Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money
growth.design
growth.design
iOS and Android app stores are where creativity, quality and talent goes to die. Whole thing could disappear tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.
Shenzhen Solitaire is probably the only quality pay once game I could name on the current App Store. There was one other but the dev stopped paying for an App Store license.
And it wasn't a particularly impressive game. There's no shortage of endless runners on mobile, and Nintendo didn't do much to differentiate themselves, so it's no surprise nobody bought it.
As for the game itself: I've played it, and it's a pretty decent runner with the physics of New Super Mario Bros. Wii/U, but it's just not the same as the more full-fledged games. It's fun to pick up and play, but not groundbreaking or particularly special.
It seemed like an anti-piracy move because the game didn’t naturally need to be online. But I never thought iPhone app piracy was much of a concern.
Recently installed it on my son’s iPad. The game has totally transformed into this kind of crap.
The recent supreme court ruling that released the sports gambling hounds has me gobsmacked with absolute disbelief.
Would be really interesting to get some hard data
I worked with a guy who spent thousands on World of Tanks when it launched 12years ago (free to play, and they didn't have anything that was pay-to-win or that resembled gambling). His income was about $40k and he had a family to support. I have since run into others who have blown similar amounts or more on mobile gaming. These people are slowly, quietly ruining their lives.
From a legal standpoint, why is it a qualified use of government paternalism to outlaw gambling? We should not be asking the government to set laws based on morality.
Practically speaking, and apologies in advance for how obvious this argument is…when you ban gambling, it doesn’t disappear, it simply goes underground. Criminal actors benefit while the state is unable to enforce any protections or see any recompense. Moreover, it’s unclear what brightline exists between “gambling” and a ton of economic decisions. If I buy a plot of land because I think it might have oil, is that gambling? When I lock in an insurance policy, is that gambling?
I get it’s popular to immediately call for government enforcement whenever you experience personal moral outrage, but the real world contains far more nuance. Making gambling and some of its “sinful” corollaries like drug use illegal has never solved the problem, and has exacerbated it for the worst off.
What an odd opinion. What about laws against murder, fraud, or narcotics? Aren't those also based on morality?
As for the brightline between economic decisions: yeah, the definition is not perfect. Poker isn't gambling for some definitions because it is 'a game of skill'. While buying a plot of land with oil is certainly a skill AND it is expected to generate profits. But we can't protect as m well against hopeful stupidity.
Buying an insurance policy isn't gambling as it reduces risk. ...selling one is gambling if you didn't do the math though.
I don't care if randos gamble in a back alley, I just don't want my kids to open up Google Play and over 90% of the games are just gambling.
I don't want gambling forced on me as the vast majority of ethical games dry up because they're all going "whale hunting".
Gambling is about addiction, and addiction is a disease.
I know i know, where to draw the line will be superhard or impossible, but this has the touch of plain betrayal to me, that classic gambling hasn't (as long as it is fair).
Government == people, like your mom.
Is it perhaps because they spent a few hundred/thousand £ on the phone itself and see that as the complete price?
I bought Super Mario Odyssey on release day in 2017 and it's never asked me for more money. In fact I think it got a few free content updates. It's the tightly-made, quality video game experience that it was when it came out.
Speaking of Super Mario Odyssey, two of us have played it from beginning to end, so we definitely got a lot of fun game time out of the cost!
A lot of the major Nintendo games are on sale this week (probably because of March 10 = MAR10), but even the oldest first‐party titles are only down to about $40 at the lowest.
Imagine how many more hours of labor goes into a modern game compared to a 1986 game. The 1986 game has nine people in the credits. Three people with the role "programmer". Two things kept prices in line. Reduced hardware costs, as the older carts are much more expensive. Increased sales, where more people buy the same software.
What age did you introduce video games to your kids?
My oldest is 5 and I let him tinker on the PS5 when I’m around playing things like Sonic or he really likes Astro’s Playworld.
We limit it to maybe 15-20 min a day but I swear it’s like I tell people I let him watch R-rated movies or something when I mention that I let him play video games at his age.
Curious what people here view as age appropriate.
I actually think video games did me a decent amount of good with reading and math skills. Lot of RPGs, minecraft, etc. I would definitely set time limits and try to push towards more "brainy" games
Our current limits for our 5 and 7 year old kids are one hour, three days a week.
In some ways it feels like letting them read visual novels. The media itself is usually great, I just worry about them getting used to the easiest forms.
We constantly played console games and board games as a family. The kids got their own handhelds about 7-8. We supervised what games they could play until high school, and limited their game playing/TV until 16 based on their grades and good behavior. After that, they really didn't need limits as they were responsible enough.
