I tried Idle Heroes, out of curiosity. Compared to other "idle" games I've played, it's way up there for in-app purchases and the need to shell out money to progress.
I haven't played this one... but saturation-level advertising in ad-supported games might have played into the loop here. I play Endless Frontier, which is another related game that has (optional) "view an ad for a reward" mechanics, and said ad is almost always for Idle Heroes.
Insofar as Endless Frontier is pretty good about not forcing you to spend money, I've resisted trying another game which looks far more like whale-bait.
I've also been playing Endless Frontier.. It's one of the least pay to win games I've ever played.. You get rewards of in game currency every day and other super rare stuff for free, it makes no sense to buy anything imo
It does makes a lot of sense to spend one dollar, because that gets you the VIP status that doubles a lot of those rewards. Makes the whole thing even more crazily-generous.
I actually went and bought one of the packs (with a permanent spirit-highlands upgrade, so not one-off currency) recently, just because I figured I'd been playing for basically-free for so long that I might as well contribute a bit more.
What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people.
I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.
These games are a modern version of slot machines. It's habit forming, and it burns time and money. tbf it's still slightly better than things that you see in a casino
I suppose they have all the downsides of coin ups plus they are also more readily accessible. You don't have to go anywhere to get your fix, it's there in your phone.
But with those, it only operated when it was fed coins. It's been shown that people spend less when they pay with cash than credit cards. Casual mobile games go beyond even credit cards and have users spend nebulous tokens. They go as far as they can to disconnect the play from the loss of money, and that's bad.
I see a significant difference between "have people pay for a fun service" and "engineer an experience specifically to be addictive".
Ever carried around $20 in quarters in a fanny pack as a five year old? It's pretty heavy. There's a pretty low ceiling on how much you could spend back in the day and it was impossible to silently, digitally spend an unlimited quantity of your parents' money.
Also, in the early/mid days of coin-up games, a skilled player could win a game with a single coin while having fun in the process and using their skills instead of simply waiting for stuff to happen.
Fighting games and head-to-head puzzle games like Bubble Bobble in a popular arcade were pretty cool like this in that people would line up to go up against the reigning champion who could go hours on a single quarter.
Sort of weird how most "social" games are both a( trash and b( almost entirely single player with a tacked on multiplayer 'tournament' mode in which you play single player against some other player's template. Even in turn based games that would not suffer from a mobile connection's latency, they still have you go up against the AI with another player's template.
Regression from the 1990s: absolutely pathetic. I wonder if legalization of internet slot machines would wipe out mobile gaming revenue and just expose it for what it is which is a workaround for laws against gambling.
> Sort of weird how most "social" games are both a( trash and b( almost entirely single player with a tacked on multiplayer 'tournament' mode in which you play single player against some other player's template.
Most “social games” are like that because if a game isn't like that, even if it has social elements, it's not considered a “social game”, even if on top of the social elements it has either gameplay-affecting (e.g., any of the wargaming.net games) or cosmetic (e.g., PUBG Mobile) lootboxes.
I think if we could wrap our minds around what is happening psychologically in these games, most of them would be off-limits to children.
What's interesting is that we've decided to define gambling according the rules of the game—in reality, "gambling" is probably more akin to a psychological state that can be induced by many different rulesets and experiences.
Mobile games today are largely thinly-veiled attempts to induce this state in children through various Skinner Box mechanics in order to get at their parents' wallets. Fine.
But the real question is: what happens to the mind of an eight-year-old if they have a gambling simulator in their pocket every day? What happens to their neurological development after five years of exposure to this "gambling" state?
Underrated comment IMHO. Those "casual"-games look like a gateway drug to gambling addiction to me. They borrow mechanics from games usually found in casinos and it is frightening to see how we let our kids play these games without much thought.
Many of those games are actually implementing gambling with their virtual currency.
They have events where you buy an entry ticket using the in-game currency then either double/triple-up or lose-it-all as the result of some random event.
I'm surprised this is even legal in the US, and not caught for app store TOS violations. It seems they've simply replaced the concept of casino chips with virtual currency. They do have some 'gameplay' outside of this but it is not much different from the various frills on video slot machines.
That's the beauty of it, they don't even have to hand money back to the user.
The trick is to make the user perceive value in whatever digital artifact their are providing. In the eye of the user it then becomes the same as money.
Make the user invest their time into the game. Time is money right? Create fake rewards for arbitrary actions. Then when they are properly hooked, ramp up the difficulty level to a limit where just paying a bit of money would make the game as fun as it was during the evaluation phase.
The idea is that advertising often gets people to buy things that are bad for them (like maybe an energy drink?) that takes up resources to produce. Maybe people buying virtual digital items is better for society than buying a brand new Corvette.
I think this is an important point. The fact that some countries have started to impose regulation against some of the tactics these gaming companies use (like Belgium banning loot boxes[0]) suggests that this is starting to be recognized.
I'm a big fan of video games, but games that are essentially thinly-veiled attempts to get people addicted and extract money make me queasy.
On a side note, I find it extremely interesting that that same law you mention explicitly sidesteps an even older form of "child gambling" in the form of trading and collectible card games.
