> Gambling tends to spur much greater ethical concern and regulatory scrutiny, yet overlap – in practice and even game design – is becoming increasingly evident.
This seems like the understatement of all understatements. These games are almost exactly like casino games in all ways, visually, game mechanics, incentives, except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling and therefore not regulated by gambling laws? Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.
> except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling
Yes, and it is extremely important. The monetary payout is what ruins lives instead of "just" wasting time and disposable income.
The added monetary payout creates an incentive to play even more to cover for the losses. In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone, so if you do that instead of paying the bills, you know you won't be able to pay the bills, this is usually enough to limit the spending.
If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more. After all, it was a bad losing streak, you will win the next one, that's for sure...
I think this comment oversimplifies gambling addiction. Yes, chasing losses is a behaviour common to many gamblers, and yes, winning money provides an incentive to gamble in the first place, but many (most?) gambling addicts have different motivations.
Here are some quotes from _Addiction by Design_, by Natasha Dow Shüll -- a book I highly recommend if you're interested in this subject:
> Julie explains: "If it's a moderate day - win, lose, win, lose - you keep the same pace. But if you win big, it can prevent you from staying in the zone." [...] "You're not playing for money," says Julie, "you're playing for credit -- credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It's not about winning, it's about continuing to play."
> [Pete says:] After sitting at the machine for fourteen hours, so tired I can barely keep my eyes open, no money in my pocket, no gas in my car, and no groceries at home, I still can't leave because I have four hundred credits in the machine. So I sit there for another hour until it's all gone, praying for me to lose: "Please God take this money so I can get up and go home." You might ask, "Why didn't you hit the cash out button?" That never occurred to me -- that was not an option.
I don't think the importance of the monetary payout is particularly clear-cut. The payin is what does the financial damage, by moving money out of the player's control. The incentives and reinforcement are what get the player hooked -- but perhaps those don't have to be financial? I won't discount the importance of the payout entirely; maybe it's critical to get hooked in the first place? But I also wouldn't be surprised if gambling addiction can arise in games which don't provide to ability to cash out.
If you reject the necessity of a monetary payout then near to all modern tech becomes gambling. Maximizing "engagement" has always been little more than a euphemism for addiction after all. And social media "engagement" is certainly destroying far more lives than gambling, not only in raw numbers but also as a percent of its users.
So many people claim to be unhappy or at least dissatisfied with social media, yet continue to spend hours per day on it, chasing those highly exploitative little dopamine rushes that drive addiction to it. And of course it regularly gets much darker than just wasting vast amounts of time. Even in a casino the overwhelming majority of people will at least tell you they're having fun. And in video games the overwhelming majority of people will not only be having fun with what they're playing, but also spending next to nothing on it.
I really do think software development can be at least somewhat similar to video game addiction. So many personal projects are just useless obsessions. I'm not sure why people don't treat them more like video games and only spend the amount of time you would be comfortable spending in counter strike.
I guess pursuit of simplicity, and supposed educational benefits (which are real, but these personal projects are different enough from commercial software, and often don't really push the boundaries of anyone's skill or involve any new technologies likely to be used outside of a hobby) make it seems worth the 10+ hours a day people can spend?
To be fair, the people quoted in the book don't seem to be having that much fun. But yes, most of modern tech seems to be exploiting the same mechanism, generating addiction.
"credit -- credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It's not about winning, it's about continuing to play.""
My emotions are muted and it's horrible. Because of this I felt the most excitement in my life when I was gambling. When I lost it was disappointing, when I won I was happy, but when I was waiting to find out I had a visceral reaction similar to being a child waking up on Christmas morning. They were the most intense feelings I've ever experienced and when you go through life feeling very little it's wonderful.
I wonder now if that kind of excitement other people experience elsewhere in life, like when meeting a friend or riding a rollar coaster. If that's true I'm just fucked.
I used to play poker pretty seriously (not necessarily super well, but let's say break-even on the game itself over about 2 years going to a casino at least once a week)
The moments between going all-in and before the showdown (where the pot is decided) were pretty exciting, but not nearly as exciting as outdoor rock climbing
Physical activity doesn't make me feel good. At best running on a treadmill for around 30mins gives me energy that feels good physically but doesn't really translate to mentally.
I've tried intense hikes and other activities but it really doesn't do much. I have ADHD and on and off depression. Maybe borderline personality disorder as well. I did try anti depressants once but it only removed whatever little emotions I experienced, not worth it.
Rock climbing is great for people with ADHD (speaking from personal experience) because you're mentally engaged, all-brain-cells-on-deck, gears turning at full capacity in what can feel in the moment like a life or death situation.
But it's actually a clever brain hack; if you're following best practices regarding safety, and choosing routes which are also safe, there's very little danger
Out of curiosity, have you tried "extreme" sports like skydiving or downhill biking? I have a theory that people into extreme sports have often muted emotions compared to ordinary folks.
> Yes, and it is extremely important. The monetary payout is what ruins lives instead of "just" wasting time and disposable income.
The actual bug is that some humans get a tremendously powerful positive reinforcement for success in their brain, no matter what form the "success" takes and they're addicted to that feeling. You're thinking it's about money, but money is just one possible form of success. Winning at a video game is also success.
These people were very useful two thousand years ago, because you can set "Find out what's on the other side of that dangerous mountain pass" as the success criteria. They were somewhat useful a hundred years ago, though there were fewer opportunities, in 1923 nobody had gone to space, but they had gone to the South Pole (although only fairly recently, and one group all died on the way back because their strategy was bad and they got unlucky). Such people are not needed in anywhere near the volume they're available today. So they're going to get addicted to things with success - e.g. video games, and we should try to ensure that the game publishers don't exploit them too much, just as we prevent gambling firms from exploiting this same defect.
