Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"The company has said in previous court filings that only a fraction of the game's players actually spend money."

I was recruited by a sports gambling company and went as far as interviewing with them. I really enjoyed the interview (interesting tech, really smart people) and I've placed a few bets along with friends before in the past without ill effect, so I did some quick checking about how gambling businesses make money. As far as I could tell, across different gambling businesses, the focus is on "whales" -- chronic gamblers who spend as much as they can or more on gambling. The public image of these "whales" is the immensely rich person who visits a casino a few weekends per year and casually loses a hundred million that they won't miss, but a lot of the "whales" are people like the ones in the article, middle class people who lose hundreds of thousands of dollars while desperately trying, and ultimately failing, to stop their addiction from ruining their lives.

Online gambling makes it profitable to pursue smaller and smaller whales, because you aren't limited by the amount of space inside your casino, or the number of people who live near or can afford to visit your casino. Your targets are everybody where you can legally operate, and you're running A/B tests and other optimization technology to increase an addictive behavior. I.e., their business model is to stoke a ruinous addiction across every social and economic class in every jurisdiction they can legally operate in.

Standard disclaimers: I'm not an expert, not an insider, not in the industry at all. Also, none of the information I learned was directly about the company I interviewed with. I'm just talking about my understanding of how gambling businesses work from what I could glean online.

Anyway, I didn't take that job.

They are called VIPs, not whales, in sports-betting world

I worked with it for a while and if I was in a position to leave that industry I would have done it sooner. But I do have to say that at least the sports betting companies I worked on they did try their hardest to follow the law as much as possible.

One thing I have to say is that it is abhorrent that betting websites are allowed to advertise at all. It should be threated the same as smoking ads regulations.

> they did try their hardest to follow the law as much as possible

Well that absolves them now, doesn't it?

It does doesn't it? If someone chooses to gamble, it's at least better to do so with regulated companies that have to follow the law. The alternative is to gamble illegally, where you might not even get paid odds or payouts.

The world where the gambler stops gambling doesn't exist.

The article says that you win points but there is no way to win money back or get payouts. What is legal is not the same thing as what is moral (and vice versa).

No illegal alternative necessary, the players of this app get zero odds and payouts.

gherkinnn is saying that just because it is legal does not mean that the people behind the company are free of responsibility for the damage their app creates.

> The world where the gambler stops gambling doesn't exist.

Casually ignoring that a large amount of gambling addicts have stopped gambling.

Also, just because people are addicted and it's not illegal doesn't make it morally right. You're still financially benefitting from their addiction.

These online casinos aren't simply complicit in their gambling addiction they are actively fueling it trying to optimize the addictiveness of their platform.

in the hood, so to speak, illegal gambling pays better than legal gambling.

Wait until you realize advertising should not be allowed.

I can’t see how this deserves to be downvoted. As far as I’m concerned, anything other than “just the facts, ma’am” advertising is about preying on human weakness. It’s legal, but is it right?

I don't think it is correct to say all advertising is preying on human weakness. Some people create good and beneficial products. advertising is how you get the word out about your product.

> Some people create good and beneficial products.

and those would shine with a "just the facts ma'am" approach.

If you put a commercial on TV with "just the facts" it's still an ad.

if you make a useful product it will be found regardless

That doesn’t work outside of mass market products.

Not in the age of internet. It does work. People asking in reddit and internet forums (word-of-mouth) is what it is. If there is a need, humankind will get around to satisfy it. Even if it doesn't work enough to satisfy the need, someone will scrape the web to create a database of every product being sold and put an LLM with embedding search in front of it to make it work. Probably Google. Ah, but turns out there is money to be made with advertising.

As a counterpoint, %99 of the ads I see are companies I already know about. I'm seeing the ads of same services of the same set of companies every year since I got a smartphone. Ads are just manipulation through creating familiarity through repetition.

Sure it does, people ask others all the time about a solution to a very specific problem.

