It's even more frustrating, because the game is good. I really enjoyed playing the first 30 levels or so. Good story, good controls, very satisfying gameplay. If I could pay $60 and just have a "classic" Diablo on my phone, I might. But I won't spend a cent on consumable in-app purchases.
It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
> It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
What I find really sad is that multiple games have proven that there is a middle ground and that making a f2p while making enormous amount of money is possible (League of Legend ...) and using such predatory system that are so prevalent on mobile is not the only solution.
There is probably already enough monetisation around skins in the games that they would have easily turn up a profit.
The rest is just greed and disregard for players but then when they don't care that the game is banned in two countries at launch because it violate gambling laws what else to expect ...
If you need to reference LoL/Fortnite to make a point, you are not making a point.
In fact, there are very few games that have done the f2p walk successfully, sustainably, and all of them pale in comparison to the few extraordinary exceptions.
There are a _ton_ of successful f2p games with reasonable monetization models - Valorant, CSGO, Warzone, Dota, Path of Exile, Lost Ark, Hearthstone, etc. It's just that games in general are a power law industry - I don't think monetization model is really what will prevent a game from being successful. In fact, much of the discourse around Immortal is that the gameplay itself is in fact top notch. Blizzard has the dedicated fanbase to make a healthy profit and more with a reasonable cash shop - they don't _need_ to resort to these extremely cash-grabby mechanics.
Cash grab will always be superior especially when you factor in the effort making the game. MMOs will be magnitudes harder than making mobile cash grab games.
I honestly thought it was inevitable for Blizzard to go down this route the moment I saw the revenue slides post acquisition. In that slide it showed that King’s mobile games made way more than Blizzards games. At that point, all the MBA suits in the board must have started thinking, “why go through all the hoops of making a good game when you could spend way less money and effort to milk the cash cows?”
Thus the pressure started mounting up on Blizzard to create more “efficient” games like Hearthstone and newer releases instead spending long time creating and refining a game like they have before.
Precisely this, I feel like the only middle-ground here is not to sell your company to corporate overlords, we learned that lesson with many other companies.
Simon Sinek has a really good point in his book "Start With Why" that basically says selling your company is a complete failure, because you basically lose your autonomy and ability to adapt to unique market conditions that let companies be successful in the first place.
If you sell your company, presumably you don't care about its future success anymore and now you have a bunch of money with which you can do whatever you want.
Lost Ark and Genshin manage to be both very cash grab and very reasonable as a free-2-play. You can spend a lot of money on both, and pay-2-win in both, but still get to experience the whole game at a reasonable pace as a f2p player.
Diablo Immortal seems to do many of the same things, but just in a much more egregious way. So far I've heard a lot about how much money you can spend on the game, but not much about how bad it makes the f2p player's experience.
In Lost Ark and Genshin most players don't care that much about whales spending 10k to deal 100% extra damage because it's purely player-vs-environment and that sort of damage boost is totally excessive and unnecessary.
But many games make progress feel extremely slow or otherwise aggravating to push purchases.
I haven't really heard much about where Diablo Immortal lies on that scale.
As an anecdote, in Genshin F2P is totally adequate — its key feature is that max character level is constrained and easily achievable, so the main difficulty becomes getting new rare characters, especially if you’re impatient.
Back when I was in the industry there was very few games that did better than breaking even. It's the same reason you don't see a lot of independent large studios any more. If you need to hit the top 15-20% to make it only publishers who can afford to spread out the risk are able to stay afloat.
I believe there is a deep disease of extreme and growing wealth inequality, whose symptoms are erupting in every area of our way of life. This is a good example. In a more wealth equal society you're financial motivated to build good products for all users. Now the entire system is geared to the whims of the rich
> It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
What makes you say that? I mostly play single-player games where I just buy a game and then play it. There are loads of those out there, with more released every week. Even with my underpowered Linux laptop I have plenty to choose from.
I never got much into mobile gaming, but have recently been having a lot of fun playing PC or console games on my phone (using a controller) with streaming services. I've played with both Geforce Now and Xbox Game Pass and (at home on my decent cable internet connection) it's working really nicely. I also have the Nvidia shield, so when I do want to game on the TV I can pick up where I left off very easily.
If you're looking for a game to play on your commute it's probably not going to work, but for at home on the couch it's great.
Ah right, I don't play games on mobile, but I think there are still mobile games with simple straight-forward pricing models. For example the Baldur's Gate series got released on mobile (already a few years ago), and Wadjet Eye Games releases most of their adventures on mobile too I think. There are undoubtedly others.
But I guess they're harder to find/more rare. As others mentioned, most people spend nothing to little on these "free" games, so as a no-spend gamer you can choose between 1) free, or 2) pay $10 (or whatever they charge) to play a game. Not necessarily a hard choice if the "free" game is "entertaining enough".
Diablo 4 will probably just be a normal PC game too. Those freemium mobile games are always scammy but that doesn't mean there aren't endless classic business model games.
A publisher that has tasted fast cheap low value entries has a hard time justifying risky quality entries when the risk of failure is much higher. We're seeing the reality-tv moment in video games with mobile freemiums and it's frightening. I feel like Square-Enix is the perfect nexus if these market forces. I'm not even sure they'll bother with AAAs after making so much money off their low effort mobile cash cows.
Not only that, but many studios are one bad selling title away from closing up permanently. They can't afford to take risks. Check out "Press Reset" by Jason Schreier for multiple examples.
I still plays Diablo 2 and 3 quite a bit. I don’t think I’d call myself a “hardcore” player — I’m not very good — but I’m definitely in the Diablo 4 launch demographic.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Diablo Immortal as sort of a canary. I can say with absolute confidence that I won’t be buying D4 at launch if Blizzard doesn’t fix the DI mess.
Among longtime players of the franchise, I can’t imagine that I’m alone.
> It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
Same can be said for software. Now it’s all SaaS where you have to pay monthly and choose from different pricing tiers or ala carte feature options to ‘win’ in a business sense.
> Now it’s all SaaS where you have to pay monthly and choose from different pricing tiers or ala carte feature options to ‘win’ in a business sense.
While some businesses abuse SaaS pricing (e.g., MS office for very basic uses, acrobat pro for basic uses, etc.), I think the SaaS pricing model has aligned the interests of developers and consumers (esp. smaller devs and smaller consumers) in a way that has allowed a wider market to have access to a wider range of affordable software and ongoing support/updates than would be possible under the previous system.
There are definitely folks, often a small niche, who really just need an old version of a piece of software for one or two small functions, and maybe those folks should be built in to the SaaS pricing model somehow, but overall I think that the merits of SaaS pricing almost always outweigh the demerits by quite a bit.
The SaaS pricing model doesn't mean just one thing, so you should probably define what you mean.
As commonly practiced, if you stop subscribing, you lose all access to the software (or get bumped down to the functionality of some free version). This moves a large portion of the risk of developing a new version from the developers to the customers. If the customers don't like the new version, it's not easy for them to switch; and as commonly practiced, they often can't continue using the old version.
I do agree that the JetBrains model aligns both developer and consumer interests. JetBrains carries the risk of developing the new version. If customers don't like it, they can unsubscribe and continue using their existing software.
For nearly everything users should be able to pay once and then pay for updates. The model Jet Brains was forced into should be the norm and not the abusive model Apple has normalized and forced onto consumers
Office Home and Student, the cheapest retail option for office, was $149.99 for a permanent license, no upgrades, per computer.
365 gives you $70/yr for latest version per computer.
Or, the real win, $100/year for up to 5 people. That's $20/year/person, which is cheaper than buying Office Home and Student for each person and upgrading periodically.
That said, I know people who do, and I have pointed them to Libre Office.
Folks who complained, but who would probably like to know about a free version (I didn’t know there was one):
- retirees on very limited income
- unemployed people
- folks of limited means who only use any of these tools 1-5 times a year, but really need the specific MS tools those 1-5 times
I will point these people to the free web app option moving forward.
I realize that the free version won’t get a lot of marketing since it produces no revenue, but it may be prudent to have an evangelist hang out in online communities of old people, caregivers, and unemployed people and keep them informed. It would help the MS image.
I realize that such a person might exist, but the relatively large number of people who complain to me about Office pricing makes me think that the word is not being spread efficiently.
I hope that the free web apps option works for this group of folks. I don't work for the Office org, but I'll see if I can't figure out a way to channel your suggestion about online community engagement to someone who can do something about it. Thanks for the follow-up!
Or by generally not giving a shit about per-country VAT rules.
There’s plenty of US based SAAS companies that sell to the EU without charging any tax, and vice versa.
Of course, this doesn’t scale well. But if your turnover in those regions where you haven’t implemented proper tax rules is less than 6 figures a year, and you have no presence there, you’ll probably get away with it.
At the heart of every SAAS offering is the core of the proposal: It takes money to make money. The same reason why finance related journals have largely kept alive while lifestyle magazines have shrivelled. If a thing costs money but ends up making you more then it's still a win-win.
You have to upgrade eventually, though. In theory, the SaaS product could be priced the same as the shrink-wrapped version, just divided by 60 months. I suspect it's more expensive, though.
All things being equal, if I ran IT, I'd rather have the SaaS model because I'll always have the latest version and not have to deal with the drama of upgrades every 5 years. I'd also prefer it as the vendor because I don't need to support multiple versions of the software long-term.
The "no longer works" comment clearly refers to the business model, ie. ignoring the quality or popularity of the product itself and just looking at the balance sheet. The gambling (microtransaction) model is enormously more profitable than the classical "just sell a game" model.
Elden Ring was spectacularly well received and has sold millions of units, but it's "only" a game. There's no casino in the back, and therefore no gambling-related revenue stream.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but if the "no longer works" comment refers to the business model as you say, then the person you replied to is saying "no, it can still work as a business model — here's an example."
It may not work as well or as easily, but I don't think that's the point being made.
The customer might want to buy a product, and the studio might want to make it, but isn’t there someone they forgot to ask?
Business models that are lower-risk and higher-return are systematically preferred by investors. Games are expensive to make. FromSoft has been successful enough to stay in business for now. They’ll always be in competition with studios that sacrifice product quality for profitability. Many studios literally cannot afford to do things their way.
Sure, positive from people who are happy to pay their way towards a victory. Blizzard as a gaming company is dead and if you never played their games you probably shouldn’t involve yourself in this discussion.
Everything I've reads says the opposite. Elden Ring has sold at least 13.4 million units so far[1], which is >$800 million in revenue. The only revenue figure I could find for Diablo Immortal is $800k [2]. They're not even in the same ballpark.
Until it doesn't. We're not talking about the same thing here because one is a one-time payment (license) vs on-going (loot boxes / SaaS). I'm highly critical of loot box (p2p) games, but you're on-going payments do pay for content in the future. Companies who charge once have very little incentive to maintain the software (assuming it requires it to).
Because Elden Ring took 4 years to develop, 5 years if you include the DLC release time. You would need to amortize its very front-loaded revenue over those 5 years, because a live-service game like Diablo Immortal would be generating somewhat consistent revenue throughout that entire time.
Let's say ER reaches 20M + 8Mx2 for it's two upcoming DLCs @ $40 each. That's $1.8B lifetime. Pretty amazing! DI would need to make $360M per year to be an equivalent business. So 800k in the first 24 hours is not too far off track to being equivalent.
We should be mindful of the biggest difference between Elden Ring and Diablo Immortal - the latter has a constant revenue stream via its in game microtrasaction capability.
Whereas the former, despite being a good game, may not provide the revenue model desired by its stakeholders.
Elden Ring isn't going to be a standalone game. The publisher (Bandai Namco) says it's the start of a franchise, which fans are almost certain to lap up for a long time to come. Had Elden Ring included microtransactions or other questionable features, it's likely fans would be far less enthusiastic about future installments, which means revenue from the franchise would dry up faster.
Someone made a video that imagined changes a company like EA or Blizzard might make to Elden Ring, charging for extra arrows, fees for questlines, microtransactions for boss assists, and so forth. It made me feel sick. I could totally see a marketing-driven game studio making similar decisions.
ER impressed me so much that I bought three earlier titles from From Software, an additional $120 spent. Regrettably, you show consumer behavior like that to a mercenary games industry exec, and they'll just see "lost opportunity to put the screws to the market" and not "we should make better games."
(This is the first time that I've literally worn out a controller playing a single game).
It seems like a good example to me. It was a sales model that worked. That's all. It doesn't have to work better than every other sales model out there. It just has to be profitable and successful on its own.
Indeed. I'm personally not a victim of loot boxes and exploitative P2W tactics because I just don't buy them. But I just want to pay some amount once and have a good game in my Android phone, without ads and without constantly nagging me to spend more! I'll pay $60 also if the game is good, I just don't want to be put into a Skinner box constantly trying to milk my "engagement" and my pockets. Is that so much to ask?
Mind you, there are some games like that (my usual routine is to go to Google Play Games, navigate to the bottom, choose "no ads" and "no in-app purchases"), but it seems that they are like 1% of the total.
If you like a specific niche subgenre, a franchise, etc. it's very likely that all games you find will be of the exploitative variety.
It's sad that I have a pocket computer with an awesome screen in my hand the whole day, and other cool features like gyroscope, GPS, etc. that can be used for gaming; and I find myself going back to my good old PC (or lately, the Steam Deck) when I want to play.
It’s even worse on mobile as the app might forcefully update you to a new Free to Play version. I spent $8 on Galaxy On Fire 2 HD which was acquired by another company then suddenly dropped the price and added ads and in app purchases. Very frustrating.
Similar experience for me. I bought the no ads version of plants vs zombies- “no ads” was even in the title. A few years later EA changed the app name and added ads.
"Escape from Tarkov" and "It takes two" are just some of the more noteworthy ones. There's tons more on steam.
It's just the mobile market that's screwed entirely. Which I find odd, because I'm convinced there are opportunities for games that work especially well on small screens with touchscreen (like Nintendo demonstrated half a decade before mainstream smartphones)
Precisely, Nintendo tried a sane sales model with Super Mario Run back in 2016. You would have access to some levels, then pay and unlock the rest. No more in-app purchases, IIRC.
The reaction was a lot of angry comments about the game being locked and that it should be free-to-play, etc.
Their next games (like Mario Kart Tour) went back to the exploitative loot box model.
Mario Run was also just not a very good game (this is obviously an opinion, but still…). I wonder how it would go if Nintendo tried releasing an actual good game for $10 or some other amount, not an infinite runner with a Mario skin.
Yes it does work. Elden Ring is another example of a hugely successful product which is solely focused on being an excellent piece of entertainment.
It’s just more optimal for
Profitability to create addictive garbage like this. Blizzard has chosen to be greedy and predatory rather than trying to create art of entertainment.
You are comparing a full AAA game for PC and console made for hardcore gamers versus a mobile game with loot boxes designed to attract and exploit kids or people that addicted to this kinda crap and disguise it like a game, pretty much like slot machine do.
> It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
I think the assumption that another model was even considered is what people are getting wrong. The game was made explicitly and intentionally for this p2w / gamble business model. There was never an attempt to make it anything else. Blizzard lent their IP to make a cash grab. They’re milking their IP while they can, and monitoring both back lash and revenue, and will be repeating it.
It's a pretty great Diablo experience on an iPad with a controller. It is sad that you can't just pay a decent amount of money to get a classic experience. Maybe people will discover a path where you could pay a reasonable sum of money to get a fairly normal grinding experience with Diablo. I'm not opposed to in-app purchases, but I'm not a gambler, and I don't support gambling business models.
I saw some reviews and write-ups saying that it would be more fun as a $10 game, but I think that's part of the problem. This is not a $10 game. It should be fully priced.
For whatever reason, proper up-front never took hold on mobile. I know Apple really pushed 99-cent apps early on, and maybe that is part of the genesis of this. It has been even harder to convince Android users to pay for apps and games. And so here we are.
I suspect it would be really hard to convince people to pay $60 for a mobile game after all these years of cheap and free games, no matter how good and how expensive it was to make. It's kind of illogical when you think about it. The latest iPhones are at least base PS4 in terms of power. The iPad Air And Pros are well beyond that.
As others have noted, there are ways to make f2p work well. You can do season passes and cosmetic stuff. You don't have to go whale hunting.
Realistically, we probably need legislation to make this kind of whale hunting illegal. We also need Apple and Google to step up and start caring about business models that support great software.
It's not just games, we aren't getting great mobile software in general -- at least not at the rate we saw with desktop computers.
Proper up-front never occurred because Apple refuses to implement a simple free-trial-period mechanism. And it is impossible to filter store searches in a way that tells you which apps would behave roughly in that way (therefore anything with IAP I just assume must be a gambling/gem-bags/garbage model).
Really no video game lets you do a free trial. To me the start of all this was Google. Google completely changed the way we interact with services and technology. It’s amazing and completely “free”.
Back when games were distributed as a physical media, there were demo version you could get with a game magazine for free, or early downloads via Internet. Plus Google Play in the beginning let you try any purchased app for, what? 48 hours? I don't recall exactly now.
Honestly, the gameplay looks like a slightly-polished Diablo 3. It isn't that exciting to me. What's more-interesting to me, though, is your comment about people discovering a path to get a normal experience. Diablo 3 was reworked a year after release to move to that model, and honestly it's a very fun game. They dropped the auction house stuff, tuned gear drops to help you find your own kit, and added rifts and bounty stuff. It's still a very fun weekend experience. I think you're right about mobile pricing. That said, with Apple's recent campaign promising to replace computers with iPads, it's possible we are in for a shift.
The issue is fundamentally that releasing a single game for a single fee yields linear growth, which is to say the amount your growing by is stagnant. Stagnant growth, to an investor, is essentially a signal that your company is currently failing. So unless you can grow your growth, you fail, and the only way to continue growing your growth is if new products remain cash generating indefinitely.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Your insight connects the software industry to the larger macroeconomic environment of low interest rates and growth-seeking (rent-seeking?). A one-off’s sales have a ceiling, where a recurring revenue source is an indefinite fountain of sales.
The same could be observed of Hollywood. How much of the derivative sequels, reboots and spin-offs are driven not by a lack of creativity as is often bemoaned, but rather by a greater-than-ever desire to develop “fountains of sales” rather than one-off artistic hits?
I've played to around level 30 or so also and it feels just like any other recent Diablo. So far it seems like I can pay to speed things up/improve the drop rate, or just keep playing without just fine. Is there some spot I'm going to hit that I can't progress without paying?
The article mentions that you can get the best gear for free but it will take you about 10 years. So I'm sure you can play it and have fun. If you try PVP however then you would be at a great advantage if you pay money for upgrades.
But these games are explicitly designed to be frustrating and not fun when played for free.
The math and game design are expertly crafted to make you play compulsively. They most certainly have been designed to cause psychological pain when you don’t play it you don’t pay. They are not designed to cause fun or joy.
It's not like you can get the "best" seasonal gear in D3 (which is paid upfront) without a ridiculous amount of grind. Well, not as ridiculous as 10 years, but still.
Without knowing how money scales in this game it's very hard to judge the 10 years / 110k figure. In D3 sometimes you're grinding exponentially for 1% or even 0.1% improvements at a time, and you don't have to.
Don’t play the “accessibility” nonsense argument with us old-time gamers. You know what I could have done in D3 to skip the grind, if I wanted to? Use cheats or trainers or a save file from the internets, in a single player game, for which I paid for. Not this nonsense today, where even single player games are gated behind “sErViCeS” backend to prevent cheating, aka DRM for the payed DLC stuff, that is already on disk downloaded, in a single player games. Please stop.
Really? I did plenty of pushing into high-tier rifts solo in D3. It's definitely more stable and reliable with multiple people, but I did plenty of grinding solo and have a good time.
The article is really quite confusing. Early on it says F2P can't get the best gear, then later says they can. Then they say even for paid players it's random so I'm not even sure how they come up with 100k figure.
It's just hard for me to get upset about a game that's always been a pretty skin over a blatant Skinner box.
The way those games are designed most of time there is a way to get good gear for free, but its usually behind hundreds of hours of same monotous gameplay.
I’ve played Homeworld mobile recently. The progress is great for first 15 hours but then game drops at you timegates. Wanna spaceship strong enough for later content? You can do god know how many missions hoping you get ship design, or you can do god knows how many missions to earn money to buy that from one of factions for cash. Or you can buy credits for cash. But only on Android because game is in public beta and Apple forbids monetization in those.
And once you get the ship design, you need to mine resources for it (this is manageable) but then you need to refine those, which takes around 70h of wait, but if you have other premium currency named „adamantium”, you can cut that wait in half for 100 adamantium, then another half by another adamantium and half of that.