I made the "sad" joke to my kid who loved arcades like Dave and Busters/etc. while growing up that the ticket games are kid gambling.
If you look at the last 10 years in those places, the "gambling" games basically are taking over an ever-increasing amount of floorspace. Many games may as well be slot machines for all the interaction and experience they give.
I feel these games are less dangerous than gambling is. It seems to me gambling has a greater ability to suck money out of peoples pockets. It's also the case these games are doing nothing magic the gathering hasn't been doing for decades.
There is zero reason these games should not have 13+ restrictions however. Under 13 and you're too young to play these games. Don't care if this means there's a bit of a double standard.
I don't know. Magic the Gathering, while flawed, is a real game that can be played with skill. These online "games" have barely any game in them at all; it's very telling that in many of them you essentially spend money to bypass the tedious parts, which is actually all there is (as well as buying trinkets, skins, etc).
If there's anything to compare these kind of "games" with, maybe it's precisely with online gambling. They are thinly disguised online gambling, which makes them worse in my book.
Speaking an ex- and now current MTG player, it most definitely has a strong gambling aspect to it. If you've hung around box openings and such, you'll see the same highs and lows, especially right now when an IN PRINT card can and will retail for > 1000 USD.
> But the real question is: what happens to the mind of an eight-year-old if they have a gambling simulator in their pocket every day? What happens to their neurological development after five years of exposure to this "gambling" state?
I wonder about this often. I contend that we are getting better at extracting money from people. Is there some sort of line we will cross at which point the majority of people are psychologically unprepared to resist spending their money in a way that causes them financial harm?
We understand that friction causes consumers to consider their purchase more carefully, so we've worked hard to lower friction, and this has a statistically noticeable increase in users who complete their purchase.
I'm genuinely curious whether we'll eventually reach some sort of threshold where the bulk of the economy is simply driven by overriding our better instincts.
I completely agree! I’m not sure how to define the horizon, so I’m not sure whether we’ve passed it. It’s not clear to me exactly how effective advertising is, and its effectiveness also clearly oscillates over time and between demographics!
I'm with you on this and I think the problem really got started when Zynga began actively optimizing to monetize underlying addiction in its core users years ago. The real solution here is that we need legislation for "casual" games that puts addictive games into the same bucket as gambling, but doing that is going to be really difficult (how do you even legally define bad addicting gameplay?).
A really simple solution would be to cap the amount of money a user can spend on a single game in a certain time period after the initial buy-in (so games could still charge hundreds of dollars for Premium/GOTY/etc editions). Even something like $50/mo would stop whales
If it is a simple solution, then there likely is a simple work around.
In this case, large companies with multiple games can have cross game promotions. Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble.
Sure, Blizzard does this a lot with their games. The idea behind it is more that it prevents whales, destroying the business model... the kids spending $100/mo are nothing compared to the people who spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on these games every month. That's who they're targeting.
> Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble.
The business model for these games is that 99% of players spend negligible amounts, and 1% spend hundreds or thousands; the minnows are a loss leader to get to the whales. Restricting spending to $50 or $100/month would destroy games like this entirely. (Which I'm fine with, personally.)
It would destroy the current whale business model, but it might still result in going after big spenders in other fashions by getting more games for them to play a shorter time each and it might result in them modifying the feedback loop to get more people spending the maximum allowed.
Also, are the minnows really loss leaders or just not as profitable?
$50/mo would stop CCGs in their tracks. I know enough grown-ups with enough money who drop a few hundreds when a new set releases in MtG: Arena or Hearthstone (and those amounts don't count as whales)
Why is $50/month an acceptable amount to spend on alcohol or coffee but not on games? Does it only apply to these style of games or do games like league of legends need to limit purchases too?
(I don't have an answer, fwiw, but I'm not overly keen on this solution)
I'm of two minds about this solution (I like the "it'll immediately destroy the whole business model" approach), but I'll bite. There are couple of reasons:
1) Children are already restricted from consuming alcohol and coffee.
2) You can only drink so much coffee before your body asks you to stop, or gives up completely. It's not pleasant.
3) Coffee doesn't have this level of addictive properties (alcohol has, and as you'll note, alcoholism is a big problem, though see #5 and #6).
4) There are already "social antibodies" preventing most people from overconsumption of alcohol (and to some extent, coffee).
5) Alcohol prohibition didn't work because it unfairly punished the addiction-free majority, but what's proposed here isn't a restriction on video games, but on a particular aspect of a particular set of them. The proposal doesn't restrict the fun-giving part, only the addiction-inducing and addiction-exploiting parts.
6) Nobody designs alcohol or coffee with the sole intent of causing addiction their users that can be exploited for money. Whereas these games absolutely are designed like this.
To try and shorten my response - I agree with you that the core issue is a predatory design, and that the addictions have differences to physical addictions.
However I still disagree that putting a $50 (for arguments sake) cap on the amount to be spent will even help. If that issue worked, it would work for alcohol too. Just because alcohol makes you ill doesn't stop people with an addiction from drinking themselves sick and waking up and immediately resuming drinking. Coffee may have been a bad example but tobacco is another reasonable comparison - limiting tobacco consumption to an arbitrary limit won't help people with a nicotine addiction.