Just have a website/app/whatever that displays a database of products and information about each, comparisons, etc.

There is no excuse for invading people's lives with unasked for media of any kind.

People who want to know about new products can go to places where such information is available and seek it out.

The real problem is where to draw the line, which is partly cultural.

There's a similar concept in legal contracts, with "unconscionable" terms.

If you really believed in that idea you wouldn't go on news.ycombinator.com to advertise it

This is the business model of many free-to-play games.

For instance: Overwatch relies on whales to purchase their excessively expensive and worthless in-game skins, and fund the business.

Buying skins in a game is the same thing as buying fashionable/brand-name clothes. Gambling is different.

I was a Hearthstone whale on a small scale relative to wealthier people and a large scale relative to my family's annual income. I wanted certain gold cards (rarer) for aesthetic reasons in my decks, and shortly before I quit all Blizzard games (for the slot machines they are, to me) I bought fifty packs just to get enough dust to craft the golden legendary I wanted.

I did something similar with World of Warcraft, buying a level boost that I ended up not using, just to "round out my character list." It was a low point in my life and I will never go back to that behavior.

I recognize these games can be used and enjoyed responsibly, just not by me and that's okay.

This comment made me chuckle. Because I am a sober alcoholic. One of the things I remind myself all the time is: "It's wonderful that people can enjoy alcohol in moderation. I am not one of them."

It makes me sad that you can't play quite good games, just because predatory monetization has ruined them. It's not your fault, it's just the world we live in.

Hearthstone helped me get over my regret about selling all my Magic: the Gathering cards. I played Magic on the school bus in the 90s, had a lot of fun trading and making decks, and eventually sold it all because I didn't make the effort to find people to play with.

Hearthstone lowered that barrier significantly, and I still consider it an excellent game, aside from the predatory/monetary trappings. I might still play it if it could be done with real magic at my dinner table with friends, for a one-time flat fee or for the caloric cost to summon all the components, assuming some reasonable magic system.

As it is now, I like playing Cribbage with my wife, and am looking forward to teaching our daughter how to play Chess, Go, Backgammon, Arimaa, and any other game that isn't packaged in a predatory wrap.

If you ever want to get back into magic, definitely check out pauper. The decks have to use only card that were printed at common rarity. There are only like 20 cards in the cardpool that are over $2, and you can build pretty much any deck for less than $50.

> I recognize these games can be used and enjoyed responsibly, just not by me and that's okay.

Smoker before smoking is widely recognized as an addiction:

> I recognize these herbs can be use and enjoyed responsibly, just not by me and that's okay.

Ok, tbh, not all games and gaming are addictive. Though a big proportion is, with the rest being wasting one's life, as defined by a certain set of moral values. Though that is not yet a crime.

Yeah it's exactly like buying Gucci, except if it was dispensed in a slot machine and you had to spin it 100 times to get the clothes you want.

And the odds of the machine were rigged and personalized to you, which is illegal in real gambling

Overwatch and almost all modern games moved past the lootbox mechanic because that was getting too close to many countries gambling laws.

Now you just buy what you want.

Like you go into a store and buy a Gucci wallet. You go into the Overwatch store and buy the latest One Piece Collab.

No slot machine or anything.

The Overwatch store is in your living room and available 24/7, before/during/after intense gameplay.

Do you know that Gucci has on-line store, also available 24/7 from your living room?

Gucci isn’t affordable by many, a $30 skin is. Plus the overwatch skin is digital, you can’t resell it nor does it mean anything in the real world. Not the same.

What do either od those have to do with anything?

Because affordability affects the success of the money grab?

Regarding RMT, I think Valve did the master play with their proto-NFT marketplace stuff, really ahead of the curve.

