Well, conceptually it's really no different than online poker. I don't worry about that stuff because there is an age limitation on online gambling. Maybe we need a similar limitation here.
Oh, bother.
Well until then you had better hope your kid doesn't gain access to any credit card info.
Edited by M84 on Feb 6th 2021 at 1:21:44 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Hah! Won't share personal info here, but that ship sailed. (Can you guess why I'm here, asking these questions?)
Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 5th 2021 at 12:31:39 PM
Oh, bother.
Hmmm...
Hmmmmmm...
Welp, keep a close eye on your credit card bill charges in the future.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Lost in Space
A slight deviation from the topic, but this video
(that came across my feed because Jim Sterling is a contributor to it) discusses ADHD and its impact on gaming. One of the specific points covered is how people with impulsive personalities, especially those who are easily bored and/or distracted, are ideal and intentional targets for predatory microtransactions.
My son has ADHD and I do not allow him to spend money directly in games. He's required to get my okay for any microtransactions or other purchases he makes. This way I can introduce a step between the impulse and the execution in which he must think about whether he really wants and/or needs the purchase.
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 5th 2021 at 12:37:35 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
For the record, I do the same thing. Hint: make sure he never has the opportunity to write down your credit card number. Just saying.
Figure of Hourai
Unfortunately, I have my own credit cards. Fortunately, I am also the most indecisive purchaser ever. ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
A nice butterfly
Ay yo let me at ya
We can speak THE LANGUAGE
Lootboxes work as an operant conditioning stimuli to the behavior of purchasing: the lootbox opening is filled with digital behaviors that are then embedded into a secondary reinforcer: a fabricated social one.
When your kid buys a loot box or a crystal or whatever in clash of clans, he is lured not just by the promise of advantage, but a higher position in the scoreboard: the reward is not just the tangible advantage that would allow you to beat a level.
Companies know this and they deliberately build a society of its own within their world. Sometimes, I would argue, they breed themselves despite the company's efforts.
My first example would be the "Good" (and I am liberally using air quotations here) one. Valve.
Back in 2012, Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike is a very simple multiplayer videogame. You have 9 classes, each has their gun, you have an alternative gun earned by achievements earned from just playing the game, and that's that. Go duke it out. They began to introduce more weapons, however, and they needed a better way for players to access them.
They did a store, of course. But these never feel fair: some weapons can be objectively better than others, and even if not, they are better in some situations and having the option feels nice. They introduced a random drop system, where for every hour played, players would get an increased chance for an item when they died.
What players did, was create maps where you could sit idle, an play something else or go to work and your account would be racking up hours doing nothing, constantly dying and spawning on a server. So you would come back home to a nice chunk of items, that you otherwise would not have were you a casual player who did not do this.
This also felt unfair.
And then came the hats.
Alongside weapons, you could get hats. The hats did not fulfill any purpose whatsoever. The hats for Team Fortress 2 and the skins for Counterstrike were, for gameplay purposes, worthless. You would gain no advantage, you would gain no prowess, you would not get health. But you would have a rare item no one else had.
Some of the things Valve did (some tongue in cheek) were to give a free hat to everyone: in fact they tracked people hwo used the previous "idle" servers and other cheats and bugs, and deliberately did not give them this free hat (which, funny enough, was a little angel halo, named "Cheater's lament").
Then came the trading market.
Hats could now be sold to other players for real money, or traded for Keys, each worth USD $2.50 to open a crate that could drop either a weapon, or a hat. These keys could exclusively be obtained on the market, sold by Valve. They racked in a lot of moolah with this gambling, which only grew more and more insane by the passing moment. They did not stop there: they released more and more hats (an in fact release more hats than they do weapons), and added "Unusual" effects for it.
The most famous hat of this, was a "Flaming Team Captain". A hat that was a reference to Street Fighter's M. Bison that was also aflame. This hat was super popular to the point people paid up to USD $14000 dollars for it. Other rare items became super rare ways to advertise your digital wealth: An obscure game made you get a unique hat in Team Fortress 2 if you preordered it on Steam? You get "Max's head", which became an expensive replacement to keys for trading purposes. Did your account log in on a mac? Your account got "earbuds", whose value could be measured in Max's heads and dozens of keys' worth.
This explosion in the market still is rampant today, and is kept up to date with new, unique effects for hats and weapons that are based on promotions, limited editions, etc. And this is uniquely cheap: These hats are not physical things. The amount of money it would cost Valve to give every single person a Flaming Team Captain would be 0 dollars. The amount of money they make by making a scarcity model is measured in truckloads.
As of right now, on backpack.tf, a pair of vintage earbuds is worth 1370 keys to trade for: remember each key is USD $2.50 each.
Yanis Varoufakis was the resident economist at Valve, because they needed one. Varoufakis ended up becoming the Minister of Finance of Greece.
Many other Videogames followed suit. In my opinion the most relevant would be mobile games, such as Clash of clans and its many clones due to its popularity, and World of warcraft, that did the same mechanisms but also embedded them in their narrative.