And then you need to build ship in shipyard which takes between 10 to 15 days, but with adamantium you can slice that time down like for refining.
Every day you can collect 100 adamantium for free and buy 1000 extra for $9.99.
I mean, it's been like this since the first Diablo. Even the sounds and animations when killing major bosses sounded and looked like a slot machine. It's nice that people are upset about it as they should, but this is not a new phenomenon and I'm puzzled why the hate is directed at DI specifically. At the end of the day a grizzled old-school gamer could not play multiplayer, ignore all paid options, and end up with the exact same experience as Diablo 2.
DI is high profile release, which is why the uproar is large enough to reach the mainstream. But its nothing new and happens in every fandom when favorite brand enters the mobile gaming.
It’s rumored that EA lost exclusivity on Star Wars games because of their mishandling of license and time-gating legendary Star Wars characters behind hours of gameplay (it took 42h of grind to unlock Darth Vader, but you could just pay extra on in-game roulette to unlock him sooner). This also caused uproar that reached mainstream media and commentary from members of state governments.
You have these things called eternal crests which cost 160 “gems” (the real money currency). These let you run a special dungeon that guarantees a drop of a legendary gem rated between 1 and 5 stars. In fact if you fail the dungeon somehow it’ll refund the crest and let you try again.
Apparently the drop rate for the 5 star gems is 4.5%, so my napkin math works out to around $50 per 5 star legendary gem.
I can’t go back and check my math because I uninstalled the game.
> Yeah I mean the game is intentionally confusing.
I agree there.
I think my char is ~38 and I have 4 legendary gems mixed levels 2-3. I haven't and won't pay any money, but so far the game has been fun. I haven't been limited at all in my progression, in fact the game has felt too easy. Will I ever have 5x5star gems? Probably not, but I would have gotten bored way prior anyway.
I dislike F2P/micro tx games as much as anyone, but so far I haven't been limited in any way. When it does (or I get bored) I'll stop playing.
I spent $7 and just finished the main storyline. Then I joked to my friends “okay I’m level 60 I’m done now”. But then I thought about it and I uninstalled the game. I beat it, I get how the game works, I got an authentic Diablo experience. I’m done now.
you know, this helped me realize why I rage-quit C&C Rivals. I was having a lot of fun, thinking I'm good at the game, going on 40-game win streaks.... then suddenly I am facing opponents with characters 2 levels above mine, getting creamed 90% of games and coming nowhere near being able to upgrade my characters... unless I spend and unknown amount of money on crates.
> It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
Fwiw, I would be onboard with some kind of model where one pays a small monthly (or additional fee) for continued updates. For instance, I play a few multiplayer games (overwatch, hunt showdown) and I'd be ok paying $1 a month or so to support continued updates / balancing etc. It seems like companies are missing the boat on the nominal recurring fees (vs say, the WoW level subscription of tens of dollars a month).
I play Overwatch too and I'm kind of worried about what's going to happen when Overwatch 2 releases. OW 1's monetization policy is extremely generous, at this point in the game's lifecycle I have about 1000 hrs of playtime and have nearly every single cosmetic, and the only money I've sent Blizzard's way is the CD key and the pink charity skin.
I worry that the pendulum will swing too far in the other direction and we'll see P2W elements, particularly in the PvE mode that eventually releases.
And no matter how well it does, investors will expect growth. So what further sliminess does Diablo Immortals 2 do to get growth? This behavior is unsustainable.
It works, just that the incentive of a BigCo is to maximise shareholder value and thus revenue which results into hacking everything we can and exploit user behavior to squeeze the most out of the pockets of consumers.
Basically the mechanism of incentives just works against us.
We do really need a renaissance of authentic & sustainable products which are profitable and are there to delight, not to min/max our savings.
Depends what you are into:
Driving: Assetto corsa, iRacing, basically most racing simulators
Flying: VTOL VR, DCS, MS Flight Sim 2020, Ultrawings
Shooting: Onward, Pavlov, Contractors, Hot dogs horseshoes and handgrenades
Social: VRChat, Rec Room
Story/single player games: Half Life Alyx, Boneworks, Skyrim or Fallout 4
Stealth: Budget Cuts
Others: Beat saber is a must
I'd say VR is finally at the point where there are great games in most genres, and we are finally past the point where a stupid, 2 hour "experience" costs $40, in other words, most games being released for it now are not gimmicks. Honestly my recommendations are a little out of date. I've pointed out what I would consider "the classics" at this point
it's the exact model that has taken over everything, just wearing a slightly different coloured hat.
give you the item for free or at a discount, then desperately try to enslave you to their payment model
people have been getting loans, mortgages and paying rent for centuries, but now it's moved onto phones, cars, apps, games, SAAS, free trials for streaming services, klarna, etc, etc, etc
they're all some variation on rent-seeking behaviour, they just vary in the form rent takes, and how they put the product in your hands in the first place
more modern iterations often don't forcibly take the rent, but use social pressures to coerce their userbase to the point where a % "voluntarily" pay rent. some still do forcibly take the rent.
the end result for you is a product in your hands, nearly always for cheaper than it would have been 15 years ago, but at either a lower quality, or a higher future cost
the end result for the "landlord" is almost a guarantee of projected earnings
>> It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works.
That model still works very well, probably as well as it ever has. But now there are also other models for your phone and computer. If people rejected them, only the "make good game, sell it" model would be left.
> It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".
It does work, but not at the profit multiples that venture capitalists and private equity currently demand. Speaking of gaming overall, not iOS specifically.
Lots of folks disappointed at Diablo Immortal are comparing it to a PC game which it isn’t. It’s a great game that lets you play and experience Diablo on the go, during your lunch breaks, and on the porcelain throne.
Once you adjust your expectations and understand that this is a filler game before D4 you’ll see that it’s a great game that can be enjoyed for the content without paying a cent
I feel like we're well past due for some kind of price hike on AAA video games. Games were $60 when I was a kid, and inexplicably, they still are, for the most part.
Unfortunately, since investors have figured out that the subscription model extracts the most profit possible, I have a feeling we're going to be seeing more and more of that rather than a simple price increase.
Wouldn't surprise me if we even see Steam unveil something like Xbox Game Pass for their marketplace within the next few years. Maybe the worst part is the fact that you no longer actually own anything when all you're paying for is a subscription, but that's more or less how Steam already works, minus the recurring payments.
People keep saying games should cost more, and yet games routinely gross orders of magnitude more than in the past due to sugnificantly expanded market.
The market has been rapidly expanding for a long time, hence less need to increase prices. That plus if you include special, gold, ultimate editions, dlc packs, microtransactions, etc prices have been going up.
The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game?
As a different example - I'm sure it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to max out your characters and gear in Genshin Impact, but I've played very enjoyable 100h+ and it's perfectly fine even if you don't have the max ascended characters and gear, I have a feeling those are there basically for the wales to spend money on but aren't necessary for gameplay in any way(well maybe for some crazy hardcore end game content, but as always, that seems to be something 0.0001% of the playerbase enjoys).
My point is - the game can still be enjoyable and worth playing even if you can't get the endgame gear. Is that the case here? I don't know.
> The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game?
Technically no but Diablo and ARPGs in general are all about items and for a very large class of players who enjoy this genre it's all about min / maxing your character, or at the very least getting improved items / skills / kill speed as you progress. Tying items into a cash shop in the way it's been done here feels really dirty, like it's going against the entire ethos of the genre.
This is partly why Path of Exile has been wildly successful for almost 10 years (it's another ARPG). Their cash shop is focused on cosmetics and quality of life improvements. You can't just buy items or things that make your character more powerful.
The only reason I bring up PoE is to demonstrate it's possible to create a long running profitable ARPG with cosmetic cash shop items in a free to play game. I do know things like stash tabs are borderline and debatably a kind of essential item but I'm ok with that, you can get very far without thinking about them and you purchase them once and you're good to go for years. It was also like $15 from what I remember, it's been a bunch of years since I played so I forgot. I do know I spent around $40-50 total on that game on various quality of life things and it felt like money well spent. I was happy to support GGG. In fact, I ran into a billing situation once and they gave me free coins to compensate a customer support pain point (which I didn't ask for) but I didn't want their work to go unpaid so I ended up purchasing more to match what they gave me.
Not nickel and diming your customers and not preying on weakness goes a long ways for building up a loyal fanbase. I haven't played PoE in years but I feel like they won me over as a customer for life. I didn't think it was possible to ruin the Diablo franchise more than the original release of Diablo III but I think Diablo Immortal may have won in that department.
This take seems off to me specifically in you last paragraph. Whether it is MTX in the form of cosmetics or p2w mechanics both are predatory to people with addictions to games and kids.
I feel like people are upset about p2w mechanics in the game but at the same time say "I'm fine with cosmetic mtx" which makes the whole argument read to me as you are upset that people want to use money to win and that means they shouldn't so you will virtue signal like I care about people spending $10k. If you as an individual don't like p2w that's fine. I get that, but let's stop acting like we care about the virtues of it when kids are spending $1k on worthless Marvel skins in Fortnite or Roblox and there is little uproar about it... We just don't like going into a game where a rich person can beat us, which is understandably frustrating. The other virtue outrageous is just disingenuous imho.
Your take is even more off since you didn't see the blindingly obvious difference: having a choice in your game progression.
- Cosmetics are a choice. They don't affect your progress in any way.
- Bought character power is not a choice. You can happily play X amount of hours but at one point you'll hit a brick wall you can't overcome without money. And no don't tell me that "eventually you will", because elementary psychology says people get discouraged and quit if their effort isn't rewarded until a certain time threshold. That time is much less than what a F2P will allow you.
I don't know if you deliberately missed the point or you can't see something that's easy to notice.
What point are you making? I'm making a point that you can spend $100k on cosmetics in Roblox or Fortnite, and people do spend thousands of dollars over time almost unknowingly. I assume you would think this is bad right?
If manipulative psychology is the issue at hand than quantitatively speaking if you spend 10k on cosmetics or 10k on p2w through manipulative psychology what is the ethical difference?
If you think I'm arguing for a side you are mistaken. I just don't think people actually care about people who are victims of this. They just don't like p2w games, and that's fine. I'm just calling a spade a spade.
Also I feel like you are going down a rabbit hole of being gated on a game from being top 10 on a leaderboard, because the story mode and making it to level 60 seem completely accessible with no money. This is kind of a crazy path to walk down especially for PC gamers, who seem to be the most outraged, where affluence is definitely an advantage even if the game isn't the one making the money off it. For instance, the difference between a refresh rate of 250hz vs 60hz on a competitive FPS game. Try and tell me there isn't an advantage between a $800 gaming rig vs a $10k gaming rig...
Of course I agree with that. I was under the impression that we're not discussing whether addiction is bad -- it's widely known that it is.
I was arguing that "Minecraft and Roblox and millions of other games feed off the weak minds of virtual cosmetic addicts" does not at all make the pay-to-win model of other games okay. Because it did seem like you went off on a whataboutism road.
That the world is screwed up doesn't mean we have to give up. We can try and improve little corners of it.
Yeah I feel you. I don't think I was whataboutism-ing. The parent comment said PoE is fine because it's just cosmetics in game that you can buy. I guess I should have said you could spend thousands of dollars on PoE on cosmetics, but I'm just stating that one isn't better than the other. The main topic to me is that people are saying they don't like p2w games, and it feels like a weak argument if you say you don't like manipulative psychology in MTX but you actually are fine with it in regard to cosmetics because it doesn't impact your experience.
I just get this vibe that people don't think through their stance these days. They just want what they want, and use ethics to support their point when they don't really have a consistent sense of morality to speak of.
MTX are not inherently evil, for example I fully support one-time unlocks with MTX. It's a fair business model. (Although in these cases they might not be called MTX at all; probably "expansions" or "DLCs".)
And the thing with cosmetics is that they're opt-in; whoever decides to never buy will also never be negatively affected -- which is not true for pay-to-win.
I guess that's why there's this "evilest, eviler, evil and less evil" scale of game MTX.
I personally would prefer all cosmetics be farmable but I'm okay with having those be also available for buying.
> I just get this vibe that people don't think through their stance these days. They just want what they want, and use ethics to support their point when they don't really have a consistent sense of morality to speak of.
I thought it through and my stance is I do think there's a very big difference between p2w and cosmetic only cash shops from a moral stand point in the context of Diablo Immortal and PoE.
I never felt like PoE was trying to push me into buying something. The purchases I've made (0 cosmetic btw, it's been all quality of life things) were on my own terms, I didn't feel manipulated in the slightest. There was no gambling mechanic, it was a straight "I give them money and they give me stash tabs" transaction, there's no catch. I don't need to login every day to keep them, they exist until PoE decides not to run PoE anymore.
The above is a lot different than Diablo Immortal trying its hardest to convince you to buy something because it directly alters the core mechanics of an ARPG which is to make your character stronger by trying to get you to purchase items that make your character stronger. The whole system is set up to make you constantly evaluate "well, should I grind this out 8 hours a day for 4 months or spend $50 to have it in a few days?", and it's painfully obvious.
These elements are also pushed into the game's UI so it's in your face all the time. They also took it 1 step further and introduced a lot of randomness into your real money purchases and they self destruct if you stop logging into the game. I was trying to compare this to a "real life company" like a casino or car salesman but somehow even they seem better from a morality standpoint when compared directly to Diablo Immortal.
So yes, in my mind there is a big morality difference between these 2 games in how they operate their cash shop. One of them feels like inconceivably high pressure sales tactics designed to maximize profits at no cost while the other feels like a game that does everything in its power to kill you with kindness by providing value through entertainment in the game so you end up making purchases because you like the game and want to support the developers, what you get out of that is more like warm fuzzies and some quality of life enhancements (or cosmetic things if that's what you like).
These are all valid reasons to dislike p2w games. I do think that some of the p2w aspects are more complex/confusing than in previous games, but for instance losing paid for content because of time constraints isn't a novel idea. That's literally what a battle pass is. PoE has Vault Pass. You have to log in and play to receive those awards. You pay for the opportunity to get them and there is a time constraint if you don't play enough. Some games more than others make the battle pass easier to achieve with dailies.
That said you are addressing that you "feel" like it's not as bad. However, I would argue that PoE wouldn't be still running so successfully without whales that may or may not be victims. You are, like many sane human beings, reaping the benefits of a well funded development team by whales. Does that make it ethically right because you don't "feel" it or see it as egregiously? Should a skin ever cost $50?
Like most things you feel it when it impacts your experience, which is very clear if you aren't a spender in a p2w game. If it didn't impact your experience you don't care hence why you think one is worse than the other. It's about how you feel, and that is the problem today. It's hard to solve a problem when people are inconsistent about where they stand on an issue. Do they care about victims and these MTX tactics or do they just not like p2w games. Personally, I don't think p2w games should be illegal much like I don't think gambling should be illegal, but I do think there needs to be more regulation about predatory MTX especially in regard to children across the board.
> It's about how you feel, and that is the problem today.
An opinion is often based on feel. For context I've put in thousands of hours into D2 back in the day, not nearly as much into D3 and quite a lot into PoE but no where near as much as D2. With Diablo Immortal I haven't seen this type of backlash over a cash shop and how it ties into core game mechanics in my life of gaming.
I also can't speak for PoE's finances or how they remain in business. I'm sure there's whales out there but I don't consider that my business, so you are right in that their actions don't affect me. If someone wants to pay $50 for a cosmetic skin and the game makes it available then so be it, for me personally that immediately gets classified as optional so it doesn't affect my experience playing the game. I never get the urge to buy those things because I see others having it. I also don't make assumptions about why they bought it (to support the game, they have addiction problems, etc.) because that's not my battle and there's nothing I can do about that in the end anyways.
My philosophy has been to apply a pretty basic set of rules in that if a game does what I think are predatory things then I don't play it, buy it or contribute to its parent company's profits. If I like a game and it feels reasonable to me in how its priced (1 time purchase, cosmetic cash shop, etc.) then I will happily support it. Everyone's rules here are different.
in this game ? absolutely game progress is limited by it. can't complete a quest if your combat rating is not high enough and the only way to improve it is to upgrade your items.
how do you upgrade your items ? by upgrading their rank and the rank of the gems they have attached to them.
so how do you do that ? well either directly pay money, or pay money for for stuff needed to to challenge elder rift so that you can drop the resources necessary. or if you really don't want to do that challenge the rift without the resources and have a really shitty drop rate of alternative resources that can be converted into runes that can be used to make said gems. that would mean that you needs months of repetitive farming.
oh an the first fixes of the paid drug is handed to you for free so that you get a taste of how great of a drug it is. then once you're dry of it they'll keep giving it you at ever decreasing doses to keep you crazed for you fix until you crack and give in.
my experiences with game is that it was enjoyable until lvl 35 which you hit in 2 days of playing and just hit an impenetrable wall at lvl 42 where it meant full time grinding or paying in order for the story to progress at an acceptable pace.
I'll just remove it from my phone or maybe play with reverse engineering it to see how hard it is to make a bot. (on the first day there was already one spamming chat)
> The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game?
It maybe not, the same way it's not necessary to own a yacht IRL to enjoy life, but why should we bring inequality in games as well?
Multiplayer games are a meritocratic dream that is probably unattainable IRL, as only the most skilled (cheaters aside) get to the top of the scoreboard.
It kills my fun to know that even this small haven of meritocracy is changing to become like the real world: the wealthy have better opportunities than I do, independently from skills or talent.
A big part of Diablo (or at least of Diablo 3) once the story is finished is to go as far as possible in the post game features.
Most people I know who have played Diablo would tell me their rift tier, paragon level (might be a different term in English but they play in french so that's the term I know).
So for new players, it might not be that big of a deal, but for players wanting to play more Diablo the game is telling them to cough up as much as they can
Well yes, the question is, when is a hardcore player going to run into this limit? After 20 hours? 50? 200? The further it is along the line, the fewer people it's going to affect. If you can have a great experience for the first 100 hours, that's still pretty good in my book.
> The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game?
Yes, at least in those types of games. Gear improvement is a big part of the game progression. Before microtransactions that just meant spending ungodly amounts of time in those games. Nowadays it means bankrupting yourself.
But it still doesn't answer my question - obviously you have gear progression without spending any money, just like there is in Genshin Impact. So at what point do you reach a point where you literally can't enjoy the game any more without spending any money? Because if it's 100h+ like for me in Genshin, then I don't think there's any problem for 99.999% of players. Yes the option to spend money and get crazy high gear is there for the wales, but is the game itself enjoyable even if you don't do this? Because I know as a fact that Genshin is. Would love to know if the same applies to Diablo.
if doing the same exact rift over and over for weeks in order to unfreeze your game progress is something you find enjoyable then yes. but realistically I don't think there exist that much people who would enjoy this.
oh and every 15 min or so you're spammed with a notification telling you take this one is lifetime opportunity to help if only for give them your credit card! if you don't hurry you'll miss out on this offer forever.
I've played less than an hour of genshin so I can't compare it since I don't know much about it. but as someone who played other games where you might need to farm for better stuff, this is nothing like that.
> if doing the same exact rift over and over for weeks in order to unfreeze your game progress is something you find enjoyable then yes. but realistically I don't think there exist that much people who would enjoy this.
It's been awhile since I played D3, but hasn't this been the model for years?
i mean, that's d2 gameplay in a nutshell. i mean, cow farming, baal farming, diablo farming... if you played any diablo, you had to do the same content non stop to get better gear. and sometimes that means weeks of farming for a small upgrade.
I disagree, the most enjoyable experience in Diablo 2 is probably during lvl 25-40 (/99), roughly corresponding to the acts 4 and 5 of the story of the first difficulty level and the 2nd difficulty level (out of 3).
I gave up on plants versus zombies 2 quickly when it became obvious the game was just prompting me to spend money at every turn. Granted, some people say this was mitigated eventually.
I think games where you have an option to pay for dlc at the start screen are fine. It's being constantly pressured that I consider to be a breach of trust.
>I gave up on plants versus zombies 2 quickly when it became obvious the game was just prompting me to spend money at every turn. Granted, some people say this was mitigated eventually.
The funny thing is the unmitigated, most pay2win version of Plants Versus Zombies 2 - the game at launch - was accidentally one of the most amazing and intense gaming experiences for people who never spent anything. For people who just really enjoyed a vastly more challenging version of PvZ.
I loved the first game but it was never a challenge, it was rare to fail a level more than once. But the levels in the second were passable if you spent zero premium currency (even not spending any of premium currency they gave you for free for logging in) - they were just very very challenging. Passing every single one required novel strategies and slowly revising, eking out a few more tiny edges each time you try, combined with absolute precision in execution, until somehow the level was passable.
