ASA Adjudication on EA Dungeon Keeper
asa.org.uk
asa.org.uk
When did gaming become a chore? I know it has been asked to death, but I cannot for the life of me figure this disgusting logic out: People play a game that is not enjoyable, and then pay extra to skip the unenjoyable parts and basically win the game, henceforth skipping the enjoyable parts of the game along with it!
It's disgusting. A money grab, pure and simple. You shoot people who don't know better, then sell them the bandaids at premium prices. In this process, you add zero value. You trap people who are likely to be trapped (most often parents of the healthy non-helicopter kind) and squeeze them. This money at the end of the chain most often comes off our various governments as these people end up running into debt.
There is nothing that describes this better as the words "predatory behaviour".
A fundamental problem with wealth redistribution as practised by governments (and credit card companies) is it makes the easiest route to riches taking advantage of people of . . . not necessarily the greatest ability to manage their finances responsibly. This means an enormous proportion of the smartest people in the western world are engaged in attempting to extract cash from people they are essentially exploiting, which ends up costing society as a whole since those people should be actively employed doing things which are more valuable.
You can't regulate taking advantage of stupidity out of the market, so the only answer is to come up with a redistribution mechanism that doesn't create such giant holes.
But what do you propose for that? Because in the world we live in, all attempts at some form of "wealth equality" led to either disaster or technological crippling.
Maybe there's an ideal solution. It's probably something you could even prove mathematically. But even then, it is not a solution that will happen in at least several generations; and in the mean time, behaviour like EA's is doing nothing but steal opportunities (when you indebt someone, you can ruin or severely cripple their entire life and sometimes their families') in order to pay for the CEOs' jacuzzis.
Ironically the better approach may be fairly close to what's in the games, and that is to expand the scope of food stamps (or similar) to create a sort of two tiered currency setup, where one currency is only legally usable for basic needs. Unfortunately that's likely to have exactly the same consequences as exists in the games.
Problem is that we simply don't have economically useful things for people to do. This problem is hitting China. Unemployment is hitting people who are willing to tolerate this quality of life :
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/...
It's being caused partially by the energy crunch (even with the US shale boom, net oil available to the world to use has been declining since 2005) and the lack of solutions (note that solar panels need ... a lot of oil to get produced, wind turbines need massive amounts of oil for their production, so so far the whole "renewable" energy thing has increased, not decreased, our reliance on oil. Hopefully that'll reverse in a decade or so, question is will it still matter by then ? Also global warming policies have basically moved a lot of factories which were in the west (where they were powered by mostly oil, some nuclear, little bit of gas), to China (where they are powered by coal). Coal is about 10x worse for the environment than coal).
But fixing the oil problem (e.g. there are massive methane deposits along continental edges that could replace natural gas. They're big enough that they put the total amount of oil available in 1950 to shame. We don't currently know how to extract them, but loads (as in dozens) of research programs are in progress to fix that) would not bring a permanent solution.
What we need is something useful for unskilled workers to do that is reasonably well-paid, can use any amount of unskilled workers, is spread about the country, and ideally cheaper than bailing out banks. Maybe we ought to take a page out of the Roman empire's book and start building cathedrals in every city in America ? Worked for Europe for several hundred years ...
Surely it is one of the goals of technology and progress that we free people from the need to work. As such, any step towards this 'leisure economy' should be celebrated, rather than thinking up pointless labour for people to do.
If people still feel too idle and can't come up with something to do on their own, they can share a 40hr job with 4 or 5 other people. I am fully confident, though, that everyone will find something they like to do to occupy their time.
Incidentally, my experience of job sharing is that it doesn't scale. You get 2 or 3 people, they arrange the job share among themselves, everyone is blissfully happy. Then one leaves and how do you fill the position, when it was tailored for one specific individual's lifestyle? The other sharers then find themselves having to adapt again, and maybe that's incompatible with the other commitments they've picked up thanks to the arrangement. 9-5 is actually the least-worst option all things considered.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society Quote: studies show that hunter-gatherers need only work about fifteen to twenty hours a week in order to survive and may devote the rest of their time to leisure
http://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expect...