Simple puzzle games like say, Candy Crush, have stuff like FreemiumTimers. Something Clash of Clans also uses. I invite you to read its laconic version. Now, tropes like this are older than people realize, because monetizing the poopsockers is as old as the first online multiplayer free games such as Ogame, a 2002 game obscure enough to not have its own TV Tropes page, used to do that. And stories of people spending way too much money on games such as these existed, but they did not become a seriously recognized issue until later.
Poopsocking, by the way, is a term that basically means that people who have or spend too much time on a game ruin it for the rest. For example, let's say you have a regular job, and you are really good at a game. A person who is mediocre will be way more known than you, and rack up way more benefits than you if they have no job, and can play a thousand more matches than you: even with a 52% win rate versus your, say, 70% win rate, they would rack up more points for having played more games.
Some games attempted to discourage these measures for legal and practical reasons. It even has its own trope: Anti Poop-Socking. But overtime, they care less about that and encourage, if not make whole new ways, for monetizing poopsocking instead of discouraging it. Some argue that monetizing it IS a discouragement, which I say it is AWFULLY CONVENIENT TO PROFIT FROM AN EXCUSE AS THOUGH NO OTHERS EXISTED.
Anyways these mobile games tend to a specific market: people who are bored at work, or who do not have a big computer but who are still bored. Lure them in with cheap little few dollar benefits (like extra lives in Candy Crush) and companies like Activision Blizzard (Yes, Activision Blizzard owns King, which makes Candy Crush) were raking in thousands of dollars from single people.
The logical conclusion of Candy Crush games were Clash of Clans clones because they embedded the community in a competition: and the anti frustation measures of "hey you can pay a few extra cents to give it another try" became "Hey you can pay a few extra cents to get more XP...also remember your clan needs you and only the people on the scoreboard will get the rewards and have their names be shown" were married. Here is where the "whales" come from: the individuals who would spend thousands of dollars for that prestige.
MMOs such as World of Warcraft, started out as popular with Anti Poop-Socking measures. But as profits became more relevant, they even began to tailor the narrative of their games to focus solely on you, choosing a team. You, identifying with a team. And you, competing against the other team. They will go as far as make the same story of one character, but depending on which side you aligned with, the character will be presented as either a hero, or a monstrous genocidal villain. And the two sides of the aisle will fight as such. And the behavior is encouraged in gameplay mechanics and narrative so deeply that it is anathema to consider to break them.
Other games have tried to capitalize on this: Wildstar tried to do the two faction things, and Elder Scrolls Online tried it with THREE teams, but the traction and popularity of Warcraft (along the fact they just steal the elements of other games and polish it into something prettier as their own since their UI design is way ahead of everyone else's) will guarantee that game will last, IMO, at least two more decades if not more.
As of right now most of videogames will introduce ways that promise you rewards for more money: season pass, extra items if you preorder, exclusive skins, time limited edition digital items. These are here to stay, but its evolution is important to know.
Some of these measures came from GOOD intentions, even clever ones, but the damage is done.
As the companies understand they can monetize more from not making fans, but sycophants, they engage in more and more greedy measures that are deliberately, sometimes scary. And its analysis is facinating as there are many elements at play, technological and experience ones. The first Super Mario games could only take you back to the first level if you lost all your lives, because no save system was available due ot technology, market, and available power, or because they just didn't think of it until someone else did.
They feed from each other, and sometimes, they feed from each other in the worst ways, cannibalizing the things that are profitable due to how well they condition people, sometimes reaching even addiction.
Addiction centers made specifically for MMOs like World of Warcraft exist, and it's a sort of well known systemic issue in places like Asia.
So the issue of behavioralist (reinforcing and conditioning), cognitive (biases), social (Online communities, increased acceptance of videogames), financial (availability of money to the population now entering adulthood), historical (history of videogame gameplay elements), and technological (increased availability of videogames) all mesh together in a historical gumbo that is interesting, and sometimes horrifying to behold, and stewed slowly in the hands of for profit corporations that have no morals to lose in an environment that has poor success in regulating it.
[[related video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c]]
Edited by Aszur on Feb 5th 2021 at 12:50:25 PM
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Ok, so the subjective part comes from how responsible purchasers are. Obviously, there's a genuine concern about gambling addiction to folks who don't know their limits or don't know how to manage their funds reasonably, but there are those who are well aware of what they're getting into and won't go off the deep end.
Take me, for example, and once again, I'll be bringing up Genshin Impact because it's the only gacha game I've played. I invest some of my money into the game for wish banners, but because of my limited budget, I can't afford to spend too much on it, otherwise, I'll go broke. In-game, there's a very efficient microtransaction I buy called "Blessing of the Welkin Moon", which deposits 90 Primogems (the wish banner currency) per day over a course of 30 days, adding up to a total of 2,700 gems. It's reasonable for me because it only costs between $7 to $10 Canadian on average, which is very affordable. It also helps that I do not have a desire to obtain every single character in the game (especially the five-star characters), so I just go with the flow with what I have. If I don't get characters, no biggie.