Although I do agree with what you're saying, it's worth noting that even though there are no orthodox ways to turn virtual currency/winnings in video games most of the time, there are plenty of under the table ways to sell virtual assets for real money.
A cynical part of me wonders if the hope with NFTs from game developers was actually that it could run around this problem and provide a more direct way to allow monetary payouts without running into issues with regulations on gambling.
Yeah, pretty much. I don't even think it was that big a secret. any studio running a Games as a Service would love to be a middleman taking in money from their biggest players. Crypto not being bound by any one country's monetary laws helps a lot as well.
It's not necessarily so they can get around gambling laws, but that could be one other side effect. Hell, for an NFT game like this you don't even need lootboxes to financnce the game. Just your 90's MMO style grinding and maybe some community functions.
>there are plenty of under the table ways to sell virtual assets for real money.
But are there any games where you can plausibly put real money in and generate excess gains in virtual assets in a short time? You can double your money in a casino in seconds, but the only way I know to extract money from video games (even play-to-win video games that milk whales for a lot) is arduous and slow gold-farming.
I agree with your take on NFTs. They would have been used that way if the NFT games hadn't basically all been Ponzi schemes. Like the pachinko gambling loophole.
I don't know that this has actually been done for these kind of games, but selling an account in it's entirety would be one way of making an asset somewhat transferable.
> ...but the only way I know to extract money from video games (even play-to-win video games that milk whales for a lot) is arduous and slow gold-farming.
I don't know what to call it, but there were examples like Anshe Chung; those might re-emerge with the upcoming vr-scape/metaverse/whatever-itll-be-called.
> wonders if the hope with NFTs from game developers
As a gamedev actively relatively socially involved with other gamedevs, those with any hopes from NFTs were a pretty small minority, and most of the shillers were non-gamedev members of the greater NFT grifting community.
That's not cynical at all, there is basically no other reason to do it. There were probably some devs who were naive and did it because they thought people wanted it, but it was always about monetizing digital assets.
> In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone
This isn't really true for any games that I'm aware of. Some games allow you to sell the skins for money (CS:GO), and for the rest you can sell the account. It's likely against ToS, but unlikely to be enforced. People selling WoW accounts with high-level characters and top-end equipment has existed since I can remember.
> If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more.
That's just someone rationalizing an addiction. It's probably a better rationalization than the people making in-game purchases they can't afford have, but both groups would almost have to be addicted first to even tell themselves something like that.
I don't believe a rational person without an addiction would gamble with their rent money. I definitely don't believe that they could then be convinced the best way to get out of the hole is to keep doing the thing that got them into the hole in the first place.
Once someone has gotten to that point, the money doesn't matter. They'll gamble with money they don't have, and they won't stop if they somehow manage to win enough to break even. It doesn't matter whether they're up or down, the answer is always gambling.
Anyone who has passed a middle school math class knows that gambling is as much of a money pit as in-game purchases, there's just more steps involved. The house always wins, after all.
Which is why gambling has traditionally been heavily regulated. Where gaming gets too close to gambling and causes similar harms, it's worth seriously considering limiting that harm through regulation.
No, you fundamentally do not understand the problem. You are willing to abstract everything from the equation apart from the outcome, and that is so wrong.
Money is a specific representation of the 'want' that drives gambling. That the outcome is getting more money or more some other representation does not matter. All that matters to the human brain is that the 'want' is satisfied.
Gambling becomes a problem when a person is willing to spend a harmful amount of 'input': usually time and/or money. This is either due to a personality flaw or due to manipulation of people into believing that the odds are in their favor, making them increase their input.
There is only not a problem when either of the following conditions is met:
- The 'input' is not at risk of damaging anyone.
- The chance of obtaining the 'want' does not modify the 'input' to become harmful.
>You are willing to abstract everything from the equation apart from the outcome, and that is so wrong.
So are governments, apparently. They don't care about the psychological impact of gambling. They still allow alcohol, subsidize corn syrup, and permit a number of otherwise harmful personal life choices. They care that it becomes insidious enough to cause crime rings. Or simply that it becomes a channel of funding that the govt. cannot easily tax.
none of that matters for a video game as of now, so I'm not surprised most countries are still arguing about it. They are talking past each other.
even under your definitions, you can argue that "the want isn't interesting" is still a valid defense for these lawmakers. Even the internet community has its share of people bashing others for playing video games or watching various TV shows. If these assumed millennials can't take games seriously, how will the boomer governments?
There's the argument that usage of drugs like alcohol increase government costs with health and law enforcement. Gaming may make your life more miserable and more sedentary but as you stay at home it generally is a win for government.
That definition covers collecting model trains or old bottle caps, if the expense is harmful to the collector. And few people would call that gambling.
There is still a payout in those games - it’s just not money. Sunk cost fallacy still plays a role.
Frankly, the addictive part is in the randomness of the payout. What the payout is isn’t particularly important. The fact that games don’t payout money could be seen as worse - you have zero chance of recovering your expenditure.
It's not gambling because there is no randomness directly between an input and output (and subsequential outputs). Unless you want to argue that the lack of clear resolution of an item as chance (be it either due to lack of knowledge or testability).
For all intents and purposes it will be considered a direct purchase, and is also why microtransactions are an entirely different 'problem' from online gambling.
Yes, I think we first saw this with cigarette cards. And people did feel compelled to buy the cigarettes for a chance at completing a set. With todays understanding of gambling and addiction, I think the only thing stopping us calling it gambling is that it is not a big enough problem to investigate and legislate.
Anyone here get in trouble for digging through a box of cereal for the toy at the bottom?
It might be worth noting that GPs premise that money isn't being moved is not necessarily true. Counter Strike, for example, has a massive market for items that are dealt with real currency. A particularly lucky unbox could win you over ten grand. The money element absolutely does come into play with some games (not all, of course).
