I strongly believe that video games today are comparable to alcohol in the 60's. Y'know, how people in the 60's would say "Oh Johnny just likes his liquor" when Johnny's drinking at 9AM, drunk at 10 and hungover by 2. Right now we have people who are facing serious problems with video games, and yet we brush them off casually and callously. I can't count the number of stories on reddit about playing video games all day and all night, at the expense of one's social life, academic success and even career. That's not normal behavior; it's behavior indicative of addiction and dependency. And I'm referring to adults. For kids, who lack executive functions, this behavior can and is even worse, even more debilitating.
Now, regulating video games like alcohol may not be the best idea. We could end up in a similar state of binge drinking, except with binge playing. But perhaps some sort of preventative measure can be taken so that kids do not get sucked into these games that are, make no mistake, maliciously designed to addict and to steal money from the vulnerable. Even alcohol manufacturers don't dose their products with nicotine.
I think, like with other addictions, you need to take a holistic view of video game addiction that also includes the circumstances of the addicted people during their transition from casual use, to abuse, to addiction.
Why? Because most people don't get addicted to video games, just like most people don't get addicted to alcohol. And while you might be able to chalk some of it up to addictive personalities (predispositions to addiction regardless of circumstances) I'm guessing a lot of it comes down to environment more than pure chance.
For video games, I think there are a few serious structural/societal issues leading to addiction. First and foremost is that keeping kids busy is hard, and the lowest effort way to keep some kids busy is to give them video games. Couple that with most kids not being allowed to just wander around outside anymore, and living in a car culture where they can't drive, and video games become the primary way most kids can play with other kids.
A lot of video games addict will tell you that the thing that keeps them coming back to games are usually 2-3 things: well-defined goals with clearly actionable tasks to be completed to meet those goals (getting level 99 or a specific rare item, etc.), the community aspect, and the feeling of proficiency/accomplishment. In real life, important goals are harder to meet and less well-defined, much higher stakes, and are done over the course of months/years instead of hours/days/weeks, so video games are much preferable to hitting goals in real life. Social isolation is prevalent so videogames can easily replace that. And in real life, not everybody can be a winner, yet in videogames everyone can feel like a badass for grinding out a skill requirement or getting a rare/expensive item.
The root cause of addiction is the same, whether it's a behavioural addiction like video games, exercise, gambling, or sex, or drugs. It's reward seeking behaviour trying to cause a rise in dopamine levels. The physiological effects of substance abuse is generally worse, but the cause is the same, from my experience and people I know the root cause is underlying psychological issues that cause people to engage in self destructive reward seeking behaviour as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
This is where I think that addiction education is completely inadequate. They teach you in school that a certain percentage of people who will do drugs (or gamble, or play video games) will get addicted, like it's some random chance. It's not a random chance though. It's easy to tell people to not do drugs, or not play video games, or to ban them from doing it, but fundamentally they're just going to engage in some other destructive behaviour if they aren't given the tools and support to engage in healthy coping strategies. We need to be teaching people how to identify addictive behaviour as it starts, we need to teach people how to reach out for support and to ensure that support is available, and we need to teach people mental hygiene. We tell people to brush their teeth and wash their hands because you don't want to get sick, but we never bother to teach people how to look after their mind.
Apperently a big issue with "gamers", which should not be confused with game addiction, is that kids use it to sooth their mental problems. If you have ADHD it's a effective way of getting something to do all the time with short bursts of dopamine. If you have social problems you can hide behind a screen with something you are familiar with.If you feel really unwell, like dealing with thr death of a relative, it's easy to play longer.
To find out how healthy the relationship with gaming is, other factors are used instead, like do the person shower, eat and don't start the day by playing instantly? There are currently science being done on this right now, I should find this.
Some kids are more prone to "get stuck" also, opening the door to an investigation into autism/asberger.
In the end kids kinda find their own way and go out and play and get bored behind a screen. Alcohol addiction and video game addiction does not work in the same way.
In Sweden we have these guys talking about gaming and doing some of the work to make "game addiction" a proper diagnose: https://www.reconnect.se
There is no english version sadly. Maybe there are other organisations that are more global.
> The root cause of addiction is the same, whether it's a behavioural addiction like video games, exercise, gambling, or sex, or drugs. It's reward seeking behaviour trying to cause a rise in dopamine levels.
At that level, lots of non-addiction behavior is indistinguishable.
> the root cause is underlying psychological issues that cause people to engage in self destructive reward seeking behaviour as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
That's, AFAIK from the actual research, far from true; there are complex relationships between addictive behaviors and other psychological trauma and disorders, but what you describe does not seem to be the dominant relationship. Often, behaviors where use creates a risk of addiction are sought out because they also, outside of their addictive properties, offer mitigation of adverse symptoms of the other condition. But that's not the other condition causing “self-destructive reward-seeking behavior”.
> we never bother to teach people how to look after their mind.
Sure we do, we spend lots of time doing that; the messages are mixed, conflicting, and probably of negligible value because we actually have very little solid information and lots of conflicting and unvalidated folk wisdom when it comes to preventive mental health care (self or otherwise.)
Yes and no. We all had our shares of beers, but only few had the urge to do/continue binge drinking past university experience. You know, those guys going for extra rounds of shots when everybody barely stands. This behavior is there long before actual addiction comes.
I'd say its a vicious circle, some are more susceptible to addictions than rest of us, and once those fall into addiction trap, its much harder to get out.
> and may or may not progress to a physical dependency too
On the other hand, DT is the only form of withdrawal syndrome that can outright kill you, and alcohol is, generally speaking, one of the most dangerous drugs from which to withdraw.
Sugar is actually one of the most common addictions in Western countries at least. It's sometimes introduced at a young age (via baby formula) and then it's present in more or less everything we eat, most times in relatively high quantities. Even in food you wouldn't imagine having sugar.
So it's hard to notice you're addicted until you start to explicitly avoid it and the realities of withdrawal (to the respective degree of addiction) kicks in.
I live this, I agree with you. An MMO was the only thing in my life I've stayed up all night for and then been able to set an alarm and wake up for after 2 hours of sleep. This was a game I committed to for 14 years. I've slept through finals, been tardy my entire life, yet for this MMO I could do anything. I was "sick" instead of seeing my girlfriend, I was otherwise occupied instead of working, or school.
I made the conscious decision years ago to never install WoW for exactly this reason. In the same way AA teaches that an alcoholic is always an alcoholic but can be sober, I choose to stay sober. I miss it. I think about it. But I have to make the active, conscious decision to 'choose life'.
I was in a good place in 2005, had sold my house and got voluntary redundancy from my job. But emotionally not so great. Long story short, I spent the proceeds from the house sale and redundancy on a level 85 character from every class, on both Horde and Alliance, on both Euro and US servers. I only stopped when a relationship broke up, and I finally realised that WoW wasn't helping. I logged out that day and haven't touched it since (8 years ago now).
I went through a severe clinical depression after that, though, and it took me another 5 years to get back to "normal" (whatever that is). Looking back on it, I was depressed the whole time and was using WoW as a way of surviving the depression without having to face my demons.
I think the problem of video game addiction has nothing to do with video games. Video games are a symptom, not a cause. The problem is the usual existential crisis of modern society: what is the point of our lives? I don't think we can solve this by regulating video games. In fact, I think that video games may be a useful barometer for mental health, and a lot less destructive than the other options (alcohol, drugs, sex, etc).
But I also think that's a completely different problem from the one the article is talking about, which is luring small kids into spending serious money on online games. That one we can solve with regulation.
I wasted 18 months of university on an MMO, 15 years ago. Cost me my social life, my girlfriend, and I found myself on academic probation.
It was absolutely insidious. I only found my way out of it by becoming a GM and then banning my own account, because even though I’d made the decision I wanted to stop, I just kept finding myself downloading and installing the client, yet again. It worked, I completed my degree, rekindled friendships. I did relapse about four years later while working a shitty boring QA job, and decided to treat the root cause, which was the shitty job, and went and started a business - and then didn’t game at all for nearly a decade.
Weirdly, my addiction and my physical running away from the environment that fostered it lead to much of the success that I have enjoyed since. It made things so intolerably bad that a ground change was mandatory.
I game again now, but it’s now on the order of about 5 hours a week on average - I’ll still occasionally spend a sleepless weekend playing something, but then I’ll go a month without. I like finite games - some adventure with an enthralling plot, and when it’s over, it’s over - or grand strategy like civ, where you master the game and move on - and frankly I find a three day deity match gruelling enough that it’ll be three months or more before I get the itch again.
I’ll never touch an MMO again - they are almost perfect and infinite skinner boxes.
I’m scrubs, I’m an addict. Spent my youth programming, going from language to language.
I was learning and it led me to jobs and I’m grateful for that, but my memories of youth is me in a dark room in front of a big monitor and a buzzing light that never really worked right.
I have almost no other memories of it.
was it worth spending my youth so that I could be 15% more productive at some firm?
Even now I come home, kiss my gf and then sit in front of the computer to chase the next big thing, mostly because when I come home I am to tired to do anything else than just programming.
There was some research on HN where they found that programming (successful run/compilation) led to similar dopamine boosts as gambling.
My neck, back and hands all hurt, but I do what I always do.
The problem that I've observed is that people get too bogged down over the use of the word "addiction" to describe this phenomenon, contrasting their psychological effects with the physiological effects one normally finds in drug addicts. In the process what gets lost in this dismissal is that, regardless of mechanism, the consequences of excessive gaming (or similarly, excessive internet consumption) echo those of some of the hardest drugs: complete withdrawl from society, neglect for self-care, chronic sleep deprivation, and thieving to support their habit. Any nerd who went to college in the 00s knew people in their freshman year who dropped out from spending too much time in EverQuest or WoW. I myself had an epiphany in 2011 after having played the newly-released Skyrim for 100 hours in its first two weeks (and those numbers are tame by comparison). It took about eight years of cold-turkey for me to stop jonesing, literally jonesing for World of Warcraft.
As humans we have yet to develop ways to cope with an overabundance of mental stimulation, in much the same way that humans are still trying to figure out how best to survive in a world where food calories are no longer scarce. What we're looking at for the next decade is the obesity crisis for the brain.
I think a much closer and more appropriate analogy is gambling. They're both forms of games and are both engineered to engage the player in similar ways. Their monetisation and marketing strategies are also converging rapidly. Buying gems and coins in a mobile game is largely indistinguishable in my mind from buying tokens for a slot machine.
The problem is games are not regulated in the way that slot machines and fixed odds betting machines are. As a result they are free to implement tactics that would be illegal in a gambling machine. For example the way some mobile games like Candy Crush calibrate the game difficulty to match the playing style of the player and adjust the odds of winning to entice them into buying coins to 'take advantage' of some perceived opportunity that the game then adjusts itself to take away from you.
I'm not sure how to address this though. How can we appropriately regulate Candy Crush, without unintended consequences for Kerbal Space Program fro example? I'm not even necessarily against pay-to-play, after all it's just an extension of the model for coin operated arcade games.
It might be controversial to suggest this, but it seems like some people actively seek out addiction. Maybe they are missing something in their lives and see an addiction as filling it somehow. Maybe we all do that in some from or other, we just call it engagement.
You're damn right! I dropped out of high school at 16, did very little besides playing video games throughout my 20s, and only in my 30s did I complete my high school diploma and enroll in university.
Here I am at age 35, in the midst of a mathematics degree, grinding my way through assignments that take days and days. I don't have time to play video games anymore, though I do spend a lot of time watching others on Twitch tv.
I've set Google Play to prompt for my password on every purchase. It's a 40 character random alpha, mixed case, symbols and number password. Hard to type when sober, impossible while drunk. Helps prevent impulse/accidental purchases. I have to really want something to transcribe that in (not stored anywhere on my phone).