Quote:life expectancy at age 15 is 48 years for Aborigines, 52 and 51 for settled Ache and !Kung, yet 31 and 36 for peas- ant and transitional Agta. Survival to age 45 varies between 19 and 54 percent, and those aged 45 live an average of 12–24 additional years The modal age of mortality in hunter-gatherers can range from 68 in the Hiwi to 78 in the Tsimane.
Well for a start that isn't true... And JK Rowling is a perfect example of it.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...
It figures it will be paid by 2020 at the latest (it also figures that current solar pv energy production matches or exceeds energy consumption by panel producers).
Also : There's caveats in this study. They are calculating the point where PV electricity production starts exceeding energy use in PV production, assuming no rise from current production levels. This is not a good guide to use to decide whether a specific installation of PV is a net-energy-negative or not. Any small-scale installation north of, say, Detroit, will never be energy positive, and is just a loss. This includes most of the German installed base.
I guess a useful government regulation would be to require estimates of the energy consumed to make certain energy products available. It would be pretty much impossible to do at the point of sale for things like retail gasoline, but a given fuel distributor shouldn't have too much trouble calculating their average for some period of time (especially if they are getting reasonable numbers from upstream providers).
I talk about gasoline because I think it would be interesting to have numbers for more than just solar panels and liquid fuels are probably one of the more complicated places to do such a calculation. It should be relatively easy for pv manufacturers.
There's a lot of understandable barriers to implementing that, but it's the only reasonable path I see. Guaranteed minimum wage is fundamentally broken, because cash is not an innately useful resource. Food is.
Soylent highlights the path to solving the regulation nightmare that surrounds agriculture. It's a hell of a lot easier to verify a soylent mixture is to spec, and the processes that created it, than it is to verify agriculture.
Soon the miracle of rocks to bread will be as ordinary as instantaneous global communication.
> Soon the miracle of rocks to bread will be as ordinary as instantaneous global communication.
I'm really looking forward to it, it needs to be done sooner than later, or we're screwed.
Really? Progressive taxes and income tests for benefits have let to disaster and technological crippling?
More likely, the only attempts at "wealth equality" that you pay attention to are the ones that fail.
1. Apps are generally made by wealthy, well-off people.
2. For many apps, the goal is to create an experience that satiates the addictive urges of people with poor impulse control. These people often turn out to be less well-off, possibly because they have poor impulse control.
3. Because money is going from the less-well-off to the well-off, wealth is being redistributed.
There's not a whole lot of research on these people, but I don't know of any evidence that they tend to be poor, while there is definitely anecdotal evidence some of them are extremely well-off ($200k+ salaries [1]).
[1]: http://www.polygon.com/2012/11/1/3587102/high-rolling-whales...
I do wonder about the thinking of people who make games like this. I mean when the business model is about getting your customers literally addicted and there's no benefit besides "it's fun" (questionably), I don't see how it's particularly different from designing slot machines. I did find a blog that discusses that perspective in more detail: https://drmarkgriffiths.wordpress.com/tag/slot-machine-addic...
Team Fortress 2 is often described as IAP done right - purely cosmetic items that confer no gameplay advantage. So it's useful to see that even that can exploit vulnerable people.
Should game makes pit protective measures in place? Or at least have a process that allows players to self-report their vulnerability?
Note that the American Social Security system is not a mandatory savings scheme. The money paid into it is not necessarily saved/invested, and can in fact be spent by the government however it wishes. The amount of money a person receives back from the scheme is also not proportional to the amount they paid in.
This is not true. The government borrows from the fund, and leaves treasury bonds in it. If you personally save your money in treasuries, it's still considered savings. This is not different.
>The amount of money a person receives back from the scheme is also not proportional to the amount they paid in.
Why would preserving wealth differences be important to a forced savings scheme?
We're using a different definition of savings. I mean savings as in not-consuming. By this sense, investing in treasuries is only 'saving' in the grander scale if the government doesn't spend the money, or if it invests it. If the government uses it for consumption or in transfer payments to people who then use it for consumption, it's ultimately not 'saved', it's consumed. This means that when the original saver gets the money back, they're not getting the money they saved, they're actually receiving a transfer payment, as the money (value) they saved no longer exists.
