I truly hate the F2P mobile gaming industry. Clone a quality (and reasonably priced) PC game, add dark patterns and microtransactions, then make money hand over fist by taking advantage of people like this.
FOMO marketing, gambling mechanics, and unrepresentative ads really need to get self-regulated by the app stores, otherwise it's going to become necessary to legislate this.
Self regulation for industries does not work. On the more serious side we have Boeing, which is allowed to self regulate. We see the results.
Mobile game industry have conferences, and these conferences have talks, panels and tracks for monetization and loyalty.
Do you believe that an industry hell bent on monetization can self regulate?
Of course, not all industry players are bad. There are better, ethical brands. On the other hand, industry is so big now, The Tragedy of Commons applies to it. If some studios refrain themselves from abusing players, at least one other studio will.
I think Apple Arcade is a good compromise for high quality gaming access.
In game purchases are banned. Games can't track you as heavily, so they are lighter on your device. They are some genuinely good games, and you pay with your wallet and play time.
I don't like ads and to be nudged to purchase stuff to be able to kill some time. Game developers need a roof, the ability to pay their bills and eat.
Also, it's a universal membership. macOS and iOS games are all included.
> I’ve struggled with gambling issues in the past, and the more I look at this, the more it feels like the same pattern playing out again
This is a common theme: Someone has a recognized gambling problem, but they don’t realize that a game like this is feeding their gambling habit.
A similar thing happens with stock trading apps like RobinHood: People who know they have a gambling addiction don’t recognize (or won’t admit) that their usage patterns are just gambling in a different format. These are the stories that end up on /r/wallstreetbets where someone traded their $30K account down to $20 through options trading before they admitted that they had a problem.
I wonder what would happen if the app stores posted info on the app page like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year". Would that do anything to help people avoid getting into this form of quasi-gambling?
> like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year"
The top 1% don’t spend nearly that much. The number of people spending eye-popping amounts is relatively small. You have to get deep into the long tail before it gets into the hundreds or thousands.
Posting these numbers might have the opposite effect: Players who spend a lot of money want to be at the top of leaderboards. If they saw what the 1% were spending they might convince themselves that not only is it okay to spend that much, but that they need to spend even more.
I think what would help is that any F2P game was mandated to never cost more than $x/year to be listed in the app store, and possibly have different tiers that a game could decide to be in ($10/$100/$1000) based on the maximum yearly spend. The game also should prominently display the total spend per year, and lifetime, every time it is launched.
Although I do not like F2P for all the dark patterns (which have infiltrated non-F2P as well unfortunately) if it was capped to a reasonable maximum amount a year, with no player to player trading at all, and no multiple accounts for the same store account, it might could be made to not be as predatory while still keeping it financially sustainable for the companies that produce the games.
A lot of "strange" economic situations ultimately boil down to whale hunting being the primary monetization model for a space. For example:
Vegas is notorious for this: especially in the past, for a person with a healthy relationship with gambling, Vegas was a really cheap vacation. Getting there's cheap relative to getting anywhere else in North America, hotel rooms were like half what you'd pay for an equivalent room elsewhere, and a lot of the entertainment was not terribly expensive. Turns out a couple of people dropping millions justifies losing money on a lot of guests.
There are a lot of mobile games that are ad supported. What are they advertising? Other mobile games. That seems weird, you don't normally see places advertising their competitors. Then you realize that the first game effectively is acting as part of the funnel for games more optimized for separating whales from large amounts of money. Your sudoku app probably doesn't have the ability to convince people to give them $10,000, but an ad here and there might push users towards base-builders and the ilk that can.
I suspect most advertising is a whale hunting game. There's no world where I go and buy a new car because I saw a YouTube ad for one. But if showing a 10 cent ad to 100,000 people causes 1 person buy the advertiser's truck with a $10,000+ margin versus their competitors', they're in the black.
I feel like we’re in an era of dark monetization patterns. This “whale” monetization reminds me of online advertising where if you aren’t paying you’re the product.
It isn’t quite the same but it’s something like, “if you aren’t paying, you’re incentivizing whales.”
Underneath all the darkness a business has to make money. People are voting with time and money that the whale strategy is optimal just like they vote with time and money that advertising is optimal.