> The added monetary payout creates an incentive to play even more to cover for the losses. In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone, so if you do that instead of paying the bills, you know you won't be able to pay the bills, this is usually enough to limit the spending.
I think this point is missing the evolution of virtual clout. As a thirty year old I can agree with your point that these rewards are valueless - but I can also see the younger generation that measures social value through virtual presence where skins and appearance can be vital to self esteem. I don't think it's correct to downplay the value that some people see in the reward of these loot boxes and other chance games.
If you align your identity with your virtual presence then failing to keep up appearances can be extremely dire - that's incredibly unhealthy, but it's the way a fair number of folks operate.
This does not align with what I've heard from people who work on mobile games: they're driven by whales who are either independently wealthy or destroying their lives. You can even use your credit card to play!
People also get addicted to things that cost no money and still ruin their lives.
But the argument here is that game devs are clearly exploiting behaviors of addiction for their monetary gain, at the expense of the addicts bank account. I think the takeaway is that it doesn't even require potential monetary gain to trap people with addictive behaviors.
I do see what you're saying, I just think you are misunderstanding addiction, it isn't logical in the first place. Gamblers do know the house wins, they still gamble. People know they shouldn't spend all their money online shopping but they do etc.
In games like CS:GO or DotA there are lootboxes that you need to spend real money to open with the chance of getting a super rare skin that you can sell for real money on certain platforms. And to make things worse most of those platforms are online casinos that allow players to bet their skins to win skins in even more perverse ways. Those platforms offer small rewards for players that advertise them in their game nicks, e.g.: `Player Name | csgobettingsite.net`. And is common to find those kind of players in matches.
> If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more. After all, it was a bad losing streak, you will win the next one, that's for sure...
Plenty of retirees flock to casinos as soon as their Social Security check clears, then spend it all and go home without selling their grandchildren into sex trafficking. There is a difference between poor people and gambling addicts. A subset of all gamblers (addicts) struggle with rationality and will reach for someone else's wallet when theirs is empty-- and eventually find themselves encased in concrete at the bottom of what's left of Lake Mead. They would do this to obtain more heroin or meth just the same.
You're describing a worst-case scenario. Most gamblers are just poor people, who are poor because they make poor choices with money (like spending it at casinos). The type who trade in functional cars and finance a new truck every time they get a raise, or buy new appliances that cost exactly as much as their tax refund check. Money burns a hole in their pocket, but they don't become the neighborhood firebug. Ironically winning the lottery usually ruins the lives of them and everyone connected to them, since their spending scales linearly with available resources. They're just cows that consume until nothing is left, then they switch from pleasure-seeking to subsistence. They're not intelligent, but they are rational.
Kids don't have vaults full of money, and they have no equity worth loan-sharking for. Their rationality is up for debate, but there's no money to be made in kneecapping or drowning child debtors. What they do have is a surplus of attention. So you keep them engaged through all means available and milk them for quarters as long as you can. Dopamine derived from playing the game is the payout children get. Casino "games" are fucking lame beyond all comprehension, so casinos have to give adults some incentive to play the push-this-button-and-leave-nothing-to-your-children game.
To me, I don't see the situation being any different than traditional arcade machines (some games had owner-adjustable difficulty settings, and I swear some games outright cheated), and yet the current state of things feels more exploitative. Maybe it's the RNG-dependence and not skill...at least you could earn extended time and rewards if you were good at the game. Everything is gacha-crap these days.
I've always been amused that the Spice channel and the like were 100% scrambled by default. Seems like they could have done way better showing the non-explicit parts of movies/shows as a "free sample," then only scrambling the signal with a quick-activation hotline overlay the second the sexy parts start.
I've wondered many times how close videogame companies are to accidentally repeating the Pinball Prohibition. There was a period of time when all pinball machines were forbidden, because lawmakers throughout the US couldn't easily enough tell the difference between which ones were gambling and which ones weren't. (That was an extinction level event that bankrupted a bunch of pinball manufacturers and nearly ended several industries.)
On the one hand, a lot of the specific loopholes that games claim come directly out of the results of the Pinball Prohibition and contest laws (can't win cash back, must have winning odds posted but it can be in the fine print, things like that) so it is unlikely to repeat exactly like it happened before. But on the other hand, some of what is going on with current whales is so blatant that some have been famously referred to gambling addiction counseling and we do seem close to that political brink that "somebody must do something" and if it happens as the wrong sort of mob mentality panic, politicians are just as likely to use a sledgehammer to the entire industry than a scalpel to the worst offenders just like the Pinball Prohibition.
(I sometimes worry, too, about the role that Steam's Trading Cards and Inventory items play into their Auctions might impact any sort of "videogames are gambling panic". Those systems' interaction with Steam Wallet is even dangerously close to feeling like "cash back" sometimes, though you can't actually cash it out and it is more of a gift card. [Though gift card-based gambling/embezzling is another potential panic of its own.] It's hard not to imagine politicians preferring a sledgehammer when even the largest, most trusted videogame store on personal computers wasn't immune to adding gambling-like elements and making extra money from whales.)
> Those systems' interaction with Steam Wallet is even dangerously close to feeling like "cash back" sometimes
Uh... it's actually very, very common to cash back from Steam. There is a subreddit for CSGO's real money trading[1]. It has 230k subscribers. And it's just a single game, not the whole steam.
> politicians are just as likely to use a sledgehammer to the entire industry than a scalpel to the worst offenders just like the Pinball Prohibition.
This is unlikely simply due to the size of the market. Video games are played by >60% of the population and generate more revenue than movies with hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake.
The point of any crackdown on gambling is to reduce revenue for what are considered to be bad actors. The size of the market might be a factor for politicians when considering how much revenue to try to reduce the industry by, but law makers continue to prove over and over again they aren't necessarily that smart once they believe their constituents are panicking about "think of the children!"