This is why American social security could potentially "run dry"[1], which wouldn't happen in a system where people only got back exactly what they put in (plus interest) and the money wasn't used for anything else.
>Why would preserving wealth differences be important to a forced savings scheme?
If you're not 'preserving wealth differences', you're transferring money to people who didn't originally earn it. This makes it a transfer scheme, not necessarily a savings scheme. The parent seemed to be looking for alternatives to transfer schemes.
1. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/social-security-trust-fund-...
While you are right that it cant be prevented, it can be made a lot harder using regulation (starting by having strict verifiable truth requirements in advertising and marketing).
I did a contract a few years ago for a startup 'gaming' company. They were extracting cash out of people for plays in their games I.e. you buy credit and throw that into nonrefundable plays. In the end if you built up enough virtual credits, you could trade them for expensive consumer electronics.
I was hired to fix their infrastructure.
Well it turns out most of their infrastructure was used to create fake players that these people were pitted against. The odds were fixed and the fake players win nearly every time. Occasionally they'd send someone a MacBook or something by pulling a number from a hat. They were fixed so short term wins were possible but it tailed off in the form 1-e^x.
So basically they were forcing people to toil with no return.
This crossed my ethical limit, so I reported this to ASA (Im in the UK too) and trading standards and immediately quit. The company scurried away with no one ever to be seen again. Turns out their op was running from Gibraltar and everyone was dodgy.
A couple of weeks later I got a narky letter threatening to sue me big time, so I wrote a 'fuck you assholes' reply and folded my limited company and started another one.
If any of the assholes, and you know who you are, are reading this, I'm still armed to deal with your shit.
If the human race grew out of this disrespect for itself and utmost respect for self-gain, things would be better for everyone.
It disgusts me.
I, of course, said 'no' to myself, and then tried to work around it, and [some technical difficulties ommited] we now have awesome feature presented as Special Encounter where players play against NPCs, but still weighed similarly to plays against real players.
Being plain evil is easy way out, with higher risk assigned to those decisions. But somewhere in the problem-solution space, there's an ethical solution begging to be found, frequently better performant than the obvious evil one.
Unrelated, how long did it took you to fold a company? It's a lengthy and painful process here, even if you're profitable and without debts to anyone.
However most of the rip off games are chance based so playing it isn't relevant.
To elaborate: The customer is attracted by the "free" game and how fun it looks. They are then kidnapped by the addictiveness of the initial gameplay - before any significant payment is required. Then they are tortured with the unenjoyable misery of the free grind; Usually whilst they are reminded of how much better their friends are getting on in the game (yay social networking!).
But they are told they can pay to skip the bad parts. This is where I compare it to Stockholm syndrome: They are confusing relief from abuse with an act of kindness. They feel the same relative bump in happiness, but mistake it for feeling good, when it's actually closer to relief from harm.
And of course, much like Stockholm syndrome, they don't even realise quite how much they've been suckered in. They just think "that was fun" - or in the case of the real syndrome, "they were justified" - rather than realise they've just had thousands of dollars extracted from them while they were held captive...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
EDIT: I realise this may be a bit offensive to those of you who work in the free-to-play industry. But as a gamer, I really do wish the industry wasn't trending this way. What's wrong with paying up front? I'll happily pay large sums of money for a game + expansions. But try and nickle-and-dime me and it ruins the whole experience.
we'll let you start a shop. then at some point we'll ask you protection taxes. if you dont pay we'll make sure to make your life hell. You can also choose to close the shop of course, and change city/country. nobody's forcing you.
Clash of Clans is the one that's at the top of the free charts right now, and its entire mechanic is based around this.
Perhaps the "free-to-play industry" needs some offending. Their entire business model is exploiting vulnerabilities in the human decision making process. It's exploitative and rotten.
I remember honest games. I want those back. Now even some paid games are infected with this F2P schlock.
I wonder how much of this finding against EA is because the time limit is a completely artificial game mechanic. E.g. Everquest is free to play now, but you can also use real money to buy points to instantly level a character to 85. However, the act of leveling up a character is pretty much set in stone for RPGs for 40 years now.
