play them then they wouldn't monetize games like this, but it's pretty apparent that people are okay with this. You want to use force via the government to stop those people from doing something they want to do and using "it's for your own good" as an excuse.
Games will absolutely shut out countries where they feel that handing regulation is too much for them. This will include games that don't conflict with the regulation, but it's simply too risky to figure out whether they do or not.
This is both P2W and gambling, and its the combination which is the issue. RNG alone isn't an issue. Also, it is aimed at youth, who not yet can deal with gambling. How come a country where you may drive at age 16 and drink at age 21 doesn't care about digital gambling via the internet?
The argument is the same about other things like heroin, gambling, LSD, etc. The law is there to protect the people. If you want to break the law, then you are on your own, with all the repercussions which may come with it including: that your Battle.net account gets disabled/banned, that Blizzard or the player gets a fine, that you become addicted, that you have to pretend you are from another jurisdiction in order to play it, that you move to a different jurisdiction, or vote for different politicians in your jurisdiction. There's plenty of options for you to influence the current outcome.
> If people chose to not play them then they wouldn't monetize games like this, but it's pretty apparent that people are okay with this.
No, it is not "pretty apparent". Stop projecting.
> You want to use force via the government to stop those people from doing something they want to do and using "it's for your own good" as an excuse.
Yes, such is the basis of law.
> Games will absolutely shut out countries where they feel that handing regulation is too much for them. This will include games that don't conflict with the regulation, but it's simply too risky to figure out whether they do or not.
That's fine, I'm not missing out, hopefully more countries follow suit and may it provide incentive to change this rotten to the core industry.
Activision Blizzard doesn't want to do that. Not the fault of governments
And as for the (im)possibility to develop games that follow the laws of all countries: that had been successfully done for decades. It just doesn't involve predatory microtransactions
In other words, they're saying that you cannot play the game.
>Activision Blizzard doesn't want to do that. Not the fault of governments
If I were Dutch and wanted to play the game, then it wouldn't be Blizzard stopping me from playing. It would be the Dutch government. That is quite literally their fault.
The Dutch government is saying that they know how I should live my life better than I do.
>And as for the (im)possibility to develop games that follow the laws of all countries: that had been successfully done for decades. It just doesn't involve predatory microtransactions
Yeah, good luck with that. Hope you have some extremely deep pockets to fund it yourself, because nobody's going to invest in it if the projected returns suck. Video game prices have stayed at the same level or even decreased over the years while costs to develop have gone up, because players aren't willing to pay the inflation adjusted price for them. They also expect way more complex technical work on the games.
And even when you make all that work the players will still jump to games like Diablo Immortal instead, regardless whether your local government bans the game or not. Getting around region locks in gaming isn't exactly new.
"Well, if I just don't buy any drugs, that'll take care of the problem."
Obviously, government interventions can have negative impacts (see drugs parallel again) but the answer is encouraging sensible regulation, not pretending, against all evidence, that it can't work.
As far as I can tell, gambling laws don't stop gambling either. In fact, it's usually the government that's the biggest provider of gambling services (the lottery). It seems like it's more about eliminating competition than anything else.
Turbo capitalistic exploitation of games is festering; and now it's more important than ever to support the good-spirited studios.
If I got lucky on a csgo case, I could go buy a different video game
Now if I get lucky in most of these other models, I can't even use that luck to buy more cases
But yeah, the "loot boxes" that are mostly gambling have been banned in many countries because they're targeted at young children.
This seems like naïve speculation to me. Think about the number/scaling of this. It would give them a few months worth of income at best?
The sadder truth is that they're exploiting escapism and maladaptive coping (addiction, gambling) in people who also use escapism to cope/relax. Often times, those same people in desperate need of escapism are there because they struggle in real life, often financially too.
So, the little reprieve they get from gaming negative impacts their physical lives.
Diablo Immortal is a caricature of the depravity most games have become. A few games like Overwatch are not P2W, but even they have lootbox mechanics for cosmetic skins (you get boxes for leveling up and challenges, as you play, though). Blizzard literally can't help themselves.
