That said, I'm not hearing nice things about IronSource and it sounds like maybe there's better ways to get user feedback than the particular implementations they're using and are going to use with IronSource.
The real dystopia is that I'm 99% sure these games dynamically adjust durations, prices, and incentives based on the user's past behavior to extract as much money per hour of play as possible. Essentially a machine that identifies and preys on a person's weaknesses.
To my way of thinking it's only slightly more reputable than bitcoin slot machine crap like stake.
I think I'm not alone in that, and the few games I really enjoyed in the last couple of years were significantly text-based and/or complex simulations for this reason.
Didn't sound very nice to me. More like an elder drug lord who knows that too many overdoses are bad for business or a virus that evolves to be less lethal because dead hosts don't spread.
Or in this case: a two minute compulsion loop would probably make it really obvious that the game is trying to hook you and might trigger some kind of counter reaction: Players realizing it's a slot machine and uninstalling it to stop themselves from wasting time. Whereas a hour-long loop might keep a player hooked without them realizing it.
There's been a quiet war for decades between people who want to design games as art, and people who want to design them as a predictable recurring revenue stream. I'm not sure what iteration we're up to now.
Roger Sharpe [1] saved pinball by demonstrating it is a game of skill.
RE: art vs profit I think there is room for both. Games are probably the best example of that. Game designers are very much artists but they are also engineers and business people.
That's also a slippery slope of an argument. Poker players claim that they are not gambling. Early stage addicts claim they are not addicts and can stop any time. Gaming, whether the player is earning money or points, all keys in on the same addictive traits of their players. Some game devs go all in on that because it is fish in a barrel stakes for making money.
The difference matters a lot to someone who owns a bar or arcade or frequents one.
Further, conflating the meaning of words in general is just not a useful approach to learning or building consensus. Words have meaning. By respecting the meaning of words we can convey complex ideas with simple language.
Saying alcoholics are basically gamblers because "what's the difference" is about as useful (read: not) as arguing that FAANG should be broken up because "monopoly". The words matter and when you use the wrong ones the merit of your argument can be easily dismissed on the semantics. It's just not persuasive.
I never equated alcoholic are gamblers. I said they are forms of addiction. I'm beating the drum that some game devs are targeting addicts. That's the direction I will continue this conversation as. Where ever you're going with I will no longer follow
Yes, with repetition, you can eventually learn to beat Ghosts and Goblins on a single quarter, but the game is not going to just let you do that on the first try. Games of that era are designed to lure you in, then kill you with something completely out of nowhere after your 3 minutes are up and it's time for the next person in line to put in their money. This self-reinforced when you saw someone who had put in the reps getting really far on one credit, so you would think you can do that. But no, you can't. You die at the end of the first stage like everyone else.
It's not gambling, but it's still designed to extract money as efficiently as possible.
Well sure the games tend to be skill based, but arcade machines were also novelties, like the little peep-show movie clips where you turned the crank and looked inside, or the "fortune teller" and some others. Skill games seem better because there is more replay value though.
But games with persistent inventory like World of Warcraft are different than PacMan machines, because you could sell your items for real money.
An example of this is multiballs. The first one (per player) can start with say three shots. The next one might require six and then the third nine. This is oversimplified but the point is the progress is consistent.
The only dynamically-scaling feature I am aware of is the replay score which (can) set a starting score based on recent plays but will also scale up rapidly when it is reached (say, +50%) until it isn’t reached, at which point it resets to the starting score. But this has no actual in-game effect.
As an example, Minecraft is only a $20 one-time purchase, but free and/or open source mods made by people who are motivated by fun instead of profit have created a staggering amount of content that happens to be really addictive to someone like me. For the $20 I got the equivalent of years of content and novelty that I can never hope to fully explore.
I wonder if any given computer program that's given a colossal amount of development resources thrown behind it will ultimately come somewhere close to irresistible, and would suck away various parts of our less interesting hopes and dreams regardless of how much monetary currency the creator is expecting the user to pay. There just happens to be a motive to tack on some extra profit if the game is pseudo-irresistable, where all that time would have been "wasted" on someone's freeloading video game addiction instead. It makes me wonder if what is known as "predatory" is just a pathological explosion of what someone thinks of as a successful accomplishment (my "any given side project could one day addict us all" theory).
It's a set of design habits that served the industry well back when they were trying to get people to pump in money, but which don't really do anyone any good when it's just you at home on a fully paid-up console game. It's not malicious, it's just a habit that got uncritically elevated to a Best Practice.