I've watched a lot of discussions about this from twitch streamers and I'm not sure where I stand.. On the one hand I'm amazed at how good this game looks on mobile and if you're just the type to casually play a game not really caring about being the best at it you could have fun playing it for free or for very cheap. On the other hand this game is clearly exploitative and while other games like Hearthstone or Clash Royale have similar pay to win mechanics they also have ways for you to enjoy the game competitively without spending a whole lot of money.
I know some countries banned games like this but I wonder, if these games get banned why not ban casinos too?
Casinos are banned in many places and also banned for kids in most places.
Clash royale is sad, becouse it is a extremely good game if it were not for the pay to win leveling mechanics. I used to play it alot but it became too frustrating meeting bad players with low ELO but high level cards that you essentially couldn't win over unless they messed up bad.
Edit:
To level up all cards in Clash Royale you also have to spend a silly amount of money. Exponential costs.
I just started playing it after a long break. I remember you used to need to upgrade your cards to challenge level in order to be competitive in challenges but now they give you all cards in challenge mode at the standard level, even cards you haven't found yet
It costs 10 gems to play a challenge and you can buy 500 gems for 5$ so that's 50 challenges, say you get at least 7 games per challenge so 350 games for 5$ where only skill matters. I'd say that's not exploitative.
Of course if you care about your rank and having a Big Number in a silly mobile game then yes you either have to play a lot or pay a lot of money.
I don't buy the "we have ways to play the game without spending lots of money" excuse these companies are constantly peddling. I refuse to accept this new default of "games" explicitly designed to abuse children and addicts.
Children don't have access to a credit card unless you give it to them. If in 2022 you're giving a kid a device where he can make payments without your input then you're responsible for it.
If you're addicted to spending money online irresponsibly I doubt there is any law that will protect you, there's millions of ways to spend money to get gratification online.
Not quite the same thing as heroin as you can easily drown your sorrows in any number of cheap video games and I'm of the belief that if you are prone to addictions the only way to evolve passed them is to go through them. I am against putting laws up against these games but I am for the community warning and talking about this so people know what they're getting into.
I'm also for legalizing all drugs but that's another discussion
Casinos and machine-based gambling are fairly heavily regulated in a lot of places, requiring a license with auditing, with rules on everything you can possibly think of. The mobile gaming industry has so far avoided this body of law by never providing anything of value in return.
Look at this guy [0], he is the rank one monk in PvP and PvE and spent 0 dollars.
I played a wee bit and it didn't seem that bad. You can pay to upgrade your gear, but that seems entirely pointless in an ARPG. The whole game is a grind to get better gear! Once you actually have perfect gear, why keep playing?
My issue with the game is that it lacks depth after having spent far too much time playing Path of Exile. There aren't that many possible builds, and the game basically tells you exactly how to build if you want to do PvP or PvE. As far as I can tell, those builds are the meta ones, so the designers are forcing the meta.
But as a game to run in and kill some monsters without thinking too much, it seems fine. Which makes sense since it's a mobile game.
interesting, so if you can be no1 while free to play is every streamer lying?
Edit: Or right now since it's early you can out-skill other people while they're figuring it out and soon the people who spend more will have both skill and raw power and will dominate
I don't understand the comment, sorry. I don't think other streamers are lying, you can pay to get stronger, easily verified by opening the shop and looking at what is available. But it looks like if you play the game as your job, you can still be competitive.
Does it suck that you can pay to get stronger and make the game unfair? Yep, but I'm not convinced it matters if you're playing casually. None of the pay to win stuff changes the game play drastically. You're only really increasing the amount of damage you do, it's not like Path of Exile where some of the really rare items can enable a new type of build or trading card games where certain cards let you build different decks with different playstyles.
Personally, I see no incentive to buy anything. I can clear a level 12 challenge rift, grind slowly and slowly clear higher level ones. Or I could spend a bunch of money and get to do level 20 challenge rifts or whatever. At which point you hit the wall and either pay money or keep grinding. But since the game is all about grinding, why pay to skip forward and grind more?
I understand your point but Asmongold and Shroud are saying it isn't worth playing the game unless you plan to spend a couple thousand dollars on it so that's where I'm coming from.
Do yourself a favor and play the game instead of trusting the words of streamers. You can get a ton of enjoyment without paying anything. If you want to be ultra competitive then it is a different story
The state of Western Australia has banned poker machines. We have a single casino in the capital which is the only sanctioned gambling establishment. So our pubs and clubs are a bit poorer and there are less of them. But they are not ruined by the horrible rooms full of sad people playing poker machines that you see in other states. I grew up on the east coast and whenever I walk into a pub in Perth I am always surprised by how authentic and nice the place feels compared to those that have poker machines.
I had a ton of fun with Clash Royale for many months (even years at this point) without spending exactly zero money. I think the way they mix free players with paying players is absolutely brilliant (from a perspective of free player).
If I go against a player two levels ahead of me, I can be pretty much sure that he bought his deck and since he's going against me not some higher rank I know I have chance of winning if I can outwit materially stronger opponent.
When I'm going against someone with lower level then I can be sure that this guy has very carefully crafted deck and is a very skilled player.
I knew someone who worked for EA as a UX researcher. He said that games like these are primarily targeting whales who will drop $10k on a game. They are the real money earners. The really sad part was the he said the most whales aren't super rich, they're just people with an addiction.
I've seen similar comments by several game devs, but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy. Think of some oil Sheik's son bored to death at home because it's too hot to go outside.
But yeah, the "loot boxes" that are mostly gambling have been banned in many countries because they're targeted at young children.
> I've seen similar comments by several game devs, but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy.
This seems like naïve speculation to me. Think about the number/scaling of this. It would give them a few months worth of income at best?
The sadder truth is that they're exploiting escapism and maladaptive coping (addiction, gambling) in people who also use escapism to cope/relax. Often times, those same people in desperate need of escapism are there because they struggle in real life, often financially too.
So, the little reprieve they get from gaming negative impacts their physical lives.
Diablo Immortal is a caricature of the depravity most games have become. A few games like Overwatch are not P2W, but even they have lootbox mechanics for cosmetic skins (you get boxes for leveling up and challenges, as you play, though). Blizzard literally can't help themselves.
The interesting thing is that you would think Blizzard would have known this. Literally the last game in the same Diablo series launched with a much-hated Real Money Auction House, which was eventually removed.
To me this "ultra-wealthy" thing has always sounded like a convenient lie whale-game devs tell themselves to sleep soundly at night. These dark pattern black holes are made purely to form an addiction and turn it into profit, they don't care about who's on the receiving end.
There's an increasing number of players who expect that either a) a game will take unlimited money and feed them dopamines in return, or b) they never have to pay a dime for anything because they're fully subsidized by the addicts. I have conflicted feelings about administrative regulation of this stuff, I just hate that things are this way, especially as an independent game dev.
(I'll do the hustle - my first game Pawnbarian is a chess-flavored puzzle roguelike. On mobile it's an ad-free demo with a single $7 IAP for the whole thing. Out on Steam and Android, iOS will follow soon. j4nw.com/pawnbarian)
It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long. Most long lived whales are likely to be from wealthy families, or the fun side addiction for a very wealthy individual. That doesn't change the fact that there are addicted people who spend a large percentage of their income on a game. Whales are one thing and addicted players are another.
I don't necessarily disagree, but for the purpose of my argument this is splitting hairs. Both audiences are functionally the same from the game design standpoint.
Why do you think the mechanics of nonchemical addiction are different to chemical addiction? I certainly see plenty of nonrich people being addicted to drugs and essentially spend everything they have on drugs (the proximity to crime is obviously an additional factor)
> It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long.
They don't have to. Repeatedly unearthing cow-clickers whom you can milk for $10'000 before sending them into financial ruin sounds like a much more viable business strategy to me than trying to build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click.
> build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click
I think you're putting wealthy folks on way too high of a pedestal. The wealthy aren't some hyper-rational, utility-maximizing robots. They're people with likes and dislikes like any other. Being a whale for a very rich person or a very rich family is a drop in the bucket in terms of their net worth. Plenty of people can keep their degeneracy to a budget.
A lot of the whales and leviathans have some kind of online presence so it's really not hard for a game dev to know them by name, or even invite them to the studio.
True...ish, but i bet a percentage of them get rich by focussing on what they are good at and neglecting their families, just making piles of money available. There's probably enough kids getting 10K a month pocket money to make GPs stragetgy viable.
The Chinese proverb “rags to rags in three generations” says that family wealth does not last for three generations. The first generation makes the money, the second spends it and the third sees none of the wealth.
This is no longer legal in many jurisdictions. Family members often have a minimum allocation of the inheritance (e.g. 25% must be equally split among all children)
Interesting, and most places it is culturally unacceptable regardless.
Yet the proverb is historical, as all proverbs are, and my response was intended to refute the dissolution of wealth, historically, by spreading it too thin.
Another element is how ambition to have your own achievement can team up with risk taking. It's usually not the humble playboy who consumes away the fortune, it's one who tries to step out of the shadow cart by inheritance by growing the fortune through a series off get-richer-quickly schemes.
Probably less so in China given that, until recently, they had severe restrictions on the number of children per a family.
Though your point is valid it's only part of the story.
I've seen many scions from China attending western universities in a state of decadence, barely focused on their course work, all too willing to live off their parents' past efforts, while driving expensive cars and walking around in clothes and accessories worth tens of thousands of dollars.
No part of this is even close to correct. No, wealth is not being evenly spread, it's becoming more and more concentrated. And no, generations are not getting "ever-larger", either; birth rates are down.
One explanation could be a difference between China and the West. Historically the West relies on primogeniture where the eldest son inherits a vast majority of the fortune and other sons need to move out and build a career for themselves. Classical China OTOH would split their fortune (which for 90% of folks was land since most were farmers) between their sons. Primogeniture encourages maintaining wealth across generations through the eldest son while the latter could mean the fortune gets spread out and eventually lost within 3 generations. For example, see research by Thomas Piketty about how ppl who were rich in 16th century Italy are still absurdly rich today.
Time to start regulating these games in the same way we regulate gambling.
They shouldn't be sold to children. They're not Kinda eggs nor LOL Surprise and should never be brushed off as surprise mechanics. They're glorified slot machines, through and through.
Apple/Google revenue will see a big decline if those games are regulated. Most if not all the top grossing games on mobile follow the same spending pattern, and a big chunk of app stores' revenue come from those games.
And that's exactly the reason almost all mobile game are utter trash.
Of course that was caused because the app-"economy" was broken from day one on: You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those. So you have to make the software "free" and sell your user's data, or charge one or two bucks and use some other immoral scheme to get your actual costs covered.
On a broken market there are only broken products… Simple as that.
My thoughts on the mobile gaming market are similar. There's great plenty of good ports of games like Slay the Spire, Civ VI, or even XCOM II. Problem is the majority of interested parties already have 'better' devices they'd prefer to play it on, so the prospect of paying even the discounted price that these ports have is too much.
So now you're left with people who haven't tried better games, and with all the good-enough free ones, how can even a discounted price full game compete?
Absolutely, I own Civ 6 on mobile because it was discounted on Christmas or something. I got most of the expansions for cheap on my PC/MacOS hybrid purchase from Steam. Then I’m expected to pay the full fat $40 for the “new” (came out in 2019) Civ 6 expansion on mobile. No way.
> You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those.
I'm not sure if that is strictly true. Prices did vary a lot in the beginning. However scale created a race-to-the-bottom situation for the exact reason you cited: most people wanted to pay less. The market was flooded with apps and games at the minimum price which created a strong expectation among the bulk of buyers.
Consumable IAP is what really enabled the gambling-like mechanics. That was discovered not long after the implementation of IAP and very quickly the game devs that converted to free + consumable IAP started making all the money. IIRC it was an open secret in mobile games many many years ago that the optimal strategy was to make the early game easy to cast a wide net, then slowly ramp up the pay-to-win mechanics to milk the whales as much as possible. You don't really care if everyone else quits - so long as most people get X% of the way through before they do. Then you tweak X% to optimize for catching the most whales.
The super critical aspect is the deliberate ramp. You have to get as many people into the early part of the funnel as possible so some of them will become invested enough to become whales. This also means you absolutely must make the game miserable for 90% of your players but only after they've made a significant investment.
That's exactly what they don't want you to realise, they are doing a lot of branding to try to make politicians forget that they get most of their appstore/playstore money from glorified gambling.
Until they steal their parents credit card, or somebody else's. Addicts tend to di desperate moves. Happened to friends, their son spent half of their montly salary in some stupid mobile game, took too long for them to find out
This is not only morally abhorrent, but also factually wrong - you can have a proper bank account with card from 16, and you can have pre-paid cards even earlier
My nephew stole my sister’s credit card and made $2000 in Fortnite purchases before he was caught. What’s insane is after the chargeback they DIDN’T revoke the items. He got to keep them. Then his account got stolen later because he’s a dumb kid but that’s a different story. Such a bad lesson to teach a kid.
You have to be vigilant as a parent. I didn’t realize until my late 20s that Diablo 2 primed me to love slot machines and gambling. It’s something I have to avoid.
Funny you say this. I’ve been playing a bunch of D2:R lately and it is honestly pretty miserable. It is full stop gambling. Grinding out mephisto runs over and over again, hoping for that nice drop, getting a minor rush of excitement when an unidentified ring drops or whatever. Just totally mindless nonsense.
Under 1% of users for over 50% of your mobile gaming revenue with a not single purchase model has been a good general estimate since 2010; I invite you to google an publicly available data on that.
From what I've seen privately 50% is a vast understatement.
And no, most of those users cannot afford what they spend.
> 10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night, and casinos do exist.
Casinos are highly regulated. Lootbox are not in most countries. And I'm pretty sure minors can't enter a casino even with their parent's credit card...
Made videogames with paid lootboxes 18+ only, problem solved.
I used to play a MUD thats been around for 30 years and has active playerbase of maybe 1-4k people and there were some players who would pay 20-40k for special wizard made items.
It was run by a non-profit, so all that money went to keep the game running, but yeah, some people put a lot of money on these games.
As a Japanese gamer says, paying for games is like dining out. You get nothing useful after a good meal, and paying for games may as well be more useful.
In my country 16k/y is a median salary. It’s heavily influenced by 1 or 2 major cities - the rest of the country earns much less, 10k/y is considered to be a decent salary. So no, it is a huge amount of money.
Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself.
Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups reinforce each other's behavior. The goal is to get them to log in every day and invest in the game.
People pay money to uncap their progression. This turns these games into spending competitions: whoever spends the most money wins the game. The corporation is the only true winner of course.