There's an increasing number of players who expect that either a) a game will take unlimited money and feed them dopamines in return, or b) they never have to pay a dime for anything because they're fully subsidized by the addicts. I have conflicted feelings about administrative regulation of this stuff, I just hate that things are this way, especially as an independent game dev.
(I'll do the hustle - my first game Pawnbarian is a chess-flavored puzzle roguelike. On mobile it's an ad-free demo with a single $7 IAP for the whole thing. Out on Steam and Android, iOS will follow soon. j4nw.com/pawnbarian)
They don't have to. Repeatedly unearthing cow-clickers whom you can milk for $10'000 before sending them into financial ruin sounds like a much more viable business strategy to me than trying to build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click.
I think you're putting wealthy folks on way too high of a pedestal. The wealthy aren't some hyper-rational, utility-maximizing robots. They're people with likes and dislikes like any other. Being a whale for a very rich person or a very rich family is a drop in the bucket in terms of their net worth. Plenty of people can keep their degeneracy to a budget.
Does the same pattern hold true for casinos? Or are the bulk of the profits coming from the poor SOBs who blow every paycheck there?
sorry, but that's just sickening.
Certainly more offspring was normal, the further back you go. So wealth division could more easily happen.
But most cultures had the idea of the "first born", the official heir... for this very reason! Most of the loot, holdings, tended to go the eldest.
Yet the proverb is historical, as all proverbs are, and my response was intended to refute the dissolution of wealth, historically, by spreading it too thin.
Our ancestors didn't do that.
Though your point is valid it's only part of the story.
I've seen many scions from China attending western universities in a state of decadence, barely focused on their course work, all too willing to live off their parents' past efforts, while driving expensive cars and walking around in clothes and accessories worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Even the "probably" is wrong. :)
They shouldn't be sold to children. They're not Kinda eggs nor LOL Surprise and should never be brushed off as surprise mechanics. They're glorified slot machines, through and through.
Of course that was caused because the app-"economy" was broken from day one on: You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those. So you have to make the software "free" and sell your user's data, or charge one or two bucks and use some other immoral scheme to get your actual costs covered.
On a broken market there are only broken products… Simple as that.
So now you're left with people who haven't tried better games, and with all the good-enough free ones, how can even a discounted price full game compete?
I'm not sure if that is strictly true. Prices did vary a lot in the beginning. However scale created a race-to-the-bottom situation for the exact reason you cited: most people wanted to pay less. The market was flooded with apps and games at the minimum price which created a strong expectation among the bulk of buyers.
Consumable IAP is what really enabled the gambling-like mechanics. That was discovered not long after the implementation of IAP and very quickly the game devs that converted to free + consumable IAP started making all the money. IIRC it was an open secret in mobile games many many years ago that the optimal strategy was to make the early game easy to cast a wide net, then slowly ramp up the pay-to-win mechanics to milk the whales as much as possible. You don't really care if everyone else quits - so long as most people get X% of the way through before they do. Then you tweak X% to optimize for catching the most whales.
The super critical aspect is the deliberate ramp. You have to get as many people into the early part of the funnel as possible so some of them will become invested enough to become whales. This also means you absolutely must make the game miserable for 90% of your players but only after they've made a significant investment.
Anyway...
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/summary?id=D00...
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/summary?id=D00002...
Whether or not this choice of mine is useful is hard to tell.
What kind of game was your friend working on? Whales do exist but they are not the bulk of the revenue
that's a very low bar to set...
In many jurisdictions they don't. And where they do, they're often very heavily regulated.
Gambling, by regulated design, rewards 45-49% of the time.
Diablo Immortal, by comparison, is designed to reward 0% of the time.
Casinos are highly regulated. Lootbox are not in most countries. And I'm pretty sure minors can't enter a casino even with their parent's credit card...
Made videogames with paid lootboxes 18+ only, problem solved.
Everyone has an addiction to something. You are lucky if its to something thats cheap and legal.