I'm not actually sure every single level was passable by not even spending the currency they gave you for free, I never quite finished it, but I got through most of them! When I logged in to finish the remaining levels later, they had made them all way easier in an effort to respond to p2w criticism so I never had a chance.
I think that's a testament to how micro transactions can ruin the balance of a game as you never know who the difficulty is designed for. With SMTV, Atlus added a dlc to make it easier to level your characters. So did they deliberately pad the leveling in order to make you buy this dlc? Or are you paying for an easy mode? Who knows.
Except they later screwed it up by adding plant and zombie level ups. And you can't even play the old version any more ! That's another issue with those "pay not to grind" games...
Every game menu feels like a casino now. Even the ones with no microtransactions put the trapping of P2W in. Cluttered flashy menus. When you get a drop instead of just giving you the item, they give you a chest with an unskippable flashy animation when you open it. P2W Casino is a horrible art-style, I don't know why conventional games are copying it. I've refunded games on steam after just seeing the menu.
I think we just aren't the intended customer for a lot of games. I mean, the casino style is used because it works for casinos as well. I'd rather just drink while watching sports in the comfortable leather chairs than playing slots and waiting forever for a drink on the casino floor, personally.
Which ones did you return? I think there are a decent number of single a developer games out there that have good progression systems. Hades, Dicey Dungeons, Golf Story...
I don't have too many compunctions about games whose revenue models gate the top 5% of possible progress. If Diablo 3 had a feature where you need to pay money to unlock the last 10% of each primal ancient item (so F2P would only get 90% perfect rolls), I don't think my game play experience would change in the least and I've put a lot of hours into that game.
Games should not be about wringing money out of people - but games need to get revenue somewhere. Asking everyone to pay before playing at all is not a clearly better (or more moral) system.
I've played about 12 hours of Diablo Immortal. I haven't spent any money, but also haven't really looked into why I would want to do it. The game is already pretty easy, and I feel like spending for better gear would make it almost non-sense, where I can just stand around while my minions kill the enemies. If they wanted to encourage micro-transactions, they should have made it a lot more challenging, so that you'd actually you know, die sometimes.
I'm wondering the same. D3 was seasonal grinds, and this new game seems to capture the same season grind. So far at least, it looks like paying lessens the grind, but rift grinding is what Diablo has been about for years.
If you're interested in PvP, you must pay in order to be competitive. Whales will simply have 50% more health and damage than you. So if PvP is your jam, you're shit out of luck if you don't also want to pay a ton of money to succeed at it.
The whole feature is effectively walled off to f2pers.
I've watched a lot of discussions about this from twitch streamers and I'm not sure where I stand.. On the one hand I'm amazed at how good this game looks on mobile and if you're just the type to casually play a game not really caring about being the best at it you could have fun playing it for free or for very cheap. On the other hand this game is clearly exploitative and while other games like Hearthstone or Clash Royale have similar pay to win mechanics they also have ways for you to enjoy the game competitively without spending a whole lot of money.
I know some countries banned games like this but I wonder, if these games get banned why not ban casinos too?
Casinos are banned in many places and also banned for kids in most places.
Clash royale is sad, becouse it is a extremely good game if it were not for the pay to win leveling mechanics. I used to play it alot but it became too frustrating meeting bad players with low ELO but high level cards that you essentially couldn't win over unless they messed up bad.
Edit:
To level up all cards in Clash Royale you also have to spend a silly amount of money. Exponential costs.
I just started playing it after a long break. I remember you used to need to upgrade your cards to challenge level in order to be competitive in challenges but now they give you all cards in challenge mode at the standard level, even cards you haven't found yet
It costs 10 gems to play a challenge and you can buy 500 gems for 5$ so that's 50 challenges, say you get at least 7 games per challenge so 350 games for 5$ where only skill matters. I'd say that's not exploitative.
Of course if you care about your rank and having a Big Number in a silly mobile game then yes you either have to play a lot or pay a lot of money.
The state of Western Australia has banned poker machines. We have a single casino in the capital which is the only sanctioned gambling establishment. So our pubs and clubs are a bit poorer and there are less of them. But they are not ruined by the horrible rooms full of sad people playing poker machines that you see in other states. I grew up on the east coast and whenever I walk into a pub in Perth I am always surprised by how authentic and nice the place feels compared to those that have poker machines.
Look at this guy [0], he is the rank one monk in PvP and PvE and spent 0 dollars.
I played a wee bit and it didn't seem that bad. You can pay to upgrade your gear, but that seems entirely pointless in an ARPG. The whole game is a grind to get better gear! Once you actually have perfect gear, why keep playing?
My issue with the game is that it lacks depth after having spent far too much time playing Path of Exile. There aren't that many possible builds, and the game basically tells you exactly how to build if you want to do PvP or PvE. As far as I can tell, those builds are the meta ones, so the designers are forcing the meta.
But as a game to run in and kill some monsters without thinking too much, it seems fine. Which makes sense since it's a mobile game.
interesting, so if you can be no1 while free to play is every streamer lying?
Edit: Or right now since it's early you can out-skill other people while they're figuring it out and soon the people who spend more will have both skill and raw power and will dominate
I don't understand the comment, sorry. I don't think other streamers are lying, you can pay to get stronger, easily verified by opening the shop and looking at what is available. But it looks like if you play the game as your job, you can still be competitive.
Does it suck that you can pay to get stronger and make the game unfair? Yep, but I'm not convinced it matters if you're playing casually. None of the pay to win stuff changes the game play drastically. You're only really increasing the amount of damage you do, it's not like Path of Exile where some of the really rare items can enable a new type of build or trading card games where certain cards let you build different decks with different playstyles.
Personally, I see no incentive to buy anything. I can clear a level 12 challenge rift, grind slowly and slowly clear higher level ones. Or I could spend a bunch of money and get to do level 20 challenge rifts or whatever. At which point you hit the wall and either pay money or keep grinding. But since the game is all about grinding, why pay to skip forward and grind more?
I understand your point but Asmongold and Shroud are saying it isn't worth playing the game unless you plan to spend a couple thousand dollars on it so that's where I'm coming from.
Do yourself a favor and play the game instead of trusting the words of streamers. You can get a ton of enjoyment without paying anything. If you want to be ultra competitive then it is a different story
I don't buy the "we have ways to play the game without spending lots of money" excuse these companies are constantly peddling. I refuse to accept this new default of "games" explicitly designed to abuse children and addicts.
Children don't have access to a credit card unless you give it to them. If in 2022 you're giving a kid a device where he can make payments without your input then you're responsible for it.
If you're addicted to spending money online irresponsibly I doubt there is any law that will protect you, there's millions of ways to spend money to get gratification online.
Not quite the same thing as heroin as you can easily drown your sorrows in any number of cheap video games and I'm of the belief that if you are prone to addictions the only way to evolve passed them is to go through them. I am against putting laws up against these games but I am for the community warning and talking about this so people know what they're getting into.
I'm also for legalizing all drugs but that's another discussion
Casinos and machine-based gambling are fairly heavily regulated in a lot of places, requiring a license with auditing, with rules on everything you can possibly think of. The mobile gaming industry has so far avoided this body of law by never providing anything of value in return.
I had a ton of fun with Clash Royale for many months (even years at this point) without spending exactly zero money. I think the way they mix free players with paying players is absolutely brilliant (from a perspective of free player).
If I go against a player two levels ahead of me, I can be pretty much sure that he bought his deck and since he's going against me not some higher rank I know I have chance of winning if I can outwit materially stronger opponent.
When I'm going against someone with lower level then I can be sure that this guy has very carefully crafted deck and is a very skilled player.
I regularly play games with gambling (gacha) mechanics and I love them. The short bursts of fun are exactly what I'm looking for in my current busy life. I have nothing against this model of monetization. Gambling is fun. Casinos are fun. I am not a big spender by any means, but I've probably spent ~$2k on these kind of games over the past two years or so. I don't regret it, and for me the fun is in figuring out how to maximize the value of my spending by doing the math for different types of purchases, sometimes even coding up simulations.
The problem starts when it's unregulated and you are tricking kids, or people who are not educated about probability, into spending their money in casinos, and use dozens of psychological tricks to do so and obfuscate purchases. Just like it's easy for kids to get addicted to social media like Instagram, it's easy and dangerous to get addicted to gambling (especially when you see your friends or popular streamers doing it). I believe all of these games should be 18+, at the very least, and come with a big warning sign.
The problem with gambling is that it taps into the dopamine system in ways that people are not aware of, even if they know about probabilities.
The effect is cumulative, and the more the person gambles, the more they will gamble, take risks, create unbalance and spend money.
Now, just like with anything related to dopamine, many people will only have a mild effect. E.G: I've played dota for a while, and never went into full spending mode.
Like you, I think it's ok to gamble once in a while, to pay for the game. After all, it's fun, and the game provides pleasurable moments, but does cost a lot of resources to develop. It's fair to give money to the company making it: after all, other games may be paid up to $60, DLC not included, while free to play are always up to date.
Yet, it's very difficult to evaluate if the tactics used by the game for gambling are twisted or not, and if the game target is going to be abused or not.
For this reason, I do think they should be heavily regulated, not just about the age, but about the nature, and intensity, or the gambling mechanism in place.
I work on video games (not on the design side but programming) and had to implement some on those systems on several mobile games. I agree with the comment above that it’s hard to draw the line between gambling addiction and à faire amount of random that brings fun to a game. Diablo 2 has already those kinds of random behavior to retain your attention and trigger dopamine rushes but without trying to grab cash from you.
The only solution to me is legal regulation, companies won’t listen as it brings money and most people like to play them. Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.
I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally and that other big countries will follow (like Korea, Japan and USA) to stop this trend and force designer to find better mechanics.
Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy. Nowadays with all the free services, it’s harder to make users pay for something they can get for « free » elsewhere. So it’s a complicated issue.
> Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.
The problem with battle passes is that they rely on you having a massive player base, and require an incredible amount of effort to develop and keep running. For a game like diablo that's clearly not a problem but for anything that's not a top 10 game on their platform it is
> I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally
I don't think this (specific) categorization is necessarily the right approach. The problematic part with casino style games and gambling in general is that cashing out provides a real money incentive, which is not present here. Calling these games gambling is kind of like calling piracy theft - the intention is right but there's an important difference. We haven't got a category for them yet.
> Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy.
On one level yes. On the other, f2p games are popular for a reason. Excellent games providing a social experience has a network effect, and if your conversion rate is 2% you don't succeed as a game by monetising better, you succeed by increasing your audience. A f2p game could be a profitable game if the active playerbase all paid $2-3 each but the _second_ you introduce a barrier there you lose many players who won't pay, their friends who might pay etc etc.
How do you stack up this opinion (ban 'immoral' video games) with the idea that drug prohibition is widely considered a spectacular failure?
Banning games like this will only drive the whales into black markets, which are more expensive, more dangerous, and benefit criminal enterprises by definition.
Many of the deaths from heroin, for example, are due to contamination with fentanyl (which boosts the potency). A company who was liable to their customers (ie: not a criminal enterprise) would be much less incentivized to lace their product, and if they did, there would be someone to prosecute instead of an entire black market to wag a finger at.
Anyways, I agree, this is an extremely exploitative design. What I don't agree on is using legal regulation to shape society into something moral. Historically, that's only made things worse.
I don't think you can compare these mechanics to heroin, which is physically addictive. A fairer comparison is social media and timelines/newsfeeds, which use very similar mechanics, including randomness, to give people their dopamine rush and make them come back. Hence all this social media addiction we have. The main difference is that no money is (directly) involved there, only indirectly through ads.
With $100 a month you can do a lot of things. (And I'm not even talking about the regions of the world where you could survive a month with that amount). Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!
Those gambling games are extremely overpriced in comparison!
But they still make that money. Guess how: By addiction, and other psychological tricks to make the price seem OKisch, even it's absolutely not.
Even the most expensive game productions could make a good revenue back than just by charging a one time fee of $40 to $60.
Now with those gambling games they made $100 a month on you… Continuously.
The whole business model is a ripoff, clearly immoral, and should get banned completely ASAP.
> Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!
I don't see the difference. Whether I pay a "subscription fee" of $100 per month or I buy two new games per month, why does it matter? Why do you think that buying two games a month is necessarily more fun than paying a subscription fee for the same 2-3 games? For me it isn't, and there aren't even enough games I would be interested in buying in the first place.
You can run the same kind of analysis on different game mechanics and strategies on games not designed to rip you off. They actually tend to be far more interesting because gambling games rarely have any meaningful degree of complexity and the singular strategy you are actually optimizing for is how much you have to sink into the game to succeed something you can probably figure out for a given game in about 30 seconds of analysis.
Basically you have a bad habit not that far off from smoking cigarettes that will probably eventually lead to dangerous overspending the first time you have an economic downturn at the same time as emotional stress. Despite such games being in general tasteless and boring you have convinced yourself its "fun" because you have trained your brain to release dopamine when you do it and can't tell the difference being joy and dopamine the same way a crack addict can't tell the difference between chemical stimulation and actual joy.
At least with actual gambling I have theoretical chance, at least momentarily to actually win money... With lootboxes outside Valve and maybe some others there is no chance to get it back.
I hope more country follow suit of Belgium and The Netherlands and classify loot boxes with a random drop element as gambling, and as such make it heavily regulated and banned to kids. This kind of practices are evidently predatorial and manipulative and should be greatly discouraged.
>classify loot boxes with a random drop element as gambling
Most people who talk about this tend to have no idea what laws already cover gambling.
I think that, in this case, loot boxes should be treated like slot machines as far as minimum payout goes; in Nevada (for example) this is minimum 75% by law- meaning that the house must ultimately return 75% of the value it takes in as winnings to its gamblers.
As these systems are effectively slot machines (put coin in, pull handle, get box), not much more needs to be done other than applying the law as written.
It might be tricky to establish a dollar value for the digital assets paid out, and would add overhead to assets distributed in this manner (how one would put a price on "asset that changes the way the game works" is, of course, an open question), but provided it's done properly should clamp down significantly on the anti-consumer aspects of these practices- which is, I suspect, the real reason everyone complains about this in the first place.
There is 0 value to things that can be generated with in games like the 'loot' from lootboxes. Value is based on a limit in supply, not only demand. The massive possible amount of supply puts the value at $0. It's worse than gambling.
>There is 0 value to things that can be generated with in games like the 'loot' from lootboxes.
But that's false, on its face in fact- there was development and artist time involved in every step of the process, and that time has a value (and an auditable one, at that).
So now that we know what the value is, taking into account that the house can only pay out in those assets, we can in effect determine a maximum profit per asset (as far as the house-player transaction is concerned)- casinos close their doors when the house is no longer able to pay out, and it's no different here.
This is not accurate. Time and resources put into making a product does not guarantee or give it any inherent value. Value of products can absolutely be 0 even if millions are dropped into its creation if there is no demand or simply infinite supply. I don't think there is infinite supply here, just pointing out this argument about value based on development cost is not accurate.
There’s also network effects, companies slight provide some things as a loss leader to other things, so the cost of A doesn’t mean A is all the company needs to charge to remain in business if their model uses A’s profits to support B etc.
The last time I went to Dave & Busters, they didn't seem to have an entrance policy.
People don't seem to have a problem with this even though a minority of their games are ultimately slot machines (the simplest of which is the "time the light" game, but the coin stackers count as this as well given that they're literally right out of real casinos).
Interestingly, the fact that D&B lets you combine winnings with cash to simply buy prizes outright arguably puts them under the 'gambling' line from a legal standpoint (it works if the tokens have "no value", which is how arcades generally do it for this specific reason- combining points with your leftover cash makes this fig leaf vanish), but the fact that they let you do that in the first place is also a pro-consumer move.
But if you can exchange tokens for prizes, clearly the tokens do have value. 1 token = piece of bubble gum, 10 tokens = keychain, 5000 tokens = fluffy unicorn. Etc.
Basically, I don't see why the fig leaf would work in the first place...
Somewhat related, I once had a job offer at an early startup and wanted to adjust the equity/salary ratio a bit. I asked "How much more equity could I get per $1k drop in salary?" The founder liked that framing but when he went to go get legal to approve they shut it down saying that putting a direct dollar amount on equity would throw a huge wrench into 409a valuations.
So while things have value, anchoring that value to a dollar amount is a different story.
> The last time I went to Dave & Busters, they didn't seem to have an entrance policy.
Nit:
> Must be 18 or over to enter the premises. Persons under the age of 18 may only enter the premises with a guardian who is at least 25 years of age. Each guardian may bring no more than 6 underage persons into the premises.
In most cases there is no market for the digital assets from a loot box, and many game operators aggressively crack-down on anyone attempting to setup such a market. The digital assets from these loot boxes have no value. These are not lotteries or slot machines as these are currently defined in Nevada, which you quote.
Let me tell you about the 1/1 "Goodhart Peacock" card the ultra ultra rare diamond legendary. While it may seem that you get two of them in every pack you're mistaken you actually got 2 different cards! They're actually super unique because each of the 20 tail feathers can be one of 20 different colours...
- Blizzards slew of beloved franchises makes it easy to entrap nostalgia addicted masses to a number of pay to win clones. Or slowly implement these types of features into existing games.
- Half of the assets are from a 10 year old prequel. This game was cheap to make and will have an insanely high profit margin. Leading to perpetuation of this model.
- Scummy mobile pay to win is already accepted as the standard for mobile. With a desktop port, Blizzard can expand that complacency to further markets.
- Pay to Win models incentivize paid content over legitimate, engaging content. I.e. story, character models and gameplay will deteriorate overtime in favor of producing content that turns profit.
I don't think its inevitable and I don't think it's a good long term monetization strategy. It's just short term planning with complete disregard for the long term health of the company. How the board of directors doesn't see this is shocking. Maybe they do and also want to milk it today instead of tomorrow just like the C-suite. Yes, exploitative mobile gaming is profitable as hell - but in the current world is alienating your extremely loyal (and higher earning) fan-base worth it?
Either way, it's a shame and a waste of a lot of really great IP that will be buried alive when the coffin that is Blizzard is lowered into the ground.
> It's just short term planning with complete disregard for the long term health of the company. How the board of directors doesn't see this is shocking.
I wonder if milking the company's reputation like this perhaps actually is the most optimal strategy for Blizzard. Innovation requires investment and luck, and it can create a great reputation for a brand. Once you have that reputation though, perhaps it's not rational to try your luck again. Maybe the expectation value is highest if you just sell out.
It's not just Blizzard, see e.g. the twelfth installment of Assassin's Creed or the eighteenth installment of Call of Duty. For that matter, it's not even just video games. Look at the tenth Fast & Furious movie or the fifteenth iPhone that are coming out soon, and will surely sell like crazy, even though they'll probably not be very innovative.
Of those listed I've only played Hearthstone and Clash Royale. I reached top rank in Clash Royale, and I believe I only spent 5 dollars on it to get a neat looking board to play on - so I don't think they generate quite the ill-will that a legendary PC competitive game developer like Blizzard generates when they produce something much worse than most existing (at least in the west) mobile free to play games.
My point isn't that these sorts of games aren't profitable - it's that they should have spun up a new studio with a new name instead of lighting the good will of a 25+ year IP that's held so dearly on fire.
Blizzard is close to being a zombie company, the last game with true Blizzard pedigree was probably around 15 years ago, their last decent game was almost 10 years ago, they are milking the last few drops from the geriatric cash cow that is WoW, they have completely failed to capitalize on competitive games with Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm or even WoW arena, and they are all languishing, Diablo Immortal is a mobile p2w game, while all they have to look forward to is Overwatch 2 which is a glorified patch and if Diablo 4 isn't some smash success they have nothing else.
Add on top of that the company culture, sexual harassment scandals, all of the significant employees leaving, the Blizzard everyone knew is long gone. Gamers have moved past Blizzard, new gamers don't care about their games, so the only thing they have left is the IP to milk nostalgia from, which is why they finally started to make remakes of Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2.
Compared to the kind of games that made Blizzard iconic like SCBW, TFT, D2, and early WoW which were basically pillars in the gaming world, the game, while polished, was a fairly mediocre Team Fortress variant in comparison. It also had lofty ambitions of sustaining a large e-sports scene to the point where investors were paying tens of millions to have the right of owning a team. That never materialized and the game has basically been stagnant for years, waiting for Overwatch 2 (which was recently teased and didn't appear to change much) while other games like Valorant or Apex have made it largely irrelevant in that space.
All you said is true, but now you're shifting goal posts. You previously said Blizzard's last 'decent' game was 10 years ago, not the last game that was 'basically a pillar in the gaming wold'.