Admittedly yes, destroying an entire industry that large would be an absolute worst-case scenario you would hope politicians are smart enough to avoid, I don't think it "likely" but I do find it useful to consider how far it could go, because it happened once (to Pinball), and we shouldn't forget that.
(ETA: Keep in mind that gambling laws in the US are extremely local with sometimes even cities in the same state disagreeing, and if a panic happens you just need a few localities with dumbest politicians to pass the harshest bills, and others to copy cat it at "public demand". That's how it happened to Pinball. That's how it happens for all sorts of terrible laws in the last few years we could point to. Bad laws in a panic are viral in the worst ways.)
Honestly I don't think pinball is a similar example, light reading indicates the market for pinball was in the 10s of millions. Inflation adjusted it sounds like the pinball industry was 1% of what modern video games are and, IMO, that kind of difference in size is a difference in kind.
A better analogy might actually be liquor and prohibition, but we're not seeing anger anywhere near that level
For those who had never heard of the Pinball Prohibition, here is an article about it[0]. Features a great photo of the authorities smashing machines like it was the 1930s and eliminating a speak easy.
People wasting thousands without realizing it through gambling mechanisms? Absolutely.
But millions? I really doubt it. It's probably a buy / trade / sell money-laundering type of operation, and that player was pissed they lost some of their assets.
I guess you're not familar with streaming culture, nor you live in an Asian country. Bragging on how much you spend on games and streaming the process is a thing. There was a Taiwan streamer who spent about 100k in hours on stream.
Of course it can be all staged. But the culture is there, and it's not that hard to imagine some people who has more money than they can spend in a lifetime doing this just to show that they can outspend the streamers.
Westerners are into that too now, I won't name names but they're happy to do it because they consider it a business expense (a tax deduction so not free, but after you add the views and subs and donations, and sometimes sponsorships, worth it). I think the influence they wield in normalising their spending habits is a problem - some say to not do what they do, but it's all a very exciting process for people and I'm sure plenty of viewers say something like "yeah spending $20,000 is stupid, I'll only spend $500".
Reminds me of how I heard Vietnam is one of the biggest consumers of black market rhinoceros horn. Lots of people are making money there, but there are only so many legitimate ways to flaunt your wealth in that system.
I think Hoyoverse (formerly Mihoyo) has the formula down. You don't have to spend money on their games. They play just fine without. But you think "wouldn't it be nice to have Ganyu or Hu Tao". I think the drop rates are better than FGO at least.
The only "You don't have to spend money"-games are like Dota2. In Dota2 you literally can't get any gameplay advantage by spending money. You get different visual effects or audio effects and that's all.
All the other freemium models are just tricking you into thinking you don't have to spend money.
And even that is still quite gambling-like, if you think about it.
I was plating DotA 2 recently. And while I didn't care for skins I was shocked that I was catching myself expending a lot of time exploring skins and managing inventory and the game rewards system. What was supposed to be a joyful and challenging activity became an excuse to addict and milk players.
The game is definitely fun enough on its own. But it went from "a fun game that gave me coins via lootbox duplicates that I could save up for some great dance emotes" to "a fun game that no longer has free cosmetics or dances, and therefore is now a fun game that is less fun that it used to be."
Plus I paid $20 or whatever for OW1. That game no longer exists. I would have happily paid $20 for OW2, even $50-60. But since I don't subscribe to the pay for cosmetics model, now blizz gets $0 from me, and I just accept I won't get cool new dances.
A lot of the time, even if the game /is/ rewarding enough on its own, the game you're really playing is still "lootboxes". Las Vegas casinos have roller coasters, live music, theatre, quality restaurants and various other attractions inside them. Some of them would even be worthwhile attractions on their own, but they're ultimately still adverts for the casinos. Gambling is just so profitable that they can afford to make their advertisements entire other fully-functionig businesses.
The market seemed to agree that OW1 was a good game. It had a good player count and looked like it made decent money. Until the end of 2019, when Activision/Blizzard decided to basically halt all work on OW1 in favor of work on OW2. It didn't help that Blizzard also moved all esports content (which they consolidated under their hat) from Twitch to Youtube at about the same time.
Which is the main reason I stopped playing. I can understand why they were removed but the lootboxes in OW1 could be farmed at a quite reasonable pace and beside cosmetics they also dropped a currency used to unlock specific items. Meanwhile I don't even know what that battle pass in Overwatch 2 does, the only thing Blizzard's marketing managed to tell me is that they want my money.
> I think Hoyoverse (formerly Mihoyo) has the formula down. You don't have to spend money on their games. They play just fine without
That only makes it more tempting to start playing. You can't get hooked on these games if you never play them in the first place, so making it 'easier' to start playing is a big part of the problem.
That was the realization that turned me off video games.
What is any modern, non-boxed sales model videogame selling?
Artificial scarcity.
And who is in absolute control of that scarcity?
The developer.
Why addict yourself to something your counterparty has every incentive to abuse you over?
Or as I asked in terms of my EVE Online experience, "Am I actually enjoying every moment of playing, or am I doing work I don't enjoy just so that I can get something?"
>Why addict yourself to something your counterparty has every incentive to abuse you over?
sorry if this answer sounds dismissive, but well: "because it's fun". I don't think myself as that strong an addict, though. So if it starts feeling not fun I simply quit spending, and likely quit altogether.
>Or as I asked in terms of my EVE Online experience, "Am I actually enjoying every moment of playing, or am I doing work I don't enjoy just so that I can get something?"
that's honestly an interesting question in and of itself. Because real life can have that analog too. Especially for an MMO like Eve. There may not always be times where I want to go out with friends, but I want to keep good relations, so I can put up with it until/unless I really can't make that plan.
