I truly hate the F2P mobile gaming industry. Clone a quality (and reasonably priced) PC game, add dark patterns and microtransactions, then make money hand over fist by taking advantage of people like this.
FOMO marketing, gambling mechanics, and unrepresentative ads really need to get self-regulated by the app stores, otherwise it's going to become necessary to legislate this.
Self regulation for industries does not work. On the more serious side we have Boeing, which is allowed to self regulate. We see the results.
Mobile game industry have conferences, and these conferences have talks, panels and tracks for monetization and loyalty.
Do you believe that an industry hell bent on monetization can self regulate?
Of course, not all industry players are bad. There are better, ethical brands. On the other hand, industry is so big now, The Tragedy of Commons applies to it. If some studios refrain themselves from abusing players, at least one other studio will.
I think Apple Arcade is a good compromise for high quality gaming access.
In game purchases are banned. Games can't track you as heavily, so they are lighter on your device. They are some genuinely good games, and you pay with your wallet and play time.
I don't like ads and to be nudged to purchase stuff to be able to kill some time. Game developers need a roof, the ability to pay their bills and eat.
Also, it's a universal membership. macOS and iOS games are all included.
I wonder what would happen if the app stores posted info on the app page like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year". Would that do anything to help people avoid getting into this form of quasi-gambling?
> like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year"
The top 1% don’t spend nearly that much. The number of people spending eye-popping amounts is relatively small. You have to get deep into the long tail before it gets into the hundreds or thousands.
Posting these numbers might have the opposite effect: Players who spend a lot of money want to be at the top of leaderboards. If they saw what the 1% were spending they might convince themselves that not only is it okay to spend that much, but that they need to spend even more.
I think what would help is that any F2P game was mandated to never cost more than $x/year to be listed in the app store, and possibly have different tiers that a game could decide to be in ($10/$100/$1000) based on the maximum yearly spend. The game also should prominently display the total spend per year, and lifetime, every time it is launched.
Although I do not like F2P for all the dark patterns (which have infiltrated non-F2P as well unfortunately) if it was capped to a reasonable maximum amount a year, with no player to player trading at all, and no multiple accounts for the same store account, it might could be made to not be as predatory while still keeping it financially sustainable for the companies that produce the games.
> I’ve struggled with gambling issues in the past, and the more I look at this, the more it feels like the same pattern playing out again
This is a common theme: Someone has a recognized gambling problem, but they don’t realize that a game like this is feeding their gambling habit.
A similar thing happens with stock trading apps like RobinHood: People who know they have a gambling addiction don’t recognize (or won’t admit) that their usage patterns are just gambling in a different format. These are the stories that end up on /r/wallstreetbets where someone traded their $30K account down to $20 through options trading before they admitted that they had a problem.
A lot of "strange" economic situations ultimately boil down to whale hunting being the primary monetization model for a space. For example:
Vegas is notorious for this: especially in the past, for a person with a healthy relationship with gambling, Vegas was a really cheap vacation. Getting there's cheap relative to getting anywhere else in North America, hotel rooms were like half what you'd pay for an equivalent room elsewhere, and a lot of the entertainment was not terribly expensive. Turns out a couple of people dropping millions justifies losing money on a lot of guests.
There are a lot of mobile games that are ad supported. What are they advertising? Other mobile games. That seems weird, you don't normally see places advertising their competitors. Then you realize that the first game effectively is acting as part of the funnel for games more optimized for separating whales from large amounts of money. Your sudoku app probably doesn't have the ability to convince people to give them $10,000, but an ad here and there might push users towards base-builders and the ilk that can.
I suspect most advertising is a whale hunting game. There's no world where I go and buy a new car because I saw a YouTube ad for one. But if showing a 10 cent ad to 100,000 people causes 1 person buy the advertiser's truck with a $10,000+ margin versus their competitors', they're in the black.