While Overwatch may not have achieved it's lofty ambitions, it's still extremely well-regarded [0], had 50 million players (which is quite impressive given that it's not free-to-play) and has grossed over $1 billion. It arguably brought the modern hero shooter genre to mainstream popularity and caused a flood of similar games to follow it. You're right, nowadays there are more popular games in that genre, but at the time it was quite a novel concept.
Since you said 10 years since the last 'decent' game from Blizzard, I assume you referred to Diablo 3. I wonder, by what metric is Diablo 3 a decent game and Overwatch isn't?
The game I was thinking about was Hearthstone, which basically legitimized digital card games as a mass market genre. Perhaps I am too harsh on Overwatch, but it is a lot like Diablo 3, which made huge releases with huge hype initially (based on expectations created from their earlier games) and see great initial success but ultimately are unable to retain or grow in the same way their competitors are.
Keep in mind that the profitability of the game is also a result of it being a paid game that also has microtransactions, and even then the gaming market has grown so much that a competitor like Apex is close to making 1 billion a year in comparison.
Under the context of industry impact, yes. If you wish to be pedantic, maybe I should have been clearer in saying that I consider everything past vanilla WoW to not be of the same caliber of the games that preceded it. Regardless, the point is that they are a shadow of their former self.
I have been playing and enjoying the game for the past few days. The P2W gem system can be ignore entirely by most players unless you want to become the best in leaderboard. Overall the monetization is on par with other mobile games. The only reason this gets so much attention is because Blizzard is a easy target to generate outrages and clicks these days.
I think the problem is that you've only been playing for a few days. Usually these kinds of games are actually fun for the first few days or weeks. It only gets back once you've already invested a lot of time and effort into the game and are hooked onto it.
Of course you may have the self control to pull out when you notice it becoming less fun but that's not easy for everyone which is why this model is quite predatory.
Several of the reports I've read indicate some p2w mechanics don't even unlock until higher levels, and so are not immediately apparent. How far in are you?
If the game's endgame monetization issues are as bad as I've heard, then this is a classic example of luring players in and then suddenly smacking them with a paywall.
Not to bash you in particular, but it always amazes me that people can judge a game's pacing and monetization without including the endgame (if it even had a start or middle in the first place; endgame can be a nebulous concept). As the game ages, that is what the majority of players will be doing for the majority of the time and that's where the game will reveal it's true colors.
In my most recent memory, this happened with New World and its lack of endgame content at release. People defended the game as fun then most apparently quit in the levels 20-30 range because they realized the game was nothing but the same anemic game loop.
Now it's down from 900k peak players to 22k peak players, which may be a nice number for some games, but it is already deader than some older MMOs with no signs of player growth (according to Steam Charts).
It should, but the negative attention this game is getting is not proportional to the degree of awfulness of the monetisation. I am just jaded by the misinformation and double standard the Internet have these days, when you see some content creators even proclaiming this game the greediest game ever made! [0] which is objectively not true. Will these creators dare to critize other mobile games like Genshin Impact and Clash of Clans? No, because these games have ten times bigger fanbase than Diablo Immortal and Blizzard is a easy target.
We might not listen to the same people then, Jim Sterling has been criticizing all this crap (including even gachas) for years... (though unless there are bigger news, this weeks' video will probably still be about DI ?)
Yes, but the combat is the core gameplay loop, and it's fun - unlike in WoW having to suffer through one after another fetch quest and the "real game" only starting after you hit max level...
As someone used to work for Chinese mobile game companies. $110k sounds average for a pay-to-win game. But the game is new. Designers would create other slots to make money.
I played a game called Kingdom Conquest then Kingdom Conquest 2 that I could see exceeding this. The game reset every few months and you’d have to spend the money all over again. I quit after my “kingdom” and all the other English speaking people got brutally subjugated by our Japanese counterparts. We just didn’t spend nearly as much money as them and totally lost.
The funny part about that statement, is my understanding of the international release of Lost Ark is that it's actually a lot friendlier than the original Korean version. You should really look into how Asian MMOs (especially Korean ones, and I think I've heard Chinese ones can be pretty bad too) work with monetization. This stuff is hardly new, and what we see internationally is generally tame in comparison. I remember almost 2 decades ago playing an international version of a Korean MMO (Dungeon Fighter Online) that had blatant "Buy this loot box to get cosmetics which give large stat buffs".
i spent $10k on a kickstarter game as far back as 2013, but i viewed it as an investment at the time. investing in the developers of the game being able to continue, as well as the assets maintained ~60-80% resale value for a time period. Sure it gave advantages in the game, but the game wasn't /designed/ around those advantages.
I think the part that's a relatively recent phenomenon is that games are designed with "free play" as an afterthought or even the game designed to push you away from it, instead of "free play" being the main design focus.
It really doesnt. Fans are just upset the Diablo name was stained with this practice. You are looking at this level of spend required for pretty much any mobile gacha game
It's not just the amount of money they try to get people to spend, it's some really obnoxious tactics, like NPCs telling you they "don't run a charity" (i.e. steering you into spending real money) and paid bonuses that you lose if you don't login daily (as opposed to free ones in most other games).
Neither of those sound unique to Diablo Immortal. Several games employ the "purchase a daily bonus" mechanic. Diablo also has several free login bonuses, like the daily kills and the blue crest (which granted, is a way to push purple crests, but it's still a daily free item).
If I can find more progress than in my real life, 110k is a fair trade. (joke)
The flip side is, no matter how the general public criticize or hate it, it works and at times, more profitable than most startups nowadays.
The game was delayed for more than one whole year as they try to fix things up, 110k is probably an optimized figure.
That say, the game is enjoyable better than most mobile rpg but brings nothing new to the table. I would prefer it to be a pay once and for expansion though.
Loot boxes/gacha games are the modern day cigarettes. Harmful, addictive, marketed to minors and very lucrative. Rest of the world needs to catch up to Belgium and Netherlands in banning these.
AFAIK it's very rare for games to implement checks like these. Only the most competitive, most popular ones tend to.
Also the always online DRM requirement has been creeping up, since having the game servers mandatorily under the full control of the company makes some of these mitigations easier.
lmfao what a garbage game. so much clientside. this should be the top concern considering it sidesteps all of the above issues completely but maybe people wont realize till people and one shot in their games
What upsets me is that in exchange for that money you’re treated to a low quality game. You can just feel the disdain for the user/victim at every step.
While launching the game for the first time:
1) No sound!
2) Forced subtitles.
3) Visible tearing in the video because of a lack of vsync.
4) Two tracking and notification permission prompts, including one that lies to you: “Your game is better if we can target ads”.
5) Obnoxious tutorial that takes control away from the player. (If an adult spoke like this to me in real life I would slap them for their insolent patronising!)
6) Forced updates.
7) Etc…
At this point I deleted then game because I don’t want to be gamed by a mega corp. I’m not a money bag to be tracked and siphoned.
I found most of your complains either false or non issue:
1. Ok, maybe a bug.
2. Given that is a mobile game and most people will no have the volume up, it is ok to have subtitles. Not to mention that games that start with subtitles are more accessible and the majority of players actually don't mind them and find them useful.
3. Fair, but given that this is a mobile game, V-sync can be a problem for lower end devices too.
4. False? I cleared the first mission and had no prompt for that and has not requested tracking at all. Android.
5. The hell you talking about? When you start you get a small cut scene and are given full control when they drop you off the ship.
6. The game is mostly online for what I can tell so updates are a given (and you can download areas separately)
The game literally removes the controls while you're being told how they work. They vanish. You can't do anything but sit there patiently while a game character lectures you about how a joystick works.
What next? "To use a key on your keyboard, apply sufficient downwards pressure that you hear a 'click'. Do this now!"
It's patronising to a level that I feel insulted and leave the game immediately.
Compare to the height of the PC game era -- which Blizzard games used to be the epitome of -- you get "dropped" into the game and you learn through discovery instead of an unskippable presentation.
The intro of Half Life is a classic example of how to do this well. This is the opposite of that.
Perhaps permission was not asked because permission was previously granted.
Example: every time I use Google maps it asks me to turn on ___location tracking, many people never encounter this because they leave ___location tracking on.
Regulation proposal: Set maximum spending limit/time tied to the purchase price. The limit is tied to account and player character.
example:
1. free-to-play: $100/year.
2. other: 10×purchase price/year. For a $50 game the maximum spending is $500 per year.
This would not set hard limit. It would only mandate up-front investment related to the amount of in-game spending. A Whale who spends $10k a year would have to pay $1k to get started.
I think this would effectively kill addictive impulse for people who can't afford it. At the same time it allows games to create expensive games.
> I think this would effectively kill addictive impulse for people who can't afford it
It would be nice if simply pricing out poor addicts worked as a deterrent, but it just doesn’t. We see this in sports betting all the time, young men are committing suicide in England after getting in too deep on the betting apps.
Regulation limiting the amount of notifications you can receive for microtransaction purchases would make a big difference I think.
Even though I am refusing to spend money for gems, there is effectively always a “look at me” notification on the screen reminding me that the store is open. They’re gaming the fact that we have all been trained through habit to check those notifications, and it is really effective.
This just woundn't work unfortuantly. It's a known fact that the large majorirty of the player base will not spend any money. This has the knock-on effect that the whales have to be squeezed in order for the game to turn a profit.
People underestmate the UA costs on these games. It can cost >$10 to get a single player into the game through advertising. So right off the bat you need to make $10 back per player to make a profit. Say 95% dont spend anything, so then you need $200 off each paying player to cover the costs of acquiring everyone else. Thats why this situation has evolved and why the games build themselves around the whales.
Of course games do get some players for free via app store discovery but predonminatly it's through advertising.
Killing UA business model would not be that bad. Protecting big business should not be the goal in itself.
We don't know what kind of games would replace these malevolent business models. We might get new kind of games and companies. Maybe less flashy, but more fun to play and better game mechanics.
If it doesn't work then this model would simply disappear. Not a bad thing either for gaming.
In the Netherlands there's already laws around this kind of business model, requiring the company to specify win chances and other things. The publisher has decided not to release Diablo immortal there for this reason.
If more countries follow suit they'll have no option but to just go back to regular business models.
This is very intriguing. I would love to hear a take based on research in psychology of addiction and gambling. I think the reason it would work is forcing people to decide to play with the analytical part of their brain, ahead of time, rather than with the addiction part in the moment.
What you’re not understanding is that this game violates the players constitutional right to have legendary gems that are as good as their favorite YouTuber.
What are they supposed to do? Just pick away at rifts for free to build up their legendary gem count like secondary citizens? Are they supposed to ONLY use the crests from the battlepass as if this is some kind of subscription based game? What if they want to work tirelessly day and night to grind legendaries to make their character more powerful but don’t have as much money as the next guy? Shouldn’t the government step in?
This would pretty much kill the current industry (*as we know it).
F2P/mobile games are monetized through Wales, but they're only willing to spend if there's enough incentive (e.g. prestige). That's not given if there's no F2P player base, because the base game would be too expensive.
IMHO the best way to go about is to vote with your wallet. There are plenty of worthwhile games where you don't have to be a whale to be successful.
Well good.. Let's kill it. Who cares if the business model works. It shouldn't work.
The idea of such regulation is to stimulate the business to move back to normal models.
In the Netherlands this is already working, Diablo immortal is not available there. It's a small market but once the whole EU does it they won't have a choice but to come up with something more reasonable. Win-win.
It was thought that people would use less restaurants and bars if smoking was forbidden.
It's more likely that when incentives change, the whole customer base changes.
The current system of preying whales to pay for games has negative externalities for gamer's who don't have addiction. Playing is cheaper, but people play less games because addictive spending mechanics is affecting where the game development money goes.
Regulation would create incentives to make games that are expensive because they are so good.
Regulation would create an incentive to region lock out the areas that regulate it. Now you have people from the regulating country use VPNs to play the game in another region instead.
Diablo Immortal is not available in Belgium and the Netherlands.
It's not about the VPN, it's the payment method and App store setup that determines if you can install the game. Regulation does not have to be watertight. It just needs to work well enough to drastically reduce harm.
But you are though. Lots of games region lock US and EU out of their game.
Lost Ark is in the top 3 of all games played on Steam and has been since it released this February. The game was 3 years old when it launched in NA/EU though - it had been out for 3 years in South Korea, 2 years in Russia and Japan. This is a game that ended up being very popular, but if nobody had bought the NA/EU publishing rights then the only way to play it would've been to play on the Russian, Japanese or Korean servers.
It's pretty normal for online games that come from Asia to not cater to the western market. I don't see why they wouldn't do this even more if we get additional regulations on games. And even when they do cater to the western market the priority is going to be North America, not Europe. Europe's almost always second class in these. (And when these games are brought over they're often Americanized/localized.)
PS Lost Ark is banned in Netherlands and Belgium too.
I wonder if there is some board / book where you can find those psychologists hired to milk money from whales. Nearly all those predatory companies have those desingers / psychologists who try to invent varioua tricks to get money from whales.
Obviously they also need to make the game fun enough so new players come and are converted to whales.
Are there any resources that show player churn?
Blizzard allready has/had Hearthstone that was very expensive (500 dollars per quarter to have most cards), but Im not sure if this didnt kill the game for 'average' players.
For me, Blizzard has always been the WarCraft 1-2 and StarCraft 1-2 company. Never liked the rest of their output over the years.
That said, it's a shame the company has been reduced to a gambling shop. Sign of the times, I guess. The writing was on the wall 10 years ago but I am no longer scared about my hobby. So what if the big guys all do lootboxes. Don't buy from them.
Activision used to have stellar catalogue 15 years ago. Now look at them. It's all junk
When I was a gamer during the Quaje2 era, my “addiction” was in trying to be the best.
Immediately after school, I would practice various maps to understand their jumping kinetics and would spend time studying and understanding all the weapon shots/kill zones to the pixel level.
No money was spent on the ‘addiction for excellence’.
These days, I actually miss this type of addiction, the one where you want to excel at a skill-based game. (Mostly a matter of not having time)
Eh, the gaming industry and the amount of games you can play is so vast these days you can still play games without having to invest further amounts to progress.
Yes there are loot box games and so on, but in reality they're a small subset. Admittedly if you primarily play mobile games then that subset is quite large.
Stick with console/PC, be suspicious of free to play and you'll be fine.
My introduction to coding was making Quake engine maps for the Jedi Knight game as a young teenager. It was super fun and I guess Minecraft or Roblox is similar to this but adding money to it kind of makes the whole thing icky and exploitative.
This is a culmination of a trend that has been going on for at least a decade:
First it was the lootboxes that became widespread:
~2010 Steam Team Fortress 2, later Counter Strike
2012 EA's Mass Effect 3
2014 Call of Duty and Battlefield
2016 Overwatch
After that it seemed lootboxes were everywhere. In 2017 there was some backlash for EA's Star Wars game and they removed lootboxes, but it did not change the situation overall.
Then in 2020 western gamers were exposed to gacha mechanics with the release of Genshin Impact, where you "roll" with special currency for weapons and characters that you can't get otherwise. And this currency is either bought with real money or VERY slowly accumulated by playing game. The game is free to play otherwise.
In february this year there was a western release of Lost Ark - MMO ARPG(genre similar to Diablo) that involves probabilistic gear upgrades where you either play weeks to months to fully upgrade it, or drop hundreds to thousands of dollars on upgrade materials, game itself is free to play. It was backed by Amazon and promoted by huge Twitch events.
Both Genshin Impact and Lost Ark have very impressive amount of content, beautiful visuals, music - all while being free to play. Could these games be made and succeed without gambling mechanics? I don't know. My experience with Genshin has been that I got a lot more out of it in terms of fun per money spent than out of most from what I buy on Steam sales - which I play for few hours and forget.
I think the regulations about these kinds of games should at the very least require devs to:
- State all the probabilities
- Define a guarantee or a "pity": at which attempt will you succeed with 100% probability.
Then for each desired outcome, e.g. fully upgrading weapon, there should be displayed an expected and maximum "price", preferably in real currency. This would at least help the adults to moderate their spending. And as for children, yeah, these games should be 18+, I don't believe a child can handle the urge to spend in these games.
There is a large difference in lootboxes that have the ability to give you more power in the game versus lootboxes that just drop new cosmetic items with no gameplay affect.
Some of those games that you mentioned only contained cosmetic items in the lootboxes.
Gamers as a community have a much more visceral reaction to paying for power in the game, compared to paying for cosmetics.
FIFA is missing from your timeline and it's what really started EA on this pathway into darkness - the 'success' there is what inspired lootifying ME3. FIFA remains one of the biggest lootbox games around.
That is an outrageous amount of money on a game, the article did also say it would take 10 years to amass all that, which is still almost $1k per month.
If that amount of gear were resellable in a marketplace then some of the moral arguments are empty. And I bet it wouldn’t be an astronomical amount because there is a random loot box/gambling/prize factor in acquiring gear in that game.
It doesn’t matter the technology behind a marketplace, SQL+CRUD and CC payments or blockchain+NFT, it’s tracking a receipt of purchase on digital items. Some would argue that blockchain is a stupid choice of technology but I would counter that the tech world has taken tech and bent it into a different purpose than intended with much success. For example, a documentation technology and protocol (HTML and HTTP) was intended for scientists to link documents to each other. We’ve taken that and bent it into complete client/server applications.
I am not a gamer, but I am fascinated by all manner of monetization. Is Diablo Immortal unique as a free-to-play game that has a microtransaction model to support continued development, or do other games do this? It seems the equivalent of the freemium model with web applications. Does buying the so-called Legendary Gems enhance "winning" or just game playing? And can "winning" result in a financial reward (like in League of Legends, Super Smash Bros., EVO 2022, Mistplay, etc)? I read that "the 1% of top professional gamers make tens of millions of dollars per year with a combination of sponsorships, ad revenue, and subscriber dues". [1] Mind blowing.
The model is extremely standard in mobile games, especially in Asia, where it has been the norm for almost a decade in gacha games, and where people are used to paying and gambling. They all have the same mechanics, or variations of them, Diablo doesn't really do anything innovative here, but it certainly is on the aggressive side.
A lot of the outrage comes from the fact that 1. Diablo is originally a PC-based IP with a PC gamer fanbase, and PC gamers are used to different monetization schemes and generally don't play mobile games. Even without the gambling mechanics, there already was a huge backlash about Blizzard making a mobile Diablo game 2. Diablo is a "western" IP where such monetization schemes are less common and the penetration of PC players is higher compared to other parts of the world where mobile game penetration is higher.
> And can "winning" result in a financial reward
Generally speaking, no. There are no competitions for these kind of games. The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless.
Remember also how Diablo 3 was released (in most countries) with a real money Auction House, which was later removed because even the devs realized that it hurt the game ?
What's interesting is Diablo Immortal's monetization introduces a level of indirection compared to Diablo 3's Real Money Auction House (RMAH), and I think it's sufficiently distinct to avoid the same fate.
In D3, you could buy equipment directly from the RMAH. This undermined core gameplay mechanisms since any loot you were likely to find would be inferior to whatever was available for pennies in the store. So why bother running the dungeons at all?
In DI, you don't buy gear directly with money. Instead, you buy access to dungeons with guaranteed drops of high level items which are statistically infeasible to obtain any other way. But this still lends plausible deniability: you're not buying your gear, you're just buying a spin at the (very weighted) wheel.
> The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless.
Interesting. Why would the publisher have such a ToS? Just so they monopolize the revenue from in-game sales? Or is it more altruistic, like preventing new players having an unfair advantage? I would have thought encouraging a secondary market in their game would actually attract players.
I would imagine it's because they want to avoid people building bots and creating businesses around accounts creation and selling. Once you have such a secondary market you get a cheap supply of accounts due to outsourced labor or bots. This devalues the in-game purchases. Why would I spent more money in-game if I can just buy a cheap account?
> Does buying the so-called Legendary Gems enhance "winning" or just game playing?
Yes. Look up “gacha games” [0] for the broader category. One very successful and very rich version of this genre is “genshin impact”
> And can "winning" result in a financial reward
In this case, no, not currently. People tend to structure competitive scenes around games without these mechanics but it could be done by the company developing the game. People are playing for the satisfaction of winning rare items or beating other people on a leaderboard.
For a programmer, are those gacha "vending machines" available in code libraries? I would love to experiment with implementing one in a productivity web application.
I am not sure I understand what you mean. The core mechanic is that rewards are randomly distributed - the namesake “gacha” machines dispense a capsule with a random toy. Think of it as a slot machine where if it hits you get an item you wanted / needed for gameplay and if it doesn’t it just took your money and gave you something useless.
