It's about the marketing and predatory practices by these publishers. There are no warnings about this kind of thing on the games, and they're marketed towards kids. Then the ESRB and PEGI rate them as acceptable for kids, because they're made up of the CEO's of these companies.
That's a really hard one to approach, willpower is something that takes active work to maintain, and if there's an easy out, people will inevitably take it over time. FOMO, or "Fear of missing out" is a real and gripping gambling tactic that has worked its way into the zietgheist of the modern gaming market. It's actually a huge issue and absolutely should be talked about more, I personally think gambling stuff in video games is right up there next to privacy issues as some of the biggest modern topics we have in the connected current age.
Sorry for the double post but that was a great way to state that.
Especially when the game are specifically designed to target gambling addictions. They make things intentionally hard to obtain, and then sell you "time savers" (Ubisoft's term) to get around them. They sell loot boxes with random rewards, which are nothing more than glorified slot machines, designed for you to keep putting coins in the machine until you get your perfect team (even though the chances of that ever happening are next to nothing).
Sure. Of course.
I really enjoyed the early Mechwarrior products - good on you for having a hand in that epic series.
I hear you guys... but then again I just wouldn't give me kids money for that stuff (I have extensive experience not giving them money for junk they ask for). Of course a lot of people are terrible at parenting which doesn't help.
Yeah, we have a lot of game devs in my family, but my cousin's experience with a Seattle based mobile studio (I will not be using names out of professional courtesy) was probably my best and most gripping anecdote I have on this. He was just excited to get a job in development coming out of Digipen and you know you want to be happy for your family, but already about 6 months in he was telling me how awful he felt over some of the practices of the studio, some of the "Whales" as they called em they had purchasing over 200,000 usd on this PHONE game for simple things like cosmetics, mild upgrades and extra continues. It got so gross, he actually ended up moving to a QA position at another company. I admit the money talks, and there have been times where if we included gambling features, we could wrap up our project a couple years early, but I just can't do that to people, and honestly I feel like these kinds of predatory things should very honestly be illegal. It takes video games, which in my opinion are the greatest storytelling medium, and turn it into drugs. Quite honestly.
The fact that there's no information for parents on these, and they're specifically rated for children is the problem. There are parents saying their kid ran up thousands on the credit card, because the game allows for it with no parental controls whatsoever. Nor is there any indication there should be parental controls, because the game is labeled as safe for children.
Haven't heard of this YongYea myself. I don't really follow any streamers, but yeah, this is what I got from his video. Doesn't seem like he plays the game and is more so just reiterating general opinions of the game currently. Not a knock on him and his content, but his video didn't really sound like personal experience.
If I can be just real with you a moment, it's not necessarily the money itself that gets at kids, it's the psychological fear of "I am missing out on a good thing" like denying kids presents on christmas. It's super good to hear that parents are watching out for their kids not to get sucked into this kind of stuff, but the thing you REALLY want to look out for, is targeted ad placement on your kids. It's so easy to opt in to targeted ads, so, so, easy, and that FOMO triggered by targeted bombardment and advertising, can make even the most stalwart want to crave these predatory items. So if you're watching out for kids, focus on eliminating the ad blitz first, don't let them get tempted in the first place.
You can't review a future product. You can only review what is there. What is there is not worth my money now, so I haven't given them a dime. I haven't really played much since they announced that Odyssey wouldn't have full VR support, anyway. Then they killed mining.
Do you know some game support have literal list of whales ? And how much the customer spend for when they contact them. So, they don't ban those whales when they misbehave, and give them a better treatment. Freeloader on the other hand, well....
He's taking everything he's seen, heard, as well as examples and presents it to an audience.
Yes, yes I do know that. You can also see that google has monetized this further in their play store, they have open view tiers now, that tell you that at certain spending levels, you can move up to higher tiers, if you get "Platinum" you actually get specialized customer service, to help you whale harder. This was put in place for titles like Fate: Grand Order, and others.
This. He isn't presenting his opinion. He's presenting the information as it currently sits, and allows us to consume it all in one place. I had no idea IGN and Eurogamer had articles about it. Now I know, thanks to his video.
100% agree. I didn't know Eurogamer did as well.
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