I feel like we’re in an era of dark monetization patterns. This “whale” monetization reminds me of online advertising where if you aren’t paying you’re the product.
It isn’t quite the same but it’s something like, “if you aren’t paying, you’re incentivizing whales.”
Underneath all the darkness a business has to make money. People are voting with time and money that the whale strategy is optimal just like they vote with time and money that advertising is optimal.
I don’t know what to do about this all. It seems like it’s just a shitty fact of human nature.
Everybody in mobile gaming and gambling industries acknowledges that “whales” are mentally sick people with addiction issues, but if you don’t capture and monetize whales, your competitor will. Your game dev studio will dwindle over years until investors drain it dry, while your competitor builds private kindergartens and schools for their employees’ children in their third worldwide campus location.
I played this game briefly and jumped before I got hooked. It's a game of progressively longer timers, resource crunches and anything to make you feel stuck so you will spend. What's more, it's not fun, imho.
It still shocks me how we all look for time sinks when we have so much we could be doing. I'm no better.
I had a similar experience on a smaller scale (but it was huge to me). Spent around $300 on a mobile game that was on top the charts at the time. Before that I didn't think I was the type of person who could fall prey to such a thing. A bigger mistake was thinking that there was "a type of person". (Or maybe there is and I'm in denial!)
It was humbling to realize how warped and blind I became.
Had to google it, but the game was Game of War: Fire Age. At the time they had a gambling mechanic where you'd buy chest with say 1000 gems and, for a time, it would be guaranteed to grant you well over 1000 gems. That hooked me and I felt really smart. Then they set the real plan into action --gradually and silently nerfing the payouts. And I played right into it, spending a little more and a little more to keep up. This was 2018, or so, I think.
So, for me, it was my pride and ego combined with seeing a rise in leaderboards and esteem in my clan that hooked me.
The core game mechanic was one where everything you built up would be utterly destroyed by someone much stronger every day or two, but you'd be left with just enough that you felt like you could rebuild and get stronger. And just another IAP or two would prevent it from happening again. It would help, but it only meant that you were an even juicier target for an even bigger whale.
The game was slick, but not too slick. It had some rough UI elements which perversely made me less alert to how well-engineered the IAP psychology was.
Not just such a guy exists. The business model of these games almost totally rely on these people to be profitable. When you spend any time thinking about this at all it's totally unethical. It would be trivial for them to put a simple spend cap in. Sorry, no matter how into this game you are you can't spend more than $1,000 in a year, or $100 in a day. That would make them tonnes of money and prevent most people making life changing mistakes. But they don't do that because their entire business plan relies on getting hundreds of thousands out of these players.
It's the typical extremely biased mobile game (Frostpunk clone in this case), where the imbalance can only be fixed by spending a lot of money.
It's counterintuitive but the article almost reads like a promotion piece. The game is so good it can get you to spend that much money. But most gamers wouldn't fall for this would they? Maybe some of them try. If a few people hear of the game and play it because of the shocking title and curiosity that's a win.
But is it actually that good? If it is, it may be worth it. I assume it's one of those games where you need to upgrade buildings, and it takes longer and longer? In that case I am disappointed.
If you ask me, no computer game is "$30k good". But the post in the submission made you wonder and I bet that was the purpose. Promotion and "no such thing as bad publicity".
It's a pity. Computer games is something where you can make anything happen, and if done well, players could get really invested and be able to experience things they would never be able to experience IRL. It saddens me that the gaming industry isn't doing very well IMO.
You can make just about anything happen in meatspace if you're willing to piss away thirty grand in 6 months. That a purely entertainment budget of over $1,000 a week. You could fly to anywhere in the world for the weekend. You could do an irresponsible amount of cocaine. Throw lavish parties. Fund a pretty respectable gambling habit (it's like microtransactions, but they sometimes give you your money back!). Buy yourself a gun collection. Alternate between all of the above!