Perhaps I need to play to understand, but it sounds like “gacha” machines behave like in-game vending machines where the player can purchase "features" to enhance their avatar etc.? Or do I have that wrong? I just assumed that those “gacha” machines are code libraries in gaming engines (Unity, Godot, GameMaker: Studio, etc), and that maybe a “gacha” machine code library is available open source or in some other fashion.
Gacha games are mostly card-puller games. You pay $X for X pulls, with more expensive packages giving more pulls with a supposed higher success rate of 'winning' (getting a good/rare pull).
They use hidden weights, as well as max item rolls per day. This means that to keep items rare via artificial scarcity they will only allow so many of those cards to be pulled per X hours/days/whatever but they don't tell you this anywhere. So if that new hot card that just dropped is up for grabs, you buy 10 pulls. But you don't know that it's already been pulled X times by other people, so you have literally no chance to 'win'. So those pulls will be wasted.
The companies always lie about chances to win, the pulls are insane, you can see streamers do massive pulls, the numbers are sometimes out there, just community gathered.
A real life example is one of those light-roulette machines at arcaded where you slam the button to stop the spinning light. The only actual chance you have to win is after $X has been spent on the machine, before that threshold has been met winning is impossible, stopping the light at the correct spot won't matter it will simply roll to the next losing light. Or claw machines are the same and will only actually close enough to grab a toy after $X has been spent.
Gambling is one thing but these skinner boxes masquerading as games are pure evil as they change the rules constantly and make winning downright impossible.
There are many gacha games on the market today that do post their odds and where player-validated data seems to support it. (Some jurisdictions like China and Japan require these kinds of disclosures.) But there are also a lot of markets that don’t require these kinds of disclosures and where there isn’t enough player data to draw a conclusion. So, in that case, how could you have confidence that they are not doing what you suggest? Even if they were, would it even be illegal? (If you never post what the odds are in the first place, is it fraud to keep changing the rules?)
This is why I’ve always been a bit surprised developers haven’t done more to get ahead of these kinds of issues with responsible disclosures and transparency, because it seems to be just inviting regulation. I honestly don’t think most F2P games pull the kinds of slimy tricks you’re accusing them of (most just use simple loot tables and RNG), but there’s nothing holding them accountable to say they can’t because everything is opaque.
Even regulated state lotteries do shady shit and are sued due to lying about odds and remaining prizes, and having seen first hand the way those and arcade games work.
I played some when they first dropped and the android playstore options were limited. You could see the bullshit weights first-hand if you had enough free pulls. Again, this, along with streamers doing massive pulls, and community-gathered spreadhseets are where I get my information, not from the game page that says '1 in 100 chance of legendary pull!' because, again, it's always been bullshit.
Even the disclosure of odds isn’t enough imo, because often it’s odds of a “pull” that costs various amounts of abstracted in game currencies with complicated conversion rates between each other and to the money you put in. It becomes a very complicated math problem most people just ignore.
The machine is a metaphor for gameplay mechanics where you purchase a random chance for a reward. They are not something I can see related to libraries, but a kind of gameplay, in the same way that “leveling up” in an rpg wouldn’t really make sense to me as a library.
At like 50¢/subscriber/month, that adds up fast for people with millions of subscribers. I bet the sponsorships are moreso about figuring out how to fill the streaming time, rather than the payment itself
I put this game in the same category as Anthem, Fallout 76, and unfortunately many others. No fans wanted it, no developers wanted to make it, nobody cares about it. The only people excited about this are the executives who saw how much money other Mobile / Co-op Multiplayer / Arena shooter / Battle Royale / etc games were making, and are hopeful they can get a piece of the pie. This sort of thing never seems to end well for the game companies that push it.
Sometimes though, companies seem to learn from their mistakes on these. EA went from a straight awful company to producing one of my favorite games, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, with no forced multiplayer, no microtransactions, no DLC, just a great game out of the box. So although Blizzard franchises are certainly hurting right now, sometimes the night is darkest just before the dawn, so to speak.
This seems like a perfect time to point out how well Diablo 2 Resurrection works with a gamepad. I hooked my 55" Acer monitor over DP to my PC, just start Diablo 2 through Proton, move the window over to the Acer monitor, sit back in my favorite chair and hack and I slash away til my heart's content.
If Microsoft wouldn't buy ATVI (at a higher price than the current stock price), I would have sold my shares months ago. I don't have any hope for ATVI anymore. Instead of providing value to their customers - the gamers, they squeeze it for shareholders. I doubt, Diablo 4 will be any different.
Honestly that's pretty cheap for a F2P game. The most financially successful F2P games will have planned for spend to 'go infinite'. This may be by setting up money fights on a ranked ladder, or constantly rotating out characters so that spenders have to reset progress.
The fact that you can max out in Diablo Immortal, and so cheaply, shows Blizzard still hasn't learned what F2P is all about. They are listening too much to their Gamer customers who are a microscopic piece of their TAM and unlikely to source many whales. Whales are incredibly wealthy people for whom $110k is weekend fun money. Gamers are a cohort that like to brag about fun hours per dollar. They're budget customers.
Blizzard thinks that you make console & PC games on mobile and you make mobile money. A lot of game companies from the before-mobile-times think this is a formula. And their customers egg them on. But if you build the mobile game those customers want, you will lose money at worst and leave money on the table at best. Talking 90% of the money still on the table.
Blizzard's biggest problem is perhaps that their IP appeals only to Gamers, who as a culture resist F2P business models (budget customers.) This article is one such example, meant to stoke outrage within that group. The people who are going to spend $110k on Diablo Immortal don't read Gamer media, or even consider themselves Gamers. They've never been on Twitch and they don't have Steam accounts. Gamers think they are the center of the gaming universe but mobile gaming audiences have turned them into a niche audience in less than a decade.
I think Blizzard should give up at this point and keep making games mech-aesthetically tailored for the budget Gamer audience. Blizzard and Gamers alike think WoW was a huge gaming phenomenon but on the mobile scale it registers somewhere around Subway Surfers. Blizzard IP does not splash with mobile audiences. When a Gamer brand enters the mobile market it's akin to releasing a video game movie in theaters. Diablo Immortal is a lot closer to Mario Bros Movie than Sonic Movie in that analogy.
They also have very tame monetization in their upcoming Warcraft mobile game when compared to the game it's cloning - Clash Royale. There are no loot boxes and you can buy character outright. Still the announcement was met with mixed reactions.
Maybe Blizzard's reputation has been so tarnished that even that is not enough and they need to forgo any mechanism that can be remotely considered giving paying customer advantages.
The thing is Activision has already successfully brought its flagship title Call of Duty to the mobile with only cosmetic store and making banks with it. So I disagree with you that Blizzard will be leaving money on the table by following that route.
It would be interested to see how well Diablo Immortal is going to do considering how much bad press it gets. Like you said the mobile gaming population is so much bigger than the PC one, but I question if the former are really immune to the opinions from YouTuber, social media and word of mouth from their friends.
I think a nice addition at the bottom would be the addendum, "if the goal is maximise profit at all costs and there is no regard for their customer-base beyond how effectively they can be exploited."
P2W is getting a lot of flak, but any game where you have to do not-fun grinding to get to the "good part" is effectively P2W. You are trading something of value, your time, not because the activity is fun, but because it gives you power to then enjoy the game. It's P2W, just not using currency.
And this trade is arguably worse overall for society than P2W using money. In that, you are producing something of value for society to get that money; in grind-to-win, you are producing nothing of value for society (and the game company gets no compensation as a result.)
The cost of a grindy game can be shockingly high, if you bother to compute the value of the time you are spending on it. That you find the grind tolerable doesn't reduce this cost.
I think a big part the problem is that of you include a cash shop of some sort in your game, the incentive immediately shifts to maximize the grind as much as your players are likely to tolerate. The more you can successfully push this, the more money the time-saving items you sell will turn a profit.
So any game that includes this sort of transactional mechanic has a strong perverse incentive to waste your time.
I'm glad I don't have time to play video games. The industry is getting worse and worse every year. (I thought my WoW addiction back in the day was bad - but at least the spending was capped at 13 Eur/month).
I’ve played a bit, and the reason I don’t mind the p2w model is because I’ve never tried to compete at that level. Let’s be real, even if it wasn’t pay to win there are still people out there who will be so far ahead of me that it nights as well be.
When I played D3 I actually played solo most of the time, really only competing against myself and enjoying the game. One time someone gave me a weapon that let me one shot everything and it honestly ruined the game for me. I deleted and started over because for me the fun is in the journey.
1) If the journey have enough content to sustain a huge grinding time, it's ok.
2) If you can make it expensive without making mandatory (to buy), it's ok.
3) If you build a legit character buying or farming and it can be evaluated at 100k USD, it's pretty awesome! (Check MIR 4 Top Characters Price)
But if you play a blizzard game, with no NFT (or Open marketplace) and being treated as criminal if you sell the product of your farming/grinding time, it's pretty fucked up.
Instead of government, an industry standard: total microtransaction purchases cannot exceed the full market price of the game. If the purchase limit is reached, every microtransaction item is unlocked unconditionally.
- DLCs are not microtransactions but they must add either new features or narratives.
> Many non-F2P MMOs have a subscription model instead. The market price quota would be based on the market price of subscriptions
> Assets such as new models and textures are the simplest skeletons of a game. A new feature is comparable to a side game and a narrative could be an entire game on its own ie: CYOA
To clarify, the 2 criterions should be 'best practices' and not hard enforceable rules. However, games that don't adhere to the best practice should have the stigma associated with the ratings M or AO.
An adult should be capable of judging the poor value of microtransactions and have the choice to suffer the consequences of consensual decisions at their own expense.
> To clarify, the 2 criterions should be 'best practices' and not hard enforceable rules. However, games that don't adhere to the best practice should have the stigma associated with the ratings M or AO. An adult should be capable of judging the poor value of microtransactions and have the choice to suffer the consequences of consensual decisions at their own expense.
What makes you think that it's children being exploited and not adults? I've worked on a few f2p multiplayer games and the player bases are usually older than you are implying. It's not 12 year olds using their parents credit cards the vast majority of the time (and when it is, its rare enough that there's a news story about it).
I don't understand why people are still surprised about Blizzard shenanigans.
The golden era was 20 years ago, let it go.
Every new game from the last five years has been a disaster in one way or the other. They are even managing to slowly kill their never-ending holy cow: World of Warcraft.
A better way to think about it is that these games are designed for - and paid for by - exactly the very few people who want to spend this much on winning a game. Everybody else gets to free-ride on this, and only pay what they want (mostly zero)
The problem with this is that games designed to be monetized this way are going to build their progression, reward-systems, cosmetic systems, grind balance, etc. around it.
So the players who are "paying what they want (mostly zero)" aren't getting a normal but free Diablo game, they are getting version of that game balanced and prioritized around the whales that /will/ be spending the money. The actual customers.
I'd rather pay than "free-ride", because I don't want incessant popups telling me how how I can skip the grind (that is tuned to irritate me) by buying a gems with my credit card.
I'm not as valuable to Blizzard/Activision/NetEase with my one-time-purchase though, and they know it.
That's why I don't play these games. But other people have different preferences and that's okay by me. I don't see a need to judge the company(ies), the users, or the system. Not saying you are, but it seems to be the flavor of this article and much of the sentiment in these comments. Why?
I think there's a point where it feels like it's gone beyond simple price discrimination to leveraging hundreds of employees and millions of dollars to actively manipulate and exploit a player base that is often substantially comprised of children. I've watched developer presentations on how best to implement Skinner boxes and other gambling mechanics to help condition users and obscure exactly how much they are spending. That may be fair to judge a company poorly for.
For me personally, it represents the fact that the company is actively working against my best interests, and that feels bad. Additionally, completely selfishly, it makes me sad to see games that I would otherwise enjoy be distorted by this sort of monetization.
An interesting way to think about it for sure. Sub in “jack daniels” or “bud light” for Diablo and it gets depressing fast when you consider 80% of liquor is consumed by less than 10% of drinkers, who each have an average of 20+ drinks a week, every week (forgive that I cannot source but trust this is based on seeing real data).
Still, we must consider that growth is what a company is after, and that growth happens at the margin, not the core.
Another problem with Diablo Immortal is that they gimped the game to allow for people using mobile devices to play it. It's really weird to see a Diablo game where inventory management doesn't play a big role.
There's an interesting amount of misinformation regarding MTX in Diablo Immortal. But the TL;DR is that the significant gameplay advantages from MTX only really apply at higher Paragon levels, requiring hundreds of hours to hit. The primary way of increasing power before that is the same as it was in any Diablo; get better gear, which can't be accelerated by MTX at all.
Hitting lv. 60/completing the main story content is very easy and does not benefit much even if you did spend money to get 5-star Legendary Gems (although there are level gates once you hit lv. 35; daily quests provide the best way to get around those, those aren't paywalls). That takes about 20 hours, which is good value for a free game even if you bounce off.
I know this is a crazy thought and not inline with a lot of the blizzard hate - but why don't games like this allow more gifting style mechanics?
I consider the Twitch gift sub market. And I consider that weird crypto game Axie Infinity. It seems we are only considering the purchasing power of whales that want to flex. What about whales that want to collaborate. Whales that want to demonstrate their generosity.
I remember a reddit post about a guy who had a rich friend that would constantly take him on wild adventures that the poorer friend couldn't afford. The rich guy didn't care about spending the money and the poor guy was good company.
I think an interesting monetization mechanic would be a game where the pay-to-win aspect was in the recruitment and outfitting of other players. So as a poor player I could have the opportunity to earn high-level gear based on the spending of a whale whose campaign I was joining.
This was one thing I appreciated about Pokemon Go! when it first came out and everyone was playing it. It's one of the only free-to-play games that got me happily buying the in-game currency to buy items, because I could buy and use the (don't remember what it was anymore, too long ago, I'm sure someone else here remembers) item that attracted Pokemon to my area for a half hour at a time, and all players in the region benefitted.
So I was buying and deploying these things over and over again just so my wife and kids in the area could have more fun. I specifically remember we attended a wedding at Disney World and my wife (girlfriend at the time) couldn't move around because of a recent surgery (I pushed her around Disney World in a wheelchair the whole time), so me buying those things let her capture Pokemon from our hotel room, and I could see a bunch of other people in the area playing as well. I hope I helped several kids enjoy playing the game more during that time.
I'd love more games to have something similar. If something only benefits me in a game I don't feel too motivated to buy it, as I can usually just deal without and progress slower, of just play a different game altogether.
It doesn't have to be specific to your physical region (although I think that helps, it was cool to think I was helping people near me), but maybe just where you're at within a game world, or something.
You end up with a huge security incentives problem. If there's a way to extract the value from one account and give it to another, you massively increase the incentive to phish users, set up black markets for buying items off of a hacked account, or just transfer it to your own.
You could set up a payment system to buy items that's not a player account. You buy an item just to give. There's still a phishing incentive, but is it worse than any of the other content you can buy online?
Credit Card theft/fraud is why. If it was possible to "transfer" funds like this then mechanisms for fraudulent purchases will increase dramatically. Eve Online introduced purchasing in-game currencies because it was rife on the "black market" anyway and they also saw a huge number of fraudulent purchases and/or charge backs. 3rd party grey "broker" sites popped up with way below market rate prices, 99% of which are using fraudulent CCs to fund them, and bot accounts to transfer the in-game stuff.
Why not steal the idea of Pokémon go? Transfer doesn’t go to a person but to an area or group of people. You could pay to unlock an area and take a group of people on a quest. Or perhaps a boost or buff in an area.
If you can't gift items, it seems like a huge missed opportunity because I feel like there's a lot of things people don't buy for themselves but they might be willing to buy for other people as a gift.
For instance I don't think I would ever spend 30 dollars on a bottle of wine to drink at dinner, but I could pay 50 or 60 to buy a bottle of wine as a special gift to a friend.
Whoa, very interesting! i'd love to play this game.
> spending of a whale whose campaign I was joining.
Also, for me very punishing mechanics with high risk, high reward games have had an underserved market place. I love pking on a variety of different MMO's and sometimes when you are pking in max gear you are risking 10g's IRL. Full Torva on runescape is 6g's and once you add up the rest of the rings and amulets, you can easily be risking $15,000.00 IRL money.
However, there is no benefit to anyone besides yourself. Clans are 'superficial' as there is no real 'shared loot' system, clan building requirements outside 'daily's', but being the biggest clan doesn't give you 'benefits' outside a few dailys and some xp.
When I was 11 some guy randomly gave me like 20k gp and dragonhide in RuneScape and I haven't forgotten that moment in the mines outside of Varrock since.
Even Path of Exile only allows gifting microtransactions through explicit interactions with support, and they're somewhat picky about verifying that you're buying the items for someone you know personally -- they're going out of their way to avoid letting players trade in-game equipment for paid cosmetic items.
I think these free to play might be more of just 'pick your own price'. That way they get people that wouldn't pay 60$ for a mobile game and also people that would pay 1000$ for a game.
While I personally don't like it, because it feels like I'm getting an unfinished game if I don't spend a lot, I'm sure that there are many that enjoy this model and don't mind it at all.
And at the end of the day, these people that spend more money are actually the ones that feed the developers~
I think you are right if the game offers mostly single-player experiences, though the developers of such games often implement dark patterns that set players up for spending more than they rationally would.
As soon as player-vs-player is introduced, f2p players become part of the "experience" for the whale players.
But you can easily re-sell that NFT, whereas it’s against the T&C to sell a game account for real money, and it seems there is no “real money cash out” in Immortal. So not really something you can speculate on or trade as far as I can tell.
Lootbox games: I don't understand why these kind of games are not getting banned or heavily restricted. There is absolutely not a single positive thing about these games. Moral doesn't matter.
it won't be available in the Netherlands or Belgium, because we have laws against them, now they just don't release the games here. I hope more of the EU will join us with similar laws so it will become impactful.
You mean pay for loot box games? I ask because Diablo is one of the original grind for random drop games. At its core, Diablo has always been a gambling game even before micro transactions.
Diablo was still enjoyable without the best stuff. And they never forced you to pay for anything to progress.
Diablo III made it even easier to get all the set gear (I have several sets on Switch and I only play casually) and it became about designing builds around gear that could survive the highest torment difficulties.
Other games like Borderlands with similar item systems also don't rely on the player getting the absolute best gear to progress either.
These pay-to-play games on the other hand, force you to hand over cash to progress and the fun often stops if you try to play for free.
Yes, paying out of game currency for in game rng loot.
It has always had the gambling element though. While doing Meph runs I came to the conclusion that I wasn't playing because I was having fun, I was playing for the thrill of the loot drop rng.
If you walk around a low income area in the US, you’ll find loot boxes littered on the ground. We call them scratch off tickets. Getting the okay from the government to prey on your fellow citizens has precedent here.
It seems like the online discourse stalled out at, “Well Pokémon cards are legal, aren’t lootboxes basically the same thing?”. I have my own opinion on that but I never saw a consensus rebuttal form against that point.
Add to that lotteries, or pretty much anything that has random outcomes. Even if you don't gamble with cash, but something like Pokemon cards or digital items, there will always be secondary markets that let you cash out. If you want to ban these things, you'd have to ban all randomness.
Investors love the monetization model and they get to decide what is just right and moral in our system of economics. The “fiduciary duty” to investors means sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves.
If you can make money, you MUST make it.
Someday I hope we find some way as a society to give value to other things. Its not really working out.
There's a difference between what the law says they can and can't do, and what the forces of capital are set up to encourage them to do. The law may say you can't avoid costly waste disposal by dumping it into the rainforest, but the incentive (ie the profit motive) is there to skirt as close to breaking the law, and often blowing right past it.
I mean I don't think I even need to give examples of corporations breaking the law because they thought they could get away with it. Corporations, like any group of people, can fail to see the big picture. Short term profits for the risk of a big slap on the wrist is a gamble a lot of companies take.
> sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves.
It would be great if we could stop spreading this misunderstanding. Fiduciary duty is a duty not to deliberately destroy shareholder value. Basically you can't set it on fire or loot it. It is not and has never been a duty to do absolutely anything anyone can possibly conceive of that will enrich the shareholders. Leaders are free morally and legally free to consider intangible factors that bear on the long term health and viability of the company and indeed do so every day.
> It is not and has never been a duty to do absolutely anything anyone can possibly conceive of that will enrich the shareholders.
This. Otherwise Apple and Disney would be forced to sell porn. But they don't because of their moral (one could argue prude) stance which makes less money for the investor.