I was far more concerned about them having a cell phone. We resisted as long as possible, and then started with dumb phones without a data plan.
That being said, his reading and math abilities are quite good and we attribute that to videogames, and a healthy dose of Mo Willems books.
I bought a game (Spelunky) on the Switch online shop. Nintendo then proceeded to send me constant emails about how my “coins are expiring.” So they award coins for purchases which you can save up to get “free” games, but then make them gradually expire if you don’t use them. What kind of high pressure sales tactic is this?
I was really turned off. I can see how this would be highly manipulative to kids though.
Why is Nintendo doing this crap? They’re a privately owned, family-run company. They don’t have outside shareholders to please. They could just choose to be less profitable and focus on protecting their family-friendly brand. This excessive greed is highly unseemly.
This is not fun! This is straightforward psychological manipulation! It’s taking people’s loss aversion [1] and grinding it as hard as possible for as much profit as they can. This is especially bad when you consider that they are a family-oriented company that primarily markets to children.
So for example if you acquired 10 gold coins during July 2020 (it doesn't matter when or how many purchases or how spread they are through the month), all ten of those coins would expire simultaneously at the end of July 2021, while any coins you acquired later would remain. It's not a radioactive decay at all; it's a simple expiration date on each individual coin, like you get on coupons or other incentive programs.
The coins expire for the same reason that coupons expire, airline loyalty program miles expire, etc -- they're a liability on the company's balance sheet which potentially could build up infinitely if there wasn't some limit to how long they needed to be tracked and redeemable.
Regarding e-shop: I'd never let my hypothetical children have access to any kind of e-shop where you can purchase without me having to confirm. Parental controls FTW.
The alternative is to uncheck “save payment method for future purchases”.
Most japanese residents can tell you near every store will have a points card system where you get 1% back in points. Or 0.5% for the stingy super markets.
What is lesser known is that by law such points, and even digital in-game currency, must expire else be considered money and regulated as such.
Its super confusing and hard to explain, because it doesnt make sense!
I see this game as a capitulation and it's akin to seeing Santa Claus dying.
I would support a law against this entire business model on digital app stores, not necessarily a total ban, but something. No company can resist the temptation unless they are forced to. Google and Apple are making tons and tons of cash off unfettered addiction. Good luck though - there's an entire industry making a lot of money off this and a lot of decent jobs that depend on addicts feeding the system.
Second, I've personally become very wary of any mobile app that introduces multiple currency types. There's gold, and rubies, and power balls, and stardust! At some point pretty early on I decide it's not worth it to figure out how much things /actually/ cost and delete the thing. My understanding is that the math shows companies that microtransactions are the winning move over and over again. I hope that eventually there's enough grumpy consumers both parties become worth serving better.
In a sense, games are often about managing resources. Currency is a resource. If you have one currency type, you can come up with a dominant strategy that maximizes production of that particular currency type. If you make multiple currency types, which are difficult / inefficient to exchange for each other, it encourages people to interact with more portions of the game. You can also have certain currency types tied to key parts of the game’s progression.
Take a look at games like Hades or Control. Hades has obol, darkness, gems, chthonic keys, ambrosia, titan’s blood, diamonds, and nectar. That’s 8 different currency types, the way I count it. No microtransactions—you purchase the game and play it until you are satisfied. There are a ton of game design reasons why those different currency types exist, rather than using a single currency type.
The freemium / microtransaction model just needs one more currency type—something that is slow to acquire, but you can buy it with cash, that directly translates into gacha or something similar, and can be easily converted to other currency types. If Hades had microtransactions, it would probably just have 9 currency types instead of 8.
By comparison, there are plenty of games (especially older ones) with only one or two currencies. Maybe you just find the one place in the game world that lets you grind out those currencies the fastest, and you do that over and over until you’re sick of it.
> Currency is a resource
by ignoring the context of the comment you replied to, and the rest of your comment just builds upon that.
Currency in this context is not just a resource, it's specifically resources tied into a system of microtransactions.
So that includes currency you buy directly with money and currency that is accepted alongside purchasable currency. Having Rubies, Emeralds, and Gold as three different currencies obviously doesn't mean anything special in isolation. Why would having X resource types in a game be special or predatory in isolation?
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What makes it predatory is when only Rubies and Gold can be purchased with money, and some items can be purchased with Emeralds or Rubies, and the pricing for Rubies and Gold are different... the end result is muddying the actual costs of items, and making it more difficult for players to only spend once.
The main MO behind systems like that is to make one currency more important at the start, for example, by letting it get you ahead on core mechanics. Then in the later game having content like skins and characters be locked behind another currency which you're now encouraged to buy having naturally accumulated enough of the first currency through gameplay.
