Not sure if I’d call this “peril…” Call me a boomer, but if killing deliberately addicting feedback loops spells peril for the industry, then the industry has lost the plot.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
The entire business model is an abuse. Only legislation will stop it. You were never going to shop your way out of it - it is the dominant strategy. If we allow it to continue, there will be nothing else.
I’m still not going to glibly endorse the actions of a dictatorship doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons. It is horrific that this human-rights black hole has such an influence on global industries, simply by dictating what its people are allowed to enjoy.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Counterpoint: Cosmetics. Developers get more money, whales and streamers get to show off, and the rest of us can still play normally.
Horseshit. You are guided to value whatever worthless crap the game sells. If that’s the only way a game makes money - funneling you toward that is the only reason the game exists. That is what all systems exist for, and that is what the full might of developers’ manipulative rhetoric steers you toward.
All video games make you value arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games.
Every form of ‘it’s only X, it’s not as bad as Y’ is just willful ignorance toward how Y served the purpose of separating you from as much actual money as possible, and X has the exact same goal but a sharper razor.
Games cost money to develop. Unless a game is open-source, you either pay a fixed price initially, or have microtransactions. The problem is when they get greedy and do both / make it pay to win. Selling cosmetics does not affect gameplay, so I don’t mind them doing it.
Path of Exile is a good example. F2P, quality game, shit ton of content, and not once did I feel tempted to buy cosmetics. I did buy additional stashes once, but that was a conscious choice to support the devs after playing for tens of hours.
Again:
You are guided to value whatever worthless crap the game sells. If that’s even the primary way a game makes money - funneling you toward that is the only reason the game exists. That is what all systems exist for, and that is what the full might of developers’ manipulative rhetoric steers you toward.
And if it’s that or buying games, gee, can you guess which one I endorse?
Most players I know do not pay for cosmetics. ‘Whales’ - rich people who want to show off, or who love the game and want to support it - buy them. Some streamers also buy, but they get compensated by their sponsers. There is the occassional case of a kid buying it with their parent’s money, and such purchases should definitely be reversed, but otherwise I see nothing wrong.
There’s also a good chance the so called ‘whale’ isn’t actually that financially well off, and is being manipulated by the game into spending more than they can actually afford.
‘It only rips off some people’ is not a defense.
Don’t bother, this guy is just absolutely out of touch and unhinged when it comes to games.
It is horrific that this human-rights black hole has such an influence on global industries, simply by dictating what its people are allowed to enjoy
Why? You clearly have no issues with any other government denying people their rights and exerting massive influence over media. Just pissy that it isn’t your own?
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I don’t agree with Momo, but this comment is shit.
Honestly, I think it’s a good tool for parents (that cares) teach good financial habits from early age. It might even teach parents themselves better financial habits cause a lot of our economics are based on impulse buying behavior. (whether the impulse is generated by superficial, seasonal, compare to Jones, sales and promotions, government rebates, etc. )
If we follow the train of thoughts and going backwards, any “feel good” purchases should not exist and it’s an abuse to the consumer. ie. why should you buy a game the torture you for hours with difficult bosses, put you through lots of stress, agony, twisted plots that might make you cry or angry and then you get absolutely nothing you can hold on to except for those “experience” itself. Your console breaks, disk scratched, save file lost, etc and everything would be gone except whatever that’s left in your memory.
Why do you buy [insert brand name] shirts, tie, shoes, jacket, blah? This literally extends everywhere.
Let those gacha, impossibly time limited events, all be life lessons. You simply can’t get everything, your time and resource are limited, it take special kind of people and dedication(both mentally, physically and financially) to get what they can do. You can’t be lucky enough to be a billionaire heir or oil princess? well, too bad, learn to accept reality, just like learning not everyone can make the cut to sports pro-league even if they dedicated their life training for it, genetics decides a lot of factors for that, same for e-sports.
If you can’t even bother to teach your children those, well, maybe it’s also hard to ask you to review your life decisions.
Once my son is old enough to do basic financial decisions with allowance, I will just let him decide if he wants to use that to buy snacks he liked or whatever in-game currency he wanted. Just like we can’t all afford a Ferrari or [insert expensive car], we compromise and make decisions to make us survive and then be happy enough to keep going.
Fuck them kids. This is a problem for everybody, adults especially. Kids are not the “whales” these bastards hunt.
Let those gacha, impossibly time limited events, all be life lessons.
Fuck that. Entertainment does not need to be a nightmarish morality tale about capitalism, let alone one that somehow costs real money! That’s not a lesson. That’s abuse with an added finger-wag. ‘Tut tut, how dare you give us your money, like we tricked you into doing. Bet you won’t do it another dozen times!’
Teach your kids to buy good games. Not to throw money at fake shit the game makes them value.
And stop shitting on strangers’ hypothetical child-rearing skills in ways that highlight the failure of enforced civility. ‘Can’t teach your kids not to fall for scams? You must suck at life! Tut tut.’ Infer vicious rebuke here.