I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed. The best part was my bot was statistically indistinguishable from a sufficiently addicted player due to the game's own design. I'd like to believe I helped destroy that game.
so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves.
Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?
Hey, I love video games. They've given me thousands and thousands of hours of fun. Awesome games like Subnautica can bring joy to the world.
The problem is the one time I tried mobile games I eventually started waking up at 3 AM because that's when some timer resets. At some point I started wondering where my life went so wrong.
Then I started studying the design of these games and I realized they are designed to cause this sort of addiction and harm. They employ the same strategies as casinos and drug dealers. They straight up subvert the reward center of people's brains to the point they harm themselves and even destroy their own lives.
Yes. Social media is the exact same brand of brain-hijacking dopamine dripfeed. They too want their apps to be habit forming in order to maximize the amount of user attention they're capturing so they can make more money on advertising. Every time you see someone talking about "engagement" this is what it means.
Software like uBlock Origin is so world changing they should be built into our operating systems in order to help destroy the revenue of these abusive corporations.
Because a normal hobby is not designed to be addictive.
A hobby like wood working doesn't push you to do woodworking every day and there are not people behind this non existing mechanism who design it like it.
Also normally a hobby costs money due to physical parts of that hobby. A software engineer as a hobby only needs some computer, would worker needs a metal saw.
Fitness hobbies also punish you for taking some time off. But they still just happen to be that way, instead of being deliberately designed, and that's a distinction that should very much be allowed to make a difference. It's not unusual at all for intent to carry legal significance.
The risk/benefit calculation of fitness activities is overwhelmingly positive. Their health benefits of exercise might as well be infinite. Even such a benign activity can be pathological though: accidents and lesions during training, anabolic steroid abuse, body image issues...
The risk/benefit calculation of predatory gambling video games is overwhelmingly negative. It's really no big loss if they were to be outlawed straight up. We have much better games available for our enjoyment.
There was a leaderboard posted in the local gym. It was for the most frequently coming members. Some of them regularly racked up >400 visits a year. I didn't even realise at the time that it was weird until a doctor mentioned that these are likely people with addiction or body image issues. I guess you can overdo anything.
That's the important part. Not only are these games "designed for addiction," they are written as if someone opened up a psychology textbook on manipulation and implemented every chapter.
Never thought of that, good point. I guess in the end if we wanted to find the boundary for harmful/tolerable addiction, we might not be able to find it, it’s a continuous spectrum. I guess in the end intent would need to decide the ethics—is the product designed to leverage addiction or is it designed to enable people to have fun, which might lead to addiction?
I think there is a very blurry line between non-chemical addiction and just liking something very much. Say a person spends thousands on audiophile equipment where the layman couldn’t hear the difference, and often even a double blind of audiophiles can’t, is that spending an addiction? Or do they just enjoy chasing that dragon?
Isn't addiction diagnosis usually about "does this negatively impact your life and relationships"? Basically on the level of "would you get into risky debt or skip on necessities for yourself or family by buying more equipment? "
> Isn't addiction diagnosis usually about "does this negatively impact your life and relationships"?
Yes. This is more or less standard criteria for diagnosing mental disorders.
A. Persistent and recurrent problematic gambling behavior leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as indicated by the individual exhibiting four (or more) of the following in a 12-month period:
1. Needs to gamble with increasing amounts of money in order to achieve the desired excitement.
2. Is restless or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop gambling.
3. Has made repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop gambling.
4. Is often preoccupied with gambling (e.g., having persistent thoughts of reliving past gambling experiences, handicapping or planning the next venture, thinking of ways to get money with which to gamble).
5. Often gambles when feeling distressed (e.g., helpless, guilty, anxious, depressed).
6. After losing money gambling, often returns another day to get even (“chasing” one’s losses).
7. Lies to conceal the extent of involvement with gambling.
8. Has jeopardized or lost a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of gambling.
9. Relies on others to provide money to relieve desperate financial situations caused by gambling.
The deflection point for me on Regulation is purchases vs loot boxes
If the game is implimenting direct purchases, where you buy Item X for Y price then I feel regulation is unwarranted even in the context of harmful levels of purchasing
However if the game is using a loot box system where the play buy a "chance" to "win" an item they desire, then I think that should be considered a "game of chance" like a lottery or slot machine, under which there should be some regulation to require the disclosure of odds, how many times their is a payout, etc etc etc
Diablo seems to use a Loot Box system, not a direct pay system
The difference to older tech like mechanical slot machines is that the game records everything the player does, and can then drop a "discounted" special offer at the right time to maximize the likelihood of keeping the player hooked.
While some games do, the few that do those odds are not predominantly displayed nor they are externally validated as being accurate.
There is also no disclosure as to if the odds are manipulated on a per player basis, which I believe there are a few patents related to changing the "drop" rate based on player behavior, this is similar and can be combined with your comment about monitoring to drop a discount at the right time
In the context of Diablo, I can not find the Odds of their loot boxes anywhere published.
> so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves.
This is an incredibly simplistic view of the problem, on multiple dimensions.
On one dimension, a question of to what length should we give companies the right to harm people. Because if something is knowingly designed to take advantage of the study of psychology to hurt people then that’s what this is.
On another dimension, the person spending the money is typically hurting others (spouse, kids... business partners) at least as much, but frequently more, than they hurt themselves.
Giving companies the freedom to do things like this takes away our freedom to live without others harming us. Its really hard to understand why this is even debatable.
I agree with you, but it’s interesting that everything you say applies to the sugar industry, and that industry has harmed far more people (and our healthcare system).
It wasn't liked by the right-wing government, even though they implemented it in the first place. They financed a report that investigated it's effectiveness, and then tried to bury it because it showed it worked as intended.
> It wasn't liked by the right-wing government, even though they implemented it in the first place.
Quite the conundrum. On one hand, it’s a neat tool for class warfare, an occasion to have a laugh about those bums who cannot control themselves, and drone on about Protestant values and work ethic. On the other hand, some chums would make less money, and we cannot have that.
Even if you thought that being addicted to gaming or gambling is no different for the creature than any other hobby, like kayaking, it might help you to look at the other side of the question:
How much should we allow others to enrich themselves off the addictions/compulsions of others?
I always thought that was a compelling point even when I was a libertarian for one year as a uni freshman. That people should be able to consume what they want doesn't finish answering the question.
> How much should we allow others to enrich themselves off the addictions/compulsions of others?
the current line is drawn at 18+ and non-chemical addiction, or light chemical addition like nicotine. It is worthy of debate, whether psychological addiction ought to be included.
My guide would be that if it causes external harm, then it should be regulated, where external harm is defined as harm that, while undertaking said activity, would befall a third, unrelated party.
Golf seems very similar to me. There's the random element. A friend described it as a feeling of continual frustration followed by a high when he hits a good shot.
You similarly can buy your way to 'success' with gadgets and training or investing more time.
There's the community of similar addicts that gather together and provide a social element and re-inforce each others addiction. People's marriages suffer to the degree that there is a term "golf widow" for someone who's lost their partner to the game.
But I can still see clear differences between golf clubs and casinos, and there's also similar differences between different mobile games. I feel it's worth delineating them, particularly as golf isn't constantly being replaced with a slightly modified version of golf that takes it 2% closer to being a Casino and casino's are heavily regulated for good reasons.
> But the most accurate and refreshing response received to this day has been… addictive! And if you think about it clearly, what better one-word description encompasses all that we know of this exhilarating sport known as Golf. There is no description more encompassing of a sport such as golf!
> And this is best described by a psychological principle referred to as “intermittent reinforcement”. Intermittent reinforcement is the formula foundation for all forms of addition. Take gambling with a slot machine as an example. You lose, lose, lose, lose and suddenly you win! And yet, despite the guaranteed repetitive loss and the incidental win, people love to play slot machines for hours. Why is intermittent reinforcement so powerful? In its simplest translation, the reinforcement pattern that blooms into addiction must entail of high levels of reward and amusement without the predictability factors which can trigger boredom. It‟s the unpredictability of when the reward arrives that draws and engages people into the activity. The rewards that are distributed intermittently trigger and release significantly higher doses of a pleasure inducing hormone known as dopamine, than the same rewards distributed on a more consistent (predictable) basis.
> Can you think of another activity that features in more intermittent reinforcement than golf? No matter what level of golf you are playing, it is guaranteed that you are going to hit more shots that feel miss-struck than well-struck. Some may argue that the pros hit the ball well on almost every shot, but on the contrary the better you are the higher the standard to what constitutes a shot that delivers maximum satisfaction and reward. To a highly skilled golfer, maximum satisfaction is gained through a perfectly struck and executed shot. While by the same token, for the double-bogey player, a drive that is struck decently and stays in the fairway is also a cause for celebration.
It is about hitting a very small/light ball very far. It is about interaction with natural elements in real time (wind/grass etc). It may be physics but it is physics in the real non-vacuum world. Even a perfect robot could not place a golfball in the same spot repeatedly. That is the unescapable random element.
i havent seen a robot capable of reading wind patterns from tree movement as well as humans.. again you are minimizing the deterministic factors where humans have a compelling advantage by over-essentializing perception beyond your personal capability as "random"
you're just making the same argument with a different subject... the same "random" argument can be applied to home runs in baseball if you wanted. hopefully you can see the ridiculousness of that example... I've researched your artillery example enough to know that artillery fire is done with a human wind calculation based upon one direction of wind... not at all comparable to human eye perceiving strength of gusts, wind alleys, etc. based upon personal experience with a certain course... but i'm not really interested in 1000 red herring discussions. please stick to golf if you really care about this.
Same for me. 2015 or so. FarmVille addiction. Once I clicked 1200 times straight to farm/plaugh/seed, my fingers heart. So searched for a solution and found click recorders . Not exactly cheat but once I started using the auto click, I was out of addiction within a month and left game in Two month.
Awesome. In these cases, bots are not really cheating, they're legitimate self-defense against shitty repetitive addictive games. They are addiction prophylaxis and treatment.
This is really insightful. Things in 2022 are so bad that the manufacturer of this addictive product is not only unregulated, but has actually banned the therapy in its ToS.
(If you think about that a bit it follows that the smartest course of action is to break the ToS early and often!)
Yeah. The thing about these little agreements is they're all about what's good for the company, never what's good for us. They are inherently abusive and it's in our best interests to subvert them as much as possible.
I think it's okay to label it as cheating and not feel like you're breaking some moral code. If the game is rigged, then the only way to win is to "cheat". When the hero in a story does it, we call them clever.
This picture is too black and white. I have no interest in EA games so I don’t know if it appliesto them, but most “social” games make the bulk of their revenue from players paying small amounts every now and then, or ideally on a regular (a bit every events) shedule. The main target is not the whales, it’s the sustainable long tail (though paying players stay a small minority, even 4~5% of hundreds of thousands of users is a big pool).
This is basically the “recurring revenue” model, it’s the monthly packages sold in Yostar or Mihoyo games.
Sure, people who get easily caught in competitive schemes will have a hard time to stop, and will get caught in nightmarish situations. The same as people who can’t stop drinking and become alchoholic over time. This is a nefarious effect that we should pay attention to, but a super small minority becoming alcoholics doesn’t mean alcohol industry itself is a conspiracy to produce them. Moderate people exist. We should find ways to to protect the vulnerables, but it also means coming to terms with the nuances of the situation.
I kinda find it surprising to assume a company like Mihoyo consistently makes record profits from just a few whales addicted to gambling. It litteraly makes no sense.
I also don’t see these companies disclose their revenue per user statistics, could you share some of what you read positing current gatcha games are sustained by whales ?
Thanks! To TLDR my answer, the first link gives interesting numbers but are very generic, and as the top gatcha devs won’t give breakdown numbers of user spending patterns, in the end it doesn’t tell that much more.
I should disclaim I do play gatcha games on a somewhat regular basis (I need to know how they work for various reasons) and follow the different communities around.
On the first link:
> Whale game users: 1% of the players, generate 64% of the income spending 2,694 dollars per year.
> Medium-high game users: 3% of the total, generate 20% of income spending 373 dollars a year.
> Average game users: 2% of the total, generate 4% of income and spend $ 104 per year.
First, that 1% of “whales” at 2,694$ per year is interesting, as it puts it around the 2,482$ said to be spent on entertainment on average in the US [0], which doesn’t seem to be freakish in context.
Then there’s also no breakdown of social games and “normal” games, like Minecraft which for instance has monthly subscriptions for online services, and other games who have season passes or allow to buy in-game contents like songs, levels etc.).
Sure social games must have a decent share, but right now for instance I see in my [edit to US ranking] Roblox, Apex, Pokemon Go in the free app ranking and they aren’t gatcha. The above number must also including straight purchaseable games.
It’s interesting numbers, but don’t tell us much about gacha games in particular (though the author has opinions on the subject, which I mostly agree with).
The second link is from 2015, that’s almost the beginning of the field, the candy crush days and developpers not understanding clearly what is ok and what is not. A lot has changed since.
I don’t have access to the third link, it asks me to pay to become premium (the irony), and it’s also from 6 years ago…
> I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse
engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks
were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and
the game's hold over me was destroyed.
This is absolutely fascinating. It's something I kinda missed from
Digital Vegan, thinking that extrication would be a matter only of
self-mastery and access to good information rather than fighting
back. Most people do not have that capability.
But fighting back is exactly what you've done, and it's worked for
you. I wrote earlier that the relationship between users and
developers is increasingly an adversarial one [1]. Things like "right
to repair" have become an open battle between ecological common-sense
and pure greed. Where your health, wealth and environment is under
attack from rampant greed a legitimate (moral/ethical) response to
hostile technology is obviously hacking back.
But it's not a universalisable moral principle, unless we want a
descent into chaos and digital "civil war". Therefore the proper
solution is to start recognising what some of these companies are
doing as crimes. You need the law on your side when you act in
self-defence.
A digital civil war is preferable to surrendering to the designs of exploitative corporations. We should fight back on principle. We should block ads and tracking, scrape websites, reverse engineer private APIs, violate DRM technology, replace their proprietary apps with our own free software that we control, feed them false data to poison their data sets... We should do everything we possibly can to defeat any attempt to exploit us. We don't need their permission to do it either.
Turning things into crimes is the corporation's game. They're the ones with billions of dollars and expensive lobbyists. We shouldn't be trying to beat them in this space. We need ubiquitous subversive technology that neutralizes their exploitation whether the laws allow it or not. It shouldn't matter whether it's legal or illegal. We need technology that makes it impossible for them to exploit us in any way, and we define what is and isn't acceptable or exploitative.
That sounds like an arms race that's both wasteful and difficult to win. Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society? These corporations are not out to get us. They maximize profit constrained by the regulatory environment. We have to guide them, and channel their capacity for good.