I have my password stored on the Xbox, but I've made abundantly clear that they are not able to purchase anything without consent. My kids are 10 & 12 and know it's really money and if they make even a single purchase without consent all gaming and internet privileges go away indefinitely. I get immediate receipts via text, so the ban hammer would go down quickly.
Edit, also the kids arent allowed to my phone, either. They have their own devices, and can't purchase anything on theirs (requires Mom's password). My wife likewise has her iPhone to prompt for password on purchases.
That’s an interesting comparison. Following the analogy, we should have the equivalent of « alcool concentration » for addictiveness. Some games are pretty mild relative to in app purchases pushing or addiction mechanics , while others are simply awfull.
People have reasons for addiction, stress, problems, depression, loneliness, boredom. They will fill it with addiction what is easily available to them, gets them out of their problems and works. Video games are more easily available to many compared to alcohol + cheaper.
If you don't remove the cause of the addiction, the person will fall back or into a new one.
Anything can be an addiction, meaning if it stops you from going to school/work, building and maintaining relationships, having food and shelter then it qualifies IMO. So while I support trying to help people in this situation I would be careful to not make it harder for everyone else that is responsibly enjoying those things.
All business behaviour is (potentially) predatory. It's the job of regulators to set the rules, and for businesses to play within those rules as optimally as they can. It's definitely not the job of companies to _not_ give their customers what they want.
If something permissible could increase their user engagement but they opt not to do it for ethical reasons, they just lose share to the less ethical companies.
It's my right as a member of a democracy to call out when a company is doing something unethical with the hope of swaying the opinion of my peers against such business practices.
It's my privilege to do so on this platform.
This type of behavior is unethical which is an entirely different thing than illegal. I hope we can adjust regulations on the market to make such behavior illegal. I have this hope because I don't want to live in a society where an increasingly portion of the population is addicted.
Yes, I probably should have framed my answer more carefully.
My point wasn't that people shouldn't complain about this stuff. My point was just that businesses, by their nature, are sociopathic (regardless of whether anyone who works at them is a sociopath).
This isn't true. It's actively _weird_ that some people insist it's true. Most businesses are set up for some actual reason and their founders weren't thinking "I wonder how I can get lots of money given I have no ethical precepts whatsoever"
My current CEO has actually ranted about this at some length, that he'll run into people in the same game (startup founders pitching for investment or to find early customers) and some of them really do think the point of what they're doing is to get money. What is the _money_ for, idiots? Did you just really want lots of pictures of the Queen? No? Then your whole ethos is pointless busywork.
Even people who have a goal that I think is silly, like Musk's colony on Mars, at least that's actually a goal. You can look at things and say "That helps with the goal" (e.g. re-usable launch vehicle) or "That does not help" (e.g. accusing random people who disagree with you on twitter of being criminals).
If you just need to buy food and pay rent then, fine, whatever, work for the psychopath business that is just acquiring money for no discernible purpose. But if you've got to a point where you can pick, go find a business that has a purpose you at least mostly agree with.
I don't disagree with any of this. And if we're talking early stage, founder-led startups, I'll grant that this may not apply. It's most relevant to large, board-led corporations, and it's also not necessarily zero-sum: it's up to regulators to set the rules such that sociopathic businesses benefit their shareholders and their customers.
My proviso that businesses tend to act like sociopaths _even if no one who works there is a sociopath_ is important.
Suppose I go to pick up coffee, but on the way to the stand I see a homeless man and decide he could use the money more than me, so I give him the money instead of getting coffee. Everyone wins: homeless man gets money, I get a feeling of satisfaction that is presumably better than the coffee.
Now suppose instead of getting myself coffee, I was actually getting coffee for my boss, who'd given me $5 for it. Suppose that if either I or my boss had been getting _our own_ coffee, we'd choose to give the homeless man our money instead.
The only scenario where he doesn't get our money is when I'm acting on behalf of my boss: my boss gave me a task, and I can't choose to give my boss's money away -- not even if that's what I would do in my boss's shoes, and not even if that's what my boss would do.
When I act on behalf of my boss, I'm less charitable than either of us individually.
If this is how you feel your corporation behaves, quit.
It's not a good way for them to run a business, any business. They're failing already, get out ahead of the game.
What your coffee money analogy gets at is a culture where employees are encouraged not to do anything except tick the boxes and get through the day. The boss sent me for coffee, so the only thing I can do is go get coffee. I'm really just an over-specified delivery robot and shouldn't think about what I do, let alone why - just do it.
Boards like you've described are not providing their company with the only thing they are supposed to offer for their high salaries - direction. They're leeches. I'd like to see shareholders either embrace this, cut costs and replace such boards with just some standard paperwork saying the shareholders don't care about the big picture, so blunder along until the executives accidentally go bankrupt and too bad OR fire such inadequate boards and hire somebody who actually has opinions and acts on them for better or worse.
I'm just trying to illustrate what happens when you have an agent-principal relationship, which is the situation that public corporations are in.
Now, perhaps my boss and I have an agreement such that if I see a suitably sympathetic looking homeless person, I can alter the coffee mission and give them the money instead. But the the number of potential situations that could arise exceeds the number of prior agreements we could conceivably have, and ultimately in the face of uncertainty my default position has to be 'do what the boss said'.
The scenario was between me and my boss, but the analogy is for the relationship between the board of directors and the shareholders. It's not practical for the (millions of) shareholders to communicate their specific desires in every potential circumstance to the board. The board's default mission is 'enhance shareholder wealth'. Thus _on average_ the board's decisions will probably be less charitable than those of any individual board member or individual shareholder if they weren't acting on someone else's behalf. See the Milgram experiment, for example.
The reality is that for most shareholders, the company is just an anonymous component of their retirement fund, and all they want is for it to go up. Super funds generally don't even tell you what companies you're invested in.
So the average shareholder does not want the board of directors they've never met of a company they don't even know they own to decide without consultation to give THEIR retirement money to a (figurative) homeless person who the board decided was more worthy of the shareholder's money than the shareholder. They just want their retirement fund to grow, and this is what the boards of these companies have been tasked with: if the shareholders want to be charitable, they can do that on their own.
Enhancing shareholder wealth doesn't have to be zero-sum: in a free market, transactions should be beneficial to both parties. You give customers something they want, and customers pay you for it. Everybody wins. It's up to regulators to set rules such that legal methods of enhancing shareholder wealth don't include exploitation.
And if clickbaity headlined articles don't get written and people don't complain about it (assuming their experience is entirely individual and of their own making) then no regulation occurs because there's no community outcry saying that it's necessary.
It's not fair to lump all video games into one category and then malign them. Video games consist of a wide variety of forms and business models. Even the ones that people will think are exploitative, other people enjoy playing them and it forms part of their social life, a way to unwind and relax in short bursts.
Agreed that video games are not all bad. I purposefully chose alcohol as a comparison because it's neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Plenty of people enjoy drinking alcohol and have it as a part of their social life, a way to unwind and relax. However at the same time we should acknowledge that video games, like alcohol, can have a dark, addictive side. In the case of video games this is especially insidious due to the way certain games are engineered to be addictive. Basically I'm not saying video games, in all their creativity, brilliance and technical accomplishments, are necessarily bad for society.
I agree with the similarities with regard to addiction. But the mode of delivery is very very different. You can drink enough hard liquor to get drunk and satisfy the addiction cravings in 30 minutes or less and that 30 minutes of drinking(which you can also do while doing other things) will effect you for the next several hours. If you played video games for 30 minutes a day that would be a "healthy" amount in most cases.
I also like to compare video games to porn. It's achievement porn that can replace hobbies, creative pursuits, and working (lots of unemployed men game all day), just like porn can replace sex and relationships.
I remember first playing WoW and thinking how dumb and childish it was. Then it sucked me in and I became obsessed with it, especially PvP. It made me realize that games with cartoon graphics such as Fortnite specifically target children and young teens.
I disagree. This isn't about all games. This is about some AAA games literally bolting a gambling mechanics onto a crap game, to cause gambling addiction.
I think any game is addictive. Having "gambling mechanics" certainly doesn't make it any better, but that's like saying alcohol causes a drinking problem. Yet many people that drink occasionally are not alcoholics.
But having a Skinner box and other psychological tricks that empty your wallet is a serious problem. An addicting game that doesn't extract money wastes your time, granted, but an addicting game that extracts money can leave you homeless, without a job and on the street.
Equating the two is like saying - all drugs are the same when one drug can leave you with a slight migraine while other kills if you take a mg more than the recommended dose.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that AAA game companies are at fault for producing video games that influence people through addictive psychological tricks to the point of ruining their lives.
I completely agree that some methods uses by game companies are dubious at best, and can ruin lives. However, I don't think that game companies are to blame.
> Equating the two is like saying - all drugs are the same when one drug can leave you with a slight migraine while other kills if you take a mg more than the recommended dose.
All addictions are not equally destructive. But, all addictions can be destructive depending on the individual.
Many other companies are using similar tactics in other areas than video games. People obsessively use Facebook/Instagram to the point of depression and suicide, are they to blame? Are McDonald's commercials to blame for obesity and heart disease?
Where does it end? Are we saying that the average person has no control, and can't think for themselves? I think it's easy to play the victim card, but hard to actually deal with the core issues that lead you there.
> If I understand correctly, you're saying that AAA game companies are at fault for producing video games that influence people through addictive psychological tricks to the point of ruining their lives.
No, not AAA exclusively. But there is a certain set of games that relies on these tricks.
> Did McDonalds create a "Diabetes increases sales" video? Because AAA and mobile games did.
The video linked is just one person in the industry. I'm sure you could find 100 videos on seductive advertising to get people to spend money on other stuff. I'm not sure your point here.
Any other company could still be using those tactics without publishing a video about it.
If I go to McDonald's website right now, I can find a position open for "Us Marketing, Consumer Insights Associate". One of the responsibilities:
* Develop, manage and execute consumer insights plan to understand trends, consumer attitudes and behaviors, key functional and emotional requirements, consumption occasions, and translate those learnings into insights to be used as foundations to drive future growth
And some requirements:
* Strong understanding of behavioral science standard methodologies
* MBA (preferred), Marketing Research or related field (e.g. Psychology, Anthropology, Behavioral/Cognitive Science, Statistics) or Strategy.
So they are to study consumers and their behaviors, then to use that to drive business growth. They also clearly want someone who understands human behavior, presumably so they can leverage that to get people to spend more money.
> The video linked is just one person in the industry. I'm sure you could find 100 videos on seductive advertising to get people to spend money on other stuff. I'm not sure your point here.
One of many. This isn't about advertising. It's about triggering a basic randomized rewards impulse and exploiting it for money.
It's essentially a Dark Pattern that is used to drain your wallet. Except that Dark Pattern reinforces gambling addiction.
That said, I do think marketing as is, is a horribly unethical psychology/social research at best. So your point, further reinforces my view.
I'm not saying it's not useful, but so were Mengele's cliffnotes.
I, personally, feel somewhat offended by this characterization. While it’s true that I can stay up too late playing some video games (have to be specific ones to get me invested enough), I can do the same for other things like binge-watching anime. (And the root cause is my mild depression anyway or my ADHD depending on activity, I believe) But the current vast majority of what I do when playing games is honest practice and effort to reach a semi-pro level at my chosen game. And there are actual careers being made by the pro players of the game, or streamers playing it. On top of that, by learning how to play this team-based game more effectively, I’ve encountered a surprising number of lessons that apply outside of the game. (How to interact with “unpleasant” people, how to make suggestions without making someone feel belligerent and do the opposite, how “expending” a resource first puts you in a worse situation, etc) And on top of that making new friends by playing with the same people for months in a competitive environment. You can learn a lot of practical things, including discipline and dedication, from trying to improve to be a higher level player.