If you’re talking about rubies, emeralds, and gold, can you explain where those come from? Maybe provide a link?
As far as I know, in Mario Kart Tour the key limited currency is rubies. You can exchange rubies for coins, fire them into a pipe to get gacha, or various other things. This is similar to the other freemium games that I’ve played. Maybe my understanding of Mario Kart Tour is incorrect or incomplete.
Yes, there are multiple forms of currency, but only rubies are really limited. The other currencies can more or less be earned freely by playing the game (if I understand the game correctly). The ruby economy exists to get you to spend cash on the game. Likewise, in Hades, the weird economy of titan’s blood, diamonds, and nectar is what encourages you to complete the game using different combinations of weapons and heat levels.
Mario Kart Tour is letting you trade one currency that is paid for another that is earned. That "taints" the currency that can be earned by allowing them to use it to hide the real cost of an item.
And to top it off here Mario Kart is artificially limiting how many of the "earned" currency you can actually earn per day.
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You're also getting caught up on non-existent currencies that were named as digs at pay-to-win shovelware... this isn't about a literal game with "Rubies Emeralds and Gold"* it's about how currency X Y and Z are intermeshed to keep people buying.
* Rubies is one of the premier cliched names for premium currency in a P2W game, it's not unique to MK...
https://clickerheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Rubies https://war-dragons-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Rubies https://twitter.com/TWD__Survivors/status/148019707811037593... https://gamermovil.com/free-rubies-dangerous-fellows/ https://mytona.helpshift.com/hc/en/5-cooking-diary/faq/318-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0QwrCfYnVE
Okay, what you said was unclear and I asked for clarification. I guess if you were trying to get me to fall into a trap, you won.
For example, you clearly did not read the whole thing, or definitely didn't understood what you read, when your other reply was
> Rubies are the limited currency here. These are handed out according to a timed schedule (slow drip)
> Gold can be farmed. You just need to be decent at playing the game.
When something like 5 slides are spent explaining the coin system, explaining that they are also drip fed by capping how many players can earn per day, that coins can not be unlocked just by playing well: some of the objectives require using specific locked characters.
And looking this up myself to verify it's even worse: There are paid passes that don't remove this limit but only increase it?! So you pay to still be capped on your daily progression??
It almost seems like you're a victim of this type of game and so for you, what the rest of us see as predatory, you see as perfectly normal. You keep saying things like "just for the impatient or unskilled" without understanding how little of this system has to do with being a test of skill, and how much of it has to do with extracting more money from people.
To be clear, your behavior in this thread is inappropriate. You are expected to disagree with people without talking about “spoon-feeding” people explanations, or acting like the person you are talking to is some kind of idiot child.
> When something like 5 slides are spent explaining the coin system, explaining that they are also drip fed by capping how many players can earn per day, …
The cap for gold is relatively high. It’s not unlimited, it’s just high. That’s what I’m talking about. You farm it by playing every day, doing the daily quests / challenges, and you get a decent number of coins. This is different from rubies, which are more limited. Rubies you get like, once every 5 levels or something, and when there’s a new tour. Not often.
> It almost seems like you're a victim of this type of game and so for you, what the rest of us see as predatory, you see as perfectly normal.
Again, your behavior in this thread is inappropriate. It is wrong to make conjectures about whether the person you’re talking to is a “victim” of “what the rest of us see as predatory”. You should not behave this way.
There are a lot of games out there without microtransactions that have the same kind of currency as the gold coins in Mario Kart Tour. These coins are not primarily there to manipulate you into spending real money—that’s what rubies are for. The purpose is to manipulate you into play the game regularly—you get rewarded for playing the game consistently, every day. I’m making a distinction between the currencies which are there to manipulate you into playing the game, and the currencies which are there to manipulate you into spending money. Obviously there’s not a hard line here between the two types, but I think that they are distinct enough.
It would be nice if we could just disagree and have that conversation. Again, it’s inappropriate to conjecture that I misunderstand something because I disagree with you on some point. Disagreement is normal, your behavior in this thread is not.
When you're still saying things like
> You farm it by playing every day, doing the daily quests / challenges, and you get a decent number of coins. This is different from rubies, which are more limited.
While not realizing the entire crux of the issue is "a decent number" is a completely arbitrary limit designed to encourage compulsive engagement and monetary spend, which is something that is predatory... implies that you have fallen for it hook line and sinker and are now simply incapable or unwilling to see it from any other viewpoint than "acceptable".
But apparently the odds of selling you rubies are quite high, it's certainly more likely than a lot of things.
Multiple currencies (that can be indirectly bought for dollars) is thus a symptom of a game designed to remove my money.