> That sounds like an arms race that's both wasteful and difficult to win.
It is.
> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?
We should, if we can. I'm just not holding my breath.
I think copyright should be abolished but the trillion dollar companies that depend on it will never allow that to happen. So we're better off de facto abolishing it by making copyright unenforceable and eliminating consequences for copyright infringement.
I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.
>I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.
Honest question (and I am not fan of advertising here and not trying to be an apologist)..
What business model replaces it, in your mind?
In the world that exists today, how do companies who provide free services online (including the creation of information) pay their staff and their operational costs, if not through being paid to display ads or sponsorships?
> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?
Turns out that's also a Red Queen's race. And if you look at the lobbying costs vs. potential rewards, there's a lot of room for escalation in US politics.
> Therefore the proper solution is to start recognising what some of these companies are doing as crimes. You need the law on your side when you act in self-defence.
The only difference is who does the concrete fighting: you by yourself, or let the police and criminal prosecution do the fighting.
Good question. I'm not sure which would be faster and fairer. Police
and courts have enough to do dealing with reality, without getting
involved in our messy hacker games. So long as the law is clear, we
should want people to help themselves first and foremost. The key is
really dismantling protectionist laws that enable powerful aggressors,
not arming the people with more protectors. On what the law cannot
speak it should remain silent, and I do believe that vast tracts of
so-called "cyber-law" are absolute rubbish - utterly unfair, bought by
lobbyists and written by incompetents to defend the barons' castles.
Take this down and let nature run its course to restore the proper
balance.
I agree regulation is needed. I think these situations are also partially due to a failure of anti-trust. In many of these cases, there is insufficient competition for these companies to be forced to act in the user’s best interest.
Addictive products are another case where the user is unable to choose in favor of their own self-interest, because the product is exploiting weak points in human psychology.
It is an alcoholic leaping over the bar to start drinking directly from the tap. It is a violation of the rules and will get you banned, but it will not cure a true addiction. Some gamblers are addicted to the game, but some are actually addicted to the money they want to win from gambling. Gaining access to free ingame stuff by cheating might mitigate some harmful economic effects but it wont necessarily allow an addict to stop. Making the beer free might stop kids from thinking it cool. It wont stop someone actually addicted to beer.
> Gaining access to free ingame stuff by cheating might mitigate some harmful economic effects but it wont necessarily allow an addict to stop.
The free stuff exists to instill an habit in players. People literally force themselves to log into the game and do daily tasks because otherwise they're missing out on daily rewards.
My bot completely nullified their little scheduled rewards design. I was now free to play the game whenever I actually felt like playing. Then I discovered I didn't actually feel like it, I was just going through the motions due to negative reinforcement.
Don't underestimate the power of software. It can literally liberate us.
> It is a violation of the rules and will get you banned
> I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating.
Oh yeah that works so incredibly well! I get addicted to idle/tap/infinite progression types of games every now and then.
At one point I got sick of it and I wrote a program that taps my phone with an axidraw robot. Seeing the progression happen without my own input totally broke the addictive cycle for me.
I'm sure you know there are other ways. Android phone emulator on a PC and scripting the mouse is one of the easiest. However I'm incredibly impressed that you used a software/hardware solution.
Thank you for mentioning the hardware, I looked it up and it looks affordable and interesting. https://www.axidraw.com/
When Facebook introduced games on their site I used to play one game. It was some stupid game with limited energy, but for me mechanics was pretty new. So I created Selenium bot that on schedule do some simple tasks. Since I was little addicted to game I created club and invite people to join it.
And I shared my bot with them. Reaction was very negative. People blame me for "hacking" and ruining game.
I never shared or published my bot either. Gaming communities will never understand. They wouldn't even entertain the notion that anti-cheating software could have false positives.
Are there enough of those guys vs people who will spend 10? I guess you need 1k of those people to make up one whale, but aren't there more little players by a lot?
I guess I don't have the data. Also maybe you can get both at once by targeting the big guy.
The vast majority of users do not spent anything. This is no problem for the game developers, as they can serve as cannon fodder for the few who do invest money.
I wonder what we could do to legally balance this. Out right banning is bit questionable. But weekly or monthly spending reports? Some total number shown regularly to players?
You could just cap the maximum spend of any one player in any game (or group of players). Even if it was some stupid high number like $1,000, it would limit the blast radius. Also, banning loot boxes of course. Totally can be done.
I think that the option in appstores to completely hide all games with in-app purchases would be enough. Like, if you don't know they exist, you can't get hooked. Probably banning advertising such games anywhere but on the AppStores, too.
I'm all for advertisement ban. Or at least limiting periods allowed. It gets either really funny, sad or scary however you take it when you see some games like Raid Shadow Legends advertised for years extremely prominently. At least when comparing to most other mobile titles... And then the places it is advertised. Like cooking channels...
I uninstalled Diablo Immortal last night as the pull to spend money was getting greater in my mind. I’ve been very sick for a couple weeks and basically bed bound, so this game was mindless and seemed fun. I got to “max level” (which is nothing of the sort the game essentially has infinite progression), and Back when I worked a dead end call center job working 80 hours a week I spent basically $100 a day on a Japanese free to play mobile game. It consumed my life and I was super depressed anyway. I felt that same feeling last night to just spend $100 “for fun” and realized how bad this game was going to be for me. These games manage to tickle that hyper competitive part of my brain that wants to “win at any cost”. So I’ll spend money I shouldn’t on a game.
It's not just the money though. Even if you remove pay-to-win and move to an ad supported model, these games are still engineered to maximally waste your time.
In fact, even games that are not designed to maximize your time spent in the game can be bad. The reward hits you get from games make you less likely to seek out other types of reward in your life. And even when you're not playing the game, your brain will be running a background task strategising how to maximize your results in the game.
Lootbox games: I don't understand why these kind of games are not getting banned or heavily restricted. There is absolutely not a single positive thing about these games. Moral doesn't matter.
it won't be available in the Netherlands or Belgium, because we have laws against them, now they just don't release the games here. I hope more of the EU will join us with similar laws so it will become impactful.
Not to defend lootbox game. But some positive thing: it makes some people's life less boring. Lootbox doesn't make games interesting. But lootbox generates money to hire good designer, programmer to create interesting games, at least for some players.
A more cynical perspective is that the designer and programmer are tasked with using all tricks possible to coerce their players to pay money. While the players spend a lot of time and money on it, their life is only less boring akin to an addict’s life being less boring when they’re on a high.
Investors love the monetization model and they get to decide what is just right and moral in our system of economics. The “fiduciary duty” to investors means sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves.
If you can make money, you MUST make it.
Someday I hope we find some way as a society to give value to other things. Its not really working out.
> sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves.
It would be great if we could stop spreading this misunderstanding. Fiduciary duty is a duty not to deliberately destroy shareholder value. Basically you can't set it on fire or loot it. It is not and has never been a duty to do absolutely anything anyone can possibly conceive of that will enrich the shareholders. Leaders are free morally and legally free to consider intangible factors that bear on the long term health and viability of the company and indeed do so every day.
> It is not and has never been a duty to do absolutely anything anyone can possibly conceive of that will enrich the shareholders.
This. Otherwise Apple and Disney would be forced to sell porn. But they don't because of their moral (one could argue prude) stance which makes less money for the investor.
Both companies target demographics that would oppose that.
Also the PR storm of such a reversal would significantly damage their stock prices. More importantly, stockholders suing either company to force them to reverse the policy would be an even bigger story.
It's not a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as possible, it's to maximize value for shareholders which means stock price rivals revenue.
Correct. Actually, the directors and shareholders are both bound by the company constitution or charter, as well as the various agreements between them. None of these documents ever say “make money at any cost”, and I suspect this whole fiduciary duty nonsense was pushed down from Wall Street, who of course stand to profit from the concept.
You just got to look at a company like Boeing and how it changed over the years. The fiduciary duty of the directors didn’t change; but the directors certainly did.
> The “fiduciary duty” to investors means sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves.
Larry Fink disagrees, and companies like Exxon have learned that not only is it not the only option, it's not an option at all. In fact, it's to the point that politicians like Mike Pence are talking about the big bad shareholders terrorizing companies.
> If you can make money, you MUST make it.
This is a common sentiment at all levels. Who wants to do good if they can make 3 times as much helping big tech sell ads?
There's a difference between what the law says they can and can't do, and what the forces of capital are set up to encourage them to do. The law may say you can't avoid costly waste disposal by dumping it into the rainforest, but the incentive (ie the profit motive) is there to skirt as close to breaking the law, and often blowing right past it.
I mean I don't think I even need to give examples of corporations breaking the law because they thought they could get away with it. Corporations, like any group of people, can fail to see the big picture. Short term profits for the risk of a big slap on the wrist is a gamble a lot of companies take.
Children have parents who know what their children are doing online. In any case, children don’t have access to credit cards or any other means to pay for in-game items.
It's like selling cigarettes to children using manipulative marketing specifically aimed at children like cute characters on the box and blaming the parents.
Every single statement in this post is a lie, its a bit of an achievement
1 - some children have no parents
2 - we have data to prove that parents don't know what their children do online, and never did. This is a complete fabrication
3 - children do have access to creditcards, both legally from the age of 14 or 16 depending on jurisdiction, and illegally
4 - there are many non-credit-card ways of paying for ingame items, including crypto
Anyway, given your views, I presume you are in favour of legalising cocaine and other drugs? Otherwise this whole line of argument would be hypocritical.
“The hope you feel when you are in love is not necessarily for anything in particular. Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns.” – Susan Griffin
If you walk around a low income area in the US, you’ll find loot boxes littered on the ground. We call them scratch off tickets. Getting the okay from the government to prey on your fellow citizens has precedent here.
It seems like the online discourse stalled out at, “Well Pokémon cards are legal, aren’t lootboxes basically the same thing?”. I have my own opinion on that but I never saw a consensus rebuttal form against that point.
Add to that lotteries, or pretty much anything that has random outcomes. Even if you don't gamble with cash, but something like Pokemon cards or digital items, there will always be secondary markets that let you cash out. If you want to ban these things, you'd have to ban all randomness.
You mean pay for loot box games? I ask because Diablo is one of the original grind for random drop games. At its core, Diablo has always been a gambling game even before micro transactions.
Yes, paying out of game currency for in game rng loot.
It has always had the gambling element though. While doing Meph runs I came to the conclusion that I wasn't playing because I was having fun, I was playing for the thrill of the loot drop rng.
Diablo was still enjoyable without the best stuff. And they never forced you to pay for anything to progress.
Diablo III made it even easier to get all the set gear (I have several sets on Switch and I only play casually) and it became about designing builds around gear that could survive the highest torment difficulties.
Other games like Borderlands with similar item systems also don't rely on the player getting the absolute best gear to progress either.
These pay-to-play games on the other hand, force you to hand over cash to progress and the fun often stops if you try to play for free.
Loot boxes/gacha games are the modern day cigarettes. Harmful, addictive, marketed to minors and very lucrative. Rest of the world needs to catch up to Belgium and Netherlands in banning these.
As someone used to work for Chinese mobile game companies. $110k sounds average for a pay-to-win game. But the game is new. Designers would create other slots to make money.
I played a game called Kingdom Conquest then Kingdom Conquest 2 that I could see exceeding this. The game reset every few months and you’d have to spend the money all over again. I quit after my “kingdom” and all the other English speaking people got brutally subjugated by our Japanese counterparts. We just didn’t spend nearly as much money as them and totally lost.
It really doesnt. Fans are just upset the Diablo name was stained with this practice. You are looking at this level of spend required for pretty much any mobile gacha game
It's not just the amount of money they try to get people to spend, it's some really obnoxious tactics, like NPCs telling you they "don't run a charity" (i.e. steering you into spending real money) and paid bonuses that you lose if you don't login daily (as opposed to free ones in most other games).
Neither of those sound unique to Diablo Immortal. Several games employ the "purchase a daily bonus" mechanic. Diablo also has several free login bonuses, like the daily kills and the blue crest (which granted, is a way to push purple crests, but it's still a daily free item).
The funny part about that statement, is my understanding of the international release of Lost Ark is that it's actually a lot friendlier than the original Korean version. You should really look into how Asian MMOs (especially Korean ones, and I think I've heard Chinese ones can be pretty bad too) work with monetization. This stuff is hardly new, and what we see internationally is generally tame in comparison. I remember almost 2 decades ago playing an international version of a Korean MMO (Dungeon Fighter Online) that had blatant "Buy this loot box to get cosmetics which give large stat buffs".
i spent $10k on a kickstarter game as far back as 2013, but i viewed it as an investment at the time. investing in the developers of the game being able to continue, as well as the assets maintained ~60-80% resale value for a time period. Sure it gave advantages in the game, but the game wasn't /designed/ around those advantages.
I think the part that's a relatively recent phenomenon is that games are designed with "free play" as an afterthought or even the game designed to push you away from it, instead of "free play" being the main design focus.
While I definitely don't like pay-to-win monetization style, what I find even more ridiculous is the laws at Belgium and Netherlands around loot boxes.
I mean, no one is forcing anyone to play a game or purchase a lootbox. Why ban a game mechanics for this? It hurts the (potential) players, let people decide for themselves FFS.
Casinos shouldn't be regulated too. If nobody is forcing anyone to attend into something (like going to a casino or playing a pay-to-win game) nobody should have the right to change or regulate the inner dynamics.
As long as the game doesn't clearly lie (e.g. telling a lootbox does something that it doesn't) everybody knows what a lootbox is. Playing the game is a voluntary action taken by an individual, just like going to a casino. They are responsible for their own actions, and blocking a certain demographics' (e.g. people in Netherlands) to access to a game/mechanics (e.g. Diablo Immortal + lootboxes) is fundamentally against people's freedom of choosing to play a game or not.
It's their money, they can spend $1m if they want to, on lootboxes.
Would I? Definitely not. But blocking someone who does want to from doing it, whereas it doesn't have negative effects to society (e.g. Doesn't affect anyone but the person themselves) is ridiculous.
>
Casinos shouldn't be regulated too. If nobody is forcing anyone to attend into something (like going to a casino or playing a pay-to-win game) nobody should have the right to change or regulate the inner dynamics.
In theory, humans are rational, and in theory, spherical cows are an excellent basis for economics.
Human brains have bugs, and these industries exploit them. It's predatory, and utterly reprehensible.
Human brains have bugs, and anyone going into a casino or a pay-to-win games know what they are going into. (If they don't that's their problem for not doing their own research and using common sense before putting their money)
Human brains also have a bug around sugar consumption. I've yet to see selling people sugar or sugar-containing foods/beverages being regulated.