Go play Rust with a group of people, wage war against another group. It's extremely fun when everyone involved is really passionate and invested. You can't get that feeling out of any deadly sin.
Maybe I'm a lover not a fighter, but I can think of several activities to do with "passionate and involved" people that are dramatically more fun than swinging virtual rocks at virtual walls.
Don't get me wrong: I do not have a 60k a year entertainment budget. I get plenty of kicks out of my well-coordinated Squad gameplay with my friends. But thinking it's how I'd best be spending $1000 a week for maximum enjoyment? Absolutely not.
If there's a game that all of a sudden makes people enjoy it that much that they'd spend $30k on it as the rule not the exception, I'll be very worried that those people will retreat in the game from real life. It would go way beyond "I spent 10h straight playing GTA because I can do so much stuff in the game".
$30.000 is a lot of money anywhere in the world so it takes a lot to make a balanced person dish this kind of money for a game. Most of the world's population doesn't have $30k as their entire wealth.
> I spent 10h straight playing GTA because I can do so much stuff in the game
Think bigger. Any single player game is not what I am talking about. You can only feel superior to others, etc, in multi-player competitive games like Counter Strike (where, I'm sure, lots of people spend a lot of money on in-game items already). I think that real life is the ultimate game of this kind, but it is not always fun because you only have one life you can receive punishment like going to jail, etc, so there is a limit to what you can realistically do and what you can experience. I think of real life as a sort of a lobby between computer games.
And this is why even with all the calls on gambling I hate Valve's model on CS2 and TF2 lot less. At least you might be able to extract some money in one form or other. Instead of all of it being just gone.
So many criticize gambling when the same patterns pop up in so many other places. I would argue gambling is far more ethical considering the odds are posted and the systems are regulated, with the ability to self exclude.
F2P games and loot boxes are just unregulated black-box gambling. And beyond that, the people who implement dark patterns in so many things, would certainly increase their morality if they switched to building slot machines. Terrible
It seems like the mobile ecosystem is the most user-exploitative of all software ecosystems.
Outside apps for accessing useful services or doing work, everything seems designed to addict, manipulate, or drain bank accounts: most games, social media doom-scrollers, payday loan in your pocket apps, crypto and stock trading apps that are built like casino games on purpose, and now sports betting.
Everything is also loaded with as much spyware as possible, and given that it's a phone and users say 'yes' to permissions it can often do very invasive things like track the user's location in real time.
> Outside apps for accessing useful services or doing work, everything seems designed to addict, manipulate, or drain bank accounts: most games, social media doom-scrollers, payday loan in your pocket apps, crypto and stock trading apps that are built like casino games on purpose, and now sports betting.
You just described the work of a better half of this forum, don't expect much sympathies. Of course most will say they don't / didn't work on the evil part like it somehow actually matters.
Last I checked it's trivial to not spend your time and/or money on such stupid apps.
checks his pixel 8a yep, there's no games installed here
The amount of people in both this and the reddit thread treating the poster like some minor without responsibility for their actions is pathetic.
This is a grown ass adult pissing their time and money away on mobile games. Then when they realize how totally reckless they've been, seek a f*cking refund? And people are calling for laws protecting this grown ass adult from themselves? We're clearly not talking about some eight year old people.
Quit expecting some nanny state to do your adulting for you and grow the fuck up.
It doesn't have to be either-or. We can expect grown adults to control their behavior, while at the same time deciding as a society that there are some industries/products that are harmful enough, and without any beneficial effects to offset that harm, that we just don't want them around tempting people who might have a weakness for them.
We already do that with lots of things, from hard drugs to prostitution to owning your own nuclear weapons. Some of us may disagree with some of those laws, but unless you're the most extreme libertarian who ever doffed a fedora, there's probably something that you'd say shouldn't be accessible to every random adult capable of poking at a phone.
I truly hate the F2P mobile gaming industry. Clone a quality (and reasonably priced) PC game, add dark patterns and microtransactions, then make money hand over fist by taking advantage of people like this.