You seemed to be suggesting that we should not be skeptical of this, because similar game design elements can be used for other reasons.
Rubies are the limited currency here. These are handed out according to a timed schedule (slow drip) or at a slow enough rate that you don’t want to wait for them. Playing the game more is not a good strategy for getting more rubies, because it’s either too slow or simply doesn’t work at all.
Gold can be farmed. You just need to be decent at playing the game. Anything with a cost in gold can be purchased through ordinary gameplay. People playing the game will tend to play the game -> win gold -> get toad, rather than going the dollars -> rubies -> gold route.
The rubies -> gold exchange is there for people who are unskilled, impatient, or otherwise unwilling to play the game to earn gold. To be honest, I don’t think this exchange is there to obscure the dollar cost of buying characters in coins, because you’re supposed to be buying better characters with rubies in the first place.
I don’t play Mario Kart Tour, but a friend sat me down and explained all the predatory mechanics it has to try and get you to spend money. He went into detail about how the pipe works, the different currencies, etc. My own experience is with a game called Mahjong Soul. Mahjong Soul has jade and coins (and some other irrelevant currencies). Jade is the dollar-equivalent currency. You can’t earn it through gameplay. You can exchange jade for coins, but since you can earn coins by playing the game (daily quests, winning matches, etc) you are probably not going to make that exchange. You instead spend the jade on summons to earn new characters and outfits.
This is just the general formula I’ve observed. Any normal game will have currencies 1..N which can be earned through gameplay. The freemium / microtransaction games will often just add some dollar-equivalent currency, like rubies in Mario Kart Tour, or jade in Mahjong Soul. That dollar-equivalent currency can be exchanged for gacha (in both games) or exchanged for inferior, farmable currency (in both games).
There have been exploitative home console games and non‐exploitative arcade games and mobile games, but to me the overall opposite pattern seems to hold true. Then again, perhaps I’m being blinded by nostalgia for the home console games of my childhood!
Like, Super Metroid is just fucking great. Timeless. That goes for a lot of those games from the early 90s through early 2000s. Symphony of the Night? A masterpiece and still absolutely worth playing. Some of the Final Fantasy games? The series has veered into a different genre, so it's hard to compare those with earlier entries, but mid-period FF games are totally on par with or better than many trad JRPG-style games still coming out. Chrono Trigger? Still excellent. Most of the Gamecube-era Nintendo multiplayer games are about as much fun as their modern versions, still. Some fighting games? Mid-period entries in those series are often better than the newer ones. And so on.
Most of those I didn't play back in the day, so I don't think nostalgia's blinding me.
There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
While this doesn't stop me from picking up new stuff occasionally, I have used this fact to crowbar myself off the content treadmill. Why look forward to the movie coming out in six months when my movie backlog is already as tall as I am? Why play these addiction-based mobile games when I've got enough mobile games that don't do that?
Granted, in the case of mobile games, one is really reduced to filtering through the pile to find one that doesn't work this way, but on a moment-by-moment basis, you don't need a thousand good choices... you just need the one. My phone isn't loaded down with games, but the Slay the Spire that is on it, has zero microtransactions, and basically has the same gacha mechanics embedded into it even if you need that sort of thing, is pretty sufficient for most times I've been reaching for my phone lately.
There is a local arcade I've been to a few times, but it's a price to buy in and everything inside is free play after that, so you don't have to worry about the arcade mechanics draining your wallet either.
This is why doom & gloom reactions about anything that might slow media publishing don't make any sense to me. I'd have to be insanely dedicated to make it through the backlog of very-likely-to-be-good stuff I want to experience for basically any medium, just of what's already been published/recorded/whatever. Like, tens-of-hours-per-week dedicated, for decades, just to make a single pass over all of it. "We can't reform copyright, what if novels stop being written and movies stop being made!" Well... it'd harm my quality of life basically not at all, so, that just doesn't seem like a huge problem to me (putting aside that a huge amount of writing is free anyway, and has a large audience—see: fan fiction).
Maybe I'd finally get through my list of pre-WWII films I want to watch, at least, before kicking the bucket. Catch up on the titles from the first few thousand years of the written word that are still on my to-read list. Big deal if very little more is published, it'd be impossible to run out of great material as it is.
It's even true for the young medium of video games! I'm still likely gonna have probably-good games on my to-play pile that were already published by today in 2023 if I live until 2070, even if zero more games are published starting this second. "What if this reform means less stuff gets published?" God, I just do not care. Hell, if a reform stops most new publishing but makes older stuff cheaper and more widely available, it might be a win for me, overall. Running out of content to "consume" is a complete non-issue regardless of what happens to those industries in the future. There are several lifetimes worth of good-to-great content already.
