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
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.
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.
We've passed some really unhealthy point in game development with this bonus money making...
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.
I guess I don't have the data. Also maybe you can get both at once by targeting the big guy.
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. :)
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?
The ONLY people that would do that, are people with an addiction
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.