Human brains also have a bug making many of them social media addicts.
Human brains have so many bugs. At the end of the day regulating these businesses will hurt more people who voluntarily want to be involved than saving potential addicts.
The real solution is never preventing people from doing things (of course as long as they affect only the person and not the others' rights), instead, it's educating.
If those governments placed their efforts into educating the people about addiction mechanics of those games/casinos etc. instead of blocking/regulating altogether, it would be much more beneficial than blocking people from their own decisions.
> Human brains have bugs, and anyone going into a casino or a pay-to-win games know what they are going into. (If they don't that's their problem for not doing their own research and using common sense before putting their money)
"It's OK if people's lives are intentionally ruined purely for corporate profits, so long as it's at least partly those people's fault. They shouldn't let themselves be tricked."
> Human brains also have a bug around sugar consumption. I've yet to see selling people sugar or sugar-containing foods/beverages being regulated.
By the way, San Francisco taxes sugary drinks and requires them to have a warning label.
> The real solution is never preventing people from doing things (of course as long as they affect only the person and not the others' rights), instead, it's educating.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps it's best to find a balance between them?
This is like saying people ought to be free to sell meth on the corner because you are smart enough to avoid addiction. Societies have good reason to ban things that are a net negative to society.
There is an argument for decriminalizing drug possession. The same argument in no way holds for drug dealing. The price would come down and availability would skyrocket as would the problems that stem from use.
> Casinos shouldn't be regulated too. If nobody is forcing anyone to attend into something (like going to a casino or playing a pay-to-win game) nobody should have the right to change or regulate the inner dynamics.
This is, of course, a position that is yours to hold. But I do hope that you recognize that it's quite a small, fringe one. It's a bit strange to use a fringe opinion about casino regulation as the stepping stone for an implication that loot boxes shouldn't be regulated.
You emphasize personal responsibility, but most of the world doesn't have that on the top of their societal values[0]. And one person's problematic gambling, as any other addiction, definitely impacts others, similar to how substance abuse or any other addiction really[1].
> Playing the game is a voluntary action taken by an individual, just like going to a casino.
The same argument can be made for other regulated activities like drinking alcohol or smoking (whether you agree or not, that's how it is in a lot of places today). Those are voluntary activities too.
> whereas it doesn't have negative effects to society
Addiction _does_ have negative effects on society, which is why these rules get introduced. It looks like this ban [1] is enforcement of gambling laws, because the loot is transferrable it's deemed to have value. I'm curious in this case to know how much of an impact banning these particular games actually has though.
People put tens of thousands of hours into these sorts of games though to get equipment. Put that same time into a minimum wage job and we’re approaching the same amount of money. Seems relatively fair.
Those sports memorabilia are at least traded on a market, and thus hold and retain that "investment". Not that sports memorabilia make much sense to me either, but at least you get something of proven value.
I regularly play games with gambling (gacha) mechanics and I love them. The short bursts of fun are exactly what I'm looking for in my current busy life. I have nothing against this model of monetization. Gambling is fun. Casinos are fun. I am not a big spender by any means, but I've probably spent ~$2k on these kind of games over the past two years or so. I don't regret it, and for me the fun is in figuring out how to maximize the value of my spending by doing the math for different types of purchases, sometimes even coding up simulations.
The problem starts when it's unregulated and you are tricking kids, or people who are not educated about probability, into spending their money in casinos, and use dozens of psychological tricks to do so and obfuscate purchases. Just like it's easy for kids to get addicted to social media like Instagram, it's easy and dangerous to get addicted to gambling (especially when you see your friends or popular streamers doing it). I believe all of these games should be 18+, at the very least, and come with a big warning sign.
The problem with gambling is that it taps into the dopamine system in ways that people are not aware of, even if they know about probabilities.
The effect is cumulative, and the more the person gambles, the more they will gamble, take risks, create unbalance and spend money.
Now, just like with anything related to dopamine, many people will only have a mild effect. E.G: I've played dota for a while, and never went into full spending mode.
Like you, I think it's ok to gamble once in a while, to pay for the game. After all, it's fun, and the game provides pleasurable moments, but does cost a lot of resources to develop. It's fair to give money to the company making it: after all, other games may be paid up to $60, DLC not included, while free to play are always up to date.
Yet, it's very difficult to evaluate if the tactics used by the game for gambling are twisted or not, and if the game target is going to be abused or not.
For this reason, I do think they should be heavily regulated, not just about the age, but about the nature, and intensity, or the gambling mechanism in place.
I work on video games (not on the design side but programming) and had to implement some on those systems on several mobile games. I agree with the comment above that it’s hard to draw the line between gambling addiction and à faire amount of random that brings fun to a game. Diablo 2 has already those kinds of random behavior to retain your attention and trigger dopamine rushes but without trying to grab cash from you.
The only solution to me is legal regulation, companies won’t listen as it brings money and most people like to play them. Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.
I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally and that other big countries will follow (like Korea, Japan and USA) to stop this trend and force designer to find better mechanics.
Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy. Nowadays with all the free services, it’s harder to make users pay for something they can get for « free » elsewhere. So it’s a complicated issue.
> Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.
The problem with battle passes is that they rely on you having a massive player base, and require an incredible amount of effort to develop and keep running. For a game like diablo that's clearly not a problem but for anything that's not a top 10 game on their platform it is
> I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally
I don't think this (specific) categorization is necessarily the right approach. The problematic part with casino style games and gambling in general is that cashing out provides a real money incentive, which is not present here. Calling these games gambling is kind of like calling piracy theft - the intention is right but there's an important difference. We haven't got a category for them yet.
> Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy.
On one level yes. On the other, f2p games are popular for a reason. Excellent games providing a social experience has a network effect, and if your conversion rate is 2% you don't succeed as a game by monetising better, you succeed by increasing your audience. A f2p game could be a profitable game if the active playerbase all paid $2-3 each but the _second_ you introduce a barrier there you lose many players who won't pay, their friends who might pay etc etc.
I don't think you can compare these mechanics to heroin, which is physically addictive. A fairer comparison is social media and timelines/newsfeeds, which use very similar mechanics, including randomness, to give people their dopamine rush and make them come back. Hence all this social media addiction we have. The main difference is that no money is (directly) involved there, only indirectly through ads.
How do you stack up this opinion (ban 'immoral' video games) with the idea that drug prohibition is widely considered a spectacular failure?
Banning games like this will only drive the whales into black markets, which are more expensive, more dangerous, and benefit criminal enterprises by definition.
Many of the deaths from heroin, for example, are due to contamination with fentanyl (which boosts the potency). A company who was liable to their customers (ie: not a criminal enterprise) would be much less incentivized to lace their product, and if they did, there would be someone to prosecute instead of an entire black market to wag a finger at.
Anyways, I agree, this is an extremely exploitative design. What I don't agree on is using legal regulation to shape society into something moral. Historically, that's only made things worse.
You can run the same kind of analysis on different game mechanics and strategies on games not designed to rip you off. They actually tend to be far more interesting because gambling games rarely have any meaningful degree of complexity and the singular strategy you are actually optimizing for is how much you have to sink into the game to succeed something you can probably figure out for a given game in about 30 seconds of analysis.
Basically you have a bad habit not that far off from smoking cigarettes that will probably eventually lead to dangerous overspending the first time you have an economic downturn at the same time as emotional stress. Despite such games being in general tasteless and boring you have convinced yourself its "fun" because you have trained your brain to release dopamine when you do it and can't tell the difference being joy and dopamine the same way a crack addict can't tell the difference between chemical stimulation and actual joy.
At least with actual gambling I have theoretical chance, at least momentarily to actually win money... With lootboxes outside Valve and maybe some others there is no chance to get it back.
With $100 a month you can do a lot of things. (And I'm not even talking about the regions of the world where you could survive a month with that amount). Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!
Those gambling games are extremely overpriced in comparison!
But they still make that money. Guess how: By addiction, and other psychological tricks to make the price seem OKisch, even it's absolutely not.
Even the most expensive game productions could make a good revenue back than just by charging a one time fee of $40 to $60.
Now with those gambling games they made $100 a month on you… Continuously.
The whole business model is a ripoff, clearly immoral, and should get banned completely ASAP.
> Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!
I don't see the difference. Whether I pay a "subscription fee" of $100 per month or I buy two new games per month, why does it matter? Why do you think that buying two games a month is necessarily more fun than paying a subscription fee for the same 2-3 games? For me it isn't, and there aren't even enough games I would be interested in buying in the first place.
The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game?
As a different example - I'm sure it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to max out your characters and gear in Genshin Impact, but I've played very enjoyable 100h+ and it's perfectly fine even if you don't have the max ascended characters and gear, I have a feeling those are there basically for the wales to spend money on but aren't necessary for gameplay in any way(well maybe for some crazy hardcore end game content, but as always, that seems to be something 0.0001% of the playerbase enjoys).
My point is - the game can still be enjoyable and worth playing even if you can't get the endgame gear. Is that the case here? I don't know.
A big part of Diablo (or at least of Diablo 3) once the story is finished is to go as far as possible in the post game features.
Most people I know who have played Diablo would tell me their rift tier, paragon level (might be a different term in English but they play in french so that's the term I know).
So for new players, it might not be that big of a deal, but for players wanting to play more Diablo the game is telling them to cough up as much as they can
Well yes, the question is, when is a hardcore player going to run into this limit? After 20 hours? 50? 200? The further it is along the line, the fewer people it's going to affect. If you can have a great experience for the first 100 hours, that's still pretty good in my book.
> The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game?
Technically no but Diablo and ARPGs in general are all about items and for a very large class of players who enjoy this genre it's all about min / maxing your character, or at the very least getting improved items / skills / kill speed as you progress. Tying items into a cash shop in the way it's been done here feels really dirty, like it's going against the entire ethos of the genre.
This is partly why Path of Exile has been wildly successful for almost 10 years (it's another ARPG). Their cash shop is focused on cosmetics and quality of life improvements. You can't just buy items or things that make your character more powerful.
The only reason I bring up PoE is to demonstrate it's possible to create a long running profitable ARPG with cosmetic cash shop items in a free to play game. I do know things like stash tabs are borderline and debatably a kind of essential item but I'm ok with that, you can get very far without thinking about them and you purchase them once and you're good to go for years. It was also like $15 from what I remember, it's been a bunch of years since I played so I forgot. I do know I spent around $40-50 total on that game on various quality of life things and it felt like money well spent. I was happy to support GGG. In fact, I ran into a billing situation once and they gave me free coins to compensate a customer support pain point (which I didn't ask for) but I didn't want their work to go unpaid so I ended up purchasing more to match what they gave me.
Not nickel and diming your customers and not preying on weakness goes a long ways for building up a loyal fanbase. I haven't played PoE in years but I feel like they won me over as a customer for life. I didn't think it was possible to ruin the Diablo franchise more than the original release of Diablo III but I think Diablo Immortal may have won in that department.
This take seems off to me specifically in you last paragraph. Whether it is MTX in the form of cosmetics or p2w mechanics both are predatory to people with addictions to games and kids.
I feel like people are upset about p2w mechanics in the game but at the same time say "I'm fine with cosmetic mtx" which makes the whole argument read to me as you are upset that people want to use money to win and that means they shouldn't so you will virtue signal like I care about people spending $10k. If you as an individual don't like p2w that's fine. I get that, but let's stop acting like we care about the virtues of it when kids are spending $1k on worthless Marvel skins in Fortnite or Roblox and there is little uproar about it... We just don't like going into a game where a rich person can beat us, which is understandably frustrating. The other virtue outrageous is just disingenuous imho.
Your take is even more off since you didn't see the blindingly obvious difference: having a choice in your game progression.
- Cosmetics are a choice. They don't affect your progress in any way.
- Bought character power is not a choice. You can happily play X amount of hours but at one point you'll hit a brick wall you can't overcome without money. And no don't tell me that "eventually you will", because elementary psychology says people get discouraged and quit if their effort isn't rewarded until a certain time threshold. That time is much less than what a F2P will allow you.
I don't know if you deliberately missed the point or you can't see something that's easy to notice.
What point are you making? I'm making a point that you can spend $100k on cosmetics in Roblox or Fortnite, and people do spend thousands of dollars over time almost unknowingly. I assume you would think this is bad right?
If manipulative psychology is the issue at hand than quantitatively speaking if you spend 10k on cosmetics or 10k on p2w through manipulative psychology what is the ethical difference?
If you think I'm arguing for a side you are mistaken. I just don't think people actually care about people who are victims of this. They just don't like p2w games, and that's fine. I'm just calling a spade a spade.
Also I feel like you are going down a rabbit hole of being gated on a game from being top 10 on a leaderboard, because the story mode and making it to level 60 seem completely accessible with no money. This is kind of a crazy path to walk down especially for PC gamers, who seem to be the most outraged, where affluence is definitely an advantage even if the game isn't the one making the money off it. For instance, the difference between a refresh rate of 250hz vs 60hz on a competitive FPS game. Try and tell me there isn't an advantage between a $800 gaming rig vs a $10k gaming rig...
Of course I agree with that. I was under the impression that we're not discussing whether addiction is bad -- it's widely known that it is.
I was arguing that "Minecraft and Roblox and millions of other games feed off the weak minds of virtual cosmetic addicts" does not at all make the pay-to-win model of other games okay. Because it did seem like you went off on a whataboutism road.
That the world is screwed up doesn't mean we have to give up. We can try and improve little corners of it.
Yeah I feel you. I don't think I was whataboutism-ing. The parent comment said PoE is fine because it's just cosmetics in game that you can buy. I guess I should have said you could spend thousands of dollars on PoE on cosmetics, but I'm just stating that one isn't better than the other. The main topic to me is that people are saying they don't like p2w games, and it feels like a weak argument if you say you don't like manipulative psychology in MTX but you actually are fine with it in regard to cosmetics because it doesn't impact your experience.
I just get this vibe that people don't think through their stance these days. They just want what they want, and use ethics to support their point when they don't really have a consistent sense of morality to speak of.
MTX are not inherently evil, for example I fully support one-time unlocks with MTX. It's a fair business model. (Although in these cases they might not be called MTX at all; probably "expansions" or "DLCs".)
And the thing with cosmetics is that they're opt-in; whoever decides to never buy will also never be negatively affected -- which is not true for pay-to-win.
I guess that's why there's this "evilest, eviler, evil and less evil" scale of game MTX.
I personally would prefer all cosmetics be farmable but I'm okay with having those be also available for buying.
> I just get this vibe that people don't think through their stance these days. They just want what they want, and use ethics to support their point when they don't really have a consistent sense of morality to speak of.
