Italy investigates Activision Blizzard for pushing in-game purchases
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Has anyone other than Bobby Kotick and the other previous ABK shareholders benefitted from the acquisition? Xbox hasn’t gotten any more successful as a brand, the consoles aren’t selling, Game Pass subscriptions only keep getting more expensive (which I’d imagine leading to retention issues), they need to put more and more games on rivaling platforms, they've shuttered studios they've previously purchased, and these days I imagine they’d rather use that cash on AI instead.
For more serious offenses I agree that should be the norm, but we're talking about mobile games being annoying. Even with the "won't someone think of the children" angle it sounds excessive. What have we really lost from mobile Call of Duty not being better?
> Has anyone other than Bobby Kotick and the other previous ABK shareholders benefitted from the acquisition?
Me, as a consumer. I haven't purchased a game in over five years and I've played a ton on Game Pass. And the diversity of games I've played is greater than before, there's many indie games I wouldn't otherwise have tried. The catalog is high quality and hasn't descended into garbage like Netflix over the years. It's been too good a value to feel possible and however long they want to keep it up, that's great.
is this satire?
You might as well have said that you need to be a police officer to make sure your child isn't hit by a drunk driver, kidnapped by creeps or attacked by someone on the street. Children are under the care of parents or guardians for a reason. It's not to fist fight criminals or design their own security system.
With tech, we've largely abdicated that, placing the entire burden on parents to defend against industrial-scale manipulation.
Expecting individual parents to successfully counter industrial-scale behavioral engineering is a systems failure, not a parenting failure.
Surely, HN of all places recognizes that the EU fines Meta/MS any time they have a shortfall in their budget.
Am I supposed to be upset at this?
I'm trying to imagine how you envision regulation without going after the biggest individual apps that enable child financial fraud & sexual grooming.
The tools currently exist to "protect" children in game. Abdicating your responsibility as a parent is not a problem for the state to solve.
It says that the parental settings (when enabled!) are just letting children do whatever they want by default:
- buying overpriced objects - chat without any restriction online - play without interruption for long time
I think the first one is probably the most poignant: piping children into disguised gambling addiction by default seems like a major fault. Borderline illegal, if you ask me.
It looks a lot like a phony feature "let's add a parental control, it will make people feel like we're trustworthy and bring back more revenue. And please don't disable ingame purchases by default, this is our cash cow".
You seem to be forgetting a crucial part of this. The parent. If a parent is buying their child a gambling game then that's on them. Not on the government to force everyone to submit their IDs and face scans to play a game for adults.
Parental controls are not a phony feature at all. That's like saying accessibility options are phony features. It's an option for people who need it. Just because it isn't default in every scenario doesn't mean it's disingenuous.
Which government's way of doing things would you suggest is "healthy"?
Hopefully you're not serious saying the US [appears to be healthy]?
But some of the ideas on what needs to be done is just silly.
Here is some of the ideas the Norwegian Consumer Council suggested: - All things in games should be shown in real money value, not in game currency that you have to but for real money, and the price should reflect the most expensive way to get the currency. - All transactions in games should have the same rights as in real life(if you buy an item in game, you could use your right of withdrawal). - Users should be able to choose how much the want to buy of premium currency/spend.
While it might have good intentions, they have serious issues. I sell bundles of in game currency. I don't allow users to select just how much they want to buy. I don't do this as part of an evil plan, but because it makes sense. Bigger purchases give more, because the percentage lost to fees are lower. Tiny amount can not be bought, as it would not make sense considering the per transaction cost.
I don't price things in real currencies, cause after the purchase is made, it's not real money, and if it were, I'd be a financial institution and break the rules of all major card networks. It also would cause issues when it comes to inflation adjustment. If an user buys 100 "coins", they can buy something for 100 coins. If I adjust for inflation then I adjust the price of coins, not how many coins are needed to buy something in game. That would not work with real money.
Regulation is welcome, but don't do something dumb. Let most thing be as they are, but put strict rules in place on kids making purchases, that way a grown up who hopefully understands money can approve or deny the purchase.
If you offer something that cannot be handled like that and absolutely has to be "in game", it's probably because you're trying to extort the players by frustrating them or try to exploit psychological weaknesses to make users pay more than they want to and you should stop that.
So if I look at your in-game purchases, I’m going to find that they aren’t all priced to make the user buy the next-larger increment of currency… right?
As a gamer, I don't think they should ever feel the need to purchase anything with real world money in a video game, even with a parent. Purchasing the game should be the last time a parent ever has to worry about spending actual money on it.
So you sell $100 of in game currency for $85. It's all the same except 1 coin equals one cent when you buy it in the smallest bundle.
> I'd be a financial institution and break the rules of all major card networks.
It's measured in dollars but it is a gift card. It's not that serious.
This is a solved issue in basically any real life commerce. (Depends on the country if it's enforced) You say what your transaction fee is and add it on top. Then people can decide for themselves.
> Bigger purchases give more, because the percentage lost to fees are lower.
Encouraging bulk purchases seems like an orthogonal problem to allowing users to choose the amount. You could always allow users to choose the amount and just include the transaction fee.
> after the purchase is made, it's not real money, and if it were, I'd be a financial institution and break the rules of all major card networks
If card networks are operating in the country, they'd have to abide by the country's rules too.