Granted this is a specific “track” that most are likely not going to be following, but I think some lessons apply even if you just want to improve and get a higher “Elo rating”. And there can be negative interactions, just like almost anything in this world can become unhealthy for someone. But I think the vast majority of people can interact with video games in a healthy way that helps them destress, or cope with something in life, or whatever else. Seeing the “overwhelming numbers of reddit posts” feels almost like confirmation bias, or at least just seeing something that feels like a problem when it’s likely affecting less than 0.1% of people playing video games. On the flip side I’ve read stories in the past about how video games have saved lives, because it gave people something to live for in a horrible part of their lives. And when they get to a bettering place, they’re able to interact with them in a much healthier way because they themselves are in a healthier place.
Anyway, this is a big rambly thing I typed on a phone, so it’s hopefully cohesive and understandable. But I felt a need to give an opposite perspective from someone who has never been able to dedicate their free time to anything for more than a week or something until I found a competitive game I wanted to make a run at getting into at least the semi-pro scene with, maybe even someday the pro scene.
EDIT: And I have a healthy life outside of the game too. I’m married with a wife who is supporting me in getting better at this game, I hold the job making the vast majority of our money, have a healthy relationship with family on both my and her side, have good friends, help around the house, etc. I’m not just sitting in a dark parents basement playing games all day. But I do put a lot of hours into it because it’s whats necessary to get better, and maybe I’m choosing to trade that time for some other thing, but it’s a choice I’ve consciously made for improvement, much like someone here might make that choice to build a product. I shouldn’t be “shamed” for building one skill while someone doing almost exactly the same thing but in an “approved” arena is lauded.
>I strongly believe that video games today are comparable to alcohol in the 60's.
Get off it. There's a strong difference between playing a game like ''Super Mario Odyssey'' and the trash Google allows because it makes money on trickery and theft.
>Right now we have people who are facing serious problems with video games, and yet we brush them off casually and callously.
China locks up people who have ''Internet addictions''; they might find ''lies'' about political protests in China, as an example.
>I can't count the number of stories on reddit about playing video games all day and all night, at the expense of one's social life, academic success and even career.
Clearly one's career is said person's most important aspect. They could be working or participating in office politics instead of having fun.
>That's not normal behavior; it's behavior indicative of addiction and dependency. And I'm referring to adults.
Yet, nowhere in your message do you wonder why people would rather play games than do other things. You seem to think games are at fault, rather than the sorry state of society.
>Now, regulating video games like alcohol may not be the best idea.
It's important that every medium be heavily regulated, to prevent the wrong ideas from getting through.
I think an obvious solution here is simply to strengthen consumer protection laws and shift the burden of preventing this from the consumer to the vendor.
The common thread in all these stories was "a kid spends a bunch of money, parent asks for a refund, is told no". But consider if the law says that digital goods such as this must be refunded on demand unless you can prove the purchaser wasn't a child. (If you want to really drive the point home, add a penalty clause for abuse, so you have to refund 150% of the total if there's evidence of any attempt to target minors, hide the charges, dark patterns, etc.)
If Apple becomes statutorily required to refund the money, they'll get very good very quickly at kicking bad actors off their platform.
This shouldn't be a system where parents try and protect themselves and their children and scummy vendors try and exploit them; it should be a shystem where Apple (and the other platforms and market operators) try to protect themselves and scummy vendors try and exploit them. Leave liability with the people most able to protect themselves, not the least able.
I don't think bans or treating games like drugs is needed; if you remove the financial incentive of being abusive, you'll stop the abuse.
I think parents need to understand that you can't give children a credit card, or credit-card like power.
I was 14 before I was given access to a credit card.. and was given a dire warning about when it could and should be used.
If parents can't lock out purchases so they have to physically approve each purchase, then yes, they should be able to get refunds and penalties... But if they give their children the password to buy/download apps unsupervised, they need to understand the consequences (and really, how the heck do you not realize that unlimited purchasing power on an app store is a possibility?)
The first story in this article is about a kid with "the mental development of a 7 year old"... Well.... I wouldn't give MY 7 year old a credit card! Supervise your children! If it's too much work to monitor their purchases and approve each one, complain to the platform for more control. It would take Apple, Google, Steam, etc. <120 hours of work to implement a "Monthly budget" system if people demanded it.
Btw, how do you miss that 3,200 pounds is spent over 3-4 months, if that clears out your bank account? I'd agree that 14 days is a bit short for a refund period, but asking for 4 months to return digital goods that have been thoroughly used by that point..... might as well shut down all the game studios...
This is a great case for debit cards, here in the Netherlands those are much more common than credit cards, so children (in my experience) learn to be better with money because you can't spend what you don't have, and if all they have is a couple of bucks of pocket money the potential loss is also far less.
Consumers will abuse this, there is already proof of this with cardholders calling in to credit card companies claiming they didn't make the purchase and their credit card was stolen.
Further reading on the topic can be found by researching, 'friendly fraud'.
Easiest present day solution, use one time burner cards or set limit cards.
http://privacy.com , no fees, works within the USA, similar services throughout the world.
I'm well aware; my day job often involves dealing with such reports.
I'm also aware that if you err on the side of protecting children when it comes to disputes with bottom feeders like Supercell and King their ilk, the collateral damage will mean we have fewer companies like Supercell. I consider that a feature, not a bug. :)
A few people getting refunds for gems for a shitty mobile game they don't 100% deserve is a price I'm happy to pay. Business models are not inherently viable, and as a society, we don't need to protect this one.
We don't NEED to find the right set of laws to let abusive freemium games survive while also protecting the vulnerable, because only one of those two conflicting goals is actually desirable.
What about phone companies with limited data plans?
A friend of mine had his kid use his iPhone's hotspot and got a $800 bill connecting it to his tablet to watch movies while on vacation. Is this the phone companies fault because the person let his kid know his iPhone password?
Yes, being able to accidentally cause $800 overages is terribly anti-consumer.
After it continually happened to people roaming, the EU by law instated a cap where the operators need to request an SMS confirmation once the overages hit a certain cost.
For domestic data, I can't remember the last time I saw a plan that didn't just cap your speeds once you hit your data cap.
I wouldn’t say its the phone company’s fault directly but did they even try to contact your friend in any way to let them know that their bill is now 2, 3, 4 or even 5 times bigger than usual?
I mean, why should they? Most phone companies allow you to set budgets, I do not see this as an issue with the phone company in this scenario at all. As other people have said, parents should be monitoring their kids spending (if at all), most stores have an option to require the password - I do not see why this is not enough.
The amount of crap in the app stores that encourage this sort of behaviour is truly, truly shocking.
The gaming community often lambast companies like EA etc for loot boxes ("surprise mechanics"), which is definitely a problem that needs to go away, but from this article I suspect there's a lot of examples of absolute bottom of the barrel shovelware on the app stores that's raking it in from accidental purchases from children or vulnerable adults.
I remember Apple saying they were putting together some sort of curated program for high quality games, maybe with a subscription model. Which is cool and everything but creating a two-tier system doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Maybe any transaction should have a 2FA style system where the cardholder need to explicitly approve it through their phone. Or maybe a daily spending cap or something like that
I was just having an internal debate about the merits of a spending cap. I'm not usually one for such blunt regulation, but there really is no way to justify spending +$100 on mobile games daily unless an individual is addicted, deceived, or in some other way psychologically manipulated.
Although society would probably benefit from similar caps in casinos, and I doubt that regulation will ever arrive be legislated.
Obviously there are ways to cirumvent that but it seemed to help him.
I suspect it's harder to block these in app purchases at the bank level though, unless everything goes through Apple/Google pay and you block at that level
It's a blocklist that all licensed gambling companies in Sweden are required to respect. You add yourself to the list for a certain amount of time, and can't unblock yourself until that time has expired.
This is true in the UK as well. Unfortunately there are new online bookies every week.
The government also set a maximum amount of 4 video game slots machines per store, causing the number of stores to go up by 3 or 4x meaning that after self excluding from one place, you will still walk past many others as you go about your routine. Thankfully this is now being rolled back, as they have set a maximum stake that means most of these stores will have to close down.
you can block in-app purchases at the ios level using restrictions. i don't recall if the setting is a different password than the one to login to the ipad though. iirc it seems that you set it up when you enable restrictions.
Can the use of the term “surprise mechanics” not in itself lead to some definition of gambling? eg.: Gamblers continuously perform some
behaviour in order to
activate some sort of “surprise circuit” within the mind?
Surely their definition is not too far from that of gambling or the mechanics of the circuits activated by gambling/surprises, within the mind.
Gambling requires you to win something of value. Pinball machines only give you free games and are not giving something of value. However some countries like the Netherlands have a definition that includes many of these video games.
2FA is one of those basic things that should be standard for all credit card charges. I want to have the change to approve or deny every charge. Is that so much to ask?
I was about to say this won't help at all with the microtransaction problem detailed in the article, but then I read your link and found this more complete (although confusing) description of the exemption you name:
>single transactions must be less than €30, up to a maximum of €100 or five transactions
It's the "or" there that I don't quite understand. Does this mean that any 5 transactions can be made without 2FA as long as their cumulative total is less than €100? If so, does the system ask for 2FA after surpassing the €100 limit? Or does this mean that 5 transactions can be made as long as each is under €30?
While probably helpful to families and individuals who face these sorts of issues, the explanation of the law could certainly be clearer here...
Its the same rules as contactless credit card payments by most banks here: after every 5 transactions you need to verify, everyone not larger than 30€ and the sum of these 5 transactions may not exceed 100€.
If your next spending will break these rules you need to verify it
The benefits are largely obscured by in-game currencies, which exist primarily to obfuscate the true cost of inane in-app purchases; maximize the odds of having a useless residual balance (thus encouraging more spending); and reduce barriers to spending.
Games don’t have to prompt for confirmation to spend proprietary fake money. This removes an opportunity to reconsider a purchase, and dramatically increases the chance of accidental spending. And without a dollar value that players can easily reason about, it’s easy to not realize how much you’re spending. “35 crystal whatzits? Um, okay, that doesn’t sound like much.” Never mind the fact that you actually have to buy at least 50 whatzits to have 35, because the next lowest option is to buy 25.
I don’t have any data on this, but I’d be willing to bet that revenues from in-app purchases went through the roof when someone had the bright idea to switch to an in-game currency (and, eventually, multiple currencies).
I was thinking more as in, sending the approval to a separate device, but obviously that wouldn't work if you just have one device that you let your kids play on.
I have to explicitly approve every install and purchase on my kids' iPod Touches. I don't know if they would need a fingerprint on my phone to be able to spend money there, but I assume all the tools are in place to control this sort of behaviour. Apple really need to make it clearer and easier for people.
I disable in app purchases in their entirety on my own personal iOS devices. Mainly cause I’m paranoid that I’ll accidentally tap something and then accidentally approve it when trying to hit the home button.
I’ve had apple devices for years, and I’ve gone in and manually enabled the ability to in-app purchase less than a half a dozen times.
(This, and similar restrictions are buried in the screen time settings, in “content and privacy restrictions”)
Ironically the majority of purchases I make on iOS are in Audible, for which Amazon refuses to pay App Store fees so I have to do it all in a browser. I guess that’s one case in which I wish it was simpler to spend my money/credits.
as much as i dislike amazons practices, i have to cheer them on for doing this. apples fees are atrocious, and amazon is helping people to get used to alternate ways of spending. if more people do this eventually apples control of transactions can be broken.
Seconded. I'm on Android, my kid uses my phone, and he can't buy anything on his own as I have to type in my password for each purchase. If I recall correctly, I had to choose this behavior the first time over (no default, you moved on by picking one or the other), then it remembered my choice. Is anyone's experience different?
Has anyone done a breakdown of Apple's profit from hardware vs (in-)app purchases? Feels like this is a situation where they're not selling the devices as loss leaders, and could easily improve people's experiences and perceptions by cracking down a bit, without it really costing them much. Feels along the same lines as the privacy push - they _could_ make lots of money selling your data, but they're selling the peace of mind as a feature.
That is somewhat misleading as some apps are essentially shareware, aka free with a single in app purchase to the the full version.