I thought it through and my stance is I do think there's a very big difference between p2w and cosmetic only cash shops from a moral stand point in the context of Diablo Immortal and PoE.
I never felt like PoE was trying to push me into buying something. The purchases I've made (0 cosmetic btw, it's been all quality of life things) were on my own terms, I didn't feel manipulated in the slightest. There was no gambling mechanic, it was a straight "I give them money and they give me stash tabs" transaction, there's no catch. I don't need to login every day to keep them, they exist until PoE decides not to run PoE anymore.
The above is a lot different than Diablo Immortal trying its hardest to convince you to buy something because it directly alters the core mechanics of an ARPG which is to make your character stronger by trying to get you to purchase items that make your character stronger. The whole system is set up to make you constantly evaluate "well, should I grind this out 8 hours a day for 4 months or spend $50 to have it in a few days?", and it's painfully obvious.
These elements are also pushed into the game's UI so it's in your face all the time. They also took it 1 step further and introduced a lot of randomness into your real money purchases and they self destruct if you stop logging into the game. I was trying to compare this to a "real life company" like a casino or car salesman but somehow even they seem better from a morality standpoint when compared directly to Diablo Immortal.
So yes, in my mind there is a big morality difference between these 2 games in how they operate their cash shop. One of them feels like inconceivably high pressure sales tactics designed to maximize profits at no cost while the other feels like a game that does everything in its power to kill you with kindness by providing value through entertainment in the game so you end up making purchases because you like the game and want to support the developers, what you get out of that is more like warm fuzzies and some quality of life enhancements (or cosmetic things if that's what you like).
These are all valid reasons to dislike p2w games. I do think that some of the p2w aspects are more complex/confusing than in previous games, but for instance losing paid for content because of time constraints isn't a novel idea. That's literally what a battle pass is. PoE has Vault Pass. You have to log in and play to receive those awards. You pay for the opportunity to get them and there is a time constraint if you don't play enough. Some games more than others make the battle pass easier to achieve with dailies.
That said you are addressing that you "feel" like it's not as bad. However, I would argue that PoE wouldn't be still running so successfully without whales that may or may not be victims. You are, like many sane human beings, reaping the benefits of a well funded development team by whales. Does that make it ethically right because you don't "feel" it or see it as egregiously? Should a skin ever cost $50?
Like most things you feel it when it impacts your experience, which is very clear if you aren't a spender in a p2w game. If it didn't impact your experience you don't care hence why you think one is worse than the other. It's about how you feel, and that is the problem today. It's hard to solve a problem when people are inconsistent about where they stand on an issue. Do they care about victims and these MTX tactics or do they just not like p2w games. Personally, I don't think p2w games should be illegal much like I don't think gambling should be illegal, but I do think there needs to be more regulation about predatory MTX especially in regard to children across the board.
> It's about how you feel, and that is the problem today.
An opinion is often based on feel. For context I've put in thousands of hours into D2 back in the day, not nearly as much into D3 and quite a lot into PoE but no where near as much as D2. With Diablo Immortal I haven't seen this type of backlash over a cash shop and how it ties into core game mechanics in my life of gaming.
I also can't speak for PoE's finances or how they remain in business. I'm sure there's whales out there but I don't consider that my business, so you are right in that their actions don't affect me. If someone wants to pay $50 for a cosmetic skin and the game makes it available then so be it, for me personally that immediately gets classified as optional so it doesn't affect my experience playing the game. I never get the urge to buy those things because I see others having it. I also don't make assumptions about why they bought it (to support the game, they have addiction problems, etc.) because that's not my battle and there's nothing I can do about that in the end anyways.
My philosophy has been to apply a pretty basic set of rules in that if a game does what I think are predatory things then I don't play it, buy it or contribute to its parent company's profits. If I like a game and it feels reasonable to me in how its priced (1 time purchase, cosmetic cash shop, etc.) then I will happily support it. Everyone's rules here are different.
> The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game?
Yes, at least in those types of games. Gear improvement is a big part of the game progression. Before microtransactions that just meant spending ungodly amounts of time in those games. Nowadays it means bankrupting yourself.
But it still doesn't answer my question - obviously you have gear progression without spending any money, just like there is in Genshin Impact. So at what point do you reach a point where you literally can't enjoy the game any more without spending any money? Because if it's 100h+ like for me in Genshin, then I don't think there's any problem for 99.999% of players. Yes the option to spend money and get crazy high gear is there for the wales, but is the game itself enjoyable even if you don't do this? Because I know as a fact that Genshin is. Would love to know if the same applies to Diablo.
if doing the same exact rift over and over for weeks in order to unfreeze your game progress is something you find enjoyable then yes. but realistically I don't think there exist that much people who would enjoy this.
oh and every 15 min or so you're spammed with a notification telling you take this one is lifetime opportunity to help if only for give them your credit card! if you don't hurry you'll miss out on this offer forever.
I've played less than an hour of genshin so I can't compare it since I don't know much about it. but as someone who played other games where you might need to farm for better stuff, this is nothing like that.
> if doing the same exact rift over and over for weeks in order to unfreeze your game progress is something you find enjoyable then yes. but realistically I don't think there exist that much people who would enjoy this.
It's been awhile since I played D3, but hasn't this been the model for years?
i mean, that's d2 gameplay in a nutshell. i mean, cow farming, baal farming, diablo farming... if you played any diablo, you had to do the same content non stop to get better gear. and sometimes that means weeks of farming for a small upgrade.
I disagree, the most enjoyable experience in Diablo 2 is probably during lvl 25-40 (/99), roughly corresponding to the acts 4 and 5 of the story of the first difficulty level and the 2nd difficulty level (out of 3).
in this game ? absolutely game progress is limited by it. can't complete a quest if your combat rating is not high enough and the only way to improve it is to upgrade your items.
how do you upgrade your items ? by upgrading their rank and the rank of the gems they have attached to them.
so how do you do that ? well either directly pay money, or pay money for for stuff needed to to challenge elder rift so that you can drop the resources necessary. or if you really don't want to do that challenge the rift without the resources and have a really shitty drop rate of alternative resources that can be converted into runes that can be used to make said gems. that would mean that you needs months of repetitive farming.
oh an the first fixes of the paid drug is handed to you for free so that you get a taste of how great of a drug it is. then once you're dry of it they'll keep giving it you at ever decreasing doses to keep you crazed for you fix until you crack and give in.
my experiences with game is that it was enjoyable until lvl 35 which you hit in 2 days of playing and just hit an impenetrable wall at lvl 42 where it meant full time grinding or paying in order for the story to progress at an acceptable pace.
I'll just remove it from my phone or maybe play with reverse engineering it to see how hard it is to make a bot. (on the first day there was already one spamming chat)
I gave up on plants versus zombies 2 quickly when it became obvious the game was just prompting me to spend money at every turn. Granted, some people say this was mitigated eventually.
I think games where you have an option to pay for dlc at the start screen are fine. It's being constantly pressured that I consider to be a breach of trust.
Every game menu feels like a casino now. Even the ones with no microtransactions put the trapping of P2W in. Cluttered flashy menus. When you get a drop instead of just giving you the item, they give you a chest with an unskippable flashy animation when you open it. P2W Casino is a horrible art-style, I don't know why conventional games are copying it. I've refunded games on steam after just seeing the menu.
I think we just aren't the intended customer for a lot of games. I mean, the casino style is used because it works for casinos as well. I'd rather just drink while watching sports in the comfortable leather chairs than playing slots and waiting forever for a drink on the casino floor, personally.
Which ones did you return? I think there are a decent number of single a developer games out there that have good progression systems. Hades, Dicey Dungeons, Golf Story...
>I gave up on plants versus zombies 2 quickly when it became obvious the game was just prompting me to spend money at every turn. Granted, some people say this was mitigated eventually.
The funny thing is the unmitigated, most pay2win version of Plants Versus Zombies 2 - the game at launch - was accidentally one of the most amazing and intense gaming experiences for people who never spent anything. For people who just really enjoyed a vastly more challenging version of PvZ.
I loved the first game but it was never a challenge, it was rare to fail a level more than once. But the levels in the second were passable if you spent zero premium currency (even not spending any of premium currency they gave you for free for logging in) - they were just very very challenging. Passing every single one required novel strategies and slowly revising, eking out a few more tiny edges each time you try, combined with absolute precision in execution, until somehow the level was passable.
I'm not actually sure every single level was passable by not even spending the currency they gave you for free, I never quite finished it, but I got through most of them! When I logged in to finish the remaining levels later, they had made them all way easier in an effort to respond to p2w criticism so I never had a chance.
Except they later screwed it up by adding plant and zombie level ups. And you can't even play the old version any more ! That's another issue with those "pay not to grind" games...
I think that's a testament to how micro transactions can ruin the balance of a game as you never know who the difficulty is designed for. With SMTV, Atlus added a dlc to make it easier to level your characters. So did they deliberately pad the leveling in order to make you buy this dlc? Or are you paying for an easy mode? Who knows.
I'm wondering the same. D3 was seasonal grinds, and this new game seems to capture the same season grind. So far at least, it looks like paying lessens the grind, but rift grinding is what Diablo has been about for years.
> The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game?
It maybe not, the same way it's not necessary to own a yacht IRL to enjoy life, but why should we bring inequality in games as well?
Multiplayer games are a meritocratic dream that is probably unattainable IRL, as only the most skilled (cheaters aside) get to the top of the scoreboard.
It kills my fun to know that even this small haven of meritocracy is changing to become like the real world: the wealthy have better opportunities than I do, independently from skills or talent.
I've played about 12 hours of Diablo Immortal. I haven't spent any money, but also haven't really looked into why I would want to do it. The game is already pretty easy, and I feel like spending for better gear would make it almost non-sense, where I can just stand around while my minions kill the enemies. If they wanted to encourage micro-transactions, they should have made it a lot more challenging, so that you'd actually you know, die sometimes.
If you're interested in PvP, you must pay in order to be competitive. Whales will simply have 50% more health and damage than you. So if PvP is your jam, you're shit out of luck if you don't also want to pay a ton of money to succeed at it.
The whole feature is effectively walled off to f2pers.
I don't have too many compunctions about games whose revenue models gate the top 5% of possible progress. If Diablo 3 had a feature where you need to pay money to unlock the last 10% of each primal ancient item (so F2P would only get 90% perfect rolls), I don't think my game play experience would change in the least and I've put a lot of hours into that game.
Games should not be about wringing money out of people - but games need to get revenue somewhere. Asking everyone to pay before playing at all is not a clearly better (or more moral) system.
The worst thing (for me) about this is that whenever I go to the Apple App store I get bombarded will all these "games" that just try to make my life actively worse.
I don't understand why they pollute their brand like that.
The trouble is that sometimes in-app purchases means the game is a demo, and you use the in app purchase to buy the full game. There are good games that follow this model that you’ll miss out on if you filter out in app purchases.
This is made by the company that gave us Warcraft III reforged. A money grab that made the game worse and ruined the already existing game. they have no goodwill.
Because of the money. Games account for approximately 70 percent of the entire App Store’s revenue, and 98 percent of in-app purchase revenue. Apple is not very motivated to stop these practices because it makes them many billions of dollars.
I really like the concept of [Playpass](https://play.google.com/intl/en_au/about/play-pass/), for Android, it gives you a tonne of really good games that aren't pay to win, have offline support and are fun. I don't really play many games anymore, especially on mobile, but I found a few when I went away on holiday and wanted to play a few games here and there when travelling.
If Microsoft wouldn't buy ATVI (at a higher price than the current stock price), I would have sold my shares months ago. I don't have any hope for ATVI anymore. Instead of providing value to their customers - the gamers, they squeeze it for shareholders. I doubt, Diablo 4 will be any different.
I'm glad I don't have time to play video games. The industry is getting worse and worse every year. (I thought my WoW addiction back in the day was bad - but at least the spending was capped at 13 Eur/month).
Sometimes I see ads for mobile games and I get curious about them. Then I go to youtube and watch the playthrough videos and realize just how much of my life and money I could waste on what turns out to be 100s of hours of mostly random button mashing. The Kim Kardashian video game playthrough is a good one if you really want to dig deep into the depths of consumerist nihilism[1].
Anyway, doing the playthrough, or watching a video game speed run is enough to spoil the whole game for me and make me not want to play it. Problem solved. Also, there's all the free to play retrogames out there which are great if you just have endless amounts of free time. I guess I just don't get gambling, especially when you can't actually win money.
For me, Blizzard has always been the WarCraft 1-2 and StarCraft 1-2 company. Never liked the rest of their output over the years.
That said, it's a shame the company has been reduced to a gambling shop. Sign of the times, I guess. The writing was on the wall 10 years ago but I am no longer scared about my hobby. So what if the big guys all do lootboxes. Don't buy from them.
Activision used to have stellar catalogue 15 years ago. Now look at them. It's all junk
In-game skins are going nowhere, let a government force the company into creating a package with however many skins they want (maybe based on prior sales or realistic expectations) per season (whatever their season looks like) and walk away from it. You know they won't be able to add more.
Because what's stopping them now to change the decimal point however they see fit.
I suppose the same could be done with progression (where the real money is). Either make it tradeable somehow and lock it down, or outright ban it and allow for more expensive but regulated skins be the only funding capital.
If I can find more progress than in my real life, 110k is a fair trade. (joke)
The flip side is, no matter how the general public criticize or hate it, it works and at times, more profitable than most startups nowadays.
The game was delayed for more than one whole year as they try to fix things up, 110k is probably an optimized figure.
That say, the game is enjoyable better than most mobile rpg but brings nothing new to the table. I would prefer it to be a pay once and for expansion though.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadI know some countries banned games like this but I wonder, if these games get banned why not ban casinos too?
Clash royale is sad, becouse it is a extremely good game if it were not for the pay to win leveling mechanics. I used to play it alot but it became too frustrating meeting bad players with low ELO but high level cards that you essentially couldn't win over unless they messed up bad.
Edit: To level up all cards in Clash Royale you also have to spend a silly amount of money. Exponential costs.
Far, far, quicker to get cards to tournament standard.
It costs 10 gems to play a challenge and you can buy 500 gems for 5$ so that's 50 challenges, say you get at least 7 games per challenge so 350 games for 5$ where only skill matters. I'd say that's not exploitative.
Of course if you care about your rank and having a Big Number in a silly mobile game then yes you either have to play a lot or pay a lot of money.
My secondary clash account is staying as Level 1, ie with no upgraded cards at all, and I regularly beat level 10/11 players.
If you're addicted to spending money online irresponsibly I doubt there is any law that will protect you, there's millions of ways to spend money to get gratification online.
These games are explicitly designed to prey on people prone to gambling-like addictions.