You do realize that there are much worse scams irl for adults than gacha games right?
Unfortunately, human do learn “better” through experience (subject to personal trait that falls under a statistic distribution), and because of that a
- shit I should’ve saved the money used for 20/40/60 dollar cosmetics/passes/event only unlocks for this new game that I really wanted
is much much better than
- my [insert close relatives] maxed out my card now I am [insert big number] in debt.
- shit I bought a [insert expensive big ticket item] and I can’t afford to pay the monthly now, what can I do? (just go check any financial help forum)
- insert that many other scams you can find common popped in forum that cost from hundreds to 100k+( cue people dump their retirement money into crypto )
I could afford to let my kid learn opportunity cost using the mtx, or dollar store toys, actual gacha eggs, etc once I start to let them handle their own allowance. They could also learn a bunch of marketing strategy that applies to them to make them dump allowance when talking with me later requesting to get more money to buy whatever they currently wanted. I’d rather spend that money as learning cost, than whatever forbidden method and then when they started working they dump their entire paycheck on those or even more expensive stuff because the sales convinced that they “can”.
So yes, fuck them kids, let them stumble when they are short, let them trip to learn to pay attention on the road, let them whine for a month why they can’t get extra to buy skin or whatever latest and greatest trending shit that some of their friends have because their physical or virtual piggy bank is empty. Fuck them with all the tricks at much smaller scale and let them learn from it.
Oh, does murder exist? Then I guess knife-point robbery is okay. Worse crimes mean this crime can’t matter.
Better your kids learn from a mugging, right? I mean compared to murder it’s no big deal.
Jesus Christ.
I could afford to throw my kid to the wolves and hope for the best
Or you could teach them economics with real products instead of scams. Not just “less worse scams.” No scams. That’s the ideal: zero scams.
And the reason for that ideal is adults. I don’t give two shits about your children, in this context. They are irrelevant to why I am saying, this business model is a scam, and we should just ban it. Arguing that we should encourage that bullshit, specifically because it is a scam, specifically to take advantage of children, is batshit fucking stupid.
Well, I would never compare even 20 dollar bad purchase decision as to let them commit murder or feed them to wolves. I don’t feel like continue discuss with you helps cause you can also see my other responses to why I feel it’s a good tool for parents.
If you’d like to think this business model is a scam, then so do many other industries, like government run lottery or casinos, or trading card game, etc. Your logic is like “let’s ban all bad things so they don’t ever happen.” right, good luck with that zero scam ideals, might as well try to build a no lying society?
When alcohol and cigarettes are scientifically proven bad to your health, look what our society decides to do with them?
I do the next best thing I can think of to educate and guide my kids, you do your effort to ban this type of business model, cool? I am not against that really, if you can pull it off.
Laws? Preventing bad things?! Preposterous!
Since when are scams illegal?
I reiterate: Jesus Christ.
You know what, sure, give your kids just a little heroin, to teach them not to do heroin. God luck and good speed.
Meanwhile - for adults - this entire business model is intolerable. You have access to your credit card. Right? You can blow your entire paycheck, not some measly allowance, on fake shit inside a ““free”” game. That’s what it’s designed to take from you. We don’t fucking need it. It’s infecting everything. We can just ban it.
If we do not ban it, there will be nothing else. For me, or you, or your smack-addict sprog. The entire video game industry is slowly being ruined by this bullshit, and your fusion-hot take is that we should let it scam children specifically because it’s a scam. What the everlasting fuck.
It’s hard to argue with people thinking that giving a kid heroin is equal to let them open a gacha egg or lootbox and how they respond to the results. I don’t know how you can make that connection and I’d like to see a reputable peer reviewed study where even expose once or a couple times lootbox and then they become untreatable gambling addicts. Show me anything and I will make personal call to the research institute asking questions and donate them, hosting a website and then spread it like gospel. You can’t because that’s not how gambling addiction works.
You are forming this “XXX = evil” argument and tag it’s like feeding heroin to your kid. But provides nothing or alternative to help parents to catch those traits early. The same take away your entire pay check works for pretty many other things that are currently exists, like option trading, you wanna ban those too?
Lastly, you are also wrong about how the game industry works today. The whale hunters are moving to expensive skins in limited timed pass/event purchases to fomo their whale targets, the lootbox bussiness is shrinking even after the kompu gacha ban in Japan. People can sue and get (maybe not full) their money back, a couple case in Japan, EU, US and even Canada already.(most recent notable is the Epic lootbox/vbuck settlement case.)
The AAAs there are more games that recently come out without “any” mtx except digital deluxe and pre-order bonus, and they make banks compare to those in the F2P space. Which universe you lived in that all games become F2P and you are forced to play those and have to become addict to them? Check both out:
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2022
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2023
Notice any difference? There are less F2P titles in top platinum 1st~12th in 2023 than 2022, where is your version of F2P doomsday coming from?