I think Apple would be well served by limiting in app purchases to either 200$ over the lifetime of app or 20$ per month. That would get rid of most bad press without costing them much. They could even then allow specific exceptions on a case by case basis.
This would make the business model for gatcha games (which rely on a small fraction of their player base sendings tens of thousands of dollars each) essentially impossible.
Mobile free to play games now make up the majority of money made in video games today.
It's strange then that most of these games aren't that interesting. Who are the players of these that make up the new class of gamers?
It would seem that the payers are the exploitable - those able to be swindled with casino mechanisms.
As an ex- free-to-play game developer and one who believes regulation often does more harm to consumers than good, I'd like to see something done. I'm just at a loss for what would work.
I almost fell into such a trap before. I knew about the mechanics, but I was willing to give the developers the benefit of a doubt. And so I started playing, and after a while started to acquire shortcuts with money. Once, twice and at the verge of the third time, I realized what I was doing and stopped immediately.
The money you use is never much, but that is just part of the design to make you throw out even more -- a few cents here a few cents there and suddenly a sizable amount builds up.
Now I am 33 and have a bit of experience with addiction. That helps identifying these traps -- Dopamine kicks are always the same, chemically induced or by stimulating your brain with rewarding gameplay. But to be sure, would I have been born 20 years later, I would definitely be hooked on that particular game and still throwing money out for -- not much but a faster reward-cycle.
> I would definitely be hooked on that particular game and still throwing money out for -- not much but a faster reward-cycle.
Do you think that's an inherently bad thing? Maybe it was for you at the time but I feel like the ability to reliably turn money into entertainment (in this case "a faster reward-cycle") is a great thing to have available to people who already have their basic needs met.
No, not necessarily. It depends on each individual and the circumstances they are in. Its like with drugs, if you have a healthy social circle, a relationship / family you care about and a stable and productive work-environment, it will be a lot harder to get you addicted to the rewards of micro-transactions.
>> I feel like the ability to reliably turn money into entertainment (...) is a great thing to have
Yes, definitely. Each and every person can use (or learn to use) these games responsibly -- Not only games -- books, videos you name it -- like most people here I have a steam account, amazon prime, audible and a few other amenities where I wouldn't use my money in a compulsory manner. But a lot of free-to-play games have these little tweaks, that make it so very easy to spend money and don't even think twice about it. The occasional invite to start a transaction, placed at strategic "blockers" where you'll otherwise have to wait for 24h to advance can already be enough.
The crucial thing is to know about these mechanisms and have some sense of introspection into ones own behavior -- these skills can be learned.
EDIT: After I read some of the other responses and thought about it -- it is also important for us all, to acknowledge that some of these mechanisms do work like drugs -- neurochmically. And like with drugs prohibitions are counterproductive -- but a good effort in regulation might be a good step forward -- I've read very good examples in the other parts of this thread regarding a step like this.
Does it still look like such a good thing of you're already in a world that is capable of supplying almost unlimited free entertainment (or education, for that matter). I mean, I'd say the preference for entertainment over education is somewhat depressing/pathological, but let's leave that 'elitist' position behind...
In times passed we had a limited supply of literature, music, games, even god forbid, TV and movies. But these days we can put those on mediums that practically never degrade, and the rate of production has gone through the roof, and the producers of many of those goods are either dead and gone or there is no way to get money to them for their work, and we have the technical means to get them to whoever could want them at an almost zero marginal cost.
In that environment, a population that clocks time mindlessly feeding dollars to another party looks pretty sick. Which is, it would be my contention, is exactly what they are.
It is essentially the same as the old and uneducated who pump billions of dollars through the mindless gambling machines in my country. Not a image of humanity anyone would talk about with anything approaching pride/respect. Frankly, we should be ashamed...
In that case, what’s wrong with heroine? You’re just sticking entertainment into your arm. (This is intentionally hyperbolic).
This issue isn’t really the money -> gratification conversion, it’s the addictive nature of the process. If I’ve done everything I can to addict you to my product (to remove your ability to decide for yourself)... I’m in a morally bad area.
I’m of the opinion that some of these addictive response patterns should be banned from games flat-out, whether or not there’s a direct connection to someone’s line of credit.
If heroine were free, it would still be a problem for those addicted to it, if not for very long. (Although no one would have a financial incentive to get other people hooked, so it’s an interesting thought experiment as to whether use would increase or decrease).
That is a very bad example. In Switzerland, if you are a severe addict, you can get heroine in pharmacies. The most important restriction is that if you buy the stuff, you are also bound to go to a therapeutic clinic and have staff assisting you whenever you want to withdraw. There are also clean injection rooms and other social mechanisms that help you get off the stuff.
The result -- fewer heroine addicts, fewer drug-related crime, less active criminal underworld (because of lower drug-related income).
An adult discourse and proper handling of addiction and substance abuse not only helps the addicts, but the whole society.
Giving away the addictive thing you still have to pay the societal cost of having people addicted to it. Switzerland handles this is a very admirable way and they have excellent outcomes, due to treating addiction as a disease rather than an individual moral failing.
I don't see why substance abuse in particular should get a super-special treatment in our discourse on human addiction-related behavior.
If it's destroying your ability to function in society, and something that you might want to drop the habit of, we should support our fellow people in doing it. If that is gambling, video-games, porn, they all activate similar dopamine related effects. Heroine and other opiates are super-effective at this, but it is still the same pathway being activated.
Good response! See my updated/edited other post. You are right essentially -- these games can and sometimes do work like drugs -- neurochemically. And like with drugs total prohibition will probably make things even worse.
I think there are plenty of companies who there who do everything in their power to addict people to their products. Whether it's moral is a completely different discussion, but I definitely don't think this pattern is unique to game developers.
Yes. First, it turns the game from an good or service I buy to enjoy into a glorified supermarket where I'm supposed to buy even more goods. This frequently ruins both immersion and gameplay.
Secondly, the developers now have incentives to make you spend as much as possible, which is why you'll frequently see psychological tricks to move you in that direction.
Even if the developers were completely earnest, the rewards cycle will cause craving for mire rewards and will easily keep one glued to the game longer than intended.
If I need to exert willpower to use a service "responsibly" while the service actually makes its money from people using it irresponsibly, the service probably shouldn't be used in the first place.
> It's strange then that most of these games aren't that interesting. Who are the players of these that make up the new class of gamers?
It's just one data point, but my mother-in-law, who's in her late 60's, plays a lot of free games. She did an audit of her spending last year and discovered she'd spent over $500 in Candy Crush (I think that was the game). She complained to them and they gave her a partial refund, though to my knowledge she continues to play the game. I would bet a lot of these players are less tech savvy older folks.
What exactly does one complain about? If I complain to a movie theatre for all the money I've spent on tickets, they're just going to say "Um, okay..?"
This is a silly comparison. A movie theatre is an exchange of money for a one time service. Something most people understand. F2P gaming is something a lot more insidious. Like if the movie theatre was trying to nickle-and-dime you for a dollar or two throughout the day.
How about a state regulation prohibiting stores to sell anything with real money procurement and trading mechanisms inside as games? Anything that allows in-app purchases or trade should be re-classified, a "trading platform," perhaps or, indeed, a casino? But then it would be up to society whether to allow their kids to play in a casino, or draw in a trading platform - where brushes have to be purchased. Squeeze those app business men a little bit. If Candy Crush allows to purchase in-game items, it's a freaking trading platform.
Most of these apps exist because consumers expect them to be free and refuse to pay even a little bit up front. This "freemium casino" model of monetizing games and other apps arose out of the feedback loop that started with cheap consumer driven development.
This is because the platform holders have trained the customers to value the games at $0. Even a game with an equivalent experience to PC or console will feel much more expensive on mobile at the same price.
Apple and Google care about the attractiveness of the platform. They want you to buy the phone with the impression that apps are included for free.
There's an interesting duality in that. Companies are choosing to maximise profits by tapping into addiction and gambling, and consumers are choosing to accept and reward that.
I don't agree though that there's only up-front payment or freemium options on the table, nor do I agree that consumers wouldn't accept up-front payment if that was really on the table.
Consumers paid up front for games on the Gameboy and other handheld devices, and they paid enough to keep that industry alive right up until mobile games took over.
Any expectations consumers have right now that mobile games should be free is on the publishers, not the consumers - and while consumers are enabling and supporting the freemium casino model, I don't think that us humans in aggregate have as much freedom of choice as we like to believe.
Regulation is the only way out of this bind, but with the continued rise of neoliberalism that's just not going to happen.
Is the consumer expectation that mobile games be free on the publishers if they're responding to market conditions created by those same consumer expectations?
Seems to me like a chicken and egg problem where the entrenched nature of freemium games create a consumer expectation that games should be free up-front, causing consumers to avoid up-front payment, which causes up-front payment models to be less successful, which further entrenches the freemium game model, etc.
I agree with you on principle that it's up to publishers to make the effort to change this model, but I don't see how that could happen without some external nudging to overcome the market forces at work.
I've tried looking for games I could buy outright. Try finding a game without ads or in app purchases. It is extremely difficult to search by those criteria.
I've been trying to find such games for my kids (4 & 6) - there really are no search options to help.
Indiscriminate third party advertising and freemium games are going to cause significant long-term harm to mobile gaming, and possibly also to society as a whole.
There's still some games out there that use IAP in small doses (<10 total) to sell reasonably sized chunks of content, but they don't make the money that freemium games do.
(My own device operates on the same rules as my kids - no third party advertising, no freemium IAP stuff. There's really nothing to miss in that space anyway…)
I am interested in making games, and looking at market data, either you can build a good game and pray you get lucky, or you can make a much easier game and build in pay to win and hope you get lucky.
It's much easier to make a pay to win game, so I could try a few times more than by trying to make a good game off the bat.
People just don't like to pay money up front, so getting them to start for free and then adding in the paid features to skip past your intentional delays is a pretty strong tactic to get people to pay when they otherwise wouldn't. I just refuse to do it because I find it unethical.
> It's strange then that most of these games aren't that interesting.
Most dont earn money. It is winner takes all market.
> Who are the players of these that make up the new class of gamers?
I am. A while ago I ditched "traditional" games entirely and are not coming back, ever. I played only mobile games after. Through it is less so now, I did not ditched them and are willing to continue playing them (unlike traditional that I have decided to not play again).
Start with why Nintendo games are non-exploitative: no microtransactions, and a single retail purchase.
Regulate children's games such that they must have a minimum price (eg. $4.99) and contain no microtransactions.
The same could be done with pornography: require $4.99/month as the minimum charge, paid via credit card, to access, and DNS ban all sites which do not acquiesce.
> Start with why Nintendo games are non-exploitative: no microtransactions, and a single retail purchase.
On mobile this isn’t true. I worry that now that Nintendo has gotten a taste of the F2P riches via Fire Emblem Heroes these ideas will seep into other parts of the business.
Every game should have to display a "Maximum cost of online play" on the cover with ESRB rating and on the app store listing. If not limited just show ($10,000+).
Would give parents a rough idea of how exploitive a game's online currency system is.
I think this is an excellent idea that informs consumers and doesn't stifle developers. It would allow you distinguish between a one-time purchase game (maybe even with some DLC) from an endless money pit.
I see Game A and notice the maximum cost of play is, let's imagine, $30. I can then tap and see the base game costs $10 and there's some additional content I can buy. If I bought everything possible I'm out $30.
Next I see Game B. I can immediately tell that they'd willing take my entire life savings for some stupid candy-themed puzzle game and pass on it.
A glaring oversight in and of itself. If you're going to have interoperability between mobile and console games, the ratings agencies should have jurisdiction across the spectrum.
That throws the baby out with the bathwater due to its coarse grained nature.
I'm fine with having a free game using an IAP to unlock full functionality, or to have a small! series of IAPs for it.
I think there's also a viable model for subscription gaming, mobile MMOs are plausible.