Of course, the best outcome is not to be addicted.
(I'm also not sure it's actually true, either - would depend on what metric you use)
As a Japanese gamer says, paying for games is like dining out. You get nothing useful after a good meal, and paying for games may as well be more useful.
In my country 16k/y is a median salary. It’s heavily influenced by 1 or 2 major cities - the rest of the country earns much less, 10k/y is considered to be a decent salary. So no, it is a huge amount of money.
Uh... the nutrition that your body needs to keep going? Is this a trick question?
Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself.
Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups reinforce each other's behavior. The goal is to get them to log in every day and invest in the game.
People pay money to uncap their progression. This turns these games into spending competitions: whoever spends the most money wins the game. The corporation is the only true winner of course.
I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed. The best part was my bot was statistically indistinguishable from a sufficiently addicted player due to the game's own design. I'd like to believe I helped destroy that game.
Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?
The problem is the one time I tried mobile games I eventually started waking up at 3 AM because that's when some timer resets. At some point I started wondering where my life went so wrong.
Then I started studying the design of these games and I realized they are designed to cause this sort of addiction and harm. They employ the same strategies as casinos and drug dealers. They straight up subvert the reward center of people's brains to the point they harm themselves and even destroy their own lives.
Software like uBlock Origin is so world changing they should be built into our operating systems in order to help destroy the revenue of these abusive corporations.
Cant believe you actually want to debate this.
A hobby like wood working doesn't push you to do woodworking every day and there are not people behind this non existing mechanism who design it like it.
Also normally a hobby costs money due to physical parts of that hobby. A software engineer as a hobby only needs some computer, would worker needs a metal saw.
The risk/benefit calculation of predatory gambling video games is overwhelmingly negative. It's really no big loss if they were to be outlawed straight up. We have much better games available for our enjoyment.
Look at organized sports, if you don’t show up enough times, you don’t get to play anymore.
It is human abuse.
Yes. This is more or less standard criteria for diagnosing mental disorders.
A. Persistent and recurrent problematic gambling behavior leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as indicated by the individual exhibiting four (or more) of the following in a 12-month period:
1. Needs to gamble with increasing amounts of money in order to achieve the desired excitement.
2. Is restless or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop gambling.
3. Has made repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop gambling.
4. Is often preoccupied with gambling (e.g., having persistent thoughts of reliving past gambling experiences, handicapping or planning the next venture, thinking of ways to get money with which to gamble).
5. Often gambles when feeling distressed (e.g., helpless, guilty, anxious, depressed).
6. After losing money gambling, often returns another day to get even (“chasing” one’s losses).
7. Lies to conceal the extent of involvement with gambling.
8. Has jeopardized or lost a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of gambling.
9. Relies on others to provide money to relieve desperate financial situations caused by gambling.
If the game is implimenting direct purchases, where you buy Item X for Y price then I feel regulation is unwarranted even in the context of harmful levels of purchasing
However if the game is using a loot box system where the play buy a "chance" to "win" an item they desire, then I think that should be considered a "game of chance" like a lottery or slot machine, under which there should be some regulation to require the disclosure of odds, how many times their is a payout, etc etc etc
Diablo seems to use a Loot Box system, not a direct pay system
The difference to older tech like mechanical slot machines is that the game records everything the player does, and can then drop a "discounted" special offer at the right time to maximize the likelihood of keeping the player hooked.
There is also no disclosure as to if the odds are manipulated on a per player basis, which I believe there are a few patents related to changing the "drop" rate based on player behavior, this is similar and can be combined with your comment about monitoring to drop a discount at the right time
In the context of Diablo, I can not find the Odds of their loot boxes anywhere published.
This is an incredibly simplistic view of the problem, on multiple dimensions.
On one dimension, a question of to what length should we give companies the right to harm people. Because if something is knowingly designed to take advantage of the study of psychology to hurt people then that’s what this is.
On another dimension, the person spending the money is typically hurting others (spouse, kids... business partners) at least as much, but frequently more, than they hurt themselves.