There is a distinction between lootboxes with tradable items and those without, if the items are tradable it is literally gambling. But yeah, sucky either way

It's not the trading, it's the paying money for lootboxes. Plenty of roguelikes/roguelites have loot boxes, but they randomly generated chests you open by defeating bosses, not by pulling out your credit card

>Yeah it's exactly like buying Gucci, except if it was dispensed in a slot machine and you had to spin it 100 times to get the clothes you want.

Not sure if you're into buying designer stuff, but that industry is going in a similar-ish direction.

People buy a bunch of undesirable crap just so they can be put on the VIP list and maaaaybe get the opportunity to purchase the actually desirable products at a far below market price.

Not sure if Gucci themselves do this, but I know Rolex and at least one of the big handbag brands (Hermes?) operate this way.

> Buying skins in a game is the same thing as buying fashionable/brand-name clothes. Gambling is different.

It’s not a good fit either: A game company can terminate your account and you lose it all.

Depending on the game, but in some you also cannot resell or transfer your skins. Therefore the only thing of value is the account, but terms of service also make this a non-starter.

What’s consistent here is that the business model revolves around feeding and addiction and relying in said addicts (aka, whales).

You can resell clothes. You can't resell skins in most games, including Overwatch.

People can be addicted to games as well, and spend thousands of [insert monetary units], tons of such cases on Eve and simple mobile "pay-to-play" freemium games. Probably not on the scale of addictive gambling it's definitely no insignificant.

Unless the skin is in a lootbox

Buying skins from the skinner box

I'm not in that industry, but if I was, I bet you could do something shady. Perhaps people who buy expensive skins have an increased chance of "luck" within the game. Critical hits may be more likely, more high quality gear drops. It's possible there isn't a clear line between gambling and fashion. At least, that's if the industry is unscrupulous, and I generally assume that describes most companies.

Having played a lot of games, if that was the case, it would be vox populi. In all gaming communities there are very smart people and if the damage output is important, they'll have it traced, if loot if important, it'll be traced too.

In the Call of Duty games if you purchase a premium skin the matchmaking algorithm tries to match you into servers where fewer (or no) players have that same skin, to increase the feeling of exclusivity. This is not a secret, Activision even patented the idea.

I wonder if anybody specifically gets "elite" skins to increase their odds of being matched against easier opponents.

In my experience most free-to-plays just use a battlepass nowadays and don’t rely on whales (though obviously all games have them)

Gambling based games like cs:go and genshin absolutely apply to what you’re saying though

Battle Pass is just a subscription with more steps. It was cool when I could just pay $50 for an online game and play it for years in dedicated servers so long as there were other people who paid $50 out there.

I miss community-hosted servers in games.

Nowadays it's all servers that are only run by the developer, who could just flip a switch tomorrow and tell you "Remember that $80 you spent on Game 1 few years ago? You're gonna have to pay up again for Game 2. Also we're turning off the servers for Game 1."

Overwatch 2 was odd because it was only half that.

"Remember that $80 you spent on Game 1 a few years ago? Well, you get Game 2 for free. Also, were turning off the servers for Game 1"

It doesn't sound as wrong but the community still hated it.

> It doesn't sound as wrong but the community still hated it.

It only seems odd if all context is left out.

Blizzard's whole pitch for Overwatch 2 is that it would introduce single player and co-op PvE content. It didn't do that.

Overwatch 2 was much stingier with rewards for gameplay than Overwatch 1.

Overwatch 2 started locking new heroes behind a paywall, where they'd previously been entirely free in Overwatch 1.

Overwatch 2 charged much more for it's items, and limited specific items to bundles in an attempt to force players to spend much more than they would for the item itself.

Overwatch 2 made multiple changes to balance, that weren't always well received.

The sad thing is that people seemed fairly excited for PvE Overwatch. That excitement was strangled through a combination of hubris, corporate greed, and an inability to deliver.

There've been PvE missions for a few months now. I think part of the reason they were initially cut/delayed was because of all the shakeups at Blizzard after so many people left and/or got fired for misconduct.