Requiring that all apps indicate their (enforced) maximum monthly and lifetime spend limits would work very well for me. An app with a $20 lifetime limit is a try-before-you-buy app, and one with a $20 monthly limit is a subscription app. One with "Unlimited" for monthly is a freemium casino, and is much more easily avoided.
Wouldn’t they all say “$10,000+” in that case? Are there really any games out there that stop you before you make a purchase saying “You already spent $100 this month. Please don’t give us any more of your money!”
For apps that have their own currency, it's of course possible to spend $10k+. But before every exploitative game hopped on the custom currency bandwagon, you used to be able to buy skins/guns/characters/etc. outright with real money. If my game allowed you to buy 5 characters each worth $10, then I could accurately claim the max IAP profit from each user for me would be $50.
But you're talking about one-time purchases, which is common for apps, but not so much for games. But even in apps you have monthly subscriptions that still somewhat skew the way you perceive the price. What's the max IAP profit for Netflix or Spotify? (Subscriptions bought through the app still net a cut to the store provider.)
Virtual currencies are a scam on its own, but even games without them can be exploitative. The monetization of games has become so frequent, that's it's basically accepted as something ordinary. I've noticed that some developers don't even bother creating a currency anymore, you just get the Playstore € prompt for the item you want to buy.
Most free games are built on the premise that it's never-ending or always expanding. Either you can upgrade to infinity or keep playing, because they keep adding new content. I don't think I've ever stumbled upon a game where you have limited things to buy.
The only solution I see, which is just plain unrealistic, is to put IAP apps into a seperate category. I've started doing this, by not downloading apps that have the "Includes IAP" and I'm pretty satisfied. I don't think any game/app should be qualified as FREE, if half of it is locked behind a paywall.
There really are still games out there that aren't built on the freemium model, yes.
There really should be freemium games that advertise a monthly ceiling on possible spend as a feature to attract customers who are wary of pay-to-win gaming or exploitative models.
I think some apps have 'parental controls' that allow for this, but this kind of labeling would provide a strong incentive to set an upper limit.
I think this would benefit the game ecosystem greatly, because the effects of a relatively small proportion of the audience dropping 80-90+% of revenue really distorts game design to try to capture this upper end.
I’m really confused why “maybe make it impossible for this to happen” is so controversial. People fuck up sometimes. Kids are tough. And as peddlers of technology the onus is on us to make people’s lives better, not worse, which includes having the tiniest bit of compassion and maybe using some of those VC millions to prevent these kinds of things. Do y’all truly believe that everyone that this happens to was being careless? Is there no room for an honest mistake?
Not sure how many people know this but you can use a service like privacy.com to get burner credit card numbers. For example, you can create a burner credit card number that only works one time or has a specific spend limit (like $20 per transaction or $20 total in transactions per month). Credit cards/debit cards are inherently insecure because the credit card number can be reused by anyone who has the code.
It is a free service. If the parents in the article used a service like that then all of their spending problems would be solved because junior couldn't charge the card any further. All additional transactions would simply be declined.
The article talks about government regulation, but the government honestly has better things to worry about than what junior is spending on apps. People simply need to use the existing services, like privacy.com, to control their spending.
There is no way to distinguish between an adult and a kid with their parents' credentials.
If the precedent gets set that you can buy in-game currency and then reverse the charge on the grounds that that was your friend's kid, not you, what will happen?
All I see is that it becomes tougher to offer games that are monetized in this style, which seems like a positive effect. So assigning responsibility to the parent doesn't seem that important to me.
You usually have your account banned when a charge is reversed to undo the "progress grained". This makes it less attractive for real players to abuse.
Adult who realize what they are doing and want to stop cold turkey doing it? Fine with me as well.
The problem I think is the all-or-nothing aspect. So you trade off convenience for safety and it mostly works out but the worst case is worse than many people think it could be.
Why, for example, can you as a parent not set an (even global) spending limit on in app purchases?
Why can't you disable in-app purchases per app?
I think the answer to those sorts of questions is pretty easy to come up with. Lot's of things could technically be done that would make it easier for parents to manage this stuff, but it's not going to happen without a push from somewhere because every barrier you put in place will reduce revenue somewhere.
Did you read the article at all? A game says it is for 3 years old and above and it uses trickery to manipulate a 5 year old into thinking that real money is just game coins. How are you supposed to control that?
by outlawing it outright. the law should then provide that they can ask for all money spent to be returned. this should apply to all games targeted at children, even if an adult plays it.
i'd never. i'd get a separate bank account for the kid instead. i even got a separate account for my own online payments.
banks need to make that easier. essentially, if we even want to allow children sto spend money online, we need to start handling allowances online too. automatically transfer $10 every week to my sons account, for example.
Another one of those oversensationalized outrage articles that can be boiled down to "I cannot put even a minimal effort in keeping an eye on my children, so I will blame someone else for it and make it their responsibility." There is literally a setting on iOS for that specific specific scenario, which allows to prevent in-app purchases[0]. And it is very easy and intuitive to set up too, so it isn't like it is hidden behind millions of menus and dark patterns.
I've been in IT Admin for years, and one of my kids managed to subscribe to two things in one day, one that cost $10 per month and one that was $78 per year, despite having exactly these kinds of controls already set on the device.
Thankfully I receive a notification email for activity on the account, so I was able to go through the non-obvious method of unsubscribing before the "three-day free trial" expired when the charges would have started.
The device was setup to require a password for in-app purchases. They even need a password to install new, free apps. I've since locked down the devices even harder, having looked up various guides on all the various settings that need to be changed from their very open defaults.
I've also removed credit card details from the shared family account - which can't be done from the device itself, only via the online account management tool.
I still don't know how those subscriptions got through, but they did.
Thanks for the reminder though, I'm going to check through those settings again, just to make sure they're still tight, and haven't been re-opened by a software update or other "insecure by default" situation.
I can't imagine how far outside 'normal' this level of IT device maintenance is for regular folk.
> "I cannot put even a minimal effort in keeping an eye on my children, so I will blame someone else for it and make it their responsibility."
For centuries, it's been trivially possible for parents to manage their children's access to funds. Nineteenth century homesteaders could send their kids off to market with appropriate funds to buy what they needed. Now all of a sudden this doesn't work and kids by default have access to near infinite (at their scales) lines of credit because of internet purchasing.
Why is this burden suddenly on the parents? Why can't app vendors (and in particular their middlemen who manage the purchases) make even a minimal effort at not having this system be broken by default?
> Nineteenth century homesteaders could send their kids off to market with appropriate funds to buy what they needed. Now all of a sudden this doesn't work and kids by default have access to near infinite (at their scales) lines of credit because of internet purchasing.
Huh? The old model is working just as well as ever. Why would you give your kid your credit card? Have them make their internet purchases with a gift card, the non-insane way.
Almost all major credit cards have a system to generate virtual card numbers with dollar limits on them. Generate a virtual card number with some limit, give to the kid or configure it on their device. Every time you need to increase the limit you have to login on a site that only the parent has access to.
Is toggling a single simple menu setting before handing off your portable computer you use for managing your life to your child considered a legitimate burden?
>Why can't app vendors (and in particular their middlemen who manage the purchases) make even a minimal effort at not having this system be broken by default?
Apple put an effort into making it all locked behind a simple menu setting, which to me looks about as functional and non-broken as it can get. I don't know what more can one expect from a company, aside from being able to read the mind of whoever is using the device at the moment and automatically adjust permissions based on that.
It's not simple, on iPad anyway. There are various layers of menus and options and some aren't as 'blanket' on/off as they appear
looks about as functional and non-broken as it can get
iPads, at least, can't even accurately track usage time in their own device. We've got time limits set on overall device usage time and specific app times, and it's woefully inaccurate, and that function is part of the same 'device control' app / settings area that looks after lock-down settings for in-app payments and new app installations etc.
That's why I've removed any credit card details from the Apple account.
Why can’t the parents set the account up with no credit card and top the account up with gift cards that you can buy online and in most supermarkets?
I set up my brothers’ account like this and he used it until he was around 14/15 and old enough to know the consequences of spending all your money. Then we linked it up to _his_ debit card. We allowed for something like £10 a month on the App Store, and about £100 a year on the Xbox store with the gift card method.
The limit of the budget taught him not to spend all his money at once or he would have none left. But a lot of parents seem to think these companies should do the parenting for them because they can’t be bothered.
Kids can use gift cards, and if you do use a credit card for an account your kid (or spouse... or parent) is using then you can remove your card after the purchase.I've been doing it for years, on a few different platforms, with no issue.
That said I do wish there was an easier way to say "don't ever save my card info" It's clearly a dark pattern, and I routinely get furious about the loopholes I have to jump through .
Because they're making a lot of money with the way it is? Most people who catch their kid spending $100 on a game aren't going to try to contact customer service to get their money back, they're gonna scold the kid.
That is a horrible example, homesteaders give their children an appropriate amount to purchase goods, a better example of parents who fall victim to their children purchasing in app purchase would be a homesteader that gave their child access to their family fortune while believing a child could make a correct financial decision.
You whooshed on the point. The obvious way to get some lard from the market is to hand Eustice 40 cents and send her off. The obvious way to let Ernesto play a game is to hand him your phone (no, it's not the only way, but be real: it's the obvious first choice for nontechnical users).
What's happened is that the default mode for usage has changed from "Here's a dollar for candy" to "Here's access to the family fortune". And that's bad. And it's not the fault of Ernesto's parents, it's the fault of the technology vendors.
Its written in a click-bait style (what news story isn't these days?) but the only take-home here for parents is that smartphone==credit card. The other issue is that usually for physical credit cards, its easy for a parent to keep it off limits. But if you're signed into services that can auto-charge you, things are a bit more tricky. Even if you had a separate account for your child, and only use a CC to authorize on a per-transaction basis, services can auto-save your CC info, and bury this fact inside some 20 page ToS.
That is true, I guess I was thinking more of a "stole $10 from the kitchen drawer to buy candy" kind of child, not a "impersonated dad, and wired entire life savings to russia" kind of child.
Rifling through a wallet for cash and doing it for the credit card in the next pocket are basically the same action to a child who doesn't know better. And it's not like it's a good or reasonable idea for parents to come home and lock up their wallet in a safe.
> boiled down to "I cannot put even a minimal effort in keeping an eye on my children, so I will blame someone else for it and make it their responsibility."
When you add multiple devices/platforms/app stores it becomes a lot more difficult. Sure it is a relatively seamless experience on one platform, but not all of them. Additionally, parents who didn't grow up with cellphones don't even think about this stuff until it happens. It isn't common sense for them.
These games were not just on Apple's platform. I think these types of games are predatory. What is wrong with just selling a whole game? It is hard to find any game these days that comes out complete. Blizzard did it with Star Craft 2 and for that reason, I refused to buy it.
Companies do it because you make more money for less effort, it's called games as a service. Instead of having to develop a game from scratch every few years and hope the income lasts until their next release, they create a game that they can use as a platform for expansions and microtransactions to provide consistent income over 7-10 years. Young gamers are getting so used to it that I've seen them call people entitled and unreasonable for calling out the devs on missing features at launch. They'll say things like "The game just came out 2 months ago, why do you expect them to have already added feature X to the game?" As someone who started out with Nintendo games that had no possibility of having new features added, that mentality is baffling.
Young consumers of all sorts are participants in a war many of them don't even realize exists. A war in which their opposition are marketing professionals, trained in psychology in universities to trick and exploit children. Against this, a lot of kids don't stand a chance. And it seems the marketers sleep at night by blaming the parents for failing to protect their children from predators like themselves, or by making what they (mistakenly) believe to be favorable analogies to other predatory industries targeting children, such as "collectable card games" or 900 number "video game tip lines."
I agree with your point about non-apple platforms. I cannot enumerate all of them, but it would be silly of me to expect all of them to handle that scenario gracefully, and I believe they should be required to.