I'm also for legalizing all drugs but that's another discussion
If it was, do you think it would stop them?
you could argue they provided entertainment in return.
I played a wee bit and it didn't seem that bad. You can pay to upgrade your gear, but that seems entirely pointless in an ARPG. The whole game is a grind to get better gear! Once you actually have perfect gear, why keep playing?
My issue with the game is that it lacks depth after having spent far too much time playing Path of Exile. There aren't that many possible builds, and the game basically tells you exactly how to build if you want to do PvP or PvE. As far as I can tell, those builds are the meta ones, so the designers are forcing the meta.
But as a game to run in and kill some monsters without thinking too much, it seems fine. Which makes sense since it's a mobile game.
[0] https://www.twitch.tv/wudijo
Edit: Or right now since it's early you can out-skill other people while they're figuring it out and soon the people who spend more will have both skill and raw power and will dominate
Does it suck that you can pay to get stronger and make the game unfair? Yep, but I'm not convinced it matters if you're playing casually. None of the pay to win stuff changes the game play drastically. You're only really increasing the amount of damage you do, it's not like Path of Exile where some of the really rare items can enable a new type of build or trading card games where certain cards let you build different decks with different playstyles.
Personally, I see no incentive to buy anything. I can clear a level 12 challenge rift, grind slowly and slowly clear higher level ones. Or I could spend a bunch of money and get to do level 20 challenge rifts or whatever. At which point you hit the wall and either pay money or keep grinding. But since the game is all about grinding, why pay to skip forward and grind more?
If I go against a player two levels ahead of me, I can be pretty much sure that he bought his deck and since he's going against me not some higher rank I know I have chance of winning if I can outwit materially stronger opponent.
When I'm going against someone with lower level then I can be sure that this guy has very carefully crafted deck and is a very skilled player.
But yeah, the "loot boxes" that are mostly gambling have been banned in many countries because they're targeted at young children.
This seems like naïve speculation to me. Think about the number/scaling of this. It would give them a few months worth of income at best?
The sadder truth is that they're exploiting escapism and maladaptive coping (addiction, gambling) in people who also use escapism to cope/relax. Often times, those same people in desperate need of escapism are there because they struggle in real life, often financially too.
So, the little reprieve they get from gaming negative impacts their physical lives.
Diablo Immortal is a caricature of the depravity most games have become. A few games like Overwatch are not P2W, but even they have lootbox mechanics for cosmetic skins (you get boxes for leveling up and challenges, as you play, though). Blizzard literally can't help themselves.
There's an increasing number of players who expect that either a) a game will take unlimited money and feed them dopamines in return, or b) they never have to pay a dime for anything because they're fully subsidized by the addicts. I have conflicted feelings about administrative regulation of this stuff, I just hate that things are this way, especially as an independent game dev.
(I'll do the hustle - my first game Pawnbarian is a chess-flavored puzzle roguelike. On mobile it's an ad-free demo with a single $7 IAP for the whole thing. Out on Steam and Android, iOS will follow soon. j4nw.com/pawnbarian)
They don't have to. Repeatedly unearthing cow-clickers whom you can milk for $10'000 before sending them into financial ruin sounds like a much more viable business strategy to me than trying to build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click.
I think you're putting wealthy folks on way too high of a pedestal. The wealthy aren't some hyper-rational, utility-maximizing robots. They're people with likes and dislikes like any other. Being a whale for a very rich person or a very rich family is a drop in the bucket in terms of their net worth. Plenty of people can keep their degeneracy to a budget.
Does the same pattern hold true for casinos? Or are the bulk of the profits coming from the poor SOBs who blow every paycheck there?
sorry, but that's just sickening.
Certainly more offspring was normal, the further back you go. So wealth division could more easily happen.
But most cultures had the idea of the "first born", the official heir... for this very reason! Most of the loot, holdings, tended to go the eldest.
Yet the proverb is historical, as all proverbs are, and my response was intended to refute the dissolution of wealth, historically, by spreading it too thin.
Our ancestors didn't do that.
Though your point is valid it's only part of the story.
I've seen many scions from China attending western universities in a state of decadence, barely focused on their course work, all too willing to live off their parents' past efforts, while driving expensive cars and walking around in clothes and accessories worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Even the "probably" is wrong. :)
They shouldn't be sold to children. They're not Kinda eggs nor LOL Surprise and should never be brushed off as surprise mechanics. They're glorified slot machines, through and through.
Of course that was caused because the app-"economy" was broken from day one on: You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those. So you have to make the software "free" and sell your user's data, or charge one or two bucks and use some other immoral scheme to get your actual costs covered.
On a broken market there are only broken products… Simple as that.
So now you're left with people who haven't tried better games, and with all the good-enough free ones, how can even a discounted price full game compete?
I'm not sure if that is strictly true. Prices did vary a lot in the beginning. However scale created a race-to-the-bottom situation for the exact reason you cited: most people wanted to pay less. The market was flooded with apps and games at the minimum price which created a strong expectation among the bulk of buyers.
Consumable IAP is what really enabled the gambling-like mechanics. That was discovered not long after the implementation of IAP and very quickly the game devs that converted to free + consumable IAP started making all the money. IIRC it was an open secret in mobile games many many years ago that the optimal strategy was to make the early game easy to cast a wide net, then slowly ramp up the pay-to-win mechanics to milk the whales as much as possible. You don't really care if everyone else quits - so long as most people get X% of the way through before they do. Then you tweak X% to optimize for catching the most whales.
The super critical aspect is the deliberate ramp. You have to get as many people into the early part of the funnel as possible so some of them will become invested enough to become whales. This also means you absolutely must make the game miserable for 90% of your players but only after they've made a significant investment.
Anyway...
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/summary?id=D00...
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/summary?id=D00002...
Whether or not this choice of mine is useful is hard to tell.
What kind of game was your friend working on? Whales do exist but they are not the bulk of the revenue
that's a very low bar to set...
In many jurisdictions they don't. And where they do, they're often very heavily regulated.
Gambling, by regulated design, rewards 45-49% of the time.
Diablo Immortal, by comparison, is designed to reward 0% of the time.
Casinos are highly regulated. Lootbox are not in most countries. And I'm pretty sure minors can't enter a casino even with their parent's credit card...
Made videogames with paid lootboxes 18+ only, problem solved.
Everyone has an addiction to something. You are lucky if its to something thats cheap and legal.
Of course, the best outcome is not to be addicted.
(I'm also not sure it's actually true, either - would depend on what metric you use)
As a Japanese gamer says, paying for games is like dining out. You get nothing useful after a good meal, and paying for games may as well be more useful.
In my country 16k/y is a median salary. It’s heavily influenced by 1 or 2 major cities - the rest of the country earns much less, 10k/y is considered to be a decent salary. So no, it is a huge amount of money.
Uh... the nutrition that your body needs to keep going? Is this a trick question?
Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself.
Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups reinforce each other's behavior. The goal is to get them to log in every day and invest in the game.
People pay money to uncap their progression. This turns these games into spending competitions: whoever spends the most money wins the game. The corporation is the only true winner of course.
I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed. The best part was my bot was statistically indistinguishable from a sufficiently addicted player due to the game's own design. I'd like to believe I helped destroy that game.
Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?
The problem is the one time I tried mobile games I eventually started waking up at 3 AM because that's when some timer resets. At some point I started wondering where my life went so wrong.
Then I started studying the design of these games and I realized they are designed to cause this sort of addiction and harm. They employ the same strategies as casinos and drug dealers. They straight up subvert the reward center of people's brains to the point they harm themselves and even destroy their own lives.
Software like uBlock Origin is so world changing they should be built into our operating systems in order to help destroy the revenue of these abusive corporations.
Cant believe you actually want to debate this.
A hobby like wood working doesn't push you to do woodworking every day and there are not people behind this non existing mechanism who design it like it.
Also normally a hobby costs money due to physical parts of that hobby. A software engineer as a hobby only needs some computer, would worker needs a metal saw.
The risk/benefit calculation of predatory gambling video games is overwhelmingly negative. It's really no big loss if they were to be outlawed straight up. We have much better games available for our enjoyment.
Look at organized sports, if you don’t show up enough times, you don’t get to play anymore.
It is human abuse.
Yes. This is more or less standard criteria for diagnosing mental disorders.
A. Persistent and recurrent problematic gambling behavior leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as indicated by the individual exhibiting four (or more) of the following in a 12-month period:
1. Needs to gamble with increasing amounts of money in order to achieve the desired excitement.
2. Is restless or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop gambling.
3. Has made repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop gambling.
4. Is often preoccupied with gambling (e.g., having persistent thoughts of reliving past gambling experiences, handicapping or planning the next venture, thinking of ways to get money with which to gamble).
5. Often gambles when feeling distressed (e.g., helpless, guilty, anxious, depressed).
6. After losing money gambling, often returns another day to get even (“chasing” one’s losses).
7. Lies to conceal the extent of involvement with gambling.
8. Has jeopardized or lost a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of gambling.
9. Relies on others to provide money to relieve desperate financial situations caused by gambling.
If the game is implimenting direct purchases, where you buy Item X for Y price then I feel regulation is unwarranted even in the context of harmful levels of purchasing
However if the game is using a loot box system where the play buy a "chance" to "win" an item they desire, then I think that should be considered a "game of chance" like a lottery or slot machine, under which there should be some regulation to require the disclosure of odds, how many times their is a payout, etc etc etc
Diablo seems to use a Loot Box system, not a direct pay system
The difference to older tech like mechanical slot machines is that the game records everything the player does, and can then drop a "discounted" special offer at the right time to maximize the likelihood of keeping the player hooked.
There is also no disclosure as to if the odds are manipulated on a per player basis, which I believe there are a few patents related to changing the "drop" rate based on player behavior, this is similar and can be combined with your comment about monitoring to drop a discount at the right time
In the context of Diablo, I can not find the Odds of their loot boxes anywhere published.
This is an incredibly simplistic view of the problem, on multiple dimensions.
On one dimension, a question of to what length should we give companies the right to harm people. Because if something is knowingly designed to take advantage of the study of psychology to hurt people then that’s what this is.
On another dimension, the person spending the money is typically hurting others (spouse, kids... business partners) at least as much, but frequently more, than they hurt themselves.
Giving companies the freedom to do things like this takes away our freedom to live without others harming us. Its really hard to understand why this is even debatable.
https://news.sky.com/story/sugar-tax-consumption-of-sugar-fr...
It wasn't liked by the right-wing government, even though they implemented it in the first place. They financed a report that investigated it's effectiveness, and then tried to bury it because it showed it worked as intended.
Quite the conundrum. On one hand, it’s a neat tool for class warfare, an occasion to have a laugh about those bums who cannot control themselves, and drone on about Protestant values and work ethic. On the other hand, some chums would make less money, and we cannot have that.
How much should we allow others to enrich themselves off the addictions/compulsions of others?
I always thought that was a compelling point even when I was a libertarian for one year as a uni freshman. That people should be able to consume what they want doesn't finish answering the question.
the current line is drawn at 18+ and non-chemical addiction, or light chemical addition like nicotine. It is worthy of debate, whether psychological addiction ought to be included.
My guide would be that if it causes external harm, then it should be regulated, where external harm is defined as harm that, while undertaking said activity, would befall a third, unrelated party.
Golf seems very similar to me. There's the random element. A friend described it as a feeling of continual frustration followed by a high when he hits a good shot.
You similarly can buy your way to 'success' with gadgets and training or investing more time.
There's the community of similar addicts that gather together and provide a social element and re-inforce each others addiction. People's marriages suffer to the degree that there is a term "golf widow" for someone who's lost their partner to the game.
But I can still see clear differences between golf clubs and casinos, and there's also similar differences between different mobile games. I feel it's worth delineating them, particularly as golf isn't constantly being replaced with a slightly modified version of golf that takes it 2% closer to being a Casino and casino's are heavily regulated for good reasons.
Golf is a game of 3D localization and mapping, wind analysis, projectile estimation, and fine-tune physique control...
If you are treating those elements as "random" you are missing large aspects of the game.
http://www.limitlessperformance.ca/blog/the-mental-patters-o...
> But the most accurate and refreshing response received to this day has been… addictive! And if you think about it clearly, what better one-word description encompasses all that we know of this exhilarating sport known as Golf. There is no description more encompassing of a sport such as golf!
> And this is best described by a psychological principle referred to as “intermittent reinforcement”. Intermittent reinforcement is the formula foundation for all forms of addition. Take gambling with a slot machine as an example. You lose, lose, lose, lose and suddenly you win! And yet, despite the guaranteed repetitive loss and the incidental win, people love to play slot machines for hours. Why is intermittent reinforcement so powerful? In its simplest translation, the reinforcement pattern that blooms into addiction must entail of high levels of reward and amusement without the predictability factors which can trigger boredom. It‟s the unpredictability of when the reward arrives that draws and engages people into the activity. The rewards that are distributed intermittently trigger and release significantly higher doses of a pleasure inducing hormone known as dopamine, than the same rewards distributed on a more consistent (predictable) basis.
> Can you think of another activity that features in more intermittent reinforcement than golf? No matter what level of golf you are playing, it is guaranteed that you are going to hit more shots that feel miss-struck than well-struck. Some may argue that the pros hit the ball well on almost every shot, but on the contrary the better you are the higher the standard to what constitutes a shot that delivers maximum satisfaction and reward. To a highly skilled golfer, maximum satisfaction is gained through a perfectly struck and executed shot. While by the same token, for the double-bogey player, a drive that is struck decently and stays in the fairway is also a cause for celebration.
You are allowed to be in any number of relashionships with other people, and some of them can be pretty weired.
However when someone is manipulating you and pimping you out, thats different.
You have the rirgt not to be stabbed, stolen from, or manipulated.
(If you think about that a bit it follows that the smartest course of action is to break the ToS early and often!)
This is basically the “recurring revenue” model, it’s the monthly packages sold in Yostar or Mihoyo games.
Sure, people who get easily caught in competitive schemes will have a hard time to stop, and will get caught in nightmarish situations. The same as people who can’t stop drinking and become alchoholic over time. This is a nefarious effect that we should pay attention to, but a super small minority becoming alcoholics doesn’t mean alcohol industry itself is a conspiracy to produce them. Moderate people exist. We should find ways to to protect the vulnerables, but it also means coming to terms with the nuances of the situation.
I also don’t see these companies disclose their revenue per user statistics, could you share some of what you read positing current gatcha games are sustained by whales ?
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-whales-gobble-...
https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/infographic-wha...
I should disclaim I do play gatcha games on a somewhat regular basis (I need to know how they work for various reasons) and follow the different communities around.