Both companies target demographics that would oppose that.
Also the PR storm of such a reversal would significantly damage their stock prices. More importantly, stockholders suing either company to force them to reverse the policy would be an even bigger story.
It's not a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as possible, it's to maximize value for shareholders which means stock price rivals revenue.
Correct. Actually, the directors and shareholders are both bound by the company constitution or charter, as well as the various agreements between them. None of these documents ever say “make money at any cost”, and I suspect this whole fiduciary duty nonsense was pushed down from Wall Street, who of course stand to profit from the concept.
You just got to look at a company like Boeing and how it changed over the years. The fiduciary duty of the directors didn’t change; but the directors certainly did.
> The “fiduciary duty” to investors means sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves.
Larry Fink disagrees, and companies like Exxon have learned that not only is it not the only option, it's not an option at all. In fact, it's to the point that politicians like Mike Pence are talking about the big bad shareholders terrorizing companies.
> If you can make money, you MUST make it.
This is a common sentiment at all levels. Who wants to do good if they can make 3 times as much helping big tech sell ads?
Children have parents who know what their children are doing online. In any case, children don’t have access to credit cards or any other means to pay for in-game items.
Every single statement in this post is a lie, its a bit of an achievement
1 - some children have no parents
2 - we have data to prove that parents don't know what their children do online, and never did. This is a complete fabrication
3 - children do have access to creditcards, both legally from the age of 14 or 16 depending on jurisdiction, and illegally
4 - there are many non-credit-card ways of paying for ingame items, including crypto
Anyway, given your views, I presume you are in favour of legalising cocaine and other drugs? Otherwise this whole line of argument would be hypocritical.
“The hope you feel when you are in love is not necessarily for anything in particular. Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns.” – Susan Griffin
It's like selling cigarettes to children using manipulative marketing specifically aimed at children like cute characters on the box and blaming the parents.
Not to defend lootbox game. But some positive thing: it makes some people's life less boring. Lootbox doesn't make games interesting. But lootbox generates money to hire good designer, programmer to create interesting games, at least for some players.
A more cynical perspective is that the designer and programmer are tasked with using all tricks possible to coerce their players to pay money. While the players spend a lot of time and money on it, their life is only less boring akin to an addict’s life being less boring when they’re on a high.
It's like, gaming used to have some gambling flavor elements to it, but since ~2020 they gave up moderating it and everyone decided to go all-in on gamba. CSGO skin cases were meme-ably game-able, and I'm sure some people lost their livelihood, but it certainly wasn't conditioning EVERY CHILD that played to casually walk that line deeper and deeper... What we have now is sickening.
The stance of NL and belgium of just banning all games that have gambling elements, is truly the only path forward. There will be no self-regulation. The studios have to be stopped from selling to care anymore.
Gambling in the gaming world is even more prominent on Twitch and it's not even pretending to be gaming related anymore.
An incognito screenshot of Twitch I captured just now https://i.imgur.com/fgXDAHB.png - The biggest streamer on the platform is currently streaming real money (crypto) online Slots gambling to 100k+ viewers, and a second streamer in the top 5 category is also streaming Slots.
Supposedly these streamers make millions per month from these gaming sponsorships to pretend to lose their own money in order to convince their already primed audience to become addicts to these same sites.
Children brought up on gaming have been conditioned into becoming the perfect audience for unregulated crypto gambling companies to advertise to and ruin their lives
My take on cryptocurrency has become: it’s also all gambling, and for that reason I no longer think there is any chance of it going to zero. Absent regulation there is a simply massive market for gambling. It’s shameless exploitation but people will do it (on both ends).
Most of this stuff is actually worse than casinos. Casinos have a social component, employ people, and are often at least a little regulated so that the odds can’t be absolutely 100% toward the house. Also you win actual money not a virtual game item.
>My take on cryptocurrency has become: it’s also all gambling
I have the same feeling towards the stock market. Sure, it can be well researched information on the stock in question, but it's all a bet your interpretation of that stock is right.
In other investments, you can pick an asset allocation, buy index funds of each asset, dollar cost over time, rebalance, invest over a long time.
Maybe some of that is available now with crypto? Index funds? But with how heavily the bigger cryptocurrencies are price-correlated, I don't think you get good intra-asset diversification benefits.
Personally within my asset allocation, crypto is a tiny fraction of a percent.
The stock market can be gambling, but if you put money in an index fund and don't look at it for 30 years, that's psychologically and financially very different from gambling.
Long term, Casinos absolutely have odds slanted toward the house. With the exception of a very few games, like blackjack, which can be effectively gamed, a gambler will statistically be guaranteed to go broke as the number of games approaches infinity.
That’s true of pit and slots games, but there are people who make a living playing poker in casinos. (It’s a player-vs-player hosted game with the casino taking a rake or seat charge rather than a player-vs-house game.)
Some difference in the mechanics, but the overall concept is the same. An individual player might be able to win money in poker (with some combination of luck and skill), but a group of players will always lose to the house.
Poker isn't played as a group. The "overall concept" is whether an individual player can profit over the long run, and in poker but not (say) roulette, the answer is yes.
Your approach reminded me of a joke:
Three statisticians go deer hunting with bows and arrows. They spot a big buck and take aim. One shoots and his arrow flies off three meters to the right. The second shoots and his arrow flies off three meters to the left. The third statistician jumps up and down, yelling "We got him! We got him!"
This is, honestly, why I'm focusing my children on Nintendo products. They do sometimes charge for skins, but by and large they don't succumb to the same "pay me to play" traps as other platforms.
Nintendo’s mobile games aren’t developed in-house[1]. Not that it excuses it[2], but it does create a clear line for your parent commenter: as long as the focus is on playing Nintendo games on Nintendo platforms, the plan makes sense[3].
[1]: Niantic for Pokémon Go, DeNA for Mario Kart Tour.
Not just any playing cards, but hanafuda cards, which fascinatingly evolved alongside government gambling crackdowns specifically to be resistant to gambling: "Though they can still be used for gambling, its structure and design is less convenient than other decks such as Kabufuda."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanafuda#History
I have a Switch (got it when I had a surgery to ease the long recovery). The Nintendo IP is almost completely bullshit free. The success of Switch is nice too.
FromSoftware is another bastion of hope. The popularity of Elden Ring is no coincidence.
Honestly, I shamelessly took a switch into hospital and it was an absolute god-send. I couldn't manage it while on a fentanyl infusion, but combined with the drugs it was perfect – episodic gameplay, pick up and put down, and a wonderful form of escapism. The Witcher and Skyrim come highly recommended, after BOTW.
Haha no, I wanted to emphasize how they are even doing the hardware different. The mobile form factor did fit my needs. Just fell short on the explanation.
BTW gamer community is fucked up and people will judge each other on every single detail so you are not far off.
100%, I’d do the same if I had children and honestly try to do the same for myself. It’s the only console that keeps gaming simple and fun - no achievements, less cosmetic driven games, etc…
Yeah, we tried going to iPad for our kids but it’s so full of free to play junk.
Even with Amazon Kids, though, the games are still their free to play selves without purchases, so I still see these games where dopamine hits (get coins!) are a main mechanic :(
Apple Arcade has a bunch of good games without any of this junk (there are some “+” versions of some of the f2p games like Jetpack Joyride but lots of other good stuff).
Another really great service is XBox Gamepass - you pay a monthly fee and just get the games. There's occasionally DLC for something but not the voracious grubbiness of the free to play and mobile space.
All you said is true, but they have gotten lazy and complacent these days. Not sure I would support them. They have become the Disney of video games. Family friendly, but at what cost?
This effectively needs at least the same kind of regulation as Casinos. It's nothing else than gambling, arguably much worse and predatory in luring you in and making you spend money.
It's kind of sad really, because the generation that's talking about this here are the same the people that had the best, and least adulterated versions of gaming growing up. So the grew up and ruined games going forward by making them only about money.
Who did it? The gamers playing those games you just steamrolled, or the investors in the gaming companies that mandated to do whatever to make games more profitable? What generation those investors came from isn't relevant as these types of investors are in every generation as investors were not required to be gamers but just "savvy" business types.
Video games are generally upheld as an example of good self regulation. In the US the ESRB review system was created entirely by the industry. It has universal adoption and is enforced by almost every retailer (despite being a diverse group). Futhermore the ESRB has much clearer standards than the equivalent for films.
Is it impossible to imagine the industry creating a similar system around online transactions or gambling?
Goes deeper. Self-regulation is sold by hyper liberals and libertarians as the pinnacle of freedom in capitalism. From individuals to corporation, where any form of regulation or control should be excluded
Self-regulation lasts for half a generation, at most. Then people take over who wonder why they are doing the regulating in the first place and/or see how to game it for profit. I think it does work, just not for long enough to matter.
Nothing has really improved upon csgo skins either. People forget that csgo skins were tradeable for currency. Not a USD type currency without breaking terms, sure, but steam bucks have some liquidity.
If I got lucky on a csgo case, I could go buy a different video game
Now if I get lucky in most of these other models, I can't even use that luck to buy more cases
I remember when we used to decry the "miniaturisation of addon content" with the DLC craze (instead of proper expansions) and then the preorder boni and season passes and what not (oh, the simple days).
Turbo capitalistic exploitation of games is festering; and now it's more important than ever to support the good-spirited studios.
>The stance of NL and belgium of just banning all games that have gambling elements, is truly the only path forward.
It means that you, the user, don't get to play the games you want to play or it will have no effect. Publishers will figure out ways around it and you're never going to stamp it out as long as there is demand for it.
I don't like Diablo Immortal's monetization, so I don't play it. I suggest everyone else should do the exact same thing. If you're a parent then you should forbid your kid from playing games like that too.
Getting lawmakers involved in regular video games is just going to end in disaster. They're not exactly known for making sensible laws or even understanding the subject matter.
The fact that the Belgian and Dutch governments label these predatory microtransaction schemes as gambling, shows that they understand the subject matter perfectly fine.
Yes, you and I can sensibly choose not to play those games or spend money on them. But lots of people can't. That's why laws regulating gambling exist.
Nobody is saying that you can't play these games. Those gaming companies just have to accept that their products are a form of gambling and will be regulated and taxed as such.
>Nobody is saying that you can't play these games.
The Dutch and Belgian government quite literally are saying that you can't though. Of course, in practice it just means Dutch and Belgian players will pretend they're from another European country via VPN.
>Those gaming companies just have to accept that their products are a form of gambling and will be regulated and taxed as such.
I'm not sure if you're saying this in bad faith, are ignorant of gambling laws or truly believe this. If you were to regulate video games with gambling laws then that video game ceases to exist.
Nobody can afford to publish even a remotely complex game while following gambling regulations, because every single country makes their own rules on that. You would essentially be creating a game for one country only. And at that point why bother? Just push out another actual slotmachine. You cut development costs by multiple orders of magnitude and increase accessibility of the game.
Of course, in practice the countries that regulate it would just be banned. And the players would play the game via VPN.
Also, what I'm saying is that when dozens of countries come up with new rules some of them are going to do something stupid with them. You're asking for legally mandated region locks in gaming.
Just to be clear, I don't like these games either. I hate that game companies do this.
No, the Dutch and Belgian governments are saying you CAN play the game as long as it's changed to remove gambling aspects or is sold as a gambling product with all the consequences that entails.
Activision Blizzard doesn't want to do that. Not the fault of governments
And as for the (im)possibility to develop games that follow the laws of all countries: that had been successfully done for decades. It just doesn't involve predatory microtransactions
>No, the Dutch and Belgian governments are saying you CAN play the game as long as it's changed to remove gambling aspects or is sold as a gambling product with all the consequences that entails.
In other words, they're saying that you cannot play the game.
>Activision Blizzard doesn't want to do that. Not the fault of governments
If I were Dutch and wanted to play the game, then it wouldn't be Blizzard stopping me from playing. It would be the Dutch government. That is quite literally their fault.
The Dutch government is saying that they know how I should live my life better than I do.
>And as for the (im)possibility to develop games that follow the laws of all countries: that had been successfully done for decades. It just doesn't involve predatory microtransactions
Yeah, good luck with that. Hope you have some extremely deep pockets to fund it yourself, because nobody's going to invest in it if the projected returns suck. Video game prices have stayed at the same level or even decreased over the years while costs to develop have gone up, because players aren't willing to pay the inflation adjusted price for them. They also expect way more complex technical work on the games.
And even when you make all that work the players will still jump to games like Diablo Immortal instead, regardless whether your local government bans the game or not. Getting around region locks in gaming isn't exactly new.
I truly do not mean this as a flippant response to your comment, but there is a very simple solution to the problem you are envisioning coming from these regulations. Developers could just make a game with no micro transactions. The only way your ‘issues’ exist, is if these games are only made to make money via the gambling mechanics that are being regulated. Want your game available everywhere … just make a game that people can pay for and play.
I understand what you're saying, and I don't think it's a flippant answer at all, but that's only something the game developer can do. Ultimately, they're running a business and will make choices that make them money. If that means they don't publish their game at all in Europe or North America then that's what they're going to do. They won't be poorer for it, it'll be us, Europeans, who can't play their games (or we get to play some heavily Americanized version of the game, because that's the company that ends up publishing the game in Europe with lots of American changes).
My problem with this is that ultimately it ends up limiting my choices because I happen to live in Europe. I can choose not to play games that I think are trying to take too much advantage of me (or complain about ones that try to), but it's much more difficult to play a game that isn't permitted to be playable in my region.
> The Dutch and Belgian government quite literally are saying that you can't though. Of course, in practice it just means Dutch and Belgian players will pretend they're from another European country via VPN.
I am a Dutch player who played D1, D2, D3. I won't play Diablo Immortal. First of all the condescending comment about phones as well as the launch of D3 which made whatever this game is quite sour. Then they made it a reskin by NetEase; it only uses Blizzard IP it isn't developed by Blizzard. Then they made it P2W, as this item proves.
> I'm not sure if you're saying this in bad faith, are ignorant of gambling laws or truly believe this. If you were to regulate video games with gambling laws then that video game ceases to exist.
Of course they can work around it by not having P2W. Its that simple, really. How about make a damn good game and sell it?
I can only hope more countries start regulating crap like this, as should happen with ML/AI ('algorithms') as well.
>Of course they can work around it by not having P2W. Its that simple, really. How about make a damn good game and sell it?
Because the average player is not going to pay $100 for a game. Also, now you're lumping P2W and gambling together.
But all of this is beside the point. If you do not like games like this then you shouldn't play them. I want to still be able to play the games I choose. I don't need the government to try to "protect me" from this.
Do I like that games do this? No, but I can always choose not to play them. If people chose to not play them then they wouldn't monetize games like this, but it's pretty apparent that people are okay with this. You want to use force via the government to stop those people from doing something they want to do and using "it's for your own good" as an excuse.
Games will absolutely shut out countries where they feel that handing regulation is too much for them. This will include games that don't conflict with the regulation, but it's simply too risky to figure out whether they do or not.
As someone who spend thousands of EUR on MtG in my youth and who's wife had a father who was an alcoholic I'd like to disagree with 'I don't need the government to try to "protect me" from this.' USA is also currently in an opioid crisis.
This is both P2W and gambling, and its the combination which is the issue. RNG alone isn't an issue. Also, it is aimed at youth, who not yet can deal with gambling. How come a country where you may drive at age 16 and drink at age 21 doesn't care about digital gambling via the internet?
The argument is the same about other things like heroin, gambling, LSD, etc. The law is there to protect the people. If you want to break the law, then you are on your own, with all the repercussions which may come with it including: that your Battle.net account gets disabled/banned, that Blizzard or the player gets a fine, that you become addicted, that you have to pretend you are from another jurisdiction in order to play it, that you move to a different jurisdiction, or vote for different politicians in your jurisdiction. There's plenty of options for you to influence the current outcome.
> If people chose to not play them then they wouldn't monetize games like this, but it's pretty apparent that people are okay with this.
No, it is not "pretty apparent". Stop projecting.
> You want to use force via the government to stop those people from doing something they want to do and using "it's for your own good" as an excuse.
Yes, such is the basis of law.
> Games will absolutely shut out countries where they feel that handing regulation is too much for them. This will include games that don't conflict with the regulation, but it's simply too risky to figure out whether they do or not.
That's fine, I'm not missing out, hopefully more countries follow suit and may it provide incentive to change this rotten to the core industry.
This is obviously not going to work. You'd have to be thoroughly conditioned against government intervention to even briefly entertain the notion that it might.
"Well, if I just don't buy any drugs, that'll take care of the problem."
Obviously, government interventions can have negative impacts (see drugs parallel again) but the answer is encouraging sensible regulation, not pretending, against all evidence, that it can't work.
What is "all the evidence that it can work"? Drugs are a perfect example where governments have spent a century destroying people's lives with harebrained regulation. And yet all that it has done is empowered bloodthirsty cartels in developing countries. It hasn't improved the drug situation at all, regardless how much money we've poured into it.
As far as I can tell, gambling laws don't stop gambling either. In fact, it's usually the government that's the biggest provider of gambling services (the lottery). It seems like it's more about eliminating competition than anything else.
Anti-gambling laws are not vidoe-game specific, at best they just have to be adjusted to cover them correctly. And these kind of laws are pretty obvious so I don't see why there shouldn't be sensible working laws.
There are several reasons for such laws. First of all, not everyone is good at self-control. Then, there is the big problem of this kind of games making so much money, that the alternatives are dying out. In my eyes, mobile gaming already is pretty much dead. There is too much money being made by games which coerce the user into spending more money. This limits the choices and drives more people into these games, even if they have some resistance.
They will just move on to countries with less regulation, which usually means poorer countries with less educated people. You can probably see where this is going.
Banning rarely accomplishes anything, it just moves one appearance of the problem out of sight for a period of time.
Rocket propelled grenade launchers are federally legal [0] in the United States. Furthermore, there are no federal restrictions on children using legal firearms under adult supervision.
I don't think it affects the point you're making, I just thought it might be interesting to share.
The Internet does make a country's regulations of such services weaker, yet does provide some barrier. Businesses will weigh the risks of being discovered and banned if they don't comply.
They could just block the EU region and publish to other countries instead. Plenty of games, especially from Asia, already block all EU countries from playing. Usually they're looking to sell a license or don't know how to enter the market. Nevertheless, they are absolutely willing to block the EU region.
I see so many Europeans repeating the line that if Europe regulates X together, then companies will have to care, because they can't ignore the European market. This might be true in other industries, but it's not true in gaming. I would even say that it's more common for the European market to be treated as second class than not when it comes to online games.
Isn’t that mission accomplished from the EU perspective, though? Whether they don’t care very much and left, or whether they care a lot and left, as long as the level of caring was sufficient that they were forced to take the gambling for kids stuff with them that seems like a win. The alternative is to not care at all and keep selling in the EU anyway even if it’s made illegal, which seems unlikely at the level of scale it’s happening today.
Because I like playing some of these games. I don't want to be stuck with the 5 games that are officially EU approved. Asking for this kind of regulation is basically asking for legally mandated region-locks for online games. It's back to being a second class player in another region, where technically you're not allowed to play via VPN and you might get randomly banned.
Also, it's not about the children. Children don't make their own money - they only have money that parents give them. Even if these games banned children from playing them, a lot of the people complaining about it still wouldn't stop. The problem for them is that they can't make their friends stop playing these games, so they want the government to stop them instead.
I don't like when games monetize stuff like Diablo Immortal does. I hate it. But I'm certain that when legislation does arrive it'll be broad enough that other stuff gets caught up in it and the people advocating for it will just shrug their shoulders and go "lol i didn't care about games anyway".
If it went like how nicotine and cigarettes stopped being marketed to kids, I’d be ok with that. Adults did complain that their right to smoke candy flavored cigarettes was being taken away, or that kids don’t have money for cigarettes anyway, but I think it was a net benefit. I do understand the point you’re making though and bad regulation certainly exists.
> They will just move on to countries with less regulation, which usually means poorer countries with less educated people. You can probably see where this is going.
Great - they've moved on from my country because of the ban.
> Banning rarely accomplishes anything, it just moves one appearance of the problem out of sight for a period of time.
Just above you told me what it was accomplishing. And if it "just moves one appearance of [capitalism making it so that businesses have desirable incentives that would make them willing to literally instill gambling problems in children] out of sight for a period of time" then also GREAT! That's what the legislation was FOR.
If the legislation stops working, we can discuss again then.
This is a common trope. When you're arguing against something that is obviously good, there's not many avenues left, so you hit the same three again and again:
* According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.
* The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent."
* Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.