Also, you mention unpopular balance patches, but "Blizzard sucks at balancing" has been a complaint since the early days of OW1 :P I remember when the first Mercy rework dropped... and the Bastion rework... and everything about Brigitte...

> There've been PvE missions for a few months now. I think part of the reason they were initially cut/delayed was because of all the shakeups at Blizzard after so many people left and/or got fired for misconduct.

The missions they released have nothing in common with what was discussed. PvE was meant to have persistent hero levelling, skill trees, and a proper story. What they eventually released wasn't far off what would've been a seasonal event game mode in the past, in addition to being laughably expensive and horribly broken.

> Also, you mention unpopular balance patches, but "Blizzard sucks at balancing" has been a complaint since the early days of OW1 :P I remember when the first Mercy rework dropped... and the Bastion rework... and everything about Brigitte...

The OW2 changes went beyond a broken hero. They made fundamental changes to the way the game is played with the reduction in team size and changes to tanks.

All this.

I discovered OW1 a year before it was ended. I was addicted to this game like I haven't been since I was a teenager. I would sleep and dream of the music.. it was bad.

OW2 came out and it instantly changed things. Tanks were no longer fun to play. I haven't played a single game of OW2 in almost 10 months.

They are only a glimpse of what was promised. They're void of humans and filled with bots now. No replayability and just a learning down.

Do they have custom map support yet? Most of my time in TF2 was not spent on official maps. It seems like server browsers have been disappearing since the jump from MW1 to MW2, where the quality of the PC experience is dampened for the sake of making it more like the console experience.

Nope. Custom game modes and all that exist solely on existing maps or the testing plane/box maps.

The cloest Overwatch has ever gotten to a custom map was when a (offical) OW map designer was desinging a level with his viewers on Twitch one day. Blizzard than later suprised everyone by putting it in the game for a limited time.

Many use both in order to capture multiple types of buyers.

From experience the stats are roughly thus:

- 4% of users pay for something

- 1% of users fund the entire business

A co-worker's spouse took a job at a company like that. I heard about it at a company dinner. I knew that they were quite religious so I had to ask how that squared, and the response was, "Oh, I would never use the product". It made me feel really uneasy, since I knew I'm fairly libertarian and I'd have a problem sleeping on it. The argument is always, if I don't take the money, someone else will. I guess I wouldn't like working in a liquor store or a bank either.

IME religious beliefs require suspension of disbelief and a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

When I was religious I was uncomfortable with gambling and always voted to outlaw or heavily regulate it. Yet I can see folks I knew easily justifying taking such a job. The mentality was work for the heathen to win them to Jesus, and if you got really well paid then that's more you can tithe to the kingdom.

Reminds me of most social media

Social media can certainly ruin your life, but it doesn't seem to do it quite as spectacularly and as thoroughly as a bad case of gambling addiction does.

And if it weren't for those bad cases, most of the gambling industry wouldn't exist. They aren't making their money from my friends flying down to Vegas and losing $50 each at the blackjack table.

Social media doesn't cause $100,000+ in direct losses like gambling does.

It does cause serious lifelong mental illness, which often results on $100k+ in indirect losses.

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-social-m...

And they, including Mark, actively worked against doing something about it:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/sacramento/...

The article you linked certainly doesn't use the words "cause" or "lifelong".

Correct, I inferred those words.

It would be difficult to prove that social media causes lifelong anything, because there social media hasn't been around long enough.

It's like smoking. They used to say the same things. Smoking hasn't been proven to cause cancer, etc. Then over time the science got better, more data, and bam. It was proven.

I believe this is similar. You don't. That's OK. Time will tell.