FOMO marketing, gambling mechanics, and unrepresentative ads really need to get self-regulated by the app stores, otherwise it's going to become necessary to legislate this.
The online gambling industry sees people spend huge amounts of time and effort on regulations and their requirements.
F2P games need the same regulation, if not more given that kids are targeted.
> need to get self-regulated by the app stores...
Self regulation for industries does not work. On the more serious side we have Boeing, which is allowed to self regulate. We see the results.
Mobile game industry have conferences, and these conferences have talks, panels and tracks for monetization and loyalty.
Do you believe that an industry hell bent on monetization can self regulate?
Of course, not all industry players are bad. There are better, ethical brands. On the other hand, industry is so big now, The Tragedy of Commons applies to it. If some studios refrain themselves from abusing players, at least one other studio will.
[dead]
I think Apple Arcade is a good compromise for high quality gaming access.
In game purchases are banned. Games can't track you as heavily, so they are lighter on your device. They are some genuinely good games, and you pay with your wallet and play time.
I don't like ads and to be nudged to purchase stuff to be able to kill some time. Game developers need a roof, the ability to pay their bills and eat.
Also, it's a universal membership. macOS and iOS games are all included.
I wonder what would happen if the app stores posted info on the app page like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year". Would that do anything to help people avoid getting into this form of quasi-gambling?
Except both apple and Google earn a cut on revenue so they don't have any interest in stopping the money flow.
> like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year"
The top 1% don’t spend nearly that much. The number of people spending eye-popping amounts is relatively small. You have to get deep into the long tail before it gets into the hundreds or thousands.
Posting these numbers might have the opposite effect: Players who spend a lot of money want to be at the top of leaderboards. If they saw what the 1% were spending they might convince themselves that not only is it okay to spend that much, but that they need to spend even more.
I think what would help is that any F2P game was mandated to never cost more than $x/year to be listed in the app store, and possibly have different tiers that a game could decide to be in ($10/$100/$1000) based on the maximum yearly spend. The game also should prominently display the total spend per year, and lifetime, every time it is launched.
Although I do not like F2P for all the dark patterns (which have infiltrated non-F2P as well unfortunately) if it was capped to a reasonable maximum amount a year, with no player to player trading at all, and no multiple accounts for the same store account, it might could be made to not be as predatory while still keeping it financially sustainable for the companies that produce the games.
So a statistic only for whales? Whale players have a tendency to spend no matter the game.
I love this idea. I think it would be useful for all app categories, not just games.
> I’ve struggled with gambling issues in the past, and the more I look at this, the more it feels like the same pattern playing out again
This is a common theme: Someone has a recognized gambling problem, but they don’t realize that a game like this is feeding their gambling habit.
A similar thing happens with stock trading apps like RobinHood: People who know they have a gambling addiction don’t recognize (or won’t admit) that their usage patterns are just gambling in a different format. These are the stories that end up on /r/wallstreetbets where someone traded their $30K account down to $20 through options trading before they admitted that they had a problem.
Such people are called “whales” in mobile gaming industry, they pay all the game developers’ salaries, they are the reason for many private jets.
A lot of "strange" economic situations ultimately boil down to whale hunting being the primary monetization model for a space. For example:
Vegas is notorious for this: especially in the past, for a person with a healthy relationship with gambling, Vegas was a really cheap vacation. Getting there's cheap relative to getting anywhere else in North America, hotel rooms were like half what you'd pay for an equivalent room elsewhere, and a lot of the entertainment was not terribly expensive. Turns out a couple of people dropping millions justifies losing money on a lot of guests.
There are a lot of mobile games that are ad supported. What are they advertising? Other mobile games. That seems weird, you don't normally see places advertising their competitors. Then you realize that the first game effectively is acting as part of the funnel for games more optimized for separating whales from large amounts of money. Your sudoku app probably doesn't have the ability to convince people to give them $10,000, but an ad here and there might push users towards base-builders and the ilk that can.