However, Starcraft 2 is complete and been this way since the inception. They added microtransactions years after the full release, and they all boil down to cosmetics and other completely optional and non-necessary things, like skins and banners, i.e. cosmetics. Something for hardcore fans to buy in order to support their game, but absolutely non-essential for the actual full experience. And I am saying that as someone who hasn't spent a single dime on Starcraft 2, aside from buying the full game on release (+the expansions that came out years later) and putting hundreds of hours into it.
Considering that each installment might as well been a different game, just using the same engine and graphics, I agree that it is a ridiculous complaint. Each installment had a 12hr+ single player campaign + 12hr+ co-op campaign + completely different multiplayer experience.
Even "whole" games (like the latest $60 FIFA release) have unlimited microtransactions. And it's not limited to iOS, or Android. It's on most internet connected platforms.
Defaults matter. We say this all over the place when designing interfaces. None of these solutions being proposed are the "default". The "default" is to make it as simple and straightforward as possible to give the platforms and developers money.
Worse, all it takes is one mistake on one device to open up a whole can of financial woe when it comes to a child on a device.
So you are admitting that the default users of those phones are adults. In which case, it makes sense that the defaults are set for adults. If an adult is handing their phone (with a credit card enabled on it) to their child, it is expected that they should think of things that can go wrong and disable in-app purchases. If a parent cannot even attempt to keep an eye on what their child is doing on their phone OR click a simple menu setting that disables in-app purchases, I would personally worry about their child way beyond what they can do on their phone.
Games with randomized spending of real money should be classified as “gambling” and treated appropriately. Then it’s safe to blame the parents. At the moment, games are transitioning from an entertainment product suitable for anyone to a gambling product only for adults. It’s hard to keep track of which game series have made this transition or not, so I don’t blame the parents too much.
I agree that this is preventable but you can't assume that everyone knows these things, especially when there is an article like this that doesn't contain any help or advice! Of all people the BBC should be using this opportunity to help people.
No child wakes up one morning and decides to do this, it's often a steady progression enabled by parents who have relegated their responsibilities to TV screens, video games and mobile phones. Casting blame on tech that they've let loose on their kids absolves the parents of any responsibility.
These games are literally designed to exploit vulnerable people, and they use every trick in the book to do it. Criticising parents for not being able to defend against the fruits of millions of hours of labour spent on marketing and r&d which exists solely to exploit is honestly shameful, as if parenting isn't difficult enough already. Do you really think gaming companies exploiting children by introducing them to gambling is the fault of the parents? What next, is the tobacco industry blameless too? Just a tiny bit of empathy on your part for people rather than capitalists would go a long way I think.
I agree with what you are saying, I really do, but it's still a really bad idea to give a child access to an store account connected to a credit or debit card.
Indeed, but it's only such a truly awful idea exactly because there are a lot of predators out there with no morals looking to prey on children. If a kid went into a physical shop with a credit card and tried to buy something, he wouldn't get anywhere.
I agree. The burden of responsibility for how and when a credit/debit card is used is on the owner. Unless of course you are the victim of some kind of fraud.
"I gave my child my wallet and he spent all the money in it!!!"
This is disgusting. Yes parents should be aware of these things but shifting the burden of locking down every system a child uses when this could be handled at the app store or financial processor level is ridiculous. It seems that some of these people are claiming that the game is not distinguishing well between fake and real currency. There are definitely games I've played where this is ambiguous as well.
IMO there needs to be a more rigorous opt-in process for different types of apps. You can opt in for automatic purchases for utility type apps but not for game purchases for example and it needs to be off by default. There also needs to be ways for people to get their money back in certain situations. If a child has a cognitive disability of some kind then holding them accountable seems kind of exploitative. Parents can prove these things with documentation and if proven the money should be refunded.
But still though, they gave the kid their credit card. If you don't want your kid to spend £3000 then don't give it to them?
Not defending any particular app's behaviour. Without any first hand knowledge, I certainly believe that there are scummy games out there using dubious methods to get people to rack up IAP.
While I agree that parents should never give their credit card to their kids[1], note that this is not the case in some examples from the article:
> It was on his own phone and he managed to [...] enter his own children's bank card details and buy lots of in-game items.
> It turned out my wife had left herself logged into Google Play on her old phone that she'd given to our youngest daughter.
[1] I'm not sure if this is a cultural thing. At least in my coutry almost no one has a credit card (it's more common to use debit cards + virtual credit cards) so I find the concept of "giving your CC to your child" really weird.
These systems are set up so you really don’t have much choice, though. My son will come to me and say, “Dad, I have some money from Grandma, can I use it to buy willywhacker 2 for my iPod?” I’ll say, “sure” - then he’ll hand me the $5 he got from Grandma and I’ll type my credit card number into wherever the game expects it to be and try to check the “don’t remember this card for future use” check box (if it’s there and if the game actually honors it). My kids are really good about asking before they make purchases, but a lot of these apps are designed to trick you - that’s how they make profits.
There is a lot you can do, but you shouldn't have to. This isn't someone burning down their school. This is the first world becoming the third world in digital.
In the third world you always to watch yourself so you don't hurt, scammed or abused with little recourse. So being curious, doing something different or challenging the status quo becomes a liability. Eventually there isn't much development at all, only corruption and people knowing their place.
When you buy something in a store with cash in person, after having it shown by an employee, you can still in most cases return the thing at your will. But when some clicks a button moving a few bytes with a digital payment that in reality costs nothing, there is of course nothing that can be done. This industry is just increasingly rubbish.
Don't click this, don't open that e-mail and don't answer the phone. You don't know who it is from or who it is going to. Don't have that password, don't type it there, don't have it too long and don't make it too short. We can automate your job, but not authentication. Don't publish that, don't vote like this and don't live here. Know your place.
(At least my banks haven't offered virtual cards for many years).
Well, then the USA was "third world" long before in-app purchases. When you give someone your debit/CC info, they can basically pull infinitely from your account at any point in the future thus you have to remain eternally vigilant because you once gave someone $5. Which you didn't even do. You gave them the key to your account and trusted them to only take $5, that's how crazy our system is.
Better financial tools/primitives would have gone a long way to prevent the issue in the article which most Americans don't have. I shouldn't need my bank to hopefully create a "virtual card" feature (it doesn't). It should've been ubiquitous 20+ years ago.
This is one reason I use Paypal: I can see a list of organizations authorized to take money out of my account. My bank account and credit cards? I have no fucking idea who might show up next month. Maybe that thing I "canceled" on their website four months ago?
Yeah, there are also gift cards you can buy at the grocery store (for a $5 activation fee!), but I've actually found that a lot of merchants don't accept them - they have some way of telling which credit cards are "unlimited" and which are gift cards and just rejecting the gift cards as "suspected fraud".
You can purchase specific amounts for a lot of vendors, take the time to research the product and plan accordingly and many parents will not have these issues. If using the apple App Store it is the easiest I've come across with setting limits, controlling downloads and purchases, you can add funds instantly so your child never has your card number. Unfortunately everyone believes they never have the time, even though these devices are easier then setting up a family PC was in the early 00's
Some of this is "bad parenting", but games that say they're OK for 3 year olds (like the mini-golf game described in the article) shouldn't make it easy for a 3 year old to spend money.
I have less sympathy for the high-school and college kids who did this.
If a three year old came into your hardware store waving his mother's credit card and assured the staff that he had parental permission to buy a chainsaw, would you fire the employee that sold him that chainsaw? Or would you, like the company in question in this article, refuse to respond to phone calls from that confused mother?
They aren't using a card though, at least not directly. They are playing a game.
It sounds like many games are set up to 1) encourage you to enter account information at some point and 2) not make it obvious when you are going to spend more "real" money.
Obviously these situations could be avoided in various ways, but I think it's being pretty hard on parents of young kids to blame them entirely for "falling for" scenarios that are pretty dodgy. Especially if you are a) a technologist of some sort and b) don't have kids, I would really think carefully before deciding the parents are 100% at fault.
I do have kids, and make abundantly sure that any payments on my kids' devices go through Play / App store (not a card directly), and always require a password. It does not require technical knowledge; both systems clearly show relevant controls at every purchase.
I see how being a parent of a young and active kid can be exasperating. But, if anything, it should increase the level of healthy paranoia :)
> shouldn't make it easy for a 3 year old to spend money.
Am I the only one that is impressed by a 3 year old knowing how to use a credit card online. I have trouble, at times, getting all 16 digits correct--depending on the past week's workload.
I use a "7 accounts setup" for my finances. One of my accounts is labelled "Internet" and has no more than £50-£100 at any given moment. It is the card used for Paypal, Amazon, Spotify, etc. If that card gets compromised I won't lose more than that, and my bank will most likely return the funds (yes even if it's just a Debit Card). If the account runs low then Spotify won't get paid in time and I won't cry about it :)
I always had multiple accounts but this vid and a discussion with friends (bankers and accountants) helped us all develop (each his own) 7 (or more) accounts setup. Imagine a "Dave Ramsey envelope system", but online.
As a european my question is exactly the opposite, why would you ever use a credit card if you can just pay directly with the money you have?
The concept just seems to bizzare as someone who has grown up with their country specific bank cards - getting a credit card or even a visa/mastercard debit card is something fairly unusual.
I do realize you american people have to build a credit score and there's cashback schemes. Very different cultures I guess
Well one reason people use credit cards a lot in the US is that it is much easier to dispute a payment charged to a credit card then it is a debit card. Additionally a charge on a credit card is not money you currently have it is more potential money, whereas a charge on a debit card is tied directly to your bank account and can take a while to be returned in the case of fraud. At one point you used to be basically SOL if fraud occurred using your debit card.
The concern over fraud goes the other way in Europe. We don't like the "pull" model and worry about our card number being used without our authorization. Debit card payments usually require card presence and PIN for each transaction, making stuff like that impossible.
Not for online, for physical purchases. Another fundamental/SHOCKING difference between Europe vs USA is that when you pay with your card in a restaurant in Europe, the waiter brings the POS over to you, while in the USA the waiter disappears with everyone's cards for 5mins ;)
Not good security is it? They can take their time to scan/photograph the cards etc, while in Europe the card's details are for seconds and right in front of you.
Online payments usually go through something like 3DSecure, where you get redirected to your bank and need to authorize the payment amount with a digipass or card reader, which require a PIN.
Yup - credit cards offer incentives (for example, 2% cash back) - I can't think of any good reason not to get one and have it set up so that it automatically deducts the balance from your bank account once a month - this makes it effectively a debit card where everything you purchase is 2% cheaper.
I am not trashing the credit industry, but when they give me 1% and I give them 24%...
And in the UK I do get a refund for fraudulent purchases (e.g. someone copied my card details from a store and made some purchases of women's shoes from somewhere in the UK I have never veen) - NatWest flagged it, alerted me, refunded me.
I asked my bank to automatically pay off my credit card in full at the end of each month. (It might help that my credit card is affiliated with my bank, I'm not sure.)
I've never come close to spending near my limit, so I don't know about an overdraft fee. I assumed it would decline further payments.
My credit card gives me reward points for money spent on it. Having a credit card that I keep paid helps my credit score.
I make some tiny amount of interest on the money in my account each month. I might as well collect that before parting with the money. And it's not like credit card debt accrues daily.
>If a purchase (fraudulent or not) exceeds your current balance, the payment won’t process
>But that is a good thing.
In case of fraud that's a bad thing because your cash flow is now screwed until the dispute's resolved. What do you do if you have $1000 in the bank, you get a fraudulent charge for $600, and this months rent of $800 is coming up?
Here in the Netherlands it is exceptionally hard to kick someone out of "their" home when doing so would leave them homeless. Being 1 month behind on your rent for 1 or 2 months may get you some stern letters, but you won't get kicked out if it happens once.
sadly, because of to much fraud i guess, china now doesn't allow more than one account per person (it's actually per bank, but i suspect only because it's not easy to enforce across multiple banks)
with that restriction in place, 2 or 3 accounts is manageable, but 7 almost impossible.
ideally the bank should allow to split your account into sub-accounts. so that nominally (for tax and monitoring purposes) you still have one account, but for money management purposes you have multiple.