Obviously, I think children should be forbidden from playing these types of games. They don't understand the concept of financial responsibility yet, so they'll likely just chug through their parent's money without realizing it. I've seen enough horror stories of that happening many times on articles.
Edited by DivineFlame100 on Feb 5th 2021 at 11:23:23 AM
Figure of Hourai
Ah, yeah, some games have things like that; the almost-a-subscription level of investment. Noteworthy in that when they do, the actual amount of daily free currency available tends to go way down.
Avatar Source
A nice butterfly
Another thing people sometimes miss is that these forms of entertainment are incredibly affordable, yeah. Especially compared with older forms of entertainment.
Another entertainment venue is for example, the movie theatre. Just going to see two movies a month is more expensive than a monthly World of Warcraft subscription.
There is a lot more variety and things to do on massive online games like Genshin Impact than there is after binging all the current stuff at Netflix.
Sure, keeping up with hte on season Animes is fun. But they are soon over and you have to wait.
TV series? HBO sub alone will put you 15 dollars monthly back, and all these streaming services are stacking: HBO, Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, each ranging from 9 to 15 dollars a month compared to, say, a more reasonable 20 bucks a month on Genshin Impact can turn out to be actually helpful and it is one thing keeping you distracted for months.
Even Videogame console services are super cheap. Playstation plus may be battered down cuz OMG YOU HAVE TO PAY TO PLAY ONLINE!?!" but seriusly. Compare it to. Going out every weekend to dine at a nice place and you will find the comparative price is definitely felt.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Industrious Incisors
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I can't imagine that the gameplay hours to cost ratio is that high for that many free-to-play games. I play a couple, but typically I find myself doing no more than a few minutes on each most days, and maybe an hour or so burst when they drop a new batch of gameplay content.
That's actually another thing, they really tend to want a Play Every Day approach.
SoundCloud
Oh, bother.
The Play Every Day approach is insidious because it essentially makes the game more like a job.
Disgusted, but not surprised
I mean, it's not really a big deal most of the time because, you like only go on for a couple of minutes at a time and that's it. The rewards are minor stuff like experience points and in-game currency anyway, so it's not like it's asking you to play for a shot at something rare. Plus, they're pretty much optional.
Oh, bother.
The point is that this approach is meant to make the game habit-forming.
Here's an old SMBC comic that sums it up in the context of MMORP Gs:
"Workifying" games, indeed.
Edited by M84 on Feb 6th 2021 at 3:45:59 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised
A nice butterfly
I can't stress enough what M84 said here. This is the deliberate issue. The video game industry relyin on these tricks to indulge compulsion is a long standing pattern.
And it behooves us to be concerned.
We should also award M84 with a medal for citing SMBC ![[awesome]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/minis/award_star_gold_3.png "[awesome]"){kind=small}
Edited by Aszur on Feb 5th 2021 at 2:04:46 PM
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Do you know how companies that run microtransactions (other than those based in shady data havens) can hold onto the money?
A kid using a parent's credit card without permission is normally a trivially voidable charge.
Because the bought goods can not be returned, I assume.
Like reflections in the glass!
Yeah the thing about microtransactions is that you're paying for virtual products. Like say I bought a monthly pack in Arknights that gives me a decent chunk of the premium currency and a multiroll ticket. Would I be able to return it? Prolly not. And What if I spend those resources later on the roll (say buying a few costumes and rolling on a banner) if I did and they allow refunds, would I lost the stuff I bought with the resources of the pack I bought? It's kinda a pragmatism issue (as in it would take a lot of resources to track exactly what currency you bought went into).
I presume the only other case where transactions cannot be voided would be in those involving food from a restaurant but that's for a wholly different reason.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Feb 5th 2021 at 1:48:18 AM
A nice butterfly
most legislation explicitly allows for digital refunds to not be allowed. The EU xplicitly makes an exemption of "online digital content, if you have already started downloading or streaming it and you agreed that you would lose your right of withdrawal by starting the performance"
Calendar enthusiast
It's not uncommon for companies to reverse giant microtransaction bills if a parent calls up furious about what their child did because they didn't know any better. However, they obviously don't have to do this; it's a pragmatic choice to make the odd refund to avoid bad publicity.
Ukrainian Red Cross
Sort of like how you can't return your ticket after you've seen the movie.
I miss when video games were Japanese-dominated, and we had a larger variety of big budget games with a lot more creativity instead of just gritty realistic "cinematic" shooters and open-world games.
Edited by CookingCat on Feb 5th 2021 at 5:37:04 AM
Industrious Incisors
Reminds me of how someone got refunded for Sonic Forces on Steam after beating the game. The social media manager was not happy. (He used his personal Twitter account). I think the real reason it caught the company's eye though was because they were bragging about it, which... yeah, not cool even given the game's short length and quality.
SoundCloud
Should also note that games have no limit on how much money one can spend on this crap. And it's pretty much impossible to get the money back.
Families have been put into economic turmoil due to this shit.
Yeah, this is the world of videogames now.
Disgusted, but not surprised