The difference is that even the worst arcade games were only a problem for the limited time you spent in the arcade. They weren't sitting in your pocket 24/7 sending you notifications begging you to get back to the game or leaving constant threats that you're missing out on something. Arcade games had only a single currency, quarters or tokens, and those could be freely exchanged and never expired. You didn't need 30 tokens to play, while the arcade would only sell you tokens in a non-refundable pack of 50, but that sort of scam is commonplace in mobile titles. The arcade games weren't collecting massive amounts of your personal data and selling it to data brokers either.
Mobile games are so much more abusive than even the most exploitative arcade games were and people weren't happy about constantly plugging quarters into the arcade games either! That's a large part of why the console market took off. Sadly, it seems like we're coming full circle and even major console titles now sometimes look (and act) like shitty free to play mobile games.
And if you run out of console games to emulate, there is a thriving rom hack community that has created some truly astonishing games (New Super Mario World 2: Around the World, Hyper Metroid, etc.)
What part is wrong? Fortnite has been called pay to win itself from time to time
For examples, see https://www.sportskeeda.com/fortnite/the-history-pay-to-win-... or https://old.reddit.com/r/FortniteCompetitive/comments/l2qywf... or https://www.sportskeeda.com/fortnite/fortnite-finally-proves...
There have been some cosmetics that give a slight advantage (blending in with the background too much), but they're pretty good about updating these to reduce the impact they have. Basically, those articles are complaining about the game being pay-to-win by accident.
Don't get me wrong though. Fortnite does use the psychological tricks described in the video to make you want to buy things, and I'm sure the tricks are very effective at separating kids from their money, so he's not entirely off the mark. I just think it's a bit better than most free-to-play games, and it would have been fair to also call out some of the tricks that Fortnite won't do. I play the game and I feel like I've gotten way more enjoyment out of it than the $10 I spent on a battle pass.
But maybe this is just an indication of how much worse it's gotten in the 3 years since the video was made?
I don't think the author understands probabilities. They mention the probability of getting Peach in each roll is 0.25%, but assuming that each roll is independent, there's no way to guarantee (ie. "100% chance") that you get Peach, because it's possible to fail each roll no matter how many times you roll. If we take the author's dollar amount and work backwards to see what the overall probability is we end up with 91.2%, which is high but nowhere near 100%.
>you can only receive a certain number of rewards from each rarity level per 100 Pipe uses
but further down it says
>Additionally, as long as you haven’t exhausted the quantity by rarity for its category, you can receive duplicates of a reward from the Pipe.
However, it also says
>In fact, you’re guaranteed to receive at least one reward of each type by the time you’ve used 100 Pipe pulls — though the exact reward you’ll get is random for all categories except High-End Spotlight.
I agree that each roll isn't independent and you can't model it as such, but I don't think there's any mechanism to guarantee you a prize given enough rolls, and I still suspect the author messed up the math.
[1] https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/600991-mario-kart-tour...
It's half an inside joke and half serious in our house, but I quote WOPR in War Games to the kids every so often:
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
The good news is that there are loads of great alternatives to these casino-like experiences, and it's just a matter of avoiding this stuff, and choosing the good.
I play no mobile games, they're all some cash trap like a vacuum cleaner, and simply not fun when you realize you'll never truly win anything unless you pay and pay hard. What do YOU really get for the money?
I guess knowing you're paying for Nintendo's old guard's retirements and health care.
They tried with Super Mario Run (https://supermariorun.com/en/), which was a premium pay-once game introduced by Miyamoto himself at an Apple keynote.
That didn't work, then Fire Emblem Heroes made a billion dollars.
It was so player-friendly, that it underperformed for much of it's 4 years, and ultimately shut down in November 2022.
It was unfortunate that mobile gaming is in the state that its in, but Nintendo had some good ideas in the mobile space.
Nintendo is no better than any other game publisher, they're just behind on predatory industry trends by 5-10 years, that's it. They're just now entering the "cut out content from games to sell it as DLC that you announce before the game is even released" phase that the western gaming industry went through ages ago, and even adopted the more recent "live service multiplayer game with endless daily grinds and battle passes that demands your constant attention" model with Splatoon 3.
I guess what I'm trying to say is yeah they have the essence of some problematic mechanics at work but if anything I find navigating them to be rewarding and not limiting. In this case they're not even really behind the industry, they're kind of lateral just lacking real money. I think this is an interesting position to be in, my big concern is they may be training players to feel good about these systems and then in S4 they allow you to put real money in...
It's just one step worse (maybe two) than everything being a subscription. I prefer buying games(/software) once and being left to enjoy the game.