I imagine guilds in MMOs have similar incentive. At some point you make genuine friends and you're there for them more than the daily grind itself. It's a means to gather friends together.
Cigarettes are fun too. But if you start smoking knowing that they're addictive...
The thing that really rubs me wrong is that you're playing a rigged game (literatively and figuratively) when you invest effort into grind games.
Essentially everything about the game world is under the developer's control, and they can use anything they want to get you to do what they want (spend more money).
Which to me feels like a card game where the dealer says "I'm going to cheat and redefine the rules whenever I want" and customers respond "Deal me in!"
Granted, there are good and bad developers and publishers. I play a ton of Paradox games, and I'm generally happy with the balance.
Cigarettes are a great example. Because while there are more restrictions on how to advertise them, limits on where you can smoke, and age restrictions on who to sell to, they are still perfectly legal to own and overall legal to sell to the right people.
I don't personally care if they set more restrictions, but I'm not really a fan of outright banning something that an able adult chooses to partake in. Which seems to be how so much of the conversation goes on the topic.
In any case, I still don't believe that games are so addicting as to be compared to Cigarette's nicotine. I a dealer changes the rules too drastically and maliciously against my ability to have fun... I leave. And that's why many mobile games outside of the absolute top money makers tend to be short lived. They aren't just a casino holding players hostage, they compete with other games and even medium, and like any game it can be hard to hold attention. Some may not even go in with the intent to hold the player attention for more than a few months.
>Granted, there are good and bad developers and publishers. I play a ton of Paradox games, and I'm generally happy with the balance.
of course. It's the same even with old school PS1/N64 titles. But I suppose many people aren't knowledgable enough in those games to know which are good/bad, and assume all are bad.
Most modern Asian mobage ("gacha" as they call it. Short for "gachapon/gashapon" inspired by the gumball machine esque toy of the same name) are like that these days. They are well past the days where they focus on selling solutions to hard levels.
They can "simply" create an entire culture around a game or even individual characters and use that parasocial relationship to grip players. Within the game with stories and bond mechanics and whatnot, and outside the game with animation, merch, Youtube personalities (as it's called today, Virtual Youtubers, or "VTubers"), and even concerts. And I didn't even get into the fanart side of this.
It makes for better game design at least. but what they are doing is much larger thinking than those old school arcade grift strategies.
For example, I have a friend who is into ウマ娘 (Uma Musume - Horse Girls) by Cygames. It's a "horse racing" game with anime girls with horse ears. There's a whole ecosystem around it with several anime series, concerts with music from the game with the voice actors singing and dancing on stage, variety shows with the voice actors, YouTube channels, lots of limited edition merch you can win at convenience stores.
My friend (who only has a part time job and lives with her parents at age 25) has spent over $700 upgrading just one of her characters. "But she's so cute!"
If your friend can afford that, it's honestly none of your nor our business to tell her how to spend her money.
If your friend can't afford that, why is the problem Uma Musume and not your friend? We could regulate gacha games into extinction, but that only means your friend will just find another avenue to spend $700 dollars of unaffordable money in.
If anything, I would at least take solace in the fact your friend isn't spending her money on things that would matter of factly cause tangible harm like drugs and alcohol instead.
Seems a lot like victim blaming. "Just have more willpower than teams of full-time psychologists and billion-dollar marketing budgets can erode" is basically "Worried about being mugged? Just be stronger than all the muggers, lol."
In case you weren't aware, the vast majority of people have "more willpower than teams of full-time psychologists and billion-dollar marketing budgets can erode". There are a few who unfortunately do not, but the world shouldn't have to bend over backwards to save them from themselves.
Who’s “bending over backwards” here? When gambling is regulated, nothing of value is lost. Also, when a ‘few’ people are capable of propping up an industry worth hundreds of billions, your definition of ‘few’ is pretty suspect.
I'm definitely not judging, I also spend too much money on stupid things and we're friends - we commiserate about it.
I just meant it as a concrete example of how the parasocial marketing tactics GP mentioned in these games get people to spend way more than they had planned to (or that you even could spend in "classic" games)
I agree spending beyond one's means is bad, but why is that blamed on what the money is being spent on rather than who is spending that money in the first place?
We never seem to blame the source of the problem in any of these discussions, blaming one scapegoat after another in a frantic and futile attempt to blame anything but the actual problem. It prevents any meaningful answer from coming to bear.
Not much you can do. This is stuff pretty much what every form of modern advertising wants to do, especially these days with social media like Twitter/Tiktok/Instagram/etc. It's no different than how modern musician artists aren't selling you music anymore but a "brand" and "personality". Because music doesn't make the money (not for the artist at least), it just drives fans into buying merch/concerts/etc.
It's not exactly new either. Toy lines were doing this as early as the 70's by leveraging colorful mascots in commercials and commisioning thinly veiled ads they called cartoons to keep the brand awareness. We simply have better tools to do this today.
At what point are you going to stop or finish eliminating those "manipulative business models"? The guy who keeps wasting his money is just going to move onto the next one.
No, the source of the problem are people who can't responsibly manage their finances. Whether that stems from something within their control or not is irrelevant.
It's worth mentioning that gachapon is enjoyed by people of all ages young and old, including kids. Yes, kids. It's "gambling", spending money for a chance at obtaining something, but gachapon is just a part of ordinary life in Japan.
Combined with more serious forms of gambling like horse racing (keiba) and pinball (pachinko), there simply isn't a stigma against gambling like there is in the west.
I think it's worse than that. Miyoho gives you the impression you can play their games without spending money, but in practice the gap between one copy of a character and four copies of a character can be enormous. By the time you realize this, you've been on the game for a while and are more likely to spend.
A lot of gacha games use this. Right when players think they've got something top tier, no no, the real top tier version is that .0001% drop x 4 to merge into some super version.