Giving companies the freedom to do things like this takes away our freedom to live without others harming us. Its really hard to understand why this is even debatable.
https://news.sky.com/story/sugar-tax-consumption-of-sugar-fr...
It wasn't liked by the right-wing government, even though they implemented it in the first place. They financed a report that investigated it's effectiveness, and then tried to bury it because it showed it worked as intended.
Quite the conundrum. On one hand, it’s a neat tool for class warfare, an occasion to have a laugh about those bums who cannot control themselves, and drone on about Protestant values and work ethic. On the other hand, some chums would make less money, and we cannot have that.
How much should we allow others to enrich themselves off the addictions/compulsions of others?
I always thought that was a compelling point even when I was a libertarian for one year as a uni freshman. That people should be able to consume what they want doesn't finish answering the question.
the current line is drawn at 18+ and non-chemical addiction, or light chemical addition like nicotine. It is worthy of debate, whether psychological addiction ought to be included.
My guide would be that if it causes external harm, then it should be regulated, where external harm is defined as harm that, while undertaking said activity, would befall a third, unrelated party.
Golf seems very similar to me. There's the random element. A friend described it as a feeling of continual frustration followed by a high when he hits a good shot.
You similarly can buy your way to 'success' with gadgets and training or investing more time.
There's the community of similar addicts that gather together and provide a social element and re-inforce each others addiction. People's marriages suffer to the degree that there is a term "golf widow" for someone who's lost their partner to the game.
But I can still see clear differences between golf clubs and casinos, and there's also similar differences between different mobile games. I feel it's worth delineating them, particularly as golf isn't constantly being replaced with a slightly modified version of golf that takes it 2% closer to being a Casino and casino's are heavily regulated for good reasons.
Golf is a game of 3D localization and mapping, wind analysis, projectile estimation, and fine-tune physique control...
If you are treating those elements as "random" you are missing large aspects of the game.
http://www.limitlessperformance.ca/blog/the-mental-patters-o...
> But the most accurate and refreshing response received to this day has been… addictive! And if you think about it clearly, what better one-word description encompasses all that we know of this exhilarating sport known as Golf. There is no description more encompassing of a sport such as golf!
> And this is best described by a psychological principle referred to as “intermittent reinforcement”. Intermittent reinforcement is the formula foundation for all forms of addition. Take gambling with a slot machine as an example. You lose, lose, lose, lose and suddenly you win! And yet, despite the guaranteed repetitive loss and the incidental win, people love to play slot machines for hours. Why is intermittent reinforcement so powerful? In its simplest translation, the reinforcement pattern that blooms into addiction must entail of high levels of reward and amusement without the predictability factors which can trigger boredom. It‟s the unpredictability of when the reward arrives that draws and engages people into the activity. The rewards that are distributed intermittently trigger and release significantly higher doses of a pleasure inducing hormone known as dopamine, than the same rewards distributed on a more consistent (predictable) basis.
> Can you think of another activity that features in more intermittent reinforcement than golf? No matter what level of golf you are playing, it is guaranteed that you are going to hit more shots that feel miss-struck than well-struck. Some may argue that the pros hit the ball well on almost every shot, but on the contrary the better you are the higher the standard to what constitutes a shot that delivers maximum satisfaction and reward. To a highly skilled golfer, maximum satisfaction is gained through a perfectly struck and executed shot. While by the same token, for the double-bogey player, a drive that is struck decently and stays in the fairway is also a cause for celebration.
You are allowed to be in any number of relashionships with other people, and some of them can be pretty weired.
However when someone is manipulating you and pimping you out, thats different.
You have the rirgt not to be stabbed, stolen from, or manipulated.
(If you think about that a bit it follows that the smartest course of action is to break the ToS early and often!)
This is basically the “recurring revenue” model, it’s the monthly packages sold in Yostar or Mihoyo games.