I suspect most advertising is a whale hunting game. There's no world where I go and buy a new car because I saw a YouTube ad for one. But if showing a 10 cent ad to 100,000 people causes 1 person buy the advertiser's truck with a $10,000+ margin versus their competitors', they're in the black.
I feel like we’re in an era of dark monetization patterns. This “whale” monetization reminds me of online advertising where if you aren’t paying you’re the product.
It isn’t quite the same but it’s something like, “if you aren’t paying, you’re incentivizing whales.”
Underneath all the darkness a business has to make money. People are voting with time and money that the whale strategy is optimal just like they vote with time and money that advertising is optimal.
I don’t know what to do about this all. It seems like it’s just a shitty fact of human nature.
Everybody in mobile gaming and gambling industries acknowledges that “whales” are mentally sick people with addiction issues, but if you don’t capture and monetize whales, your competitor will. Your game dev studio will dwindle over years until investors drain it dry, while your competitor builds private kindergartens and schools for their employees’ children in their third worldwide campus location.
I played this game briefly and jumped before I got hooked. It's a game of progressively longer timers, resource crunches and anything to make you feel stuck so you will spend. What's more, it's not fun, imho.
It still shocks me how we all look for time sinks when we have so much we could be doing. I'm no better.
Also speedrunning through life like that, the only life we will ever get. "killing time" = killing yourself
That game developer has quite the catalog:
https://www.centurygames.com/games/
Insert coin(s) to continue. 29, 28, 27…
I had a similar experience on a smaller scale (but it was huge to me). Spent around $300 on a mobile game that was on top the charts at the time. Before that I didn't think I was the type of person who could fall prey to such a thing. A bigger mistake was thinking that there was "a type of person". (Or maybe there is and I'm in denial!)
It was humbling to realize how warped and blind I became.
Had to google it, but the game was Game of War: Fire Age. At the time they had a gambling mechanic where you'd buy chest with say 1000 gems and, for a time, it would be guaranteed to grant you well over 1000 gems. That hooked me and I felt really smart. Then they set the real plan into action --gradually and silently nerfing the payouts. And I played right into it, spending a little more and a little more to keep up. This was 2018, or so, I think.
So, for me, it was my pride and ego combined with seeing a rise in leaderboards and esteem in my clan that hooked me.
The core game mechanic was one where everything you built up would be utterly destroyed by someone much stronger every day or two, but you'd be left with just enough that you felt like you could rebuild and get stronger. And just another IAP or two would prevent it from happening again. It would help, but it only meant that you were an even juicier target for an even bigger whale.
The game was slick, but not too slick. It had some rough UI elements which perversely made me less alert to how well-engineered the IAP psychology was.
> A bigger mistake was thinking that there was "a type of person". (Or maybe there is and I'm in denial!)
It's the second one. Only 3.5% of players spend anything on freemium games. A significantly smaller fraction of players spend over $100.
Unbelievable, but such guys exist in nearly every game.
Not just such a guy exists. The business model of these games almost totally rely on these people to be profitable. When you spend any time thinking about this at all it's totally unethical. It would be trivial for them to put a simple spend cap in. Sorry, no matter how into this game you are you can't spend more than $1,000 in a year, or $100 in a day. That would make them tonnes of money and prevent most people making life changing mistakes. But they don't do that because their entire business plan relies on getting hundreds of thousands out of these players.
What is special about Whiteout Survival?
It's not a bad game, I played for about a year in a relatively well run clan. Never spent any money on it though.
It's the typical extremely biased mobile game (Frostpunk clone in this case), where the imbalance can only be fixed by spending a lot of money.
It's counterintuitive but the article almost reads like a promotion piece. The game is so good it can get you to spend that much money. But most gamers wouldn't fall for this would they? Maybe some of them try. If a few people hear of the game and play it because of the shocking title and curiosity that's a win.