There are many games out there (world of Warcraft for example) which impose weekly lockouts - no matter how much you play you can't progress past a certain point. What ends yo happening is people start at the lockout, burn through the allotted content as soon as possible, and then just wait a week and come back. Implementing a limit isn't going to stop people who are addicted to these games from finding 5-6-7 of them to make progress on to scratch that itch.
To address one of your claims directly:
> The proposal doesn't restrict the fun-giving part, only the addiction-inducing and addiction-exploiting parts.
Firstly how do you define which parts are fun giving and which parts are addiction inducing? There is a very fine line between engaging and enabling, and it's a fuzzy one. At their core, the majority of games are Skinner boxes, and everything else is dressing over that (even MP games). What is firmly in the camp of fun for many many people could easily be considered enabling for a large group of others. People enjoy progression systems in games, they are engaging and fun, and there are clear cases where these are abusive. I don't believe that saying "if you can get 20x more people addicted you can still earn the same" is the right way to punish those abuses though.
We should look at ways of reducing the reasons why people fall I to these traps, and look at regulating the monetisation methods of these games, otherwise they'll just change tack and appear in a slightly different form in 18 months time with creative workarounds (which have already been mentioned - multiple games with tie ins, gifting, streaks, external purchased to interact with the game)
Thanks for elaboration. I do agree with the concerns you brought up. I think the main point the $50 proposal has is this: the business model around alcohol/tobacco is targeting a normal distribution of sales. The business model of those predatory games is targeting a heavily skewed distribution, in which there's a long tail of people who just wasted a lot of their time and a bit of money, and a bunch of whales that dump disproportionate amount of cash into the games. The $50 proposal, even modified to $100 or $200, essentially cuts off 90+% of the earnings and destroys the reason for making these kinds of games in the first place.
As for the "fine line between engaging and enabling", two points. One, it's not just "enabling". Selling tobacco is "enabling", those games are actively designed to max out the addiction factor. Two, I agree the line is fuzzy, but I think the "you'll know it when you'll see it" argument does apply in this case. There is a meaningful difference between games optimized for being fun and an artistic expression - like most video games in 80s, 90s and 2000s - and skinner boxes thinly wrapped in a theme. It's hard to define what that difference is, because it ultimately is a difference of Colour[0], which is something hard to capture in laws. But I believe that we must try to discourage people from creating "games" of the "Skinner-box" colour.
To give random examples of games I spent ridiculous amount of time on as a kid: StarCraft and Fallout 1 and 2. They were "addictive" in the sense a good book or a good sports can be addictive. But they were first and foremost designed to be fun and tell a story, addictiveness was incidental. At no point they tried to use it to get more money from me/my parents.
I'm happy to be a whale. I can afford it. Why do you want to stop me? I get a lot of joy from spending money on mobile games. I think it should be regulated somehow but not like that.
More legislation? While I agree that many of these games are fundamentally indistinguishable from gambling, gambling laws themselves are a complete overreach by the state. In general, when it comes to regulation, the role of the government should be to interfere at negative third-party externalities. When individuals are impacted by things they didn't consent to or take part in, there is a case for the protection of their interests to not be impeded upon. But if all parties involved consent to a behavior, as is the case with gambling, that is not a behavior for the government to control. Just because people can make poor decisions doesn't mean that we need to criminalize them.
What would you define as the third party in cigarettes? Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition, yet I find it pretty hard to accept that the current legislation against cigarette companies hasn't done a world of good for humanity.
If what you want is a "Warning, this game may be addictive" every time you load the game, then fine.
But I do not think the government should be passing hate taxes on things they don't want you to do. People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar, and they're very likely to be going for animal based products at some point.
I don't think it's the government's job to control the populace. They can force companies to make risks clear, but if the consumer accepts the risk, that should be that.
In my post I agreed with basic regulation, but against hate taxes.
>But I do not think the government should be passing hate taxes on things they don't want you to do. People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar, and they're very likely to be going for animal based products at some point.
I'm just confused what you're arguing (and why it led to this post being downvoted). I didn't compare tax to consumption under 18.
> They can force companies to make risks clear, but if the consumer accepts the risk, that should be that.
It doesn't solve anything when the problem is with externalities and prisoner's dilemmas.
Taxes on sugar and smoking can be argued on the grounds of increased load on national heathcare, at least in countries with publicly-funded healthcare. Taxes (or rather, pulling back on subsidies) on meat can be pretty strongly argued as effective means of reducing emissions and slowing down/mitigating climate change. Almost all situations where externalities are the problem share the exact same pattern: "it would be better if nobody did X, but since everyone does X, why should I stop and deprive myself of the value X gives me?".
Personally, I came to believe that the job - perhaps the main job - of the government should in fact be to act as a central coordinator, to prevent citizens from falling into emergent prisonner's dilemma-like traps.