Sure, people who get easily caught in competitive schemes will have a hard time to stop, and will get caught in nightmarish situations. The same as people who can’t stop drinking and become alchoholic over time. This is a nefarious effect that we should pay attention to, but a super small minority becoming alcoholics doesn’t mean alcohol industry itself is a conspiracy to produce them. Moderate people exist. We should find ways to to protect the vulnerables, but it also means coming to terms with the nuances of the situation.
I also don’t see these companies disclose their revenue per user statistics, could you share some of what you read positing current gatcha games are sustained by whales ?
I should disclaim I do play gatcha games on a somewhat regular basis (I need to know how they work for various reasons) and follow the different communities around.
On the first link:
> Whale game users: 1% of the players, generate 64% of the income spending 2,694 dollars per year. > Medium-high game users: 3% of the total, generate 20% of income spending 373 dollars a year. > Average game users: 2% of the total, generate 4% of income and spend $ 104 per year.
First, that 1% of “whales” at 2,694$ per year is interesting, as it puts it around the 2,482$ said to be spent on entertainment on average in the US [0], which doesn’t seem to be freakish in context.
Then there’s also no breakdown of social games and “normal” games, like Minecraft which for instance has monthly subscriptions for online services, and other games who have season passes or allow to buy in-game contents like songs, levels etc.).
Sure social games must have a decent share, but right now for instance I see in my [edit to US ranking] Roblox, Apex, Pokemon Go in the free app ranking and they aren’t gatcha. The above number must also including straight purchaseable games.
It’s interesting numbers, but don’t tell us much about gacha games in particular (though the author has opinions on the subject, which I mostly agree with).
The second link is from 2015, that’s almost the beginning of the field, the candy crush days and developpers not understanding clearly what is ok and what is not. A lot has changed since.
I don’t have access to the third link, it asks me to pay to become premium (the irony), and it’s also from 6 years ago…
[0] https://www.thesimpledollar.com/banking/savings/a-look-at-th...
This is absolutely fascinating. It's something I kinda missed from Digital Vegan, thinking that extrication would be a matter only of self-mastery and access to good information rather than fighting back. Most people do not have that capability.
But fighting back is exactly what you've done, and it's worked for you. I wrote earlier that the relationship between users and developers is increasingly an adversarial one [1]. Things like "right to repair" have become an open battle between ecological common-sense and pure greed. Where your health, wealth and environment is under attack from rampant greed a legitimate (moral/ethical) response to hostile technology is obviously hacking back.
But it's not a universalisable moral principle, unless we want a descent into chaos and digital "civil war". Therefore the proper solution is to start recognising what some of these companies are doing as crimes. You need the law on your side when you act in self-defence.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
A digital civil war is preferable to surrendering to the designs of exploitative corporations. We should fight back on principle. We should block ads and tracking, scrape websites, reverse engineer private APIs, violate DRM technology, replace their proprietary apps with our own free software that we control, feed them false data to poison their data sets... We should do everything we possibly can to defeat any attempt to exploit us. We don't need their permission to do it either.
Turning things into crimes is the corporation's game. They're the ones with billions of dollars and expensive lobbyists. We shouldn't be trying to beat them in this space. We need ubiquitous subversive technology that neutralizes their exploitation whether the laws allow it or not. It shouldn't matter whether it's legal or illegal. We need technology that makes it impossible for them to exploit us in any way, and we define what is and isn't acceptable or exploitative.
It is.
> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?
We should, if we can. I'm just not holding my breath.
I think copyright should be abolished but the trillion dollar companies that depend on it will never allow that to happen. So we're better off de facto abolishing it by making copyright unenforceable and eliminating consequences for copyright infringement.
I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.
Honest question (and I am not fan of advertising here and not trying to be an apologist)..
What business model replaces it, in your mind?
In the world that exists today, how do companies who provide free services online (including the creation of information) pay their staff and their operational costs, if not through being paid to display ads or sponsorships?
Do all websites become subscriptions?
Turns out that's also a Red Queen's race. And if you look at the lobbying costs vs. potential rewards, there's a lot of room for escalation in US politics.
The only difference is who does the concrete fighting: you by yourself, or let the police and criminal prosecution do the fighting.