It's gross when you hear a young kid talk about how much some youtuber or twitch streamer "whaled" on stream like it's a flex to be admired.
While that is true, in Genshin Impact at least, the main game is so easy it's not really an issue unless you choose to be a min-maxer, and there's no PvP competitive aspect. You can beat the abyss full f2p, but it will take a bit longer to get there (as someone who has been a denegerate min-maxer in other games, I have no interest in pushing for it myself). The worst whales I've seen are those who get emotionally attached to a character.
The other thing is that there's no meaningful leaderboard or PVP situations. Some gamers will whale to acquire or preserve a position as #1-on-the-charts, so hyperoptimizing for single player doesn't scratch that itch, unless you're doing some Rube Goldberg setup like self-promoting video streams demonstrating your overpowered build.
I've tossed a little money (probably about USD40 over three years) on Genshin, but I'd rather express my attachment to characters by buying an Arataki Itto oppai mousepad off of Aliexpress. TBH, I found my interest waning when I realized I had a sufficiently capable team of characters I liked, so there wasn't really any reason to go chasing characters I didn't want.
That's why I pay for Genshin impact despite I generally don't like such monetize system. There's no anxiety for the game, so I can just pay for my satisfaction.
It depends on how you play the game. One copy or 4 copies, even 5 star characters or 4 star characters don't really matter in killing all monsters in the open world. As long as you do not play Abyss, it doesn't matter. (e.g., me, 3 years into the game and abyss only cleared at 10-2) I spent a few hundred dollars on chars though, but they were mostly about aesthetics (you just like them).
I've spent irresponsibly in FGO in the past. I still play, but for the last three years I only spend $15 twice a year. Gambling is seductive, and it's clear that the lack of a monetary payout doesn't make it any less dangerous.
I was a big fan of Fate/Extra, Fate/Extella, Fate/Stay Night and I've gotten exposed to FGO because I follow danbooru but avoided FGO if only because I don't own a high-end smartphone and FGO has usually been difficult to run on any unusual environment like the NVIDIA Shield or emulation on a PC probably because they want to stop "cheating".
Then one day I was riding the bus and found that the obnoxious fellow rider (let's see, sometimes he drinks hard alcohol from a flask...) that I call "Francis" (not his real name, but he looks just like "Francis" from Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure) knew all about FGO characters and was the first person I met in person who knew about Nero, Tamamo, etc.
As hobbies go, I've come to find that gacha game spendings aren't that out of line. Most hobbies are expensive, it's just that gacha games are one of the more obvious examples of our time and our world view.
If you're doubting me, take a look at hobbies like ham radio or cars or golf or whatever really strikes your fancy. The vast majority of hobbies are expensive, they will make your eyes water if you aren't used to throwing wads of money around for fun. Even a gaming computer can run you a few thousand dollars, not to mention the games themselves, and I think gaming is a hobby most of us can relate to.
Another thing I've come to find, from keeping a journal of my own spendings, is that while the total sum might seem ridiculous it's actually nothing unusual when considering the length of time that money was spent over.
To use myself as an example, I've spent somewhere around $12,000 on FGO over a span of about 7 years now. Is $12,000 a huge sum of money? Yes, absolutely. But according to my Excel spreadsheet it's also about $1,700 a year or $140 a month or just under $5 a day averaged out. I spend more than that per month on just costs of living, even just eating out a couple times will cost as much per month. And remember, that's averaged out: I can go for weeks and months without spending anything if the game doesn't interest me.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is, a lot of the anti-video game and anti-gambling crowd have started to sound more like a certain segment of people demanding others shouldn't have fun. It almost sounds like a new spin on "Video games are making violent children!" because that topic has gotten stale.
Is gambling addiction a thing? Yes, and it is unfortunate; some people really do need help from themselves. Irresponsible parents and children who don't know better also inevitably exist, and they too need some safety wheels so they don't trip over too hard.
But responsible adults spending significant sums of money for fun is not and should not be a problem by itself.
>I suppose what I'm trying to say is, a lot of the anti-video game and anti-gambling crowd have started to sound more like a certain segment of people demanding others shouldn't have fun. It almost sounds like a new spin on "Video games are making violent children!" because that topic has gotten stale.
There's some merit here, but a lot of the push back comes from gamers as well.
I think it's as simple as any inevitable result when costs rise. This crowd of gamers are used to seeing games as cheap as $5 on sale and they are already up in arms about AAA titles charging $70 at launch. So there will always be some tension and push back against that. Even threats of piracy over what for a middle class first world citizen may at worst be a dinner date (not even a fancy dinner date these days, sadly). Hearing of someone paying double that for a single game on a reocurring basis sounds borderline insane.
Some may be because the gamers are young, so they literally have no income to buy games with and are impatient to wait for sales. Others may be compelled by that rising tension against "capitalism" as a whole and see these services as yet another example of big coporations invading their hobby.
I've long stopped trying to really express my POV in those spaces, so c'est la vie.
I think it's even more nefarious to have games that /don't/ resemble gambling but utilize the same psychological tricks.
I got taken by legend Richard Garriott on a slippery slide of feeling like I was supporting a historic studio, making digital investments, holding onto key digital real estate, and being part of an exclusive gaming club, all while being coerced into 5 payments per month and incessantly repeating the same in game activities for hours per day. It took 8k for me to never trust game developers ever again. I can't even buy battle passes without feeling like a sucker now.
100% agree. My youngest son got hooked into a game called Mech Arena. By the time I realized he had spent 200 dollars (my fault 100%). Games like this should be forbidden or made forbidden for people under 18 years old.
Lost about $100 a while back because my 8-year-old didn't realize he was spending real money in some F2P game on an at-the-time unlocked PS5 (though I didn't realize it was so unlocked that you didn't need a password to make purchases—I do most on my phone, for all consoles, because it's much smoother than wrestling with on-console game stores).