I don’t know what to do about this all. It seems like it’s just a shitty fact of human nature.
Everybody in mobile gaming and gambling industries acknowledges that “whales” are mentally sick people with addiction issues, but if you don’t capture and monetize whales, your competitor will. Your game dev studio will dwindle over years until investors drain it dry, while your competitor builds private kindergartens and schools for their employees’ children in their third worldwide campus location.
I played this game briefly and jumped before I got hooked. It's a game of progressively longer timers, resource crunches and anything to make you feel stuck so you will spend. What's more, it's not fun, imho.
It still shocks me how we all look for time sinks when we have so much we could be doing. I'm no better.
Readit News
FOMO marketing, gambling mechanics, and unrepresentative ads really need to get self-regulated by the app stores, otherwise it's going to become necessary to legislate this.
F2P games need the same regulation, if not more given that kids are targeted.
Self regulation for industries does not work. On the more serious side we have Boeing, which is allowed to self regulate. We see the results.
Mobile game industry have conferences, and these conferences have talks, panels and tracks for monetization and loyalty.
Do you believe that an industry hell bent on monetization can self regulate?
Of course, not all industry players are bad. There are better, ethical brands. On the other hand, industry is so big now, The Tragedy of Commons applies to it. If some studios refrain themselves from abusing players, at least one other studio will.
Dead Comment
In game purchases are banned. Games can't track you as heavily, so they are lighter on your device. They are some genuinely good games, and you pay with your wallet and play time.
I don't like ads and to be nudged to purchase stuff to be able to kill some time. Game developers need a roof, the ability to pay their bills and eat.
Also, it's a universal membership. macOS and iOS games are all included.
This is a common theme: Someone has a recognized gambling problem, but they don’t realize that a game like this is feeding their gambling habit.
A similar thing happens with stock trading apps like RobinHood: People who know they have a gambling addiction don’t recognize (or won’t admit) that their usage patterns are just gambling in a different format. These are the stories that end up on /r/wallstreetbets where someone traded their $30K account down to $20 through options trading before they admitted that they had a problem.
The top 1% don’t spend nearly that much. The number of people spending eye-popping amounts is relatively small. You have to get deep into the long tail before it gets into the hundreds or thousands.
Posting these numbers might have the opposite effect: Players who spend a lot of money want to be at the top of leaderboards. If they saw what the 1% were spending they might convince themselves that not only is it okay to spend that much, but that they need to spend even more.
Although I do not like F2P for all the dark patterns (which have infiltrated non-F2P as well unfortunately) if it was capped to a reasonable maximum amount a year, with no player to player trading at all, and no multiple accounts for the same store account, it might could be made to not be as predatory while still keeping it financially sustainable for the companies that produce the games.
Vegas is notorious for this: especially in the past, for a person with a healthy relationship with gambling, Vegas was a really cheap vacation. Getting there's cheap relative to getting anywhere else in North America, hotel rooms were like half what you'd pay for an equivalent room elsewhere, and a lot of the entertainment was not terribly expensive. Turns out a couple of people dropping millions justifies losing money on a lot of guests.
There are a lot of mobile games that are ad supported. What are they advertising? Other mobile games. That seems weird, you don't normally see places advertising their competitors. Then you realize that the first game effectively is acting as part of the funnel for games more optimized for separating whales from large amounts of money. Your sudoku app probably doesn't have the ability to convince people to give them $10,000, but an ad here and there might push users towards base-builders and the ilk that can.
I suspect most advertising is a whale hunting game. There's no world where I go and buy a new car because I saw a YouTube ad for one. But if showing a 10 cent ad to 100,000 people causes 1 person buy the advertiser's truck with a $10,000+ margin versus their competitors', they're in the black.
It isn’t quite the same but it’s something like, “if you aren’t paying, you’re incentivizing whales.”
Underneath all the darkness a business has to make money. People are voting with time and money that the whale strategy is optimal just like they vote with time and money that advertising is optimal.
I don’t know what to do about this all. It seems like it’s just a shitty fact of human nature.
It still shocks me how we all look for time sinks when we have so much we could be doing. I'm no better.
https://www.centurygames.com/games/