Addictive products are another case where the user is unable to choose in favor of their own self-interest, because the product is exploiting weak points in human psychology.
The free stuff exists to instill an habit in players. People literally force themselves to log into the game and do daily tasks because otherwise they're missing out on daily rewards.
My bot completely nullified their little scheduled rewards design. I was now free to play the game whenever I actually felt like playing. Then I discovered I didn't actually feel like it, I was just going through the motions due to negative reinforcement.
Don't underestimate the power of software. It can literally liberate us.
> It is a violation of the rules and will get you banned
Whatever. No big loss.
Oh yeah that works so incredibly well! I get addicted to idle/tap/infinite progression types of games every now and then.
At one point I got sick of it and I wrote a program that taps my phone with an axidraw robot. Seeing the progression happen without my own input totally broke the addictive cycle for me.
And I got to play with the axidraw :D
Thank you for mentioning the hardware, I looked it up and it looks affordable and interesting. https://www.axidraw.com/
And I shared my bot with them. Reaction was very negative. People blame me for "hacking" and ruining game.
So I made my conclusion and never shared my bots
I guess I don't have the data. Also maybe you can get both at once by targeting the big guy.
We've passed some really unhealthy point in game development with this bonus money making...
The ONLY people that would do that, are people with an addiction
In fact, even games that are not designed to maximize your time spent in the game can be bad. The reward hits you get from games make you less likely to seek out other types of reward in your life. And even when you're not playing the game, your brain will be running a background task strategising how to maximize your results in the game.
Anyway, doing the playthrough, or watching a video game speed run is enough to spoil the whole game for me and make me not want to play it. Problem solved. Also, there's all the free to play retrogames out there which are great if you just have endless amounts of free time. I guess I just don't get gambling, especially when you can't actually win money.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhizrsqMV8A&list=PL9aL0Ok5ss...
I don't understand why they pollute their brand like that.
The Play Store and the App Store do not even have a search filter for games without in-app purchases. I'm sure that is on purpose.
- https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-new-players/ "Why Diablo Immortal Is The Best Franchise Jumping On Point"
To quote myself from a previous thread:
"If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people in the industry, not at all. It's only to say that we as a whole are allowing the demons run amok.
I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society. Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on. Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa for example)"
I'm not 'taring' the entire industry at all. Indeed I said, "vast number of honourable people in the industry", what I am concerned with is just how wide spread the contempt is for customers that play these games. And what the contempt does in allowing utterly contemptible business practices.
What else is new from Blizzard?
My roommate in college was addicted to WOW. He'd lock himself in his room for days, failed his classes, and eventually dropped out of school. He finished it later, but only after getting over the WOW addiction. Back then (circa 2005) I remember reading stories about how Blizzard was hiring psychologists to make players more addicted ahem I mean "engaged" to WOW. Really, I guess that was just the start of it.
Blizzard has a long and sick history of hijacking human psychology for profit. Really glad I stopped buying games from them after Warcraft III.
I might check out this new mobile game for study though.
Release a half assed game in a few months. Complete the rest of the game on relaxed timeframe and release them as DLCs. Continue to milk the consumer for more $$$.
Honestly the entire concept of IAPs is predatory. Consumer protection agencies need to regulate these companies.
Than that comment is even more to the point than I thought!
At least now I'm sure it deserves an up-vote — as your helpful comment does.
It’s a gacha that seems slightly less gacha then a lot of these.
Is a game fair only if you can acquire the best gear in the game (for real money)?
The part discussed here with the gem system looks more like a slot machine than anything I would describe as game content.
Like imagine if someone said the same thing about EVE Online, how much does a "fully geared up" space station cost? How much is the combined cost of Team Fortress 2's (cosmetic) items?
Players will be stratified by how much of that $110,000 they can pay — with no reasonable way out of that class system.
In-game skins are going nowhere, let a government force the company into creating a package with however many skins they want (maybe based on prior sales or realistic expectations) per season (whatever their season looks like) and walk away from it. You know they won't be able to add more.