Shame on me for not locking it sooner. Shame on every goddamn company that knows for a fact this is happening—probably a lot—and prefers to keep robbing people rather than do something about it (say, something ethical—like shut down their company). $100 doesn't mean much to me (like, I'm not well-off enough that I don't think a thing of spending $100, but unexpectedly losing that much every now and then has basically zero effect on my life) fortunately, but that could really screw over a lot of people, in a ruin-their-whole-month kind of way ("why do they even have a playstation to begin with if $100 can really mess them up?!" PS4s are pretty cheap, used, or may have been handed-down for free or very cheap from a better-off relative or friend, and have basically the same store and most of the same games—besides, a planned expense is very different from an unplanned one)
> "why do they even have a playstation to begin with if $100 can really mess them up?!"
People want something to take their mind off of things. I am glad to hear your life is good and something you want to experience. Not everyone has that privilege.
Hey not sure why you felt it was important to reply to this line out of that entire paragraph when the next line is more than clear. just kind of seems like concern trolling.
Shame on the company? Sir this is America where Capitalism is king. Profits come before all else. Doesn’t matter if you deceive children or exploit your workers those profits must rise!
My (at the time) 9 year old daughter once bought $7,200 worth of dragon in game content on her Kindle Fire (before amazon had parental controls to stop this). The good new is that Amazon INSTANTLY refunded all of it as soon as I explained 9 year old daughter to their support team. I'm sure there's a game publisher that is still disappointed that their whale was more of a guppy.
I'm not a parent myself so maybe I'm talking out of my ass here.
but how is this even possible? my parents never gave me direct access to a credit card as a child. eventually I got a debit card to spend my own allowance chore money, but if I blew it all in something dumb that was my own problem. no pizza/movies with friends until I built it back up
I'm trying to find something which explains it clearly (so I could be wrong), but I don't think you can give a person the ability to hail Uber rides without also giving them the ability to do microtransactions in a mobile game.
The former is highly useful for parents and from what I can tell very common, not just for independence, but also safety reasons.
Yes, you can. Uber doesn’t go through in app purchases (Apple gets a 30% cut). You have to set up a separate account with payment information.
On iOS devices, you can use Apple Pay for Uber (standard credit card charges). But I doubt many parents are putting a credit card on their child’s phone where they can just tap to pay at any store.
When you were a kid your N64 wasn't hooked up to the internet with an app-store to which a credit card was already provided to pay for your monthly multiplayer-access subscription.
no but my cable was. My parents sure made sure I couldn't enter a password and buy those totally educational biology documentary channels I was curious about.
Even then, any and all payment options on my phone are bound to a password, I make sure I have to enter that password or fingerprint every single time.I do find it a bit strange that others, especially with young kids, wouldn't have similar securities. I'd probably be even more secure if I did.
For a long time, there were not parental controls on purchases, and some platforms would force you to lie about age, and give access to the family card to allow children to play games (that were clearly not adult content). Some may still have that antipattern. Parent friendliness by app store: Amazon(best), Apple(meh), Google(beware yer wallet)
Set up store on device before kids, or when they're very young and not gaming. Do not set require-password because putting it in with a controller for every single should-be-locked-to-kids action is very slow and annoying. Forget to change that when the kids start messing with the device.
I would have to beg my dad to use his credit card to make an online purchase, even if I had the cash equivalent in my hand to give to him right then!
If I new kids would be using any device I would make sure it had no payment information accessible. Which may mean the inconvenience of adding and removing payment information before and after making purchases. I can't imagine letting a child have access to a device which can spend your money, it's essentially like letting them hold your wallet, and we probably wouldn't trust them to do that if they were in an arcade, or theatre, or shopping mall, etc.
I remember buying my Runescape memberships and eventually Minecraft that way. Not having the freedom to spend my own money on the things that I actually wanted was weird.
If you're not careful about in app payment settings, your kid can rack big bills with just a few taps. I know parents in Silicon Valley who have had this happen.
Sometimes it is simply parents game console or parents stream account. For years. Then, one they they borrow it to kiddo and just don't realize the risk, because they have been buying last time months ago.
My sister-in-law who is an elementary school teacher and a good parent in many respects would let her preverbal toddlers play with her phone which is problematic in many respects.
> My youngest son got hooked into a game called Mech Arena. By the time I realized he had spent 200 dollars (my fault 100%). Games like this should be forbidden or made forbidden for people under 18 years old.
I actually think the opposite. Spending $200 as a kid and having nothing to show for it is a lesson you won't forget in a hurry, but not life altering. We should let kids experience the risks and consequences of gambling while they still have a safety net, rather than setting them loose at 18 when it's for real.
Virtual slot machines are not fun games, and Apple and Google could ban them with a stroke of a pen. They certainly should. Apple, Meta and Google could also prevent developers from advertising them, again with the stroke of a pen. You don't have a right to make them, and they are doing little for the gaming and app ecosystems by having them around.
Slot machine victims and politics are poorly aligned. Something like 1/11 of the top grossing apps on the App Store are virtual slot machines. Nonetheless the number of active users total across all virtual slot machines globally may number as low as the hundreds of thousands. This is from my experience as a game developer and publisher.
What to do in this scenario: extremely high revenue but few users? As other commenters have said, Apple's deep seeded indifference to gaming has created this beast. Apple Arcade, while generally publishing good games, is a financial and ecosystem failure: there are no breakout hits, and everyone who publishes into Apple Arcade had finished their game before showing it to Apple or had previously successful games, so they didn't help anything come to be that would have come to be already.