And in the case of the original Angry Birds, Rovio even removed it from the app stores (and renamed it for past purchases to "Red's First Flight") because of the "game's impact" on their portfolio and business model.
I say “used to” as I gave up browsing the App Store.
App stores are too polluted with garbage now, they went from being a unique selling point of mobile platforms to entirely useless and I think IAPs are largely to blame.
Straight forward, you can play it to see if you like it, you can play the different characters to see if they match your play style. No other purchases needed.
One of the most fun tower defense games I've played in a long, long time
There are some games in there, like the Star Trek one, that are clearly IAP-infested outside of Apple Arcade. You can see the inflection points and the spots where you'd be prompted to "buy" more "transporter power" or whatever. But like watching an American TV show on British TV, where the action fades to black (for a commercial) then comes right back, these are both jarring and interesting. The game would be perfectly playable, and arguably more interesting, without these points but the developers wouldn't be able to hook their whales so they exist elsewhere.
That being said, the prices in the shop are quite expensive from what I've heard from people who play the game.
[1] https://twitter.com/mariokarttourEN/status/15655858873035325...
I initially visited the site, saw how the navigation etc worked, figured it wasnt worth the read. Only after reading some comments here I figured I'd bear through it. Wasnt worth it in the end imho
My hunch is, there is another dark pattern hidden which he didn't discuss yet: the quantities in which you buy gems. You'll often land just one or two gems short of the number you actually needed. Then you can either buy the 3 gem pack for the worst relative price or buy another larger pack, encouraging you to come back later.
It seems hard to really spend all your gems and come out at zero. Usually there is a small amount left that on its own is useless but lures you into buying more.
Video games are really becoming way too exploitative.
This is a fairly common tactic when you have intermediate in-game currencies that you actually use to buy stuff in the game. For example, you can only use gems to buy stuff in-game, and most items in-game are worth a multiple of 200 gems. But when you buy the gems with cash, they're somehow only offered in multiples of 500 that are also not multiples of 200. You end up buying a few extra that maybe you didn't want, and they can later hook you in with the 'well, you already have some in your wallet' approach.
I feel like these mobile games need regulating heavily, but it's also down to use to not support these games.
Not really true. Gambling is heavily regulated for a reason, it's just that these games haven't been officially categorized as gambling under existing gambling laws (yet).
If you ever meet a gambling addict, try telling them to "just stop gambling" and see how well it works. There's something about the human brain that's highly vulnerable to this particular vice.
Drug and alcohol addiction, after years of abuse, do not result in “wins” of any kind (NB I did not say in the beginning of the addiction… but years later)
1. Technology has moved faster than regulation (a given).
2. There was a massive secular culture war victory in the west for shutting down those who decry vice and immorality among the religious, to the point that it's associated with mostly negative things: elitism, bigotry, patriarchal thinking, etc. It's simply not cool to say "gov't should regulate phones cause they are vice dispensary machines." Think of Helen Lovejoy from the Simpsons. So many times I've seen people here comment that "Elvis caused a moral panic" too or whatever basically agreeing with that point while we all work trying to get our cut.
I don't know, maybe it takes a generation going through adolescence with these things everywhere for anything to happen. Maybe these industries will self police, but I don't get why any of us would want to work on games like this, or give them to our children.
I really just meant in the sense of "normal" gamers in general, for example I've got friends who bemoan how the latest game they just bought runs like crap on their high-end PC and I'll say "stop preordering games" and they'll come up with some poor excuse as to why preordering is not the reason for these issues.
They'll complain about Diablo Immortal but download it and buy at least the first couple of packs you get offered.
I imagine it's similar here.
Still, at least Nintendo does provide a way to get this stuff without being subject to Tour's lootboxes. The Booster Course Pass DLC for 8 Deluxe on Switch offers much of the same content, except it's a simple one time purchase and in a game that isn't trying to exploit you at every turn.
With as profitable as these tactics are, I wonder for how much longer they’ll keep those tactics off their Switch games.
Or, more cynically, “… game that isn’t trying to exploit you yet…”
Not to mention locking game content behind two different tiers of subscription plans.
Compare that to the PC market. I signed up for Steam in 2010 to buy Orange Box—Half‐Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal—for $10, and for over a decade that entire game pack has remained downloadable and playable on every PC I’ve owned, including most recently the Steam Deck.
It's very much on disc DLC, except with a plastic figure associated with it.
This subreddit can help onboard you to start playing Switch on your computer. https://www.reddit.com/r/NewYuzuPiracy/
It's hard to exploit you if you're unexploitable.