On the first link:
> Whale game users: 1% of the players, generate 64% of the income spending 2,694 dollars per year. > Medium-high game users: 3% of the total, generate 20% of income spending 373 dollars a year. > Average game users: 2% of the total, generate 4% of income and spend $ 104 per year.
First, that 1% of “whales” at 2,694$ per year is interesting, as it puts it around the 2,482$ said to be spent on entertainment on average in the US [0], which doesn’t seem to be freakish in context.
Then there’s also no breakdown of social games and “normal” games, like Minecraft which for instance has monthly subscriptions for online services, and other games who have season passes or allow to buy in-game contents like songs, levels etc.).
Sure social games must have a decent share, but right now for instance I see in my [edit to US ranking] Roblox, Apex, Pokemon Go in the free app ranking and they aren’t gatcha. The above number must also including straight purchaseable games.
It’s interesting numbers, but don’t tell us much about gacha games in particular (though the author has opinions on the subject, which I mostly agree with).
The second link is from 2015, that’s almost the beginning of the field, the candy crush days and developpers not understanding clearly what is ok and what is not. A lot has changed since.
I don’t have access to the third link, it asks me to pay to become premium (the irony), and it’s also from 6 years ago…
[0] https://www.thesimpledollar.com/banking/savings/a-look-at-th...
This is absolutely fascinating. It's something I kinda missed from Digital Vegan, thinking that extrication would be a matter only of self-mastery and access to good information rather than fighting back. Most people do not have that capability.
But fighting back is exactly what you've done, and it's worked for you. I wrote earlier that the relationship between users and developers is increasingly an adversarial one [1]. Things like "right to repair" have become an open battle between ecological common-sense and pure greed. Where your health, wealth and environment is under attack from rampant greed a legitimate (moral/ethical) response to hostile technology is obviously hacking back.
But it's not a universalisable moral principle, unless we want a descent into chaos and digital "civil war". Therefore the proper solution is to start recognising what some of these companies are doing as crimes. You need the law on your side when you act in self-defence.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31626063
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
A digital civil war is preferable to surrendering to the designs of exploitative corporations. We should fight back on principle. We should block ads and tracking, scrape websites, reverse engineer private APIs, violate DRM technology, replace their proprietary apps with our own free software that we control, feed them false data to poison their data sets... We should do everything we possibly can to defeat any attempt to exploit us. We don't need their permission to do it either.
Turning things into crimes is the corporation's game. They're the ones with billions of dollars and expensive lobbyists. We shouldn't be trying to beat them in this space. We need ubiquitous subversive technology that neutralizes their exploitation whether the laws allow it or not. It shouldn't matter whether it's legal or illegal. We need technology that makes it impossible for them to exploit us in any way, and we define what is and isn't acceptable or exploitative.
It is.
> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?
We should, if we can. I'm just not holding my breath.
I think copyright should be abolished but the trillion dollar companies that depend on it will never allow that to happen. So we're better off de facto abolishing it by making copyright unenforceable and eliminating consequences for copyright infringement.
I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.
Honest question (and I am not fan of advertising here and not trying to be an apologist)..
What business model replaces it, in your mind?
In the world that exists today, how do companies who provide free services online (including the creation of information) pay their staff and their operational costs, if not through being paid to display ads or sponsorships?
Do all websites become subscriptions?
Turns out that's also a Red Queen's race. And if you look at the lobbying costs vs. potential rewards, there's a lot of room for escalation in US politics.
The only difference is who does the concrete fighting: you by yourself, or let the police and criminal prosecution do the fighting.
Addictive products are another case where the user is unable to choose in favor of their own self-interest, because the product is exploiting weak points in human psychology.
The free stuff exists to instill an habit in players. People literally force themselves to log into the game and do daily tasks because otherwise they're missing out on daily rewards.
My bot completely nullified their little scheduled rewards design. I was now free to play the game whenever I actually felt like playing. Then I discovered I didn't actually feel like it, I was just going through the motions due to negative reinforcement.
Don't underestimate the power of software. It can literally liberate us.
> It is a violation of the rules and will get you banned
Whatever. No big loss.
Oh yeah that works so incredibly well! I get addicted to idle/tap/infinite progression types of games every now and then.
At one point I got sick of it and I wrote a program that taps my phone with an axidraw robot. Seeing the progression happen without my own input totally broke the addictive cycle for me.
And I got to play with the axidraw :D
Thank you for mentioning the hardware, I looked it up and it looks affordable and interesting. https://www.axidraw.com/
And I shared my bot with them. Reaction was very negative. People blame me for "hacking" and ruining game.
So I made my conclusion and never shared my bots
I guess I don't have the data. Also maybe you can get both at once by targeting the big guy.
We've passed some really unhealthy point in game development with this bonus money making...
The ONLY people that would do that, are people with an addiction
In fact, even games that are not designed to maximize your time spent in the game can be bad. The reward hits you get from games make you less likely to seek out other types of reward in your life. And even when you're not playing the game, your brain will be running a background task strategising how to maximize your results in the game.
More countries need to adopt similar laws.
I am addicted to Dota2. Good game. I spent little money on it. I play for more than 3000 hours. I wish I didn't.
If you can make money, you MUST make it.
Someday I hope we find some way as a society to give value to other things. Its not really working out.
It would be great if we could stop spreading this misunderstanding. Fiduciary duty is a duty not to deliberately destroy shareholder value. Basically you can't set it on fire or loot it. It is not and has never been a duty to do absolutely anything anyone can possibly conceive of that will enrich the shareholders. Leaders are free morally and legally free to consider intangible factors that bear on the long term health and viability of the company and indeed do so every day.
This. Otherwise Apple and Disney would be forced to sell porn. But they don't because of their moral (one could argue prude) stance which makes less money for the investor.
Also the PR storm of such a reversal would significantly damage their stock prices. More importantly, stockholders suing either company to force them to reverse the policy would be an even bigger story.
It's not a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as possible, it's to maximize value for shareholders which means stock price rivals revenue.
Like the PR storm from searching the customer's device for evidence of illegal material they could pass on to the police?
> stockholders suing either company
What would be the basis for the lawsuit, prudishness is not codified in law.
You just got to look at a company like Boeing and how it changed over the years. The fiduciary duty of the directors didn’t change; but the directors certainly did.
Larry Fink disagrees, and companies like Exxon have learned that not only is it not the only option, it's not an option at all. In fact, it's to the point that politicians like Mike Pence are talking about the big bad shareholders terrorizing companies.
> If you can make money, you MUST make it.
This is a common sentiment at all levels. Who wants to do good if they can make 3 times as much helping big tech sell ads?
Common myth but utterly false:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
I mean I don't think I even need to give examples of corporations breaking the law because they thought they could get away with it. Corporations, like any group of people, can fail to see the big picture. Short term profits for the risk of a big slap on the wrist is a gamble a lot of companies take.
1 - some children have no parents
2 - we have data to prove that parents don't know what their children do online, and never did. This is a complete fabrication
3 - children do have access to creditcards, both legally from the age of 14 or 16 depending on jurisdiction, and illegally
4 - there are many non-credit-card ways of paying for ingame items, including crypto
Anyway, given your views, I presume you are in favour of legalising cocaine and other drugs? Otherwise this whole line of argument would be hypocritical.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-p...
It has always had the gambling element though. While doing Meph runs I came to the conclusion that I wasn't playing because I was having fun, I was playing for the thrill of the loot drop rng.
Diablo III made it even easier to get all the set gear (I have several sets on Switch and I only play casually) and it became about designing builds around gear that could survive the highest torment difficulties.
Other games like Borderlands with similar item systems also don't rely on the player getting the absolute best gear to progress either.
These pay-to-play games on the other hand, force you to hand over cash to progress and the fun often stops if you try to play for free.
- https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-new-players/ "Why Diablo Immortal Is The Best Franchise Jumping On Point"
What games are above this average?
This was true for earlier games that have been burned to the ground at that point.
From the arricle:
> As of right now, F2P players cannot earn top-rated Legendary Games, which are only available via some of the game's monetization options
Which of the current major mobile gacha games does have this kind of exclusive pay-only items mechanics ?
I think the part that's a relatively recent phenomenon is that games are designed with "free play" as an afterthought or even the game designed to push you away from it, instead of "free play" being the main design focus.
The standards for the two are quite different.
I mean, no one is forcing anyone to play a game or purchase a lootbox. Why ban a game mechanics for this? It hurts the (potential) players, let people decide for themselves FFS.
Casinos shouldn't be regulated too. If nobody is forcing anyone to attend into something (like going to a casino or playing a pay-to-win game) nobody should have the right to change or regulate the inner dynamics.
As long as the game doesn't clearly lie (e.g. telling a lootbox does something that it doesn't) everybody knows what a lootbox is. Playing the game is a voluntary action taken by an individual, just like going to a casino. They are responsible for their own actions, and blocking a certain demographics' (e.g. people in Netherlands) to access to a game/mechanics (e.g. Diablo Immortal + lootboxes) is fundamentally against people's freedom of choosing to play a game or not.
It's their money, they can spend $1m if they want to, on lootboxes.
Would I? Definitely not. But blocking someone who does want to from doing it, whereas it doesn't have negative effects to society (e.g. Doesn't affect anyone but the person themselves) is ridiculous.
In theory, humans are rational, and in theory, spherical cows are an excellent basis for economics.
Human brains have bugs, and these industries exploit them. It's predatory, and utterly reprehensible.
Human brains also have a bug around sugar consumption. I've yet to see selling people sugar or sugar-containing foods/beverages being regulated.
Human brains also have a bug making many of them social media addicts.
Human brains have so many bugs. At the end of the day regulating these businesses will hurt more people who voluntarily want to be involved than saving potential addicts.
The real solution is never preventing people from doing things (of course as long as they affect only the person and not the others' rights), instead, it's educating.
If those governments placed their efforts into educating the people about addiction mechanics of those games/casinos etc. instead of blocking/regulating altogether, it would be much more beneficial than blocking people from their own decisions.
"It's OK if people's lives are intentionally ruined purely for corporate profits, so long as it's at least partly those people's fault. They shouldn't let themselves be tricked."
> Human brains also have a bug around sugar consumption. I've yet to see selling people sugar or sugar-containing foods/beverages being regulated.
By the way, San Francisco taxes sugary drinks and requires them to have a warning label.
> The real solution is never preventing people from doing things (of course as long as they affect only the person and not the others' rights), instead, it's educating.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps it's best to find a balance between them?
And see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax .
Also, NYC tried to ban some sales of sugary beverages over 16 oz, thrown out by the courts.
I do not support them, I only hate the idea of banning anything more.
I believe education is the key but never see that done enough. (Not only about these topics but pretty much anything).
Banning should really, really be the last option.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_King...
This might not quite meet your threshold, but it's probably close. More regulation around sugar is definitely around the corner.
Just because they shared a similar view on this doesn't mean that I'm also an addict too.
While you didn't explicitly tell such a thing, directly replying with this example implies that.
I don't do them but have respect to one's own opinion about their own body even if that means poisoning/killing themselves.
This is, of course, a position that is yours to hold. But I do hope that you recognize that it's quite a small, fringe one. It's a bit strange to use a fringe opinion about casino regulation as the stepping stone for an implication that loot boxes shouldn't be regulated.
[0] See it as "individualism" here on the first map: https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-ho...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_gambling#Signs_and_sym...
The same argument can be made for other regulated activities like drinking alcohol or smoking (whether you agree or not, that's how it is in a lot of places today). Those are voluntary activities too.
> whereas it doesn't have negative effects to society
Addiction _does_ have negative effects on society, which is why these rules get introduced. It looks like this ban [1] is enforcement of gambling laws, because the loot is transferrable it's deemed to have value. I'm curious in this case to know how much of an impact banning these particular games actually has though.
[1] https://www.thegamer.com/netherlands-loot-box-ban/
edit; haha, lots of people spotted this same argument.
The problem starts when it's unregulated and you are tricking kids, or people who are not educated about probability, into spending their money in casinos, and use dozens of psychological tricks to do so and obfuscate purchases. Just like it's easy for kids to get addicted to social media like Instagram, it's easy and dangerous to get addicted to gambling (especially when you see your friends or popular streamers doing it). I believe all of these games should be 18+, at the very least, and come with a big warning sign.
The problem with gambling is that it taps into the dopamine system in ways that people are not aware of, even if they know about probabilities.
The effect is cumulative, and the more the person gambles, the more they will gamble, take risks, create unbalance and spend money.
Now, just like with anything related to dopamine, many people will only have a mild effect. E.G: I've played dota for a while, and never went into full spending mode.
Like you, I think it's ok to gamble once in a while, to pay for the game. After all, it's fun, and the game provides pleasurable moments, but does cost a lot of resources to develop. It's fair to give money to the company making it: after all, other games may be paid up to $60, DLC not included, while free to play are always up to date.
Yet, it's very difficult to evaluate if the tactics used by the game for gambling are twisted or not, and if the game target is going to be abused or not.
For this reason, I do think they should be heavily regulated, not just about the age, but about the nature, and intensity, or the gambling mechanism in place.
The only solution to me is legal regulation, companies won’t listen as it brings money and most people like to play them. Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.
I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally and that other big countries will follow (like Korea, Japan and USA) to stop this trend and force designer to find better mechanics.
Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy. Nowadays with all the free services, it’s harder to make users pay for something they can get for « free » elsewhere. So it’s a complicated issue.
The problem with battle passes is that they rely on you having a massive player base, and require an incredible amount of effort to develop and keep running. For a game like diablo that's clearly not a problem but for anything that's not a top 10 game on their platform it is
> I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally
I don't think this (specific) categorization is necessarily the right approach. The problematic part with casino style games and gambling in general is that cashing out provides a real money incentive, which is not present here. Calling these games gambling is kind of like calling piracy theft - the intention is right but there's an important difference. We haven't got a category for them yet.
> Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy.
On one level yes. On the other, f2p games are popular for a reason. Excellent games providing a social experience has a network effect, and if your conversion rate is 2% you don't succeed as a game by monetising better, you succeed by increasing your audience. A f2p game could be a profitable game if the active playerbase all paid $2-3 each but the _second_ you introduce a barrier there you lose many players who won't pay, their friends who might pay etc etc.
> So it’s a complicated issue.
Amen to that.
Banning games like this will only drive the whales into black markets, which are more expensive, more dangerous, and benefit criminal enterprises by definition.
Many of the deaths from heroin, for example, are due to contamination with fentanyl (which boosts the potency). A company who was liable to their customers (ie: not a criminal enterprise) would be much less incentivized to lace their product, and if they did, there would be someone to prosecute instead of an entire black market to wag a finger at.