There are dozens of commenters here complaining about their kids buying IAP. Personally, I find the assignment of blame for something that pisses you off kind of a moot point. You wouldn't give a fuck if there weren't real money involved, indeed there are maybe even a billion people on this planet playing some kind of free game and having fun. The worst that they are doing is wasting time. But Apple could give you a refund - it is, after all, imaginary, there's no scarcity - but they don't. It's their store. Steam gives refunds. So how about write some angry e-mails to Tim Cook, or run for office.
As a game developer, I would love for virtual slot machines to go away. The law can do that, if not Apple. But nobody can force Apple to take real risks with Apple Arcade, or force users to pay for my game. There is the problem.
It's not helping that Apple - of all companies - is making banks off softcore porn lootbox games. They had war on gaming, and got lootbox gaming eat out the platform. Congratulations, Mr. Jobs.
> 1.1.4 Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”
I suspect that if the "emotional feelings" being stimulated are Apple's cut of hundreds of millions in revenue, they'll decide that it's not porn. Those regulations are notoriously inconsistently applied.
I don't understand how monetary pay-in's without payouts is less scrutinized than with payouts, as at least in the latter the consumer could (with a low likelihood, but still) get something out of the transaction. In contrast, just pay-in means that only the company makes money and the consumer gets nothing, besides some virtual garbage.
I fear it might be the other way around. The ingame rewards are real while the payout pretty much doesn't happen. It's a carrot on a stick, the donkey gets nothing. It seems to me that one can have a much greater sense of progress if there is actual progress.
The ingame rewards are real only until the game goes dark, your device is no longer supported, or their servers shut down and suddenly you're left with nothing. At least real life gambling can leave you with something tangible.
I think another aspect that my friends and I talk about, seeing the evolution of micro transactions over the past decade or two, is the fact that gambling or making transactions for what is essentially an artificially scarce thing that can be duplicated ad infinitum without much cost.
Rewards are also frequently devalued to push you into getting new rewards. Either by power creep in released rewards or active nerfing of existing rewards.
I'd like to see some numbers about how many people struggling with gambling addictions compared to how many people struggle with in-game-purchase addictions. Both share the negative reinforcement of spending money. In exchange one gives you the positive reinforcement of playing a game. Another gives you the positive reinforcement of money. I have the feeling money is a 10x more potent reward.
This is to say, the gaming industry makes games that are a problem for some people but I'd like to see some hard numbers comparing it to gambling before I would say the product is as dangerous as gambling on a population level.
It's not just the winning that is addicting to gamblers. More often, it's the losing. Losing recapitulates the feelings of deep shame that they feel, but don't feel are necessarily justified. So in order to re-justify those feelings, they gamble away money and "act shamefully" so to speak.
This same pattern is behind a lot (if not all) addictions. It's not just a physical addiction or a dopamine rush, and it's not generally the upside that addicts are addicted to.
You should read more about addiction. You're right about the mechanism employed, but that mechanism does not addict most people. There are genetic and social profiles that make one more vulnerable to addiction, and trauma from the past that results in deep, internalized shame increases those odds dramatically.
Sure. What I'm really saying is that I bet cash payment triggers more dopamine than whatever gotcha/powerup/etc mechanic a mobile game can use. That cash payment is so much more of a potent reward that it makes sense to regulate gambling much more strictly. Of course, I'm speaking on aggregate and across the entire population, it's clear some individuals overspend on mobile games.
China banned under-18s from playing online games more than an hour a day, and only on Fri/Sat/Sun and holidays. Online games are far more addicting in my experience, but it's always easy to waste hours offline as my 90s childhood shows.
That's from a recent article - not sure if it changed since.
> Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.
Lawmakers are actively pandering to the gambling companies, as the likes of Epic successfully push to make it illegal to have controls on gaming devices under the rubric of "breaking walled gardens" and such.
Video games have been gambling adjacent since the arcade era. A lot of casinos even used to have a casino floor for adults and an arcade floor for the kids
Reading the article about the addicted woman, she's perfectly aware of what she's doing and she's perfectly aware she's blowing money away on nothing. There's nothing to be regulated. Conscious adults can make their own decisions.
How ridiculous is it for her to ask Zynga to close her account and then still try to log into it later? This isn't a regulatory issue, it's a willpower issue. Might as well regulate how much/what food you can buy so people don't get fat.
But it IS all willpower. The other take is baffling to me - the notion that "we"(the smart people/ the regulators/ the ones above the masses) need to protect weak people because they are too weak to do something about it.
It's a ridiculous proposition in my opinion. First, it's intractable - Zynga closes the woman's account, she'll find other ways to blow her money away.
But the biggest problem is not even that - the proposed solution of regulation, which nowadays is a universal hammer for absolutely every problem, takes freedom away from me and you in order to protect her. Even though as I've said it doesn't really protect her.
Regulation is a terrible solution to any problem, almost all of the time.
Ah, I though I was talking to a political zealot, thanks for confirming.
You clearly have no reference for the experience of a severe addiction and how reduced access and affordances can reduce the chances or severity of relapse.
I hope you enjoy eating your heavily regulated dinner tonight before you sleep in your building-regulated abode atop your fire-safety-regulated mattress.
> Gambling tends to spur much greater ethical concern and regulatory scrutiny, yet overlap – in practice and even game design – is becoming increasingly evident.
The government hates competition. They want to be the only ones that can swindle money out of whales via state lotteries.
State lotteries were actually specifically designed to discourage whales and big spending. That is why tickets are relatively low priced and there are no high priced super tickets. It is very difficult to impulse buy a mass amount of tickets.
They were also designed to replace numbers -- a similar game run by mobsters that took money from the poor. The rates of return of lotteries are much better than the old numbers games.
Of course some states have gotten greedy and have changed the rules to encourage more impulse spending.
This seems like the understatement of all understatements. These games are almost exactly like casino games in all ways, visually, game mechanics, incentives, except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling and therefore not regulated by gambling laws? Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.