Because what's stopping them now to change the decimal point however they see fit.
I suppose the same could be done with progression (where the real money is). Either make it tradeable somehow and lock it down, or outright ban it and allow for more expensive but regulated skins be the only funding capital.
I mean, no one is forcing anyone to play a game or purchase a lootbox. Why ban a game mechanics for this? It hurts the (potential) players, let people decide for themselves FFS.
Casinos shouldn't be regulated too. If nobody is forcing anyone to attend into something (like going to a casino or playing a pay-to-win game) nobody should have the right to change or regulate the inner dynamics.
As long as the game doesn't clearly lie (e.g. telling a lootbox does something that it doesn't) everybody knows what a lootbox is. Playing the game is a voluntary action taken by an individual, just like going to a casino. They are responsible for their own actions, and blocking a certain demographics' (e.g. people in Netherlands) to access to a game/mechanics (e.g. Diablo Immortal + lootboxes) is fundamentally against people's freedom of choosing to play a game or not.
It's their money, they can spend $1m if they want to, on lootboxes.
Would I? Definitely not. But blocking someone who does want to from doing it, whereas it doesn't have negative effects to society (e.g. Doesn't affect anyone but the person themselves) is ridiculous.
In theory, humans are rational, and in theory, spherical cows are an excellent basis for economics.
Human brains have bugs, and these industries exploit them. It's predatory, and utterly reprehensible.
Human brains also have a bug around sugar consumption. I've yet to see selling people sugar or sugar-containing foods/beverages being regulated.
Human brains also have a bug making many of them social media addicts.
Human brains have so many bugs. At the end of the day regulating these businesses will hurt more people who voluntarily want to be involved than saving potential addicts.
The real solution is never preventing people from doing things (of course as long as they affect only the person and not the others' rights), instead, it's educating.
If those governments placed their efforts into educating the people about addiction mechanics of those games/casinos etc. instead of blocking/regulating altogether, it would be much more beneficial than blocking people from their own decisions.
"It's OK if people's lives are intentionally ruined purely for corporate profits, so long as it's at least partly those people's fault. They shouldn't let themselves be tricked."
> Human brains also have a bug around sugar consumption. I've yet to see selling people sugar or sugar-containing foods/beverages being regulated.
By the way, San Francisco taxes sugary drinks and requires them to have a warning label.
> The real solution is never preventing people from doing things (of course as long as they affect only the person and not the others' rights), instead, it's educating.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps it's best to find a balance between them?
And see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax .
Also, NYC tried to ban some sales of sugary beverages over 16 oz, thrown out by the courts.
I do not support them, I only hate the idea of banning anything more.
I believe education is the key but never see that done enough. (Not only about these topics but pretty much anything).
Banning should really, really be the last option.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_King...
This might not quite meet your threshold, but it's probably close. More regulation around sugar is definitely around the corner.
Just because they shared a similar view on this doesn't mean that I'm also an addict too.
While you didn't explicitly tell such a thing, directly replying with this example implies that.
I don't do them but have respect to one's own opinion about their own body even if that means poisoning/killing themselves.
This is, of course, a position that is yours to hold. But I do hope that you recognize that it's quite a small, fringe one. It's a bit strange to use a fringe opinion about casino regulation as the stepping stone for an implication that loot boxes shouldn't be regulated.
[0] See it as "individualism" here on the first map: https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-ho...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_gambling#Signs_and_sym...
The same argument can be made for other regulated activities like drinking alcohol or smoking (whether you agree or not, that's how it is in a lot of places today). Those are voluntary activities too.
> whereas it doesn't have negative effects to society
Addiction _does_ have negative effects on society, which is why these rules get introduced. It looks like this ban [1] is enforcement of gambling laws, because the loot is transferrable it's deemed to have value. I'm curious in this case to know how much of an impact banning these particular games actually has though.
[1] https://www.thegamer.com/netherlands-loot-box-ban/
edit; haha, lots of people spotted this same argument.