As for regulating gambling and smoking and many other things you can see as "limiting freedom" - it's not like an individual decision leading to self-harm is always, or usually, an unique situation. Gambling isn't a random event, it's an exploitation scheme perpetrated fully intentionally by other people, who have literal textbooks describing the best way to fuck their fellow men and women over. It would be a pretty inhumane government that didn't take an interest in curtailing this.
You giving justifications for banning food really just proves my point. Tyranny of the majority, if that faction should ever become the majority.
With gambling there exists the chance you can bet your last $20 and make enough to pay off your debt. I don't think anyone is planning on getting rich off Idle Heroes.
I don't think that the role of the government is to do good for humanity. The role of the government, at least in a liberal democracy like the US, is to preserve liberty. In a state where the primary mandate is to pursue actions on behalf of the "good," the obvious problem is to do with how we define "good." There are plenty of cases to be made for the prohibition of alcohol and cigarettes altogether, and there have been periods where this has been democratically felt to be for the good of the nation. Many people advocate for the banning of pornography. Prostitution. Drugs. Fast food. Violent video games. There are all kinds of things that people regulate for people's purported best interest. The problem is that, as stated, people's interests vary. People's capabilities to control themselves vary. People's senses of morality vary.
But the illusory nature of "good" isn't even the primary problem. The real problem is tyranny. Government is force, no matter what, and even democracy is tyranny of a thin majority. Unless the powers of the state are limited in terms of its objective capabilities, then what is subjectively being enforced by its authoritative capacity is necessarily tyrannical to the minority.
> There are plenty of cases to be made for the prohibition of alcohol and cigarettes altogether,
Prohibition of alcohol wasn't a problem because mitigating social issues caused by its abuse is a bad idea. Prohibition was a problem because it was a bad tool for the job; it didn't solve the issues it was meant to, and caused many more of its own.
Drugs, pornography, prostitution and violent video games aren't the problem (except for people who don't think much). Drug abuse-related crime and health issues are the problem. Sexual abuse and crimes are the problem. Human trafficking and forcing people into sex work are the problem. Violence is the problem. I agree that bans are a wrong idea, but I also disagree about the role of the government. It's absolutely a responsibility of governments to deal with these issues - because really, no one else can.
> Government is force, no matter what, and even democracy is tyranny of a thin majority.
If democracy is a tyranny, then so is the "free" market. A tyranny of those who have more, who rule over those who have less. The tyranny of the economy that forces most people to make bad choice after bad choice, because the alternative is starvation. Truth is, there is no absolute freedom to find anywhere. Not in a world with so many people, not when the "minimum viable reproductive unit" of human species is a village. It's a game of finding the balance that ensures most freedom and most happiness.
Human trafficking violates consent. Violence violates consent. Sexual abuse violates consent. The government has a role in preserving consent in transactions. The third-party negative externalities I mentioned fall within the purview of government responsibilities precisely because they have an impact on those who have not consented.
Gambling does not violate consent. Drug usage does not violate consent. Prostitution does not violate consent, or in the cases that do, those independent instances are where enforcement needs to occur.
While I agree with your views here, it is incredibly important to understand that "consent" is not as black and white as you are painting it above. In many ways it suffers from the same problems as attempting to define what is "good" -- in that what qualifies an individual to be able to give consent or what consent even looks like can be arbitrary and subjective.
Would you change your position if at some point there exist a technology that modifies consent with a certain success rate so a bad actor in a free market can reliably make a significant number of people act against their interests but out of their own "free will".
Is this a matter of competence or a matter of principle?
If I can talk to some people and without threats or deceit convince a good number of them to hand me over all their savings (using a zeroday in wetware for example), does the government has a right / responsibility to stop me?
I expect ad-tech and other persuasion techniques will only become more effective. At what point do we declare regular people unable to consent similar to the way we say children and few other groups can't legally consent?
The role of the government is to solve problems that the market cannot. There's tons of market failures described in the literature (e.g. information asymmetries, principal–agent problems, or negative externalities), and others that the government can simply solve more efficiently (e.g. nationalized infrastructure prevents each private player from building their own, ultimately redundant, infrastructure, and lowers cost to entry for new players).
In my opinion, governments overreach is when governments starts to control the population's choices (e.g. prohibition or ban of illegal & experimental drugs). Government influencing the population's choices (guiding them towards "good" choices, e.g. by limiting gambling, taxing alcohol, enforcing true labels on food) can be a very good thing, [edit:] especially in situations when humans tend to behave irrationally (i.e. because our psychology / evolutionary mechanisms are hijacked).
> Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition
Sure they do. If rates of lung cancer go up because more people smoke, insurance rates for the populace at large will also go up, thereby driving down expendable income for many consumers and depressing economic growth. All of society is the third party when it comes to people making poor decisions about their health.
As an aside, I realize this reasoning can certainly be abused as a justification to make any number of questionable but possibly legitimate behaviors illegal, but it doesn't make it less true in specific cases.