Anyways, I agree, this is an extremely exploitative design. What I don't agree on is using legal regulation to shape society into something moral. Historically, that's only made things worse.
Basically you have a bad habit not that far off from smoking cigarettes that will probably eventually lead to dangerous overspending the first time you have an economic downturn at the same time as emotional stress. Despite such games being in general tasteless and boring you have convinced yourself its "fun" because you have trained your brain to release dopamine when you do it and can't tell the difference being joy and dopamine the same way a crack addict can't tell the difference between chemical stimulation and actual joy.
Those gambling games are extremely overpriced in comparison!
But they still make that money. Guess how: By addiction, and other psychological tricks to make the price seem OKisch, even it's absolutely not.
Even the most expensive game productions could make a good revenue back than just by charging a one time fee of $40 to $60.
Now with those gambling games they made $100 a month on you… Continuously.
The whole business model is a ripoff, clearly immoral, and should get banned completely ASAP.
I don't see the difference. Whether I pay a "subscription fee" of $100 per month or I buy two new games per month, why does it matter? Why do you think that buying two games a month is necessarily more fun than paying a subscription fee for the same 2-3 games? For me it isn't, and there aren't even enough games I would be interested in buying in the first place.
I don't mind casinos in Vegas but I would mind if grocery store around the corner was replaced with small, low quality casino.
As a different example - I'm sure it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to max out your characters and gear in Genshin Impact, but I've played very enjoyable 100h+ and it's perfectly fine even if you don't have the max ascended characters and gear, I have a feeling those are there basically for the wales to spend money on but aren't necessary for gameplay in any way(well maybe for some crazy hardcore end game content, but as always, that seems to be something 0.0001% of the playerbase enjoys).
My point is - the game can still be enjoyable and worth playing even if you can't get the endgame gear. Is that the case here? I don't know.
Most people I know who have played Diablo would tell me their rift tier, paragon level (might be a different term in English but they play in french so that's the term I know).
So for new players, it might not be that big of a deal, but for players wanting to play more Diablo the game is telling them to cough up as much as they can
Technically no but Diablo and ARPGs in general are all about items and for a very large class of players who enjoy this genre it's all about min / maxing your character, or at the very least getting improved items / skills / kill speed as you progress. Tying items into a cash shop in the way it's been done here feels really dirty, like it's going against the entire ethos of the genre.
This is partly why Path of Exile has been wildly successful for almost 10 years (it's another ARPG). Their cash shop is focused on cosmetics and quality of life improvements. You can't just buy items or things that make your character more powerful.
The only reason I bring up PoE is to demonstrate it's possible to create a long running profitable ARPG with cosmetic cash shop items in a free to play game. I do know things like stash tabs are borderline and debatably a kind of essential item but I'm ok with that, you can get very far without thinking about them and you purchase them once and you're good to go for years. It was also like $15 from what I remember, it's been a bunch of years since I played so I forgot. I do know I spent around $40-50 total on that game on various quality of life things and it felt like money well spent. I was happy to support GGG. In fact, I ran into a billing situation once and they gave me free coins to compensate a customer support pain point (which I didn't ask for) but I didn't want their work to go unpaid so I ended up purchasing more to match what they gave me.
Not nickel and diming your customers and not preying on weakness goes a long ways for building up a loyal fanbase. I haven't played PoE in years but I feel like they won me over as a customer for life. I didn't think it was possible to ruin the Diablo franchise more than the original release of Diablo III but I think Diablo Immortal may have won in that department.
I feel like people are upset about p2w mechanics in the game but at the same time say "I'm fine with cosmetic mtx" which makes the whole argument read to me as you are upset that people want to use money to win and that means they shouldn't so you will virtue signal like I care about people spending $10k. If you as an individual don't like p2w that's fine. I get that, but let's stop acting like we care about the virtues of it when kids are spending $1k on worthless Marvel skins in Fortnite or Roblox and there is little uproar about it... We just don't like going into a game where a rich person can beat us, which is understandably frustrating. The other virtue outrageous is just disingenuous imho.
- Cosmetics are a choice. They don't affect your progress in any way.
- Bought character power is not a choice. You can happily play X amount of hours but at one point you'll hit a brick wall you can't overcome without money. And no don't tell me that "eventually you will", because elementary psychology says people get discouraged and quit if their effort isn't rewarded until a certain time threshold. That time is much less than what a F2P will allow you.
I don't know if you deliberately missed the point or you can't see something that's easy to notice.
If manipulative psychology is the issue at hand than quantitatively speaking if you spend 10k on cosmetics or 10k on p2w through manipulative psychology what is the ethical difference?
If you think I'm arguing for a side you are mistaken. I just don't think people actually care about people who are victims of this. They just don't like p2w games, and that's fine. I'm just calling a spade a spade.
Also I feel like you are going down a rabbit hole of being gated on a game from being top 10 on a leaderboard, because the story mode and making it to level 60 seem completely accessible with no money. This is kind of a crazy path to walk down especially for PC gamers, who seem to be the most outraged, where affluence is definitely an advantage even if the game isn't the one making the money off it. For instance, the difference between a refresh rate of 250hz vs 60hz on a competitive FPS game. Try and tell me there isn't an advantage between a $800 gaming rig vs a $10k gaming rig...
Of course I agree with that. I was under the impression that we're not discussing whether addiction is bad -- it's widely known that it is.
I was arguing that "Minecraft and Roblox and millions of other games feed off the weak minds of virtual cosmetic addicts" does not at all make the pay-to-win model of other games okay. Because it did seem like you went off on a whataboutism road.
That the world is screwed up doesn't mean we have to give up. We can try and improve little corners of it.
I just get this vibe that people don't think through their stance these days. They just want what they want, and use ethics to support their point when they don't really have a consistent sense of morality to speak of.
And the thing with cosmetics is that they're opt-in; whoever decides to never buy will also never be negatively affected -- which is not true for pay-to-win.
I guess that's why there's this "evilest, eviler, evil and less evil" scale of game MTX.
I personally would prefer all cosmetics be farmable but I'm okay with having those be also available for buying.
I thought it through and my stance is I do think there's a very big difference between p2w and cosmetic only cash shops from a moral stand point in the context of Diablo Immortal and PoE.
I never felt like PoE was trying to push me into buying something. The purchases I've made (0 cosmetic btw, it's been all quality of life things) were on my own terms, I didn't feel manipulated in the slightest. There was no gambling mechanic, it was a straight "I give them money and they give me stash tabs" transaction, there's no catch. I don't need to login every day to keep them, they exist until PoE decides not to run PoE anymore.
The above is a lot different than Diablo Immortal trying its hardest to convince you to buy something because it directly alters the core mechanics of an ARPG which is to make your character stronger by trying to get you to purchase items that make your character stronger. The whole system is set up to make you constantly evaluate "well, should I grind this out 8 hours a day for 4 months or spend $50 to have it in a few days?", and it's painfully obvious.
These elements are also pushed into the game's UI so it's in your face all the time. They also took it 1 step further and introduced a lot of randomness into your real money purchases and they self destruct if you stop logging into the game. I was trying to compare this to a "real life company" like a casino or car salesman but somehow even they seem better from a morality standpoint when compared directly to Diablo Immortal.
So yes, in my mind there is a big morality difference between these 2 games in how they operate their cash shop. One of them feels like inconceivably high pressure sales tactics designed to maximize profits at no cost while the other feels like a game that does everything in its power to kill you with kindness by providing value through entertainment in the game so you end up making purchases because you like the game and want to support the developers, what you get out of that is more like warm fuzzies and some quality of life enhancements (or cosmetic things if that's what you like).
That said you are addressing that you "feel" like it's not as bad. However, I would argue that PoE wouldn't be still running so successfully without whales that may or may not be victims. You are, like many sane human beings, reaping the benefits of a well funded development team by whales. Does that make it ethically right because you don't "feel" it or see it as egregiously? Should a skin ever cost $50?
Like most things you feel it when it impacts your experience, which is very clear if you aren't a spender in a p2w game. If it didn't impact your experience you don't care hence why you think one is worse than the other. It's about how you feel, and that is the problem today. It's hard to solve a problem when people are inconsistent about where they stand on an issue. Do they care about victims and these MTX tactics or do they just not like p2w games. Personally, I don't think p2w games should be illegal much like I don't think gambling should be illegal, but I do think there needs to be more regulation about predatory MTX especially in regard to children across the board.
An opinion is often based on feel. For context I've put in thousands of hours into D2 back in the day, not nearly as much into D3 and quite a lot into PoE but no where near as much as D2. With Diablo Immortal I haven't seen this type of backlash over a cash shop and how it ties into core game mechanics in my life of gaming.
I also can't speak for PoE's finances or how they remain in business. I'm sure there's whales out there but I don't consider that my business, so you are right in that their actions don't affect me. If someone wants to pay $50 for a cosmetic skin and the game makes it available then so be it, for me personally that immediately gets classified as optional so it doesn't affect my experience playing the game. I never get the urge to buy those things because I see others having it. I also don't make assumptions about why they bought it (to support the game, they have addiction problems, etc.) because that's not my battle and there's nothing I can do about that in the end anyways.
My philosophy has been to apply a pretty basic set of rules in that if a game does what I think are predatory things then I don't play it, buy it or contribute to its parent company's profits. If I like a game and it feels reasonable to me in how its priced (1 time purchase, cosmetic cash shop, etc.) then I will happily support it. Everyone's rules here are different.
Yes, at least in those types of games. Gear improvement is a big part of the game progression. Before microtransactions that just meant spending ungodly amounts of time in those games. Nowadays it means bankrupting yourself.
oh and every 15 min or so you're spammed with a notification telling you take this one is lifetime opportunity to help if only for give them your credit card! if you don't hurry you'll miss out on this offer forever.
I've played less than an hour of genshin so I can't compare it since I don't know much about it. but as someone who played other games where you might need to farm for better stuff, this is nothing like that.
It's been awhile since I played D3, but hasn't this been the model for years?
how do you upgrade your items ? by upgrading their rank and the rank of the gems they have attached to them.
so how do you do that ? well either directly pay money, or pay money for for stuff needed to to challenge elder rift so that you can drop the resources necessary. or if you really don't want to do that challenge the rift without the resources and have a really shitty drop rate of alternative resources that can be converted into runes that can be used to make said gems. that would mean that you needs months of repetitive farming.
oh an the first fixes of the paid drug is handed to you for free so that you get a taste of how great of a drug it is. then once you're dry of it they'll keep giving it you at ever decreasing doses to keep you crazed for you fix until you crack and give in.
my experiences with game is that it was enjoyable until lvl 35 which you hit in 2 days of playing and just hit an impenetrable wall at lvl 42 where it meant full time grinding or paying in order for the story to progress at an acceptable pace.
I'll just remove it from my phone or maybe play with reverse engineering it to see how hard it is to make a bot. (on the first day there was already one spamming chat)
I think games where you have an option to pay for dlc at the start screen are fine. It's being constantly pressured that I consider to be a breach of trust.
Which ones did you return? I think there are a decent number of single a developer games out there that have good progression systems. Hades, Dicey Dungeons, Golf Story...
The funny thing is the unmitigated, most pay2win version of Plants Versus Zombies 2 - the game at launch - was accidentally one of the most amazing and intense gaming experiences for people who never spent anything. For people who just really enjoyed a vastly more challenging version of PvZ.
I loved the first game but it was never a challenge, it was rare to fail a level more than once. But the levels in the second were passable if you spent zero premium currency (even not spending any of premium currency they gave you for free for logging in) - they were just very very challenging. Passing every single one required novel strategies and slowly revising, eking out a few more tiny edges each time you try, combined with absolute precision in execution, until somehow the level was passable.
I'm not actually sure every single level was passable by not even spending the currency they gave you for free, I never quite finished it, but I got through most of them! When I logged in to finish the remaining levels later, they had made them all way easier in an effort to respond to p2w criticism so I never had a chance.
It maybe not, the same way it's not necessary to own a yacht IRL to enjoy life, but why should we bring inequality in games as well?
Multiplayer games are a meritocratic dream that is probably unattainable IRL, as only the most skilled (cheaters aside) get to the top of the scoreboard.
It kills my fun to know that even this small haven of meritocracy is changing to become like the real world: the wealthy have better opportunities than I do, independently from skills or talent.
The whole feature is effectively walled off to f2pers.
I don't have too many compunctions about games whose revenue models gate the top 5% of possible progress. If Diablo 3 had a feature where you need to pay money to unlock the last 10% of each primal ancient item (so F2P would only get 90% perfect rolls), I don't think my game play experience would change in the least and I've put a lot of hours into that game.
Games should not be about wringing money out of people - but games need to get revenue somewhere. Asking everyone to pay before playing at all is not a clearly better (or more moral) system.
I don't understand why they pollute their brand like that.
The Play Store and the App Store do not even have a search filter for games without in-app purchases. I'm sure that is on purpose.
This shit should have been regulated 10 years ago already
PC gaming is becoming infected too
It's very sad
Yet another company i will boycott
Than that comment is even more to the point than I thought!
At least now I'm sure it deserves an up-vote — as your helpful comment does.
Anyway, doing the playthrough, or watching a video game speed run is enough to spoil the whole game for me and make me not want to play it. Problem solved. Also, there's all the free to play retrogames out there which are great if you just have endless amounts of free time. I guess I just don't get gambling, especially when you can't actually win money.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhizrsqMV8A&list=PL9aL0Ok5ss...
For me, Blizzard has always been the WarCraft 1-2 and StarCraft 1-2 company. Never liked the rest of their output over the years.
That said, it's a shame the company has been reduced to a gambling shop. Sign of the times, I guess. The writing was on the wall 10 years ago but I am no longer scared about my hobby. So what if the big guys all do lootboxes. Don't buy from them.
Activision used to have stellar catalogue 15 years ago. Now look at them. It's all junk
In-game skins are going nowhere, let a government force the company into creating a package with however many skins they want (maybe based on prior sales or realistic expectations) per season (whatever their season looks like) and walk away from it. You know they won't be able to add more.
Because what's stopping them now to change the decimal point however they see fit.
I suppose the same could be done with progression (where the real money is). Either make it tradeable somehow and lock it down, or outright ban it and allow for more expensive but regulated skins be the only funding capital.
The flip side is, no matter how the general public criticize or hate it, it works and at times, more profitable than most startups nowadays.
The game was delayed for more than one whole year as they try to fix things up, 110k is probably an optimized figure.
That say, the game is enjoyable better than most mobile rpg but brings nothing new to the table. I would prefer it to be a pay once and for expansion though.
Of which presumably at least 10 are excellent, so think I shall pass on this slot machine game and play something else.