"Giving your kid the credit card" is as simple as using the credit card once on the device, perhaps for a completely different game (or to buy the game in the first place). There is not necessarily any kind of physical action associated with these transactions.
Compare this to the real world. You are in a store and your child heads to the counter with $3,000 worth of goods. He puts your credit card on the counter. At this point, the clerk would ask if mommy or daddy were around and probably would deny the purchase.
But the digital world? Come right up little johnny!
That’s something for these businesses to figure out. In the real world, we had the advantage of the card holder needing to be present.
Maybe the model needs to change to force digital currency purchases to happen outside of the game? That way the purchase is divorced from the play and the parents can still retain control.
Or maybe accounts need to be set up in “child mode” by default, which caps spending at $50/month?
Or maybe the game rating agencies can be made to mark all games with micro transactions as Mature (since they basically need an adult present at all times to make decisions about the game)
I don't think that's too much to ask. If I spend more than an extra £10 my phone company will start sending me messages. Plenty of families would be financially crippled by an unexpected £3000 bill.
Actually, that's a great point. In Canada, we passed legislation that caps the amount a phone company can charge you in a billing period. We ought to do something similar for micro transaction businesses (though I loathe the appearance of a dialog box - "You have reached the daily spending limit as permitted by your jurisdiction")
More importantly, how to at the same time make payment as frictionless and password-free, so that you do not lose any business to people having second thoughts or going to competitors!
Because that is the purpose of a smartphone - to funnel the user's money to the true owners of the phone. Any barriers to that must be removed.
it's not spending $3000 at once, but $5 at a time. imagine a large store with 10 cashiers, the kid coming to each cashier once per day. that means over the course of a week the kid can spend several hundred dollars without anyone noticing anything unusual.
Gave the credit card .. I don't think the credit card is always save locked away .. I mean I also did steal (not 1000s !!) out of my moms wallet, when I was a child .. just for bubble gum or so ..
To take the credit card is easy .. no Pin code .. nothing does protect the card ..
I am not defending EA (I think they are scumbags). But I remember kids back in the 90s getting hold of their parents credit card and spending money they didn't have.
And parents will just put the kid on the touchid or put their card on the kids phone to keep the kid from bothering them a dozen times a day for a tiny purchase.
A lot of this is due to dark patterns from day zero requiring a payment method to create an apple id and/or itunes account.
Apple has since relaxed this requirement, but it is like running a gaultlet to do something like remove your credit card from your account. There are also self-serving weirdnesses - somehow you can set up a child to "request a purchase" from a parent, but you can't set this up if they are 18 with a family account.
Giving a smartphone to an underage person is also like giving them a credit card, a phone that can be used to call any tolled number, a way to access inappropriate content, etc, etc.
I understand this isn't addressing the issue at hand, but having notifications sent to your phone whenever a purchase/swipe is made on a credit card is incredibly useful. It might be moot if the device receiving the notifications is being used by the person making the transaction, but I would recommend everyone to set up such a thing if their bank supports it. And, all banks should do this eventually!
I get instant purchase notifications on my bank cards; it's really good to know exactly when they get used.
Most banks in this world don't provide this service. This is why my "spending" debit card is Monzo because its all kicks ass!!! The second I spend £££, the Monzo app bleeps and shows me the amount and the store (with address, company logo etc.) I was shocked that big banks in the UK like Barclays, NatWest et al, don't bother alerting their clients immediately.
You have to be 21 to play the slots in Vegas. It's recognized as not a good idea to allow casinos and gaming rooms to extend access to addictive gambling games to children.
Gambling is also banned for everyone in many states, not just children, as the damage to society of allowing enterprises to prey on addictive personality types and create misery is recognized.
These laws need to be applied to online games as well.
This seems to be the equivalent of buying digital scratch-off lottery tickets. So you could make the argument that in-app purchases should be regulated in the same way that gambling is.
However, you could also argue that it's the equivalent of buying a pack of Pokémon cards, baseball cards, etc. - which are not regulated.
My intuition tells me that given the addictiveness and how this disproportionately affects the most vulnerable members of society, the practice should be regulated much more tightly. Also, given that these are digital goods, a more relaxed "return" policy shouldn't harm any company that is offering in-app purchases in a good-faith / non-exploitative manner.
What were these parents thinking? This isn't a new issue. People have been reading stories like this in the news for a decade and still they hand their kid their iPad and say "go play over there while dad watches the news..."
You can literally use your phone and google/apple account as a credit card nowadays. It's irresponsible to just hand that to a child. Ignorance is not an excuse. (that said, of course there should be consumer protections in place to limit the damage)
I disagree that it's as simple as just blaming the parents. As a technical community it is easy for us to assert that there are probably optional restrictions somewhere but many parents who are not technically-minded will not necessarily make that connection. Manufacturers/vendors of these devices simply don't do a good job of advertising to parents about these risks and the options available to restrict them.
iOS, as an example, does have the ability to disable in-app purchases using the "Content & Privacy Restrictions" settings, but unless you dig through the device settings and found them (under "Screen Time" no less) then you would not know that those options exist. Given the obscure naming reducing the chance of them ever being found, they had might as well not exist.
Apple could do things to improve this. They could clearly ask about parental controls up-front during the device initial setup, they could clearly place them at the top-level of the Settings app and label them "Parental Controls", they could even include a bit of paper in the box or some printed text on the packaging that explains where to find those options.
I'd argue it's the parents responsibility to educate themselves in this regard. Again, this isn't new news. If you can make a purchase on the device, your child can make that purchase too. Certainly, the OS can flag more warnings during the setup of the device etc. but I doubt the people getting into this situation will pay any more attention than they've evidently done so far (which is to say very little)
It's astonishing that the developers of games like this can sleep at night. Do they lie to themselves and pretend all the kids spending thousands of dollars are the children of Saudi royals or something? They must know that they're exploiting people who can't afford it.
Edit: these developers know damn well if their target demo is children, and they know damn well that the phenomenon of children running up huge debts without the informed consent of their parents is all too common. They know what they're doing; they can't plead ignorance. At best they are self-deluded, but it's more likely they are morally corrupt. Blinded by their love for money, totally indifferent to the suffering their business model causes.
It's absolutely revolting, and so is anybody defending it by implicitly asserting that it's okay for developers to exploit children if their parents happen to be careless or neglectful. "The parents are to blame for allowing it" does not absolve the developers who knowingly profit from it. Should it be legal for me to sell cigarettes to a child if their parents were foolish enough to give the child a credit card? Of course not, fuck off with that shit.
It even goes beyond children. I was recently approached by a mobile gaming company that is looking for statisticians for their data science department. The large companies have entire task forces dedicated to figuring out how to extract even more money out of the ~1% that pays in these games. But of course they put it in slightly different terms.
I am shocked, that it is legal to offer simple games which allow in-app purchases of this size. If you compare these games to any AAA title which goes for like $70 or less, this isn't ethical in the first place.
With the money spent by a child, there should be no way to enforce the bill. Here in Germany, children cannot do business transactions which exceed the range of typical pocket money, so we are talking a few dollars here. Any business larger than that would require the parents to agree to be valid. Invalid transactions can be reversed.
And when pointing out towards parents negligence: keep in mind that there are no multiple accounts on iOS devices and there are good reasons to spend money to buy apps on a device. Of course, with enough understanding of the technology, parents would set it up so that the password is required for every purchase. The question is, is this a reasonable request for non-tech parents?
So if Apple wants to be in a position of morale, as they pitch themselves, they should put reasonable limits to in-app purchases, especially towards these games.
Why not? How else are they going to learn how to handle money? Or do you believe children should receive every adult responsibility all at once on their 18th birthday?
Sadly these app publishers take advantage while these kids are still learning. The boy probably would never have spent £700 on the game if that had to be spent upfront. "Microtransactions" in games can't die soon enough.
I don't know elsewhere, but here (Italy) it is common enough (and highly recommended) that online "rechargeable" bank cards are used.
I don't see why one cannot give one to a kid with - say - 100 Euro initial credit on it, and let him/her do whatever he/she wants with the money.
Then manage it the same way as it was once with the (usually here weekly) "allowance", crediting on it something weekly or monthly.
I'll confess that my weekly allowance as a kid was 5.000 lire, i.e. roughly 2.5 Euro, which should say something on both my age and the effects of inflation ...
Games can be an escape, just as book reading can be an escape. The problem lies in that the book ends, but the game goes on for months, years, or decades.
Many people bring up the positivity of quitting, or minimizing, social media. The same thing could be extended to gaming.
I have quit social media, only using twitter to follow my interests, and quit gaming back in high school. Both of which took many, many weeks away from my life.
I am amazed at how much time I have outside of work compared to my peers that are hooked on social media or gaming!
All that being said, neither are evil, and both can be fun, but for many people they silently rob you of precious time, and peace.
It helps to view things not on a micro, hours per day, scale, but on a lifetime scale. 2 hours gaming daily, 5 times a week, from age 10-30 is well over a YEAR of your life! Now consider the binge gaming phases of life and it certainly takes a lot shorter of a time to hit 1 year.
One thing that I haven't used on my Switch (no kids), but I understand as a great feature, is that you can add funds available for games as a one-time purchase that can be used across the system.
The actual purchase of system currency can be controlled while allowing the dependent to make their own choices on how to spend it.
I stopped buying FIFA/Madden/etc. games. The team building mode seems like it'd be fun, but oh damn, you only have x games you can use that specific player so you have to buy contracts which costs points and good luck trying to stack your team with various players by making good trades vs the spend funds approach.
Give me a game where I can play it and GM it in such a way that if I make Joe Blow look like a star, I can trade him for an actual star and repeat the process until I have the dream team I want or whatever without spending money, I'll buy the game again. The last Madden I bought was the one with Gronkowski in the opening animation and was just disgusted with the "fun" mode being weighted heavily against you just playing and having fun.
You are permanently limited on how many times you can make a team with a player unless you pay more??
As someone who's never touched the sports games who grew up on old non-internet consoles that you can't replay the same thing is utter madness. You can't use the same player over in another attempt??? Do you run out of players?
From my personal experience, I played for like 2-3 weeks. You get a starter set with mostly mediocre cards (card based UI) and then one decent and then a great card (defensive player for me and a few other people I know; don't know if it can be someone offensive).
From there, you can do little skill things for points which can be turned in for either more cards or contracts. These are mostly skill drill type things and not really "I'm playing a football game as my team vs the Bears" or something though there are some. Don't know if the events refresh so you can unlock more points as I only played a few weeks. So there's the no pay options of keeping things going as far as I could tell.
One week I got a Greg Olsen card as part of some event promo thing. Worked very well as a tight end in Ultimate Team. A week or two later it was around Super Bowl or something and received Dak Prescott. So solid passing tandem. Then, after a few games, contracts are coming up. At first it was Dak and it cost a lot to keep him. Then, I had burned so many on him that I didn't have many left for whoever it was that was my DE (it was a moderately good stats guy. Not great, but serviceable). So I lose him and the second string guy takes his spot. After a few more games, another boot falls and more attrition. Lost Greg Olsen because I was a few contracts short and just quit because it was basically a team of second string players by then.
Dunno, I'm all for a GM/player hybrid mode, but I'd rather feel like I'm gaining something when losing something on the GM end.
My daughter is playing several of those games such as Roblox on her iPad; she can't install new applications of buy credits without me entering the password in the apple store.
The cool part of doing that is that I ask her to convince me why she needs those credits, what she will use them for, doing that I can understand what she does in the game and see if it fit her. Another side of those games is that they have a social side and you can interact with other kids, so it's important to know that and make sure your kid understands that not everybody can be nice on a social network.