I used to be a pretty hardcore libertarian. The standard libertarian arguments only really work when you have a mostly libertarian system already however. They tend to have problems when you have some form of a welfare state such that individuals who for whatever reasons are unable to support themselves end up being supported by the state. That in itself is a classic libertarian argument - the logic of welfare inevitably leads to government overreach in all areas of life because the state has established a financial interest in preventing people from engaging in "harmful" behaviors.
Gambling has negative externalities suffered by families and friends of the addicts (and more people, if addiction drives the victim to crime). That's in addition to the fact that IMO at some point in addiction, you aren't really in a state of mind to give informed consent.
My current point of view is that once a problem becomes large-scale and systemic, to the point you can actually model it at population-scale, it needs top-down attention and top-down solutions. That usually means regulation - either new, modified, or existing but better enforced. In other words, once something grows to the point it wouldn't be out of place on a SimCity/Civilizations-style game dashboard, it needs SimCity/Civilization-style solutions. In yet different words, there ain't such thing as free will and informed consent if I can reliably predict that a population under influence X will have Y% incidence of $bad-thing.
See also: vaccines, smoking, air pollution, climate change, overfishing, and countless other things where people left to their own devices and their own local, small-scale perspective reliably and fully predictably end up doing stupid things.
If you ever talked to anyone in the industry of Zynga-like games about how they think about their customers (i.e. the players), you'd be dismissive too. It's scary.
I have spent some money on doom, counterstrike, quake, unreal or even chess. Or none on games like tremulous. I've spent a lot of time in these games, I've found friends in this games that I by now know for more than a decade.
A lot of that is gone with modern match making, and modern match making is made worse with transactions. Because you need to funnel more people into the matchmaking grinder.
I think it's reasonable to draw distinctions among different types of games. Having spent much of my near 20 year career in the games industry, I'm saddened and disgusted by much of what has happened with the monetization strategies pioneered by mobile and free to play games. Maybe there's some grumpy old man syndrome at work but I also have a degree in psychology and the way these games are transparently optimized to exploit human psychology worries me quite a bit.
I left the industry in part because of these trends and I won't be letting my own kids play these types of games. I don't know that regulation is the answer (and I'm generally anti regulation) but I do think there's a real problem here.
> I'm saddened and disgusted by much of what has happened with the monetization strategies pioneered by mobile and free to play games.
There's a lot to be said that its easier to attract 1000 people and extract $500 from 10 of them than it is to get 5 bucks from all of them. Even more so when you add piracy to the mix.
Would these strategies have been a thing if so many people didn't flip their shit because a near AAA level game tried to charge a few bucks?
Just because people don't want to pay them for their products doesn't mean they're justified in doing morally bankrupt things. The current tricks employed by video games, both mobile and AAA, amount to fully intentional and premeditated psychological abuse.
> Would these strategies have been a thing if so many people didn't flip their shit because a near AAA level game tried to charge a few bucks?
Yes, since AAA Studios want all the money they can possibly get. Thus we'd always end with them trying to squeeze every last penny they can get out of their customers. And predatory tactics seem to work best for that.
AAA studios didn't invent the model and they're still not the worst offenders, not because they're any more ethical but because they get more push back from their player base when try and take it too far. It was really the mobile and casual web / Facebook games that invented most of the dark patterns and are most effective at ruthlessly exploiting them.
Taking away people with gambling addictions, children, etc (all good reasons for these games not to exist at all), I've felt for a while that their success is a great example of disparity in disposable income.
I'll be forward and be completely honest: I've spent several thousands of dollars on a single of these games. And I've played many of them. Some with just straight micro-transactions (eg: League of Legends skins), some straight up "gacha" or "lootboxes" (eg: Fire Emblem Heroes, FF Brave Exvius, and so on).
When you look at a videogame compared to other form of entertainment, is just how efficient they are in a "fun per dollar" point of view. MMORPGs that cost $10-15/month and people play obsessively several hours a day are way better than going to a bar to drink, money wise. But what if efficiency is tossed out of the window, how much is "fun" worth to someone?
It's likely a factor of their disposable income. But we're now at a point where adult professionals are very much part of the player base. So if a game is free to play, but has a loot box mechanic that can make it "more fun", what happens? Well, for people without money to burn in a fire pit, it might not be worth it at all, so they won't spend a dime. For the senior executive who makes 500k or 1million a year? They could blow through 5 grands in an afternoon without really caring.
So if you have a gaming population where 90% (I'm making numbers up) don't spend a dime, 9% is spending a moderate amount because of predatory practices (kids, addicts, etc) or because they like it, and then 1% spend an INSANE amount of money because they have no real "limit", you may come up WAY ahead than if you charged a flat fee and the same amount to everyone. Because the rich people are just THAT much richer to make up for everyone else.
I know I've read some articles (none that I can find to confirm my memory) where some of the smaller gacha games with a few tens of thousands of players run fully on the pockets of a few hundred people, if that.
Do you feel happy with your purchases still? Is there any buyer's remorse? I'm interested to know how many people who weren't obviously exploited and could afford to spend hundreds or thousands on these games feel honestly satisfied with their purchases and wouldn't in retrospect have preferred to use that money for something else.
I have gone too far once or twice (out of hundreds....) where I felt bad about it. I've felt the same way about a major renovation once too though. It happens.
The key is in your last sentence: "wouldn't in retrospect have preferred to use that money for something else."
Unless I went and blew 50k on the game (which I fortunately never did and likely never will!), that's not even a question. Whatever money I'll spend on these, I -still- have to spend on something else. I only spend a tiny fraction of my disposable income. I (and many "whales") just have a LOT of disposable income. Very few people who go and blow 1500 bucks in a night on these actually empty their bank account (at least from my experience being part of a lot of gacha game communities. I obviously don't talk to all the whales).
I have a kind of "limit" I set myself, with zero expectations. When you blow enough money, statistically the odds of getting what you want are really high. I've gotten really unlucky at times, but usually I'll get what I was whaling for. And sometimes the game shuts down, and it's like, whatever, it happens.
> Whatever money I'll spend on these, I -still- have to spend on something else. I only spend a tiny fraction of my disposable income.
This seems like a strange measure to me. No judgment on how you choose to spend your money - I've certainly spent money on things I later regret, and I've also spent large sums on relatively frivolous things which I don't particularly regret. There's always an opportunity cost though - I could have spent the money on something else, I could have saved more, I could have given more to charity. Over time I try not to repeat the expenditures I regret and focus more on the ones that I don't.
Think of it as going to a fancy restaurant. When you eat a fancy steak, it lasts a few minutes, maybe a few hours if you consider the whole experience, but at the end it goes in the toilet. But you had some enjoyment (well, unless you're vegan). You'd also get enjoyment from a much cheaper burger, too, but sometimes it's fun to do something different, even if the money is lost and you're left with nothing.
It works like that, except you usually still have something for a long time, even though it's digital.
If you don't mind... I'm eager to hear how this is... fun.
I've personally encountered whales in two situations:
One was someone in an MMORPG trading equipment. Okay, I kind of get the skipping work part, especially if the money doesn't matter.
But then there were the logs I've encountered while doing support for a browser based MMO RTS. Players clicking the same few buttons to get a small fixed amount of resources. Over and over and over again. Only interrupted to recharge the currency. How can that be satisfying? Just the "work" alone seemed demoralizing to me, but then even paying for that?
Have you ever experienced something like this? Is the process of spending enjoyable? Or does the end justify the means, especially for non-random outcomes?
Have you ever dropped a quarter in one of those machines that drop a random toy as a kid? It's exactly the same. You push the button and hope to see rainbows appear, and when they do, it's fun. No, doing it for hours would not be fun (and would be horribly expensive. These transactions can easily run 20 bucks per "pull"). You do a few in a row every now and then.
The fun part (and what distinguish the good gacha games from the bad ones) is how much fun you can have with what you get. Some feel like the transactions and the gambling is the end goal. You play to get currency to get random stuff. Boring.
The problem, is how do you identify which of your "whales" (industry term, and useful to identify the mindset of the industry) legitimately have that extra disposable income, and which of them are maxing out credit cards and spending money they don't have?
We have "qualified investors" for the worldwide casino that is the equities market, to ensure you can't gamble more as an early investor than you could afford to lose.
Any adult in the US can invest in equities. The equities just have to be listed and approved. It is all the other type of equity investing (angle, VC, etc) that you are not allowed to do (and where all the growth is moving to) if you are not a "qualified investor".
I believe a time will come where these game types are recognized in many places as fundamentally evil for their psychological manipulation of children.
Education is a defense. Once a person is aware of the psychological dark patterns being used against them, they start becoming less susceptible. Whether it's by video games, salesmen, politicians, etc. education is the best defense.
Agreed, but that doesn't mean it's easy. For one, there's so many dark patterns and bad actors in so many sectors of your life. I might be aware of the 80% of stuff that's happening (and hopefully it's the most likely 80%) but I'm not aware of that other 20% and there's always new bad things that come up. It's a constant battle, and many people just don't have the bandwidth to keep up.
I'm guessing this is why Apple decided to release their Apple Arcade subscription product [0].
Parents could buy the subscription and know that their kids would have access to quality games that don't employ these dirty mechanics and work off-line, with no ads.
I think the subscription will do well for this one reason alone.
what's wrong with apple and their understanding of reality? every single time they trying to do something, they claim they are the first who are doing it, when they literally did not do anything ever the first time. or maybe they don't understand the word 'first'?
I stopped playing not long after they raised the star cap to 13. I had nearly a full 13 star team, and had spent $11000 on the game, half of which was after I was laid off from my job. At one point I was the strongest player on my server (S6), already a competitive server (See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l3y6zOJtUM). There were people who had spent 3-5x as much as me and were still weaker because of suboptimal gameplay, but they could always spend more to catch up. This is not a brag, but rather an illustration of how rivalry between players at the top can be one of the strongest ways to motivate them to fork over more money. The amount of peer pressure from my clan leader to keep buying was insane. Eventually I told him I couldn't do it anymore.
It was fun for awhile but I am still shocked that I still spent thousands of dollars that I really needed at a later time. I fault myself more than the game's system for those decisions. Sometimes one can forget the value of money until once again experiencing the effects of not having it.
A lot of young professionals are making more money than they really need, and with the perception that they won't need it in the future. Therefore, there's a lot of people out there taking it for granted, and therefore not making it a second thought to spend on these pay to win mobile games. If you were to take away these mobile games, then this class of people would find some other equally stupid way to waste their money. In western society, there will never be a shortage of those possibilities.
I just had to stop playing this game because I was basically making no progress every day. It became less enjoyable and more of a chore every 10 hours.
* Progress can be gauged by how far a team of heroes you construct can proceed in the "single player" stages of the game. Getting further into the single player campaign dictates how much experience/gold you will earn when not playing the game.
* In order to make progress, you need to upgrade a full team of six heroes.
* Not all heroes are equal and are graded on a scale of stars from 1 to 10, with 1 being the absolute worst and 10 being the best.
* The best heroes start at a star rating of 5 (I will call them 5* to mean "5-star" and so on). In order to upgrade a hero to 6* and beyond, you need a second copy of that hero and 3 additional 5* heroes of the same faction color to promote it to 6.
The drop-rate of getting 5* hero copies is very low across most opportunities. You can "summon" heroes from scrolls purchased with real-world-money, but the odds are very low here. There are also "prophet orbs", but these orbs are very rare and hard to attain more than one of them per day.
* There are many 5* units in the game, and gameplay-balance wise, not all of them are even remotely good in the later parts of the game. There's two tier-lists mainted: one for player-vs-player, the other for player-vs-monster. If you get a 5* hero unlock and it's not on that list, it's junk and is only used as food for building your 6+ characters.
There are ways to speed up the progress with money, but you will pay an arm and a leg to make about 1/6th of a dent in fully leveling a character. You'll be lucky if $100 USD gets you an inch.
It's very much a lootbox casino game hidden behind an RPG-style idle game. I played it for about a month and I was unable to hit level 90 in time to get a second copy of one of the highest-rated characters in the game (Heart Watcher), so it felt very frustrating and not very enjoyable afterwards.
Hundreds of dollars is really not very much for many paying players to spend on these types of games. That would typically be considered a "casual" player which is just barely above a free-to-play player in terms of importance to the developers.
The game made an interesting decision that both you and the article completely missed.
A significant portion of the progress players is available via events.
Weekly and monthly events. Events on a rotating schedule give you bonuses for using each metagame system to the fullest.
Examples:
- monthly Tavern complete X # of quests for guaranteed rewards
- monthly fight X # of times in PVP for guaranteed rewards
- monthly PVE battle for guaranteed rewards
- weekly gacha summon - summon 500. During this event likelihood of 5* is doubled and guaranteed rewards
- weekly random gem boxes
- weekly blacksmith event
- weekly campaign loot event - guaranteed 5* for logging in
Utilizing these events to the fullest separates the long-term players from short-term players.
Wasting $$ outside of these events is not recommended.
This turns the game back into a fair amount of idling as you collect the resources to fill each event and wait for the right opportunity to utilize them. Then you often get major boosts of power and multiple copies of high rated characters.
So a single month of playing is barely enough to make it through one rotation and probably not enough to utilize any of them.
It's interesting to see the same people who lambast Farmville get addicted to a game like this.
It's like how Fortnite figured out how to get boys interested in dressing up their virtual Barbies so much that players use "noskin" in a derogatory manner.
In CSGO, your skins are a direct representation of how good you are. This is fact. If you spent 1k on a Dragonlore, you're one of the best AWPers in your region, hands down.
As someone who drunkenly bought 10 keys and unboxed gloves I can confirm. I'm now competing at a much higher level.
Seriously though I think the loot box model is ethically wrong. However, I don't believe it's wrong to offer skins for sale - this is no different than people wearing different brands of clothing when they compete in sports
I unboxed a knife and turned that into 2 knives and a pair of gloves. I am solidly in GN, but I do wonder if I had that better knife if I would be Global.
But, I completely agree. And whats worse is that Valve has done little to combat the darkest side of this industry, such as the 'futures' and stuff like that. Every CSGO video has an ad for some gambling site, and major events are sponsored by these companies.
The only part I like about the skins in CSGO is that you can actually 'own' the skin to a degree and make real money on it. But because of that, CSGO might also have one of the most predatory skin communities in all of gaming.
I would say spending money on games like Idle Heroes is fundamentally different than spending money on cosmetics. In Idle Heroes you literally need to spend money in order to progress and it's a deceiving feeling. Fortnite or skins are not comparable.
Idk, in quake and other games, you had servers forcing no skins. Damn no-skin no-model, rail gun jousting boxes were utterly frustrating but darned fun to play on.
This is a really weird change. I guess monetarily expected. Eh.
"There are more stat checks in the game and to get better in those stats you need to engage with the metasystems and monetize because the grind is so painful."
A game that's optimized for monetization over fun is not the kind of game I want to play.
I can't believe this is the ONLY sentence in the article that directly addresses HOW the game even monetizes to begin with. So much for "How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year".
I had no idea what 'autobattle', 'heroes charge', 'idle game' meant, and wonder what exactly gets people interested in games of this kind.
It doesn't even look like a game in the traditional sense at all - for enjoyment / fulfillment / fun. More like a colorful spreadsheet, with cheap visuals and not even mechanical skill. 'Gameplay' videos on youtube show people flipping cards and clicking through a dozen inventory management screens, nothing really happens. Really puzzling.
As an avid fan of very complex board games and a player in an "advanced stat" fantasy baseball league, I can promise you that long term grinding using spread sheets and optimization trees is fun for some people.
You play <name of FPS de jour> to show off fast twitch muscle memory, but you play games like this to show a different sort of ability. Perseverance? Intellect? I'm not sure what it is for each person specifically, but they can be fun.
If you want to get a taste with a quality game that doesn't prey on people with IAP, check out Kittens Game.[1]
You can play free online. I paid $2 one-time fee to play on my phone. There's a vibrant community on /r/kittensgame on Reddit and the dev is active there.
It is also arguably one of the most well-done idle/incremental games I've played after playing a few. The depth of it is jaw-dropping once you really start getting into the mechanics of late stage play, and you'll hit several points along the way where you think you are there only to find out everything you've been working on gets abstracted away into new growth concept that becomes critical to the next stage.
Oh, I can get behind that, played paperclips and it was pretty fun. For some reason the addition of [flash-era like] graphics on these mobile games turns me off completely.
Eh...a lot of things that seem like they should be relatively stupid on the surface are loved and revered, maybe even enjoyable. I still don't get why people pour so much over baseball statistics, but clearly its an enjoyable pastime for many.
Some other sources of fun to mull over: Tamogatchis, fantasy football, pulling a lever on a slot machine.
I spent more time playing Adventure Capitalist than I'm really willing to admit to, but despite being an idle game I have to admit it has a fun core game loop that rewards you for checking in on it occasionally. I don't really recommend that game, since its ultimately a huge waste of time, but I'll just admit that it was fun while it lasted.
When I played Universal Paperclip I realized that the whole idle game genre has a lot of untapped potential. That game has neat shifts in gameplay as well as a story arc that ends in a pretty satisfying way. http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The top tier players are an order of magnitude more powerful, but that costs thousands of dollars. And, on top of that, this gap can be crossed with about a year of play, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I’m fine being top 95% rather than top 99%. In both games I have reached a point where I not only am fully capable, but am fully capable with tons of resources that would otherwise cost lots of money and I simply haven’t used because the value props of events people are lured into are deceptively low.
I like these games, because they offer a small amount of tasks to do and a super long term scale sense of progression to plan out. It’s not pay to win, it’s pay to win quickly. You can beat everything freely without much trouble (or course other games won’t be so generous perhaps. I would guess idle heroes to be more of a financial grind)
For something like Fire Emblem I don’t think so as spending was neither required nor especially important for clearing all of the game’s content.
Although one observation I had was that money was used as a crutch by bad players who incorrectly assumed it was necessary. It’s a turn based strategy game with relatively little entropy so a lot of it is skill. A smart player would think about positioning and how to safely take out enemies. Dumber players were fond of saying how they favored defensive builds, or in other words, creating units that were strong enough to stand there and win on counter attacks. The issue with this was that as the game ramped up in difficulty this would gradually get more difficult to accomplish. So if you refuse to play the game intelligently you have to try to upgrade your characters with cash.
But then after a while you hit a wall where your characters are maximally strong (which is less than 10% better stats no matter how much you spend), you’re _still_ not going to be strong enough to handle the hardest content without playing smart.
So... money can help you get through the first 80% of content, but it won’t be enough and is not required for the last 20%... but then is required again for the side bit of absolute top tier pvp.
From a game design, I actually think this looks pretty healthy for the game’s integrity. Not the gambling habits it induces.
I agree. And again, if you spend serious cash, you can make your characters top tier. FEH has a vague PVP leaderboard so naturally those with the top tier units take the top tier slots on it. But if you’re not interested in invisible status seeking it’s pretty pointless
Many successful games can be reduced to a slot machine, even games that have a lot of solid gameplay or even outlets for creativity. The central mechanism of Minecraft is mining. Mining is repeatedly punching through rocks hoping that you'll get something cool behind the next rock.
All human processes can be reduced to slot machines if you go abstract enough. By extension that includes all games.
My criticism was that what this make the exchange so blatantly abusive. All those psychological mechanisms to "ensure engagement" and "pursue the whales" (or whatever soft term they come up for them) ... makes me sick.
I actually think I prefer a slot machine to this. It is less dishonest.
A psychologist I have worked with on a human performance assessment programme and I have spoken at length about things like the ethics of psychologists working on gambling/gaming machines with their vastly increased potential for amygdala hijacking and behavioural nudging.
There will always be trained and capable folks willing to cash a big paycheque or justify unethical professional behaviour to further their objectives.
I think open frank discussion and resilience built within families and cohorts of friends is the best defence.
No one is immune.
But a small team based approach might be useful.
The concept of digital nutrition and labelling sounds promising:
reply