> They will just move on to countries with less regulation
This knee-jerk application of libertarian ideology makes even less sense in this situation than usual. The gaming industry is dependent on improving computer hardware hardware, in-game sales rely on consumers with at least a certain degree of expendable capital. The core markets will always be countries that are well off, companies cant 'just go elsewhere' without significantly sacrificing their potential income.
Also you do realise that the wealth of a country does not correlate directly to it's levels of education?
> Banning rarely accomplishes anything, it just moves one appearance of the problem out of sight for a period of time
If the ban is easy to enforce I do not think this is true. IMO it is when the ban is next to impossible to enforce when the crime just shifts (drugs, for instance)
I knew someone who worked for EA as a UX researcher. He said that games like these are primarily targeting whales who will drop $10k on a game. They are the real money earners. The really sad part was the he said the most whales aren't super rich, they're just people with an addiction.
Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself.
Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups reinforce each other's behavior. The goal is to get them to log in every day and invest in the game.
People pay money to uncap their progression. This turns these games into spending competitions: whoever spends the most money wins the game. The corporation is the only true winner of course.
I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed. The best part was my bot was statistically indistinguishable from a sufficiently addicted player due to the game's own design. I'd like to believe I helped destroy that game.
> I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse
engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks
were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and
the game's hold over me was destroyed.
This is absolutely fascinating. It's something I kinda missed from
Digital Vegan, thinking that extrication would be a matter only of
self-mastery and access to good information rather than fighting
back. Most people do not have that capability.
But fighting back is exactly what you've done, and it's worked for
you. I wrote earlier that the relationship between users and
developers is increasingly an adversarial one [1]. Things like "right
to repair" have become an open battle between ecological common-sense
and pure greed. Where your health, wealth and environment is under
attack from rampant greed a legitimate (moral/ethical) response to
hostile technology is obviously hacking back.
But it's not a universalisable moral principle, unless we want a
descent into chaos and digital "civil war". Therefore the proper
solution is to start recognising what some of these companies are
doing as crimes. You need the law on your side when you act in
self-defence.
A digital civil war is preferable to surrendering to the designs of exploitative corporations. We should fight back on principle. We should block ads and tracking, scrape websites, reverse engineer private APIs, violate DRM technology, replace their proprietary apps with our own free software that we control, feed them false data to poison their data sets... We should do everything we possibly can to defeat any attempt to exploit us. We don't need their permission to do it either.
Turning things into crimes is the corporation's game. They're the ones with billions of dollars and expensive lobbyists. We shouldn't be trying to beat them in this space. We need ubiquitous subversive technology that neutralizes their exploitation whether the laws allow it or not. It shouldn't matter whether it's legal or illegal. We need technology that makes it impossible for them to exploit us in any way, and we define what is and isn't acceptable or exploitative.
That sounds like an arms race that's both wasteful and difficult to win. Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society? These corporations are not out to get us. They maximize profit constrained by the regulatory environment. We have to guide them, and channel their capacity for good.
> That sounds like an arms race that's both wasteful and difficult to win.
It is.
> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?
We should, if we can. I'm just not holding my breath.
I think copyright should be abolished but the trillion dollar companies that depend on it will never allow that to happen. So we're better off de facto abolishing it by making copyright unenforceable and eliminating consequences for copyright infringement.
I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.
>I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.
Honest question (and I am not fan of advertising here and not trying to be an apologist)..
What business model replaces it, in your mind?
In the world that exists today, how do companies who provide free services online (including the creation of information) pay their staff and their operational costs, if not through being paid to display ads or sponsorships?
> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?
Turns out that's also a Red Queen's race. And if you look at the lobbying costs vs. potential rewards, there's a lot of room for escalation in US politics.
> Therefore the proper solution is to start recognising what some of these companies are doing as crimes. You need the law on your side when you act in self-defence.
The only difference is who does the concrete fighting: you by yourself, or let the police and criminal prosecution do the fighting.
Good question. I'm not sure which would be faster and fairer. Police
and courts have enough to do dealing with reality, without getting
involved in our messy hacker games. So long as the law is clear, we
should want people to help themselves first and foremost. The key is
really dismantling protectionist laws that enable powerful aggressors,
not arming the people with more protectors. On what the law cannot
speak it should remain silent, and I do believe that vast tracts of
so-called "cyber-law" are absolute rubbish - utterly unfair, bought by
lobbyists and written by incompetents to defend the barons' castles.
Take this down and let nature run its course to restore the proper
balance.
I agree regulation is needed. I think these situations are also partially due to a failure of anti-trust. In many of these cases, there is insufficient competition for these companies to be forced to act in the user’s best interest.
Addictive products are another case where the user is unable to choose in favor of their own self-interest, because the product is exploiting weak points in human psychology.
It is an alcoholic leaping over the bar to start drinking directly from the tap. It is a violation of the rules and will get you banned, but it will not cure a true addiction. Some gamblers are addicted to the game, but some are actually addicted to the money they want to win from gambling. Gaining access to free ingame stuff by cheating might mitigate some harmful economic effects but it wont necessarily allow an addict to stop. Making the beer free might stop kids from thinking it cool. It wont stop someone actually addicted to beer.
> Gaining access to free ingame stuff by cheating might mitigate some harmful economic effects but it wont necessarily allow an addict to stop.
The free stuff exists to instill an habit in players. People literally force themselves to log into the game and do daily tasks because otherwise they're missing out on daily rewards.
My bot completely nullified their little scheduled rewards design. I was now free to play the game whenever I actually felt like playing. Then I discovered I didn't actually feel like it, I was just going through the motions due to negative reinforcement.
Don't underestimate the power of software. It can literally liberate us.
> It is a violation of the rules and will get you banned
Same for me. 2015 or so. FarmVille addiction. Once I clicked 1200 times straight to farm/plaugh/seed, my fingers heart. So searched for a solution and found click recorders . Not exactly cheat but once I started using the auto click, I was out of addiction within a month and left game in Two month.
Awesome. In these cases, bots are not really cheating, they're legitimate self-defense against shitty repetitive addictive games. They are addiction prophylaxis and treatment.
I think it's okay to label it as cheating and not feel like you're breaking some moral code. If the game is rigged, then the only way to win is to "cheat". When the hero in a story does it, we call them clever.
This is really insightful. Things in 2022 are so bad that the manufacturer of this addictive product is not only unregulated, but has actually banned the therapy in its ToS.
(If you think about that a bit it follows that the smartest course of action is to break the ToS early and often!)
Yeah. The thing about these little agreements is they're all about what's good for the company, never what's good for us. They are inherently abusive and it's in our best interests to subvert them as much as possible.
When Facebook introduced games on their site I used to play one game. It was some stupid game with limited energy, but for me mechanics was pretty new. So I created Selenium bot that on schedule do some simple tasks. Since I was little addicted to game I created club and invite people to join it.
And I shared my bot with them. Reaction was very negative. People blame me for "hacking" and ruining game.
I never shared or published my bot either. Gaming communities will never understand. They wouldn't even entertain the notion that anti-cheating software could have false positives.
> I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating.
Oh yeah that works so incredibly well! I get addicted to idle/tap/infinite progression types of games every now and then.
At one point I got sick of it and I wrote a program that taps my phone with an axidraw robot. Seeing the progression happen without my own input totally broke the addictive cycle for me.
I'm sure you know there are other ways. Android phone emulator on a PC and scripting the mouse is one of the easiest. However I'm incredibly impressed that you used a software/hardware solution.
Thank you for mentioning the hardware, I looked it up and it looks affordable and interesting. https://www.axidraw.com/
so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves.
Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?
Hey, I love video games. They've given me thousands and thousands of hours of fun. Awesome games like Subnautica can bring joy to the world.
The problem is the one time I tried mobile games I eventually started waking up at 3 AM because that's when some timer resets. At some point I started wondering where my life went so wrong.
Then I started studying the design of these games and I realized they are designed to cause this sort of addiction and harm. They employ the same strategies as casinos and drug dealers. They straight up subvert the reward center of people's brains to the point they harm themselves and even destroy their own lives.
Yes. Social media is the exact same brand of brain-hijacking dopamine dripfeed. They too want their apps to be habit forming in order to maximize the amount of user attention they're capturing so they can make more money on advertising. Every time you see someone talking about "engagement" this is what it means.
Software like uBlock Origin is so world changing they should be built into our operating systems in order to help destroy the revenue of these abusive corporations.
> so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves.
This is an incredibly simplistic view of the problem, on multiple dimensions.
On one dimension, a question of to what length should we give companies the right to harm people. Because if something is knowingly designed to take advantage of the study of psychology to hurt people then that’s what this is.
On another dimension, the person spending the money is typically hurting others (spouse, kids... business partners) at least as much, but frequently more, than they hurt themselves.
Giving companies the freedom to do things like this takes away our freedom to live without others harming us. Its really hard to understand why this is even debatable.
I agree with you, but it’s interesting that everything you say applies to the sugar industry, and that industry has harmed far more people (and our healthcare system).
It wasn't liked by the right-wing government, even though they implemented it in the first place. They financed a report that investigated it's effectiveness, and then tried to bury it because it showed it worked as intended.
> It wasn't liked by the right-wing government, even though they implemented it in the first place.
Quite the conundrum. On one hand, it’s a neat tool for class warfare, an occasion to have a laugh about those bums who cannot control themselves, and drone on about Protestant values and work ethic. On the other hand, some chums would make less money, and we cannot have that.
Never thought of that, good point. I guess in the end if we wanted to find the boundary for harmful/tolerable addiction, we might not be able to find it, it’s a continuous spectrum. I guess in the end intent would need to decide the ethics—is the product designed to leverage addiction or is it designed to enable people to have fun, which might lead to addiction?
I think there is a very blurry line between non-chemical addiction and just liking something very much. Say a person spends thousands on audiophile equipment where the layman couldn’t hear the difference, and often even a double blind of audiophiles can’t, is that spending an addiction? Or do they just enjoy chasing that dragon?
Isn't addiction diagnosis usually about "does this negatively impact your life and relationships"? Basically on the level of "would you get into risky debt or skip on necessities for yourself or family by buying more equipment? "
> Isn't addiction diagnosis usually about "does this negatively impact your life and relationships"?
Yes. This is more or less standard criteria for diagnosing mental disorders.
A. Persistent and recurrent problematic gambling behavior leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as indicated by the individual exhibiting four (or more) of the following in a 12-month period:
1. Needs to gamble with increasing amounts of money in order to achieve the desired excitement.
2. Is restless or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop gambling.
3. Has made repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop gambling.
4. Is often preoccupied with gambling (e.g., having persistent thoughts of reliving past gambling experiences, handicapping or planning the next venture, thinking of ways to get money with which to gamble).
5. Often gambles when feeling distressed (e.g., helpless, guilty, anxious, depressed).
6. After losing money gambling, often returns another day to get even (“chasing” one’s losses).
7. Lies to conceal the extent of involvement with gambling.
8. Has jeopardized or lost a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of gambling.
9. Relies on others to provide money to relieve desperate financial situations caused by gambling.
Because a normal hobby is not designed to be addictive.
A hobby like wood working doesn't push you to do woodworking every day and there are not people behind this non existing mechanism who design it like it.
Also normally a hobby costs money due to physical parts of that hobby. A software engineer as a hobby only needs some computer, would worker needs a metal saw.
That's the important part. Not only are these games "designed for addiction," they are written as if someone opened up a psychology textbook on manipulation and implemented every chapter.
Fitness hobbies also punish you for taking some time off. But they still just happen to be that way, instead of being deliberately designed, and that's a distinction that should very much be allowed to make a difference. It's not unusual at all for intent to carry legal significance.
The risk/benefit calculation of fitness activities is overwhelmingly positive. Their health benefits of exercise might as well be infinite. Even such a benign activity can be pathological though: accidents and lesions during training, anabolic steroid abuse, body image issues...
The risk/benefit calculation of predatory gambling video games is overwhelmingly negative. It's really no big loss if they were to be outlawed straight up. We have much better games available for our enjoyment.
There was a leaderboard posted in the local gym. It was for the most frequently coming members. Some of them regularly racked up >400 visits a year. I didn't even realise at the time that it was weird until a doctor mentioned that these are likely people with addiction or body image issues. I guess you can overdo anything.
Golf seems very similar to me. There's the random element. A friend described it as a feeling of continual frustration followed by a high when he hits a good shot.
You similarly can buy your way to 'success' with gadgets and training or investing more time.
There's the community of similar addicts that gather together and provide a social element and re-inforce each others addiction. People's marriages suffer to the degree that there is a term "golf widow" for someone who's lost their partner to the game.
But I can still see clear differences between golf clubs and casinos, and there's also similar differences between different mobile games. I feel it's worth delineating them, particularly as golf isn't constantly being replaced with a slightly modified version of golf that takes it 2% closer to being a Casino and casino's are heavily regulated for good reasons.
> But the most accurate and refreshing response received to this day has been… addictive! And if you think about it clearly, what better one-word description encompasses all that we know of this exhilarating sport known as Golf. There is no description more encompassing of a sport such as golf!
> And this is best described by a psychological principle referred to as “intermittent reinforcement”. Intermittent reinforcement is the formula foundation for all forms of addition. Take gambling with a slot machine as an example. You lose, lose, lose, lose and suddenly you win! And yet, despite the guaranteed repetitive loss and the incidental win, people love to play slot machines for hours. Why is intermittent reinforcement so powerful? In its simplest translation, the reinforcement pattern that blooms into addiction must entail of high levels of reward and amusement without the predictability factors which can trigger boredom. It‟s the unpredictability of when the reward arrives that draws and engages people into the activity. The rewards that are distributed intermittently trigger and release significantly higher doses of a pleasure inducing hormone known as dopamine, than the same rewards distributed on a more consistent (predictable) basis.
> Can you think of another activity that features in more intermittent reinforcement than golf? No matter what level of golf you are playing, it is guaranteed that you are going to hit more shots that feel miss-struck than well-struck. Some may argue that the pros hit the ball well on almost every shot, but on the contrary the better you are the higher the standard to what constitutes a shot that delivers maximum satisfaction and reward. To a highly skilled golfer, maximum satisfaction is gained through a perfectly struck and executed shot. While by the same token, for the double-bogey player, a drive that is struck decently and stays in the fairway is also a cause for celebration.
It is about hitting a very small/light ball very far. It is about interaction with natural elements in real time (wind/grass etc). It may be physics but it is physics in the real non-vacuum world. Even a perfect robot could not place a golfball in the same spot repeatedly. That is the unescapable random element.
i havent seen a robot capable of reading wind patterns from tree movement as well as humans.. again you are minimizing the deterministic factors where humans have a compelling advantage by over-essentializing perception beyond your personal capability as "random"
you're just making the same argument with a different subject... the same "random" argument can be applied to home runs in baseball if you wanted. hopefully you can see the ridiculousness of that example... I've researched your artillery example enough to know that artillery fire is done with a human wind calculation based upon one direction of wind... not at all comparable to human eye perceiving strength of gusts, wind alleys, etc. based upon personal experience with a certain course... but i'm not really interested in 1000 red herring discussions. please stick to golf if you really care about this.
The deflection point for me on Regulation is purchases vs loot boxes
If the game is implimenting direct purchases, where you buy Item X for Y price then I feel regulation is unwarranted even in the context of harmful levels of purchasing
However if the game is using a loot box system where the play buy a "chance" to "win" an item they desire, then I think that should be considered a "game of chance" like a lottery or slot machine, under which there should be some regulation to require the disclosure of odds, how many times their is a payout, etc etc etc
Diablo seems to use a Loot Box system, not a direct pay system
The difference to older tech like mechanical slot machines is that the game records everything the player does, and can then drop a "discounted" special offer at the right time to maximize the likelihood of keeping the player hooked.
While some games do, the few that do those odds are not predominantly displayed nor they are externally validated as being accurate.
There is also no disclosure as to if the odds are manipulated on a per player basis, which I believe there are a few patents related to changing the "drop" rate based on player behavior, this is similar and can be combined with your comment about monitoring to drop a discount at the right time
In the context of Diablo, I can not find the Odds of their loot boxes anywhere published.
Even if you thought that being addicted to gaming or gambling is no different for the creature than any other hobby, like kayaking, it might help you to look at the other side of the question:
How much should we allow others to enrich themselves off the addictions/compulsions of others?
I always thought that was a compelling point even when I was a libertarian for one year as a uni freshman. That people should be able to consume what they want doesn't finish answering the question.
> How much should we allow others to enrich themselves off the addictions/compulsions of others?
the current line is drawn at 18+ and non-chemical addiction, or light chemical addition like nicotine. It is worthy of debate, whether psychological addiction ought to be included.
My guide would be that if it causes external harm, then it should be regulated, where external harm is defined as harm that, while undertaking said activity, would befall a third, unrelated party.
This picture is too black and white. I have no interest in EA games so I don’t know if it appliesto them, but most “social” games make the bulk of their revenue from players paying small amounts every now and then, or ideally on a regular (a bit every events) shedule. The main target is not the whales, it’s the sustainable long tail (though paying players stay a small minority, even 4~5% of hundreds of thousands of users is a big pool).
This is basically the “recurring revenue” model, it’s the monthly packages sold in Yostar or Mihoyo games.
Sure, people who get easily caught in competitive schemes will have a hard time to stop, and will get caught in nightmarish situations. The same as people who can’t stop drinking and become alchoholic over time. This is a nefarious effect that we should pay attention to, but a super small minority becoming alcoholics doesn’t mean alcohol industry itself is a conspiracy to produce them. Moderate people exist. We should find ways to to protect the vulnerables, but it also means coming to terms with the nuances of the situation.
I kinda find it surprising to assume a company like Mihoyo consistently makes record profits from just a few whales addicted to gambling. It litteraly makes no sense.
I also don’t see these companies disclose their revenue per user statistics, could you share some of what you read positing current gatcha games are sustained by whales ?
Thanks! To TLDR my answer, the first link gives interesting numbers but are very generic, and as the top gatcha devs won’t give breakdown numbers of user spending patterns, in the end it doesn’t tell that much more.
I should disclaim I do play gatcha games on a somewhat regular basis (I need to know how they work for various reasons) and follow the different communities around.
On the first link:
> Whale game users: 1% of the players, generate 64% of the income spending 2,694 dollars per year.
> Medium-high game users: 3% of the total, generate 20% of income spending 373 dollars a year.
> Average game users: 2% of the total, generate 4% of income and spend $ 104 per year.
First, that 1% of “whales” at 2,694$ per year is interesting, as it puts it around the 2,482$ said to be spent on entertainment on average in the US [0], which doesn’t seem to be freakish in context.
Then there’s also no breakdown of social games and “normal” games, like Minecraft which for instance has monthly subscriptions for online services, and other games who have season passes or allow to buy in-game contents like songs, levels etc.).
Sure social games must have a decent share, but right now for instance I see in my [edit to US ranking] Roblox, Apex, Pokemon Go in the free app ranking and they aren’t gatcha. The above number must also including straight purchaseable games.
It’s interesting numbers, but don’t tell us much about gacha games in particular (though the author has opinions on the subject, which I mostly agree with).
The second link is from 2015, that’s almost the beginning of the field, the candy crush days and developpers not understanding clearly what is ok and what is not. A lot has changed since.
I don’t have access to the third link, it asks me to pay to become premium (the irony), and it’s also from 6 years ago…
Time to start regulating these games in the same way we regulate gambling.
They shouldn't be sold to children. They're not Kinda eggs nor LOL Surprise and should never be brushed off as surprise mechanics. They're glorified slot machines, through and through.
Apple/Google revenue will see a big decline if those games are regulated. Most if not all the top grossing games on mobile follow the same spending pattern, and a big chunk of app stores' revenue come from those games.
And that's exactly the reason almost all mobile game are utter trash.
Of course that was caused because the app-"economy" was broken from day one on: You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those. So you have to make the software "free" and sell your user's data, or charge one or two bucks and use some other immoral scheme to get your actual costs covered.
On a broken market there are only broken products… Simple as that.
My thoughts on the mobile gaming market are similar. There's great plenty of good ports of games like Slay the Spire, Civ VI, or even XCOM II. Problem is the majority of interested parties already have 'better' devices they'd prefer to play it on, so the prospect of paying even the discounted price that these ports have is too much.
So now you're left with people who haven't tried better games, and with all the good-enough free ones, how can even a discounted price full game compete?
Absolutely, I own Civ 6 on mobile because it was discounted on Christmas or something. I got most of the expansions for cheap on my PC/MacOS hybrid purchase from Steam. Then I’m expected to pay the full fat $40 for the “new” (came out in 2019) Civ 6 expansion on mobile. No way.