In original Everquest, leveling was definitely a rough chore. But what is too chore-like? Back then it took me like 20 days of playing time to hit max level for the first time. A lot of people played through it, but most didn't. It was slow and painful. Back then, you couldn't pay to bypass it (it also wasn't free to play, but if it were) - does it become a problem the minute you allow people to buy things? Whose bar for too chore-like are we using?
I've played some MMOs where there were some very highly set limits you could only bypass via buying things with real money. However, they were transferrable, and players created their own market. All the most powerful players never paid real money. Instead, they could collect resources so fast they exchanged those resources for these items. Can we call this game free?
Presumably, the MMO gameplay mechanics are sufficiently fun and engaging to keep you playing. The F2P game just wants to keep you paying.
The devs behind World of Warcraft have spent a lot of time trying to balance "grind" with "skipping grind". Making it easier to skip the "un-fun" parts of the game; all that assuming that the un-fun parts of the game are necessary to begin with.
However, here we're just talking about game design. In the case of P2W moneygrabs, we're talking about evil behaviour.
You are begging the question here, from which you derive your predetermined conclusion.
It's confusing because you've set up a false dichotomy. People pay money to avoid the unenjoyable parts of the game. They don't pay money to skip the fun bits - just because they pay money for assistance doesn't mean that the end credits start rolling.
It's disgusting. A money grab, pure and simple.
There's a lot of competition in games these days, and freemium is proving to be one of the tenable models. What's the difference between paying upfront and paying as you go along, anyway? As long as they game creator isn't misleading like EA was, I mean.
This case is about EA advertising Dungeon Keeper as free to play without being clear about IAP.
> The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Electronic Arts Ltd to ensure that future ads made clear the limitations of free gameplay and role of in-app purchasing with regard to speeding up gameplay.
In the game you have to dig out squares of terrain. Terrain squares can take 24 hours to dig out. It costs about $2.50 to dig out a single square. If you buy the largest IAP it's only about $2 per square.
> The ASA is an industry body -- it's not a government regulator.
I was surprised by this. I thought they were a stronger regulator. But a simple bit of reading of their website shows that while they have some teeth for broadcast adverts (because they cooperate with OFCOM and various Trading Standards organisations) they lack teeth for anything else, even though they claim to cover online ads. Thus, they have a list of non-compliant websites who continue to make misleading claims.
Thank you for pointing that out!
Now, we see that the top charts are dominated by games like this. Free, with IAP to accelerate. That's what the market evolution bore.
If we don't like it, we can try to ban practices, but unless Apple (as a gatekeeper) bans these things, they will persist, as that's what millions of apps across billions of downloads/players have evolved to, & will evolve back to.
To change the dominant business model, we'd need some new mechanic to supplant it, not just trying to tilt at windmills & complain.
To change the dominant business model, you need to come up with a new model that generates more profit. That is exactly what has happened here.
A thing is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. I'm less concerned about expensive IAP than I am about the people who pay for them. But then I think: So what? People will pay too much for all sorts of things. Who am I to judge.
I'm willing to pay for a good games that don't annoy me asking for more money, but see almost nothing to pay for. (I'm only talking about mobile here, desktop games market is totally different.)
That is, when I got bored I had browsed Play Market for a while and I'd say - subjectively - options where you buy a game and that's it - you enjoy the whole thing, as advertised, right to a solid logical ending, without anyone persistently asking you to take your wallet out again (to remove ads, to buy some in-game advantage or to access further gameplay) are astonishingly rare.
Crap, even Baldur's Gate is now with in-app purchases and DLCs. (But, again, not on desktop!) Guess, that must be something related to stereotypes and cliches, not real business models.
</rant>
They ruled that if you make a game like Dungeon Keeper, then you can not advertise the game as free, because it is misleading to customer. EA has to make one minor change in like three words in that ad in order to comply. E.g. all they have to do is to change "free to download and play" into "free to download and try".
In my opinion, rulings like this will only lead to minimum required compliance. A lack of paying customers will lead to real behavior changes.
They could do worse than to NOT change the ads, but update the game so that it's actually free to play. "Sorry people, we screwed up. Here, have a game. We won't do that again."
But EA, being EA, would never do that.
I'm pretty sure the ad told me that.