And from a players perspective, this is even more strange. Look at how much players stick to a good racing game, like trackmania or the new zeepkist and such. Just be straightforward, bring out cosmetic DLC and some free functional thing every few month for a few bucks and it's an honest thing.
it's called cookie run kingdoms and it triggers me on two points, not only it's exploitative model it's at the same pushing sugar, I called myself diabetical or something to raise however slim hope of awareness.
crazy times.
At some point you have to deprecate. It's delusional to expect people to find a way to both accommodate their vision and support your stallmanesque compulsions.
>Fucking worthless website.
What value have you brought to this thread?
I guess gaming did start off with literal nickel-and-diming at the arcade. I’m glad I experienced the golden age of gaming where buying a game was the only transaction needed for 50 hours of enjoyment.
And if it is available, is Nintendo blatantly ignoring the ban pretending that "firing the pipe" is not a loot box? Or have they tweaked the in-game economic mechanics to be compatible with the Belgian law?
It's nice that iOS shows the list of purchases on the app page. If only it had a filter too.
I guess all mobile games are actually just one game: whale hunter. The dev is the player and the "players" are the prey.
I feel like I should get a decent sized rubber stamp: #enshittification[2]. Alas that I cant stamp it that all over web pages & apps.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/23621907/streaming-tv-boxes-roku-am... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35051353
[2] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480479
...also as a nice side effect it would make the video games I like to play cheaper and better.
Kids have lost tens of thousands of dollars on their platform. And I'm guessing if they were sued, none of it is binding, because minors.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/roblox-criticized-for-lack-of-...
Japan is on that list as well, though I think the Mario Kart micro transactions and gambling like mechanisms are still legal.
Belgium probably has one of the strictest laws: “Looking at various games, such as FIFA 18 and Overwatch, Belgium determined that the randomized risk/reward system innate to loot boxes is tantamount to gambling.” Mario Kart Tour, for example, is simply not available there.
[1] https://screenrant.com/lootbox-gambling-microtransactions-il...
From a less direct perspective I remember vividly when my mom would be shook at the idea of a $30 Pokemon game for the DS. Now we pay $60 for a game and expected to pay up to $60 in DLC's not including ingame currency purchases. Oh how times have changed.
Also, expansion packs for AAA games have always been a thing, and it's always felt kind of painful to buy them.
I can remember having to go halves on it for my Xmas present, as I think it was well outside the norm price wise.
Never regretted that purchase though! Unlike a lot of the overpriced half finished pre-order games we get nowadays..
Sad that gaming these days has devolved into the state it has. I love gaming, and have loved gaming since I got a SNES at age 5. Micro-transactions suck, and constantly make me feel like I'm paying to let the developer get away with not finishing the actual game, rather than me paying for a fully developed game.
Nintendo, in this case, is being fucking lazy by allowing this to tarnish their brand - they are owned by 1. a family that is probably worth a few hundred million (the Yamauchi family) and has no need for a quick buck, and 2. the Saudi PIF, which has trillions of dollars at its disposal and zero need for a quick buck.
To this day I play almost zero mobile games, the one exception is the LiChess app, which is free and has zero IAPs. Occasionally I'll do the daily New York Times Crossword mini and Wordle, which is also free.
Disclaimer: when the game in question came out, I put a few good hours into Mario Kart Tour, and enjoyed the core game itself, but hated the lootbox experience.
On a complete side note: does anyone else feel that gaming, especially since the advent of mobile gaming, has really changed for the worse? It seems nobody plays together anymore, which was a big part of my childhood, teenage, and college years.
Of course I understand what has happened. But it’s kind of taken the fun out of gaming. Or maybe I’m just old, grumpy and nostalgic.
In both Chrome and Firefox, global dark styles (whether built-in or via Dark Reader) also render the chat bubbles unreadable due to contrast issues (the text color gets set to something very light, but the chat bubble backgrounds remain white).
That sucks because the design otherwise seems cute and fun to me. :(
But I actually REALLY enjoyed this right-arrow format.
but people criticized it for having to pay up front. and it was a commercial failure.
so, people gets what they deserve i guess.
(btw, "super mario run" is still updated, if you have kids just buy it, it's well worth the money)
No thanks. Gimme some KSP or a NES emulator.
For me, and I wonder for other people, when you play one of these games you come to a point where you either keep playing or stop. Is the game fun? Is progression reasonable? Is this achievable without dumping huge amounts of cash into it? If any of those is "no", I quit.
The problem is that newer games pop up and I'm sure they're going to get even more subtle about getting you to part with your money. Pretty gross.
closes the browser tab on their phone
Nowadays you just outright buy whatever character you need with rubies. Rubies can be earned by playing normally, or you can buy rubies for money. The prices for characters is a little bit steep but not so bad you can't earn enough rubies free each tour to buy what you need.