But also, I don't think that's how it works. It says "Developers must be obligated to provide an equivalence in real currency clearly and transparently next to the premium virtual currency before each transaction." (translated to English, but) - IIUC this means that if you sell a skin for "10 coins" you have to show the cost in real world money at the same time, e.g. maybe $1.9 one day, maybe $2.2 another day, based on the cost to purchase said coins. Or you could change the skin price from 10 to 11 or whatever if you want to keep the real money cost the same. It's not forcing any financial changes on you, just making you display a number.
I'd be happy to do that, but it's not really as simple as it seems. Multiple of my payment providers have fees I'm not allowed to disclose, and the same Norwegian Consumer Council has also repeatedly stated that they do not want payment fees to be passed on to the consumer as that might be unfair to those who can't use specific payment options. They are passed on to the consumer either way, so... That's the only reason I don't provide tiny purchases, as the fees will result in negative value of the sale. But again, I'd be happy if I could just add fees to the price so that people could just buy exactly the amount they want.
> If card networks are operating in the country, they'd have to abide by the country's rules too. Yes, but currently the laws are not compatible. You can't follow one without breaking the other.
The problem isn't displaying a price, but how to do it in a way that makes sense. It doesn't really make anything more clear when it's called the same thing as the currency in game and has no fixed conversion because of fees making up a larger cut for small purchases. The Norwegian Consumer Council want's users to be able to buy the smalles unit of currency if thwy want, but that must be relatively very expensive because of the fees. They alsy want prices to reflect the most expensive method of acquisition of the currency. This will 100 % result in totally unrealistic prices, that are easy to confuse with the in game currency. It's clearly easier if you buy a fixed bundle of 1000 "gold coins" for $10, and the price is listed as "Buy a $500 paiting for 100 gold coins" instead of "Buy a $500 paiting for 100 gold coins($50 real money)".
But we have to be honest here, these micro transactions are what consumers want. There is a reason that gatcha games (and paid mechanics of those games are implemented in the games mentioned in the article) are so successful and so popular. Consumers of mobile games, unlike consumers of PC games, enjoy these mechanics, gatcha games are going so far, that the core system of the game is not the gameplay (which is often disregarded as an automated activity), but rather the gatch mechanics.
Yes, these systems are stupid and insane. But they are giving consumers exactly what they want.
Personally I am very paternalistic and would support a total ban on these mechanics, together with legal limits of how much money people are allowed to spend on activities like these. Of course making any of these activities available to kids, should be banned as well. This is obviously an extremely unpopular position, since, as I said, consumers really enjoy these mechanics.
The problem is not "spending too much" on videos games. It's the reward structure designed to incentivise one to spend unbounded amounts - just like a casino.
And just like a casino, I don't know that making them fully illegal is the correct way to go. But we surely shouldn't let kids in the casino, or let casinos advertise to kids, etc.
I do not think you understand how these games work or how they incentivize spending. Lootboxes and gachas work very different to a Casino and equating their reward structure just makes no sense at all. Psychologically they work in very different ways.
I hate to be defending lootboxes and gachas, but the psychology behind those is very different to how a Casino works. Gambling addicts are at an especially high risk of suicide, because they expect some amount of returns on their gambling activity, if those returns fail to materialize the player can be in immense debt. This just can not happen with a gacha, where you know upfront that every euro you spend is a 100% loss. Again, this should not be a defense of lootboxes, but we have to be honest about these mechanics.
And the psychological mechanisms are also different, gachas and lootboxes appeal very much to a collector mindset, where people play until they get a certain rare digital good, but playing after that would be pointless. This is a different mechanism to gambling in a casino.
>And just like a casino, I don't know that making them fully illegal is the correct way to go.
I see no reason why either should be legal, to be honest. We exclude kids from casinos, because their ability to make informed decisions is limited, but the same is true for a gambling addict. Letting people just ruin their lives for whatever reason seems a pretty insane policy.
We also have state-run lotteries, which are effectively a form of regressive taxation. Aligning regulations with well-being is an ongoing project
Regarding the subject at hand, I think a very obvious and necessary first step is banning children from participation. Obviously this is easily circumventable, but at will at least be some form of harm reduction.
I think another possibility as a first step is a forced limit on how much an account is allowed to spend in a given time, e.g. the company is only allowed to add digital goods not exceeding X euros to the owners account, together with restrictions on how these items are traded, this will make whaling impossible, which is apparently the most important demographic for developers. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 ]
Also, the fact that it's called gotcha (got ya) has always had the hair up on the back of my neck.
No. It is not just "gambling" it is a very specific form of gambling, which is unlike most other forms of gambling. E.g. for most other gambling activities, the expectation is that the reward is monetary (see e.g. sports betting, roulette).
This should be clearly demarcated from micro transactions, where a predetermined reward is offered for a fixed amount of money. Lootboxes, where a digital reward (which may or may not be resellable) is given and gatcha mechanics, which are a very specific genre of gambling for digital rewards.
I see no reason why all of these should be treated the same.
>Also, the fact that it's called gotcha (got ya) has always had the hair up on the back of my neck.
Pure coincidence. The name comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon