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Let me guess
Parents need to do their fucking jobs.
These gaming companies (parasites) need to lose all their IP protections.
This doesn't surprise me. If I hear stories of some of my teenager son's classmates it sounds realistic. The other day one of his mates spent 20k in an arcade on claw machines in a single afternoon. He "won" like 4-5 massive plush dolls, and had to hide them at our place to avoid parental wrath. Can buy them for 2000jpy incl shipping on aliexpress.
Some of his friends spent their entire allowance and more on fortnite every month. Parental failure imo. Parents should teach their kids the value of things...
I wouldn't mind microtransactions, gacha games and gacha mechanics if there were sane upper limits to spend.
I was trying to learn how different gacha games work and monetization in f2p games in general, especially obes for smartphones.
I was surprised about how similar all the methods across games are. Some were a lot worse than others though.
I think the monetization method is sometimes viewed as acceptable by some, because the games often have a lot of content and can be a lot of fun to play. The thing I really dislike is that it's unfairly monetized. Some people pay the majority of the income, they are also known as whales. There are of course some people that spend small sums, but the whales is where it is at.
After Arcade games went out of fashion we had a nice long period in which players paid about the same for a game, and got the same experience.
Now vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone, and still everone gets a limited experience.
Some of the games I enjoyed the most had terrible gacha mechanics. One of them had items and mounts with 1/500 chance per pull. Of course it is designed so that it appears as 1/10, but it is really 1/500. To justify this they had the PITY system. Yes, thats the actual name of it. The pity system makes it so that after buying 500 pulls ypu are guaranteed the mount.
The price for 500 pulls? 500$
After the free pulls you could play to get, about 480$.
So I actually can't get the entire game for even 500$..
That was just one of many such instances. I could probably spend more than 10 000$ and still not unlock absolutely everything.
Was it purely cosmetic? Nope. It gave an advantage too.
Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.
vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone
Well said. I think a lot of things in the world work like this, unfortunately. Like, some people have to work long hours or hard jobs because they didn't choose a career path that would allow them to work less and earn more. I mean, it sounds very different, but it's also kinda similar in a way. There are people suffering for the benefit of other people. Saying they could choose another job is the same as saying vulnerable people could choose to not be vulnerable.
Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.
Agree, this is a great idea.
Anyone into Genshin here? When do you think the urge to spend a lot starts? I'm AR19 now, I rolled 2 characters from 20 basic wishes (Noelle and Collei), and I think I have enough crystals and primos for maybe 10-20 wishes more which is likely to yield yet another 2 characters (or more if I'm lucky). At this point, I still have no clue when I should start wanting to spend real money. There seems to be so much content to earn primos and everything else I need organically.
I haven't played Genshin in a couple of years but it's definitely one of the better ones from what I've seen. I played through f2p until I had a sense of the game and was confident in the content and monetization model. After that I did spend whatever it was, five bucks(?), for the "battle pass" but honestly as long as you have the time to grind then Genshin is fairly non-invasive. That grind is why I quit though, the end game was a slog.
In my experience, the urge only begins once you've completed the entire openworld and run out of content other than the endgame dungeons (spiral abyss, imaginarium theater). You have a long way to go before that point.
I did play a lot a couple years ago completely f2p and in the late game the artifact farming gets really bad, to the point that you farm for weeks for one character. It's not necessary to clear the story (at least in the past) but in the late abyss is mandatory and it kills any will to try off-meta/more fun builds. Still a lot of fun if you play casually.
I only really ever got the urge to spend when I lost a 50/50 for a favorite limited banner character. I stopped playing and hopped to another game instead though, eheh
1000 people is statistically shit.
This is why we really need a system where people can spend their whole paycheck and still be fine.
I do believe people should have the right to spent their money however the f they want, but this becomes extremely problematic if you don't at least regulate their spending behavior, either directly or indirectly.
So okay, now you have a society full of hopeless addicts, but at least nobody has to starve. Sound kinda... dystopian if you ask me
I really don't think everyone is not an addict because of lack of opportunity. If anything I would say many addicts arise from an attempt to escape a reality that does not meet their needs.