Another decent strategy is to pick a tour where you will just let things slide and you just grind coins and rubies.
I haven't spent a cent and I've been playing for almost 2 years.
The quality of your racing is unrelated to the result, and your opponent’s behavior is either a previous race someone else did, or otherwise completely made up.
Freemium - the 'mium' means "not really"
Now its pretty clear that they are happy to sell their AAA brand titles to the mobile casino people. And people worry that means that maybe Nintendo isn’t principled on this issue, just conservative and slow to adopt these things in the same way they were slow and conservative on online multiplayer. If that’s true, maybe soon after showing crazy profits this kind of crap is coming for all of their beloved franchises in mainline titles on Nintendo hardware.
It's possible, but I'd worry more if it starts showing up on their own consoles, instead of mobile titles that exist mostly to get people interested in playing on Nintendo's own hardware.
Which isn't to say that Nintendo doesn't do weird things with DLC elsewhere—there was a 3DS game where you could purchase minigames with real money, but let you haggle with the seller in-game to get a better price.
Nintendo's store also runs less-frequent and worse sales than others. Other stores, a two-year-old game might still be $50 full price, but it'll go on sale half-off multiple times per year. Not so much on Nintendo's store. Doubly so for first-party stuff. 20% off is a steep and rare sale for those, even older titles.
Mario Kart is also mostly course packs. Fun, but not vital.
I think the main factor's that Nintendo's got this weird cheap-on-the-hardware-side-premium-on-the-software-side thing going on. Which seems to be working for them—I'm not complaining, just observing, no other companies seem to have carved out a niche quite like that, so it's a distinctive characteristic of Nintendo.
So do you think this is the weird economics that's responsible for Nintendo shifting more to the 'standard' model of DLCs and possibly microtransactions? Because selling the hardware doesn't make as much sense nowadays?
That doesn’t mean Mario Kart 8 is a bad deal! I think even the new paid DLC is a great value to keep adding high‐quality material to an existing game. It’s pretty fascinating to see how Nintendo has managed to keep a 2014 game going, and still succeeds at convincing people to buy it for $60—it still sells like hotcakes.
Didn't know some of the base-game tracks had been DLC on the Wii U—I skipped that console, like ~everyone else, it's the only Nintendo console I don't have in my house right this second in fact, unless you count the Virtual Boy.
> That doesn’t mean Mario Kart 8 is a bad deal! I think it’s a great value to keep adding high‐quality material to an existing game. It’s pretty fascinating to see how Nintendo has managed to keep a 2014 game going, and still succeeds at convincing people to buy it for $60—it still sells like hotcakes.
I mean, I'd happily have paid $60 for Double Dash on the Switch, instead, and that's ancient at this point. It's just as fun as the day it came out, and I like some of its features better (the second seat "gunner" role was great for playing Mario Kart with my kids when they were too young to steer the kart very well—though these days they can drive the karts themselves, no problem). Emulating it in such a fashion that everyone else in the house can just pick up and play is a bunch of work and requires dedicating some hardware to it. Keeping the Wii or Gamecube plugged in is annoying and I don't really have any TVs set up for easy plugged-in-controller play anymore, making it even worse (never liked the Wavebird and such, personally).
Hell I'd pay $60 to get Blur on the Switch (or PS4/5...) and that's not even a Nintendo title.
Yeah, I misread your original comment, so I edited my response a minute or two before you replied. My bad.
Much of that revenue likely comes from players buying egg incubators and raid passes, which both are essentially pay-to-win gambling. And just like Mario Kart Tour, there are hard caps on how much can be done per day without paying.
If anything, the different color editions made trading among friends more interesting. I don't know anyone that actually bought both color editions of the same generation game.
The iPhone, the car, the clothing, etc., are all functionally identical and frequently, but not always, cost the same amount. Pokemon is different in that the two versions of each game contain all the creatures, but artificially exclude some from being caught in each title, which is absolutely a dark pattern.
> I don't know anyone that actually bought both color editions of the same generation game.
I'm not sure when they started the practice, but the most recent revision of Pokemon includes a SKU that includes both colors.
This is to get you to trade with your friends! The same thing is true for the three starter Pokémon – the only way to log all three is to trade with other players.
How would you even trade with yourself?
I was as big a Pokémon freak as anyone, lived in an extremely rural area, and still managed to complete the Pokédex without duplicate/paired games by trading with friends. (And nobody had to complete the Pokédex anyway! The games had a complete storyline without it.)
On the other hand, players of FTP games are encouraged to make micropayments, which make those games "easier."
Enough do that Nintendo offers a SKU for buying both versions simultaneously: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/pokemon-scarlet-and-...