This isn't gambling as you don't win anything of value. Every dollar you spend is guaranteed to never get you any money back.

food should also be illegal because the one time month you buy some special flour for $10 it gives you some shit recipe on the back that also says to buy Xcorp's other $12 special grain then it also requires some meme ingredient of the month like gochujang sauce. when you go to buy the $12 special grain, there will also be a conveniently placed $20 bottle of """premium""" gochujang sauce beside it and you think, "wow i'm glad this happened to be here so i didn't have to go search for it".

now you will also buy a $5 package of some spice that will go bad by the time you use half the bag

finally, you can make the meal. and it turns out okay. then repeat next month with all new ingredients. and you throw out all these previous ones then as your cupboard is getting too full of things you will never use for anything else.

in fact cooking should be illegal for these reasons because they create too much unnecessary waste and co2 emissions.

then the next day you realize you still don't know how to cook even the most basic thing and buy KFC because you already spent like 5 hours on the previous venture. $40 for the family. then there's the medical visits due to eating deep fried food and 100ml of water 3 times a day.

> how you're telling me there's something wrong with my diet? everyone else eats like this! i'm getting a new doctor

all this could have been avoided by real education such as just buying a cook book published 100 years ago.

and don't even get me started with websites, they meme you into buying 10x more fake ingredients and meme recipes that will not teach you anything.

the average poor stressed out mom spends $20K a year on this, more than twice her retail salary! making her even more dependent on her abusive husband!

what else should be illegal? alcohol.

also the article mentions that an addiction counselor got addicted. reminds me of shit arguments alex jones people make up. like when "redpillers" thought covid was ebola they would state how a top medical authority got covid. then when they thought covid was fake the would state how a top medical authority got sick from the vaccine.

> ... but a lot of the "whales" are people like the ones in the article, middle class people who lose hundreds of thousands of dollars while desperately trying, and ultimately failing, to stop their addiction from ruining their lives.

$4.4 m of net worth puts you in the top 1% by US standards. In the rest of the world (short of Monaco, Luxembourg and Switzerland and the likes), it's much less. For example top 1% in France means a net worth of $2m.

I find it hilarious the notion that the "middle class" would have "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of disposable income to splurge on gambling.

I'd go as far as saying that being in the top 1% in, say, France, puts you in the "rich" class, not the "middle class" and that with a net worth of $2m you do not have line of credits allowing you to bet hundreds of thousands of EUR/USD.

P.S: I was invited at some dude's place where he had this 3 meters high Jeff Koens sculpture (Ballerinas, kinda Jeff Koens' trademark), probably worth millions. He had four house employees serving coffee, cooking, etc. Reading HN I'd be tempted to believe he was actually a poor middle class chap and that only the Zuck and Gates are "rich".

I'm confused, are you just mad about the label middle class, or do you believe that the only people spending large sums on gambling can afford it and therefore there are no ethical issues in this type of business?

Because you seem to be setting up a straw man bringing in a lot of talk about net worths in the millions, when the conversation was about losing "hundreds of thousands". The median net worth for a US family is $192k according to a recent Nerdwallet article, so it's absolutely in the realm of possibility that millions of Americans are vulnerable to losing hundreds of thousands to a gambling addiction. Certainly a lot of people would have their lives destroyed by losing $50k to a gambling addiction, and no doubt that happens plenty. Where we draw the line on what constitutes middle class doesn't really seem all that relevant to me.

I think dkarkl's point is that it's not disposable income. Using the house HELC or emptying the retirement account to fund your gambling habit is an easy and ruinous way to get your hands on hundreds of thousands of dollars if you're middle class.

> I find it hilarious the notion that the "middle class" would have "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of disposable income to splurge on gambling.

Don’t forget that there’s also an entire industry looking to loan money to middle class folks.

The point of the article is that those hundreds of thousands of dollars are NOT disposable income -- they are life savings and home equity loans. What a callous comment.

> I find it hilarious the notion that the "middle class" would have "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of disposable income to splurge on gambling.

They get access to that money by borrowing it or embezzling it. Lots of middle class people have boring jobs with access to hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars.

If you read the article, one of the persons took out a HELOC to fund their addiction. Another one blew their entire inheritance. None of that is "disposable income".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com