And I hope your ban-this ban-that universe is so perfect that no one can scam, everyone is nice law abiding saints that work for free and help everyone in need. No no need to learn financial literacy and responsible spending behavior and you just need to hook this thing up before you sleep and your life will be perfect.
Come on, I am still waiting for your study that shows some miracle level of addiction triggering lootbox mechanics.
This is like teaching a child responsible drinking by giving him a handle of vodka a month at 12.
There are much worse real life scam traps than the couple dozen or hundreds dollars worth of mtx (if your kid has that much allowance on their device.)
If he only have 20 a month he would have to come up with strategy to get what he wanted and then if he wants extra he has to work for it.
Your analogy would be like give your kid access to your bank accounts and CC without check. Learning opportunity cost without limited resource is a poor example.
These are designed to be addictive. You would be getting your child addicted to these loops early, grinding in that mentality early, and letting them loose into adulthood.
Its microdosing them on gambling meth.
I’d rather they share with me that experience and guide them compare to let them run into that much later in life while I was not around, make sense? If I can catch my kid that are actually have that addictive trait, I need to find out early and find therapy to help them building that mental wall or setup actual social/economical fence early on.(like register them to the blacklist from casinos etc so they get turned away even if they tried.)
Please don’t compare bad spending decision to hard drug that permanently alter your brain chemicals/pathing.
Gambling addictions are literally identical to the effects of a hard drug permanently altering your neurological pathing and brain chemistry. Take a psychology 101 class.
Thats why its called a gambling addiction.
Thats why there are a fuck load of laws around gambling.
Thats why lots of people want it against the law to put in video games.
Thats why literally everyone of sound mind is telling you that this is a horrid thing to do to a child
Getting a child addicted is not the way to try and find out if they have an addictive personality.
Who said I want to get child to have gambling addiction?
Do you know not everyone expose to gambling will become addict?
Do you even know how that type of addiction works?
Do you even read and see if I find out early that if my child has that trait we can identify that from these early behaviors? (like blowing all the allowance and can not stop themselves and tries to stole CC/lie etc to just get another box open.)
Are you the type of person thinking not exposing this one thing will prevent you from other types of addiction or exploits?
Compare to hard drug that chemically changes and damage the brain and slower process where brain chemical that works themselves because of the reward stimulation is entirely different for those gambling addict prone is totally different. You are talking about the brain “response” to the stimuli, not the cause and how they form that feedback loops.
Not everyone is going to become gambling addict by opening a few loot box, or buy cosmetics. The fact that I can participate and observe how they work with “not getting what they wanted” if they get a gacha egg at mall or lootbox in a game is very cost efficient tool, Heck, you don’t even need actual currency like mall gacha eggs, plenty of mobile game gives you virtual currency to do the virtual gachas or funnel you to do more of those until you are hooked.(see Pokemom Go)
And, I do not mind restriction and even encourage that there should be laws around those chance based things for both adult and minors. Because we do need those to help those that are prone and can become addict to have something that help them identify that and help them toward therapy. Virtual game gacha/lootbox is probably the lowest cost compare to any other real life addiction for detecting those personal traits.
Last and one more time, catch it early while they have full trust in me and work with therapy is going to cost 100x less then wall them up until they are 18 and then send them to the wild on their own. What kind of sick person trying to get their own kid become an addict? Which part of my post says I want to get my kids addict? What study supports your claim that if a child expose to lootbox and then they become untreatable when you identify the trait?
Do you realize that gacha eggs/capsules exists for more than 50 years? How many gacha eggs addicts you see everyday or in the study? Like I saw those when I am so small and my grandma’s place still burn wood to heat water and cooking.
Show me any other more cost efficient way to trigger and identify that personality trait compare to a virtual game.
This won’t affect anything I enjoy playing at all.
Sounds like it only affects shitty games.
Microtransactions are just an even more inbred cousin of nft’s where there was never even a theoretical possibility of real value. Dailies and such are cancer if you have to work or do literally anything in real life. This would be a welcome change.
Hope all Chinese “game” companys go bankrupt now :)
That might backfire, seeing as most major game publishers are China-owned to some extent or other.
The ones that let themselves be bought by the red plague dont deserve to exist! Greedy fucks.
I have not really seen any reports or studies that show the harm of loose gaming policies. Yes, some are addicted and it is an issue, but is this worthy of government intervention in the context of all other issues? I am unsure. Love to see the data which seems to be absent here.
A lot of these microtransactions are designed to prey on vulnerable individuals, at the expense of making the games worse for those who don’t pay. It’s an exploitative business model that should be outlawed.
It must be a real issue for them because it’s a revenue stream via taxes as well, so they made this decision knowing it has a direct cost.
I can’t believe I’m calling China based for the second time in my life
No. China sucks.