But is it actually that good? If it is, it may be worth it. I assume it's one of those games where you need to upgrade buildings, and it takes longer and longer? In that case I am disappointed.
>But is it actually that good? If it is, it may be worth it
TF? Worth $31k? Nice try centurygames
I dunno, I would never spend that much but I can see a difference between E.G. Eve Online and mobile slop.
> But is it actually that good?
If you ask me, no computer game is "$30k good". But the post in the submission made you wonder and I bet that was the purpose. Promotion and "no such thing as bad publicity".
> If you ask me, no computer game is "$30k good"
It's a pity. Computer games is something where you can make anything happen, and if done well, players could get really invested and be able to experience things they would never be able to experience IRL. It saddens me that the gaming industry isn't doing very well IMO.
You can make just about anything happen in meatspace if you're willing to piss away thirty grand in 6 months. That a purely entertainment budget of over $1,000 a week. You could fly to anywhere in the world for the weekend. You could do an irresponsible amount of cocaine. Throw lavish parties. Fund a pretty respectable gambling habit (it's like microtransactions, but they sometimes give you your money back!). Buy yourself a gun collection. Alternate between all of the above!
Go play Rust with a group of people, wage war against another group. It's extremely fun when everyone involved is really passionate and invested. You can't get that feeling out of any deadly sin.
Maybe I'm a lover not a fighter, but I can think of several activities to do with "passionate and involved" people that are dramatically more fun than swinging virtual rocks at virtual walls.
Don't get me wrong: I do not have a 60k a year entertainment budget. I get plenty of kicks out of my well-coordinated Squad gameplay with my friends. But thinking it's how I'd best be spending $1000 a week for maximum enjoyment? Absolutely not.
> It's a pity
If there's a game that all of a sudden makes people enjoy it that much that they'd spend $30k on it as the rule not the exception, I'll be very worried that those people will retreat in the game from real life. It would go way beyond "I spent 10h straight playing GTA because I can do so much stuff in the game".
$30.000 is a lot of money anywhere in the world so it takes a lot to make a balanced person dish this kind of money for a game. Most of the world's population doesn't have $30k as their entire wealth.
> I spent 10h straight playing GTA because I can do so much stuff in the game
Think bigger. Any single player game is not what I am talking about. You can only feel superior to others, etc, in multi-player competitive games like Counter Strike (where, I'm sure, lots of people spend a lot of money on in-game items already). I think that real life is the ultimate game of this kind, but it is not always fun because you only have one life you can receive punishment like going to jail, etc, so there is a limit to what you can realistically do and what you can experience. I think of real life as a sort of a lobby between computer games.
pay to win is cancer.
And this is why even with all the calls on gambling I hate Valve's model on CS2 and TF2 lot less. At least you might be able to extract some money in one form or other. Instead of all of it being just gone.
Clickbait. I thought he was getting ready for The Day After Tomorrow.
So many criticize gambling when the same patterns pop up in so many other places. I would argue gambling is far more ethical considering the odds are posted and the systems are regulated, with the ability to self exclude.
F2P games and loot boxes are just unregulated black-box gambling. And beyond that, the people who implement dark patterns in so many things, would certainly increase their morality if they switched to building slot machines. Terrible
It seems like the mobile ecosystem is the most user-exploitative of all software ecosystems.
Outside apps for accessing useful services or doing work, everything seems designed to addict, manipulate, or drain bank accounts: most games, social media doom-scrollers, payday loan in your pocket apps, crypto and stock trading apps that are built like casino games on purpose, and now sports betting.
Everything is also loaded with as much spyware as possible, and given that it's a phone and users say 'yes' to permissions it can often do very invasive things like track the user's location in real time.
> Outside apps for accessing useful services or doing work, everything seems designed to addict, manipulate, or drain bank accounts: most games, social media doom-scrollers, payday loan in your pocket apps