In the end, I don't understand a parent that gives that power to their children...
Most parents do not spend time playing the games their children play (HN is an outlier here). I see parents giving their phones to their children with an active credit card on file. Its not really the parents fault, how could they know?
All the games start as fun and innocent. It's when the child get past level twenty that the difficulty kicks in. You have to pay to make any significant progress. Most kids don't know any better, all they do is press the button to progress. The parents don't know any better, all they did was give the phone to their restless child.
The game developer however, designed it specifically to trick both parent and child.
Other posters point out something that I found to be unexpected: The ESRB does not rate mobile games.
Now, yes, the ESRB ratings are not anything to stake your life on, but they do give parents and organizations something to go off. Does the ESRB have massive problems? Yes, of course. Do mobile games need to have some sort of rating system? I'd think that most people would say something would be really nice
Perhaps the ESRB, or an expanded board of a similar nature, should expand their mission to not only rate the content in a mobile game but also should give card-holders a better idea of what the gaming market's financial risks are?
ESRB is not a legal regulation and has zero authority. It is merely a privately held company that holds the copyrights to their system of rating video games.
Although gambling consists of convincing the gambler they will get real money in return, while these games seem to be trying to convince the gamer that they aren't spending real money.
It's definitely similar but the difference could be important.
Is there any way to link the games/play account/icloud accounts to a wallet with limited funds?
I feel like the real problem here is how these games link up to a payment method that isn't actually intended to be used for the game. Unlinking them from each other should go a long way to resolve these "my child spent a lot of money because I gave them access to all my money" problems.
If you haven't seen it all ready just take a look at the infamous "Let's Go Whaling!" talk here [1]. They're not even hiding the fact the these are the type of people Free2Play/Pay2Win games prey on anymore.
Growing up I was often nervous of accidentally purchasing something in an app store or other online accounts. Free trials will not always notify you when your free trial is up and your payments will automatically go through. Personally I believe regulations are necessary in order to avoid accidental payments for expensive applications.
Every generation has problems like this. I remember my friend become addicted to calling premium phone numbers when when he was a teenager. When his parents went to work, he would have stayed home and just keep calling all day instead of going to school. Only when the bill came through post his parents went mad and started to blame everyone but themselves. Eventually they got premium numbers blocked, but his son was spending all the money he could get his hands on on call cards.
It was a phase for him, he stopped doing that after few months.
When he talked about it years later, he couldn't believe that he did this. He says he wishes his parents gave him more attention and explained to him what it is about and why it makes no sense to do something like this.
Fascist love such stories, because they can use them to tell people how they should live and create more regulations.
There's a bunch of people in this thread saying "but what about the parents", and a bunch of other people in this thread saying "but dark patterns", and they're both missing the point.
If you're in the industry and making money from IAPs, especially from lootbox IAPs, the one thing you need to know is that governments are coming for you.
If you're Apple or Google taking 30% of those IAPs (and also not paying much tax) then government is coming after that money.
If you're a publisher selling games for children, marketed to children, with hundreds or thousands of dollars of IAPs then governments are coming after you too.
Articles like this are a clear and simple warning: fix your shit, sort out sensible industry self-regulation, or face EU wide regulation.
We have plenty of examples to prove that the EU or individual governments are not afraid of bringing in fierce regulation.
This is why we have IAP's disabled on all devices and avoid any pay-to-win games. Unfortunately an overwhelming number of game developers are focused around gamifying IAP's for max addiction to extract max revenue where I've basically lost trust in trying out any new games that aren't personally recommended.
I'm looking forward to Apple Arcade as we'll finally have a curated collection of trusted Games we can access with a single subscription so game developers are compensated and they can just focus on creating good content/game play instead of tweaking their games with Dark UX patterns to maximize IAP's.
Perhaps games with in-app purchases should be required to be rated 18+ (thus inaccessible to children's accounts). The developer can make a two versions if they think the game could do with a lower rating.
Seems to me that main problem here is that consumers have insufficient control about their payment card transactions. Why card transactions can be initiated by merchant without explicit authorization of each transaction by the customer?
If merchant-initiated transactions are desirable (e.g. for periodic payments), why there is no explicit confirmation for number and size of allowed transactions per time period for given merchant, like it is standard for regular direct debit bank transactions?
In the UK there's tremendous lip-service by the gambling industry about keeping vulnerable people safe from becoming addicted to gambling apps.
However, they spend millions constantly promoting any number of gambling apps disguised as games to children. Not just on the Internet, but on daytime TV, where you get a commercial break every 5-10 minutes. I have no idea how they get away with it - the "Regulator" must be asleep.
There is, without doubt, a lot of garbage out there in these games for purchase. There are also a lot of issues with the way they get people to spend money.
That said, if your kid steals your credit card and spends a bunch of money on it, the issue isn't the game, it's that your kid is stealing from you. If he/she stole your credit card and bought clothes at the mall, you wouldn't blame the clothing store...
I don't understand why people don't learn the rules of the game called "business" at least a little bit. If you have the right to cancel something within 14 days there are rules to how to do this. Don't expect cooperation from the other side of the table. Just follow the rules.
I'm quite sure the rules say something like this, but I'm not a lawyer and have not looked it up again:
1. Find out the business address of that company, preferably one in your country if there are multiple options.
2. Write a letter in Word where you say you want to revert the orders <list of date, object, price>.
3. Print, sign, then photograph that letter with your phone (which adds a date to the photo).
4. Go to your town's post office and tell them you want to send this letter in a way that the receiver needs to sign for that and you want to get back that signature.
5. Wait for the signature.
6. If nothing happens besides the signature, write them an email adding all the details and the photos of the signature and the letter.
7. If still nothing happens on your bank account, and the sum is over 500€ or similar go with all the documents to a court and request they help you get the money back. Not sure if other countries but in my country for 45€ they will send a specially colored letter to the company claiming the payment and threatening a lawsuit.
8. Check the times here, but when they are up and nothing happened go with all these things to a lawyer and he will probably sue for you. In most countries losing such a lawsuit is path that might end up bringing the CEO into jail (not directly, but it certainly is on the table as possibility at this point), so the chances are super high that at this point they will send the money or declare bankruptcy. In case of bankruptcy your lawyer knows how to continue.
There's no need for reminders, warnings, etc. All that might end up you being behind your deadlines. Print a paper letter, sign it, and send it in a way that can prove reception.
A professional company with good intent will also not feel threatened by you doing the right thing according to law. So don't be afraid to be perceived as unfriendly. The only people who will claim unfriendliness here either have no idea what they are doing or are using your shame against you in the hopes that you do mistakes.
We need all the help we can get here in SF with our rent! Every dollar we can get from the app helps! I just deployed a feature today that automatically charges the user's credit card when their virtual currency balance runs low and I do not feel the least bit guilty in doing it, either.
When the choice is either be out of business or homeless, what would you do?
Can't games by default send an sms/email to their parents asking for confirmation?
This could just be something you enable/disable in game with a PIN. I don't know, anything would be nice. With no protection, you get the idea this is exactly what publishers want to happen.
As a previous employee of one of the biggest free to play game companies i felt pretty bad.
What parents aren't aware of is the fact that game companies except the developers employ professional PhD psychologists to take advantage of people - mostly kids.
I find more fun in the older games. Unlike the IAP crap and all the ways of gamification, older games could be modded and had humongous modding communities.
Other than Minecraft, not so much these days. So I stick with older. Less to "gamify my wallet"
One very simple set of rules could be: 1. your app may not accept in-app purchases more than once per month, and 2. the in-app purchase cost must not exceed 10% of the original purchase price. And then 3., there should be a lifetime maximum on purchases, i.e. you can finally “pay enough”.
Instead of these or really any other sane constraints, we’ve somehow made it worse by now preferring subscriptions!!! And even more offensive, these recurring charges are allowed to be very high. And as if that weren’t rewarding enough for scammers, it can be far more frequent than one would normally expect (e.g. weekly instead of monthly). Like, REALLY!?!?
point 2 won't work. the whole reason for in-game purchases is that you can spend more than the initial cost of the game which is often free initially. (what's 10% of free?)
i'd go with a monthly limit. one that doesn't break the bank, but one that also isn't to low to make it not worth it for the game developer.
how about $10 per day and $50 per month?
then you can spend your weekends playing away and buying to your hearts content. and if you instead do that every day, well then, you are going to have to ask yourself: home come that at the end of the money, there is so much month left over?
another measure would be the cost of a pack of cigarettes. at what point does smoking affect you financially? i think there may be studies for that. that same number ought to apply to games.
now there is still the problem of multiple games. so maybe another cap for overall spending. but that is trickier. how does that cap distinguish game spending vs using an app to buy groceries online?
Parents can't be expected to get everything right all of the time. It's not unreasonable to ask that technology companies don't exploit vulnerable people, and in particular, children. Blaming the parents in this case is something I just don't understand. The companies could just like, not exploit children for profit. I've managed to go my whole life without exploiting children, it's actually very very not difficult and I have no sympathy for these companies.
TL:DR Start his gaming journey at the beginning of the gaming industry (i.e. Pong, Pac-Man) in the hope that exposure to what gaming used to be like will "inoculate" him against what gaming is like today.
What you are talking about is a subset of games today - there are still tons of great games out there with ethical monetization (more than there ever have been, in fact).
Yeah, you have to skip some of the big names and a lot of the mobile space, but that still leaves a lot of great stuff out there. While letting them experience a ton of classics certainly isn't a bad idea, it also isn't the only way to avoid predatory monetization.
What else would you realistically have done with it? Everyone likes to imagine that the would have spent it on improving practices like learning a second language and a musical instrument, but would you really have done those things or found another distraction?
He was a disabled adult with learning disabilities, I am quite sure that his experience is not the same as yours, as you would know, had you read the article.
1) You allowed your son with the cognitive ability of a 7 year old, access to £3 grand.. I'm going out on a limb here, but I don't think that was wise. I'm unable to even imagine "the correct" way you were wanting your son to use that money. Shorting Symantec?
2) Your 16 year old stole £2k of your money (and then your daughter bailed you out?). Looking for a bright side, it wasn't opiates... and your student daughter already appears to have overcome genetics/environment to get her shit together.
3) "We are technically savvy" (I already know you're not.. but pray continue) - Oh your 12 year old spent the money you gave him access to from his own bank account.. Well I think lessons have been learnt on all sides here - and if you don't think it's his fault, chuck him another £700 and see what happens. I have some lovely magical-beans I'll cut you in on, for his email address.
4) "My 11-year-old daughter has spent over £100 of my money in a day downloading apps that are the same."
Well that's a curious statement. Most stores would say "you already own this".. she was creating new accounts for the thrill of a fresh download? I can't help but feel despite your aforementioned tech-savvy swagger - you have no f'in idea what happened even as you spoke to the reporter. Still I'm completely reassured that you've now given her a PS3 where "No fraud, no online grooming and no bullying"... Three horrible things, but does most definitely have an online store, which is the single problematic thing you mentioned.
Oh I'm losing the will to live now.. and feeling increasingly misanthropic, so I'll stop.
It's probably a bit easier for me as I'll actually play the games with my kids, but the ones my daughter are into are more in this vein. Roblox specifically with Robux or whatever. She has her own Apple account, child one, and when she attempts to make an in-app purchase, it must go through me. And I am aware before the prompt comes up because we've got an understanding that if I see a request for it and we didn't discuss it prior, it's going to be rejected.
I know this comment will soon turn gray, but I'll say it again as I have before: Don't hand your credit card to a child, or to anyone else. This is your first, and most effective, line of defense.
Now, regulating video games like alcohol may not be the best idea. We could end up in a similar state of binge drinking, except with binge playing. But perhaps some sort of preventative measure can be taken so that kids do not get sucked into these games that are, make no mistake, maliciously designed to addict and to steal money from the vulnerable. Even alcohol manufacturers don't dose their products with nicotine.