> You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those.
I'm not sure if that is strictly true. Prices did vary a lot in the beginning. However scale created a race-to-the-bottom situation for the exact reason you cited: most people wanted to pay less. The market was flooded with apps and games at the minimum price which created a strong expectation among the bulk of buyers.
Consumable IAP is what really enabled the gambling-like mechanics. That was discovered not long after the implementation of IAP and very quickly the game devs that converted to free + consumable IAP started making all the money. IIRC it was an open secret in mobile games many many years ago that the optimal strategy was to make the early game easy to cast a wide net, then slowly ramp up the pay-to-win mechanics to milk the whales as much as possible. You don't really care if everyone else quits - so long as most people get X% of the way through before they do. Then you tweak X% to optimize for catching the most whales.
The super critical aspect is the deliberate ramp. You have to get as many people into the early part of the funnel as possible so some of them will become invested enough to become whales. This also means you absolutely must make the game miserable for 90% of your players but only after they've made a significant investment.
That's exactly what they don't want you to realise, they are doing a lot of branding to try to make politicians forget that they get most of their appstore/playstore money from glorified gambling.
You have to be vigilant as a parent. I didn’t realize until my late 20s that Diablo 2 primed me to love slot machines and gambling. It’s something I have to avoid.
Funny you say this. I’ve been playing a bunch of D2:R lately and it is honestly pretty miserable. It is full stop gambling. Grinding out mephisto runs over and over again, hoping for that nice drop, getting a minor rush of excitement when an unidentified ring drops or whatever. Just totally mindless nonsense.
My nephew stole my sister’s credit card and made $2000 in Fortnite purchases before he was caught. What’s insane is after the chargeback they DIDN’T revoke the items. He got to keep them. Then his account got stolen later because he’s a dumb kid but that’s a different story. Such a bad lesson to teach a kid.
Until they steal their parents credit card, or somebody else's. Addicts tend to di desperate moves. Happened to friends, their son spent half of their montly salary in some stupid mobile game, took too long for them to find out
This is not only morally abhorrent, but also factually wrong - you can have a proper bank account with card from 16, and you can have pre-paid cards even earlier
I've seen similar comments by several game devs, but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy. Think of some oil Sheik's son bored to death at home because it's too hot to go outside.
But yeah, the "loot boxes" that are mostly gambling have been banned in many countries because they're targeted at young children.
To me this "ultra-wealthy" thing has always sounded like a convenient lie whale-game devs tell themselves to sleep soundly at night. These dark pattern black holes are made purely to form an addiction and turn it into profit, they don't care about who's on the receiving end.
There's an increasing number of players who expect that either a) a game will take unlimited money and feed them dopamines in return, or b) they never have to pay a dime for anything because they're fully subsidized by the addicts. I have conflicted feelings about administrative regulation of this stuff, I just hate that things are this way, especially as an independent game dev.
(I'll do the hustle - my first game Pawnbarian is a chess-flavored puzzle roguelike. On mobile it's an ad-free demo with a single $7 IAP for the whole thing. Out on Steam and Android, iOS will follow soon. j4nw.com/pawnbarian)
It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long. Most long lived whales are likely to be from wealthy families, or the fun side addiction for a very wealthy individual. That doesn't change the fact that there are addicted people who spend a large percentage of their income on a game. Whales are one thing and addicted players are another.
> It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long.
They don't have to. Repeatedly unearthing cow-clickers whom you can milk for $10'000 before sending them into financial ruin sounds like a much more viable business strategy to me than trying to build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click.
> build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click
I think you're putting wealthy folks on way too high of a pedestal. The wealthy aren't some hyper-rational, utility-maximizing robots. They're people with likes and dislikes like any other. Being a whale for a very rich person or a very rich family is a drop in the bucket in terms of their net worth. Plenty of people can keep their degeneracy to a budget.
I don't necessarily disagree, but for the purpose of my argument this is splitting hairs. Both audiences are functionally the same from the game design standpoint.
Why do you think the mechanics of nonchemical addiction are different to chemical addiction? I certainly see plenty of nonrich people being addicted to drugs and essentially spend everything they have on drugs (the proximity to crime is obviously an additional factor)
A lot of the whales and leviathans have some kind of online presence so it's really not hard for a game dev to know them by name, or even invite them to the studio.
> I've seen similar comments by several game devs, but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy.
This seems like naïve speculation to me. Think about the number/scaling of this. It would give them a few months worth of income at best?
The sadder truth is that they're exploiting escapism and maladaptive coping (addiction, gambling) in people who also use escapism to cope/relax. Often times, those same people in desperate need of escapism are there because they struggle in real life, often financially too.
So, the little reprieve they get from gaming negative impacts their physical lives.
Diablo Immortal is a caricature of the depravity most games have become. A few games like Overwatch are not P2W, but even they have lootbox mechanics for cosmetic skins (you get boxes for leveling up and challenges, as you play, though). Blizzard literally can't help themselves.
The interesting thing is that you would think Blizzard would have known this. Literally the last game in the same Diablo series launched with a much-hated Real Money Auction House, which was eventually removed.
I used to play a MUD thats been around for 30 years and has active playerbase of maybe 1-4k people and there were some players who would pay 20-40k for special wizard made items.
It was run by a non-profit, so all that money went to keep the game running, but yeah, some people put a lot of money on these games.
I uninstalled Diablo Immortal last night as the pull to spend money was getting greater in my mind. I’ve been very sick for a couple weeks and basically bed bound, so this game was mindless and seemed fun. I got to “max level” (which is nothing of the sort the game essentially has infinite progression), and Back when I worked a dead end call center job working 80 hours a week I spent basically $100 a day on a Japanese free to play mobile game. It consumed my life and I was super depressed anyway. I felt that same feeling last night to just spend $100 “for fun” and realized how bad this game was going to be for me. These games manage to tickle that hyper competitive part of my brain that wants to “win at any cost”. So I’ll spend money I shouldn’t on a game.
It's not just the money though. Even if you remove pay-to-win and move to an ad supported model, these games are still engineered to maximally waste your time.
In fact, even games that are not designed to maximize your time spent in the game can be bad. The reward hits you get from games make you less likely to seek out other types of reward in your life. And even when you're not playing the game, your brain will be running a background task strategising how to maximize your results in the game.
Are there enough of those guys vs people who will spend 10? I guess you need 1k of those people to make up one whale, but aren't there more little players by a lot?
I guess I don't have the data. Also maybe you can get both at once by targeting the big guy.
The vast majority of users do not spent anything. This is no problem for the game developers, as they can serve as cannon fodder for the few who do invest money.
I wonder what we could do to legally balance this. Out right banning is bit questionable. But weekly or monthly spending reports? Some total number shown regularly to players?
I think that the option in appstores to completely hide all games with in-app purchases would be enough. Like, if you don't know they exist, you can't get hooked. Probably banning advertising such games anywhere but on the AppStores, too.
I'm all for advertisement ban. Or at least limiting periods allowed. It gets either really funny, sad or scary however you take it when you see some games like Raid Shadow Legends advertised for years extremely prominently. At least when comparing to most other mobile titles... And then the places it is advertised. Like cooking channels...
You could just cap the maximum spend of any one player in any game (or group of players). Even if it was some stupid high number like $1,000, it would limit the blast radius. Also, banning loot boxes of course. Totally can be done.
The Chinese proverb “rags to rags in three generations” says that family wealth does not last for three generations. The first generation makes the money, the second spends it and the third sees none of the wealth.
One explanation could be a difference between China and the West. Historically the West relies on primogeniture where the eldest son inherits a vast majority of the fortune and other sons need to move out and build a career for themselves. Classical China OTOH would split their fortune (which for 90% of folks was land since most were farmers) between their sons. Primogeniture encourages maintaining wealth across generations through the eldest son while the latter could mean the fortune gets spread out and eventually lost within 3 generations. For example, see research by Thomas Piketty about how ppl who were rich in 16th century Italy are still absurdly rich today.
Probably less so in China given that, until recently, they had severe restrictions on the number of children per a family.
Though your point is valid it's only part of the story.
I've seen many scions from China attending western universities in a state of decadence, barely focused on their course work, all too willing to live off their parents' past efforts, while driving expensive cars and walking around in clothes and accessories worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Another element is how ambition to have your own achievement can team up with risk taking. It's usually not the humble playboy who consumes away the fortune, it's one who tries to step out of the shadow cart by inheritance by growing the fortune through a series off get-richer-quickly schemes.
No part of this is even close to correct. No, wealth is not being evenly spread, it's becoming more and more concentrated. And no, generations are not getting "ever-larger", either; birth rates are down.
This is no longer legal in many jurisdictions. Family members often have a minimum allocation of the inheritance (e.g. 25% must be equally split among all children)
Interesting, and most places it is culturally unacceptable regardless.
Yet the proverb is historical, as all proverbs are, and my response was intended to refute the dissolution of wealth, historically, by spreading it too thin.
True...ish, but i bet a percentage of them get rich by focussing on what they are good at and neglecting their families, just making piles of money available. There's probably enough kids getting 10K a month pocket money to make GPs stragetgy viable.
As a Japanese gamer says, paying for games is like dining out. You get nothing useful after a good meal, and paying for games may as well be more useful.
In my country 16k/y is a median salary. It’s heavily influenced by 1 or 2 major cities - the rest of the country earns much less, 10k/y is considered to be a decent salary. So no, it is a huge amount of money.
Under 1% of users for over 50% of your mobile gaming revenue with a not single purchase model has been a good general estimate since 2010; I invite you to google an publicly available data on that.
From what I've seen privately 50% is a vast understatement.
And no, most of those users cannot afford what they spend.
> 10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night, and casinos do exist.
Casinos are highly regulated. Lootbox are not in most countries. And I'm pretty sure minors can't enter a casino even with their parent's credit card...
Made videogames with paid lootboxes 18+ only, problem solved.
Sometimes I see ads for mobile games and I get curious about them. Then I go to youtube and watch the playthrough videos and realize just how much of my life and money I could waste on what turns out to be 100s of hours of mostly random button mashing. The Kim Kardashian video game playthrough is a good one if you really want to dig deep into the depths of consumerist nihilism[1].
Anyway, doing the playthrough, or watching a video game speed run is enough to spoil the whole game for me and make me not want to play it. Problem solved. Also, there's all the free to play retrogames out there which are great if you just have endless amounts of free time. I guess I just don't get gambling, especially when you can't actually win money.
The worst thing (for me) about this is that whenever I go to the Apple App store I get bombarded will all these "games" that just try to make my life actively worse.
I don't understand why they pollute their brand like that.
The trouble is that sometimes in-app purchases means the game is a demo, and you use the in app purchase to buy the full game. There are good games that follow this model that you’ll miss out on if you filter out in app purchases.
Because of the money. Games account for approximately 70 percent of the entire App Store’s revenue, and 98 percent of in-app purchase revenue. Apple is not very motivated to stop these practices because it makes them many billions of dollars.
I really like the concept of [Playpass](https://play.google.com/intl/en_au/about/play-pass/), for Android, it gives you a tonne of really good games that aren't pay to win, have offline support and are fun. I don't really play many games anymore, especially on mobile, but I found a few when I went away on holiday and wanted to play a few games here and there when travelling.
This is made by the company that gave us Warcraft III reforged. A money grab that made the game worse and ruined the already existing game. they have no goodwill.
There will be, for sure, lives ruined because of this game's predatory practices. It really sickens me.
To quote myself from a previous thread:
"If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people in the industry, not at all. It's only to say that we as a whole are allowing the demons run amok.
I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society. Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on. Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa for example)"
Are "game devs" any different to any other category of product developers? You can say the same about tech, design, fashion, really any industry. There's assholes in every industry, you don't tar an entire industry by its worst offenders.
Yes.
No, each industry has its special flavour of abhorrent behaviour.
I'm not 'taring' the entire industry at all. Indeed I said, "vast number of honourable people in the industry", what I am concerned with is just how wide spread the contempt is for customers that play these games. And what the contempt does in allowing utterly contemptible business practices.
> There will be, for sure, lives ruined because of this game's predatory practices. It really sickens me.
What else is new from Blizzard?
My roommate in college was addicted to WOW. He'd lock himself in his room for days, failed his classes, and eventually dropped out of school. He finished it later, but only after getting over the WOW addiction. Back then (circa 2005) I remember reading stories about how Blizzard was hiring psychologists to make players more addicted ahem I mean "engaged" to WOW. Really, I guess that was just the start of it.
Blizzard has a long and sick history of hijacking human psychology for profit. Really glad I stopped buying games from them after Warcraft III.
I suppose it's a bit of a first world problem to be able to spend 100K on a game. But I'm not sure why this isn't a legitimate problem for people in "first world" countries. Why shouldn't be allowing companies to capitalise on people's addictions. I'm not sure why the existence of people who have it even worse off should compel us to do what we can to prevent people from not ruining their lives.
Thank you, and that was my guess, but I had been hoping the parent poster had a better reason for it. I get rather frustrated with the "first-world problem" argument, as it can be used to dismiss almost any problem at all. So long as there exists a worse problem somewhere, every other problem can be dismissed as irrelevant. What started as a way to dismiss complaints of minor inconvenience ballooned out into a dismissal of major systemic problems.
Is it really a sickening issue? Like come on. I am not saying this predatory behavior isn't an issue but it is far from sickening in the grand scheme of things.
It might not be the greatest evil on earth, but knowingly preying on vulnerable people in society, and causing harm for your own benefit, to me is sickening and evil.
I think a financial situation needs to be evaluated with future needs as well as current assets. Due to the US's general lack of social safety nets, retirement is primarily funded by savings of the person who is retiring. The recommended amount of savings to have by the time of retirement is 10 times your salary [0]. So by actively cultivating an addiction and leeching away retirement savings, this could easily be removing the possibility that somebody will be able to retire at all.
I might agree with you in countries that have a more reasonable and less individualistic approach to social welfare, but not in the US.
Sure they do. Not on a one go, maybe, just wait for the interest to pile up. Shor-term unsecured loans are notorious for trapping people into financial ruin. Their legality depends on jurisdiction but the last time I checked they were present in many first-world economies.
Easy access to high-interest loans is what makes deliberate addiction mechanics for mass consumption entertainment truly insidious.
Gambling used to be branded as gambling with strict state controls, and you could expect people to recognize it as a morally questionable endeavor in which only consenting adults should dabble. Games that utilize the same psychological switches as gambling and allow microtransactions that link to these psychological switches are similar enough to gambling in my books that they should be treated as such.
> Okay, would there have been an outrage if it "only" cost $1000 to full gear-up in the game?
Yes, since AAA games are typically $60 - $70. The amount here just highlights that they have no real ceiling to the amount of money they'll try to extract from someone. It's the behavior people are complaining about, not the amount.
But it’s not just harming people who spend $110k. All sorts of people will end up spending money they shouldn’t because they’ve been trapped by an addictive product.
Gamers of todays generation have been slowly taught to accept this as the new norm. IAPs, DLCs, “pay to win”, and Battle Passes are just acceptable now.
Release a half assed game in a few months. Complete the rest of the game on relaxed timeframe and release them as DLCs. Continue to milk the consumer for more $$$.
Honestly the entire concept of IAPs is predatory. Consumer protection agencies need to regulate these companies.
Isn't that a good thing? The fact that there is so much content that getting the best version of every item cannot happen, even if you spend some money?
Is a game fair only if you can acquire the best gear in the game (for real money)?
Well for sure I don't know much about the game. If it's bad or uses predatory tactics to get people's money then that is awful. This specific point though, summed up in the title, seems kind of weird.
Like imagine if someone said the same thing about EVE Online, how much does a "fully geared up" space station cost? How much is the combined cost of Team Fortress 2's (cosmetic) items?
Those sports memorabilia are at least traded on a market, and thus hold and retain that "investment". Not that sports memorabilia make much sense to me either, but at least you get something of proven value.
People put tens of thousands of hours into these sorts of games though to get equipment. Put that same time into a minimum wage job and we’re approaching the same amount of money. Seems relatively fair.
In-game skins are going nowhere, let a government force the company into creating a package with however many skins they want (maybe based on prior sales or realistic expectations) per season (whatever their season looks like) and walk away from it. You know they won't be able to add more.
Because what's stopping them now to change the decimal point however they see fit.
I suppose the same could be done with progression (where the real money is). Either make it tradeable somehow and lock it down, or outright ban it and allow for more expensive but regulated skins be the only funding capital.
While I definitely don't like pay-to-win monetization style, what I find even more ridiculous is the laws at Belgium and Netherlands around loot boxes.
I mean, no one is forcing anyone to play a game or purchase a lootbox. Why ban a game mechanics for this? It hurts the (potential) players, let people decide for themselves FFS.
Casinos shouldn't be regulated too. If nobody is forcing anyone to attend into something (like going to a casino or playing a pay-to-win game) nobody should have the right to change or regulate the inner dynamics.
As long as the game doesn't clearly lie (e.g. telling a lootbox does something that it doesn't) everybody knows what a lootbox is. Playing the game is a voluntary action taken by an individual, just like going to a casino. They are responsible for their own actions, and blocking a certain demographics' (e.g. people in Netherlands) to access to a game/mechanics (e.g. Diablo Immortal + lootboxes) is fundamentally against people's freedom of choosing to play a game or not.
It's their money, they can spend $1m if they want to, on lootboxes.
Would I? Definitely not. But blocking someone who does want to from doing it, whereas it doesn't have negative effects to society (e.g. Doesn't affect anyone but the person themselves) is ridiculous.
> Playing the game is a voluntary action taken by an individual, just like going to a casino.
The same argument can be made for other regulated activities like drinking alcohol or smoking (whether you agree or not, that's how it is in a lot of places today). Those are voluntary activities too.
> whereas it doesn't have negative effects to society
Addiction _does_ have negative effects on society, which is why these rules get introduced. It looks like this ban [1] is enforcement of gambling laws, because the loot is transferrable it's deemed to have value. I'm curious in this case to know how much of an impact banning these particular games actually has though.
>
Casinos shouldn't be regulated too. If nobody is forcing anyone to attend into something (like going to a casino or playing a pay-to-win game) nobody should have the right to change or regulate the inner dynamics.
In theory, humans are rational, and in theory, spherical cows are an excellent basis for economics.
Human brains have bugs, and these industries exploit them. It's predatory, and utterly reprehensible.
Human brains have bugs, and anyone going into a casino or a pay-to-win games know what they are going into. (If they don't that's their problem for not doing their own research and using common sense before putting their money)
Human brains also have a bug around sugar consumption. I've yet to see selling people sugar or sugar-containing foods/beverages being regulated.
Human brains also have a bug making many of them social media addicts.
Human brains have so many bugs. At the end of the day regulating these businesses will hurt more people who voluntarily want to be involved than saving potential addicts.
The real solution is never preventing people from doing things (of course as long as they affect only the person and not the others' rights), instead, it's educating.
If those governments placed their efforts into educating the people about addiction mechanics of those games/casinos etc. instead of blocking/regulating altogether, it would be much more beneficial than blocking people from their own decisions.
> Human brains have bugs, and anyone going into a casino or a pay-to-win games know what they are going into. (If they don't that's their problem for not doing their own research and using common sense before putting their money)
"It's OK if people's lives are intentionally ruined purely for corporate profits, so long as it's at least partly those people's fault. They shouldn't let themselves be tricked."
> Human brains also have a bug around sugar consumption. I've yet to see selling people sugar or sugar-containing foods/beverages being regulated.
By the way, San Francisco taxes sugary drinks and requires them to have a warning label.
> The real solution is never preventing people from doing things (of course as long as they affect only the person and not the others' rights), instead, it's educating.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps it's best to find a balance between them?
You emphasize personal responsibility, but most of the world doesn't have that on the top of their societal values[0]. And one person's problematic gambling, as any other addiction, definitely impacts others, similar to how substance abuse or any other addiction really[1].
This is like saying people ought to be free to sell meth on the corner because you are smart enough to avoid addiction. Societies have good reason to ban things that are a net negative to society.
There is an argument for decriminalizing drug possession. The same argument in no way holds for drug dealing. The price would come down and availability would skyrocket as would the problems that stem from use.
> Casinos shouldn't be regulated too. If nobody is forcing anyone to attend into something (like going to a casino or playing a pay-to-win game) nobody should have the right to change or regulate the inner dynamics.
This is, of course, a position that is yours to hold. But I do hope that you recognize that it's quite a small, fringe one. It's a bit strange to use a fringe opinion about casino regulation as the stepping stone for an implication that loot boxes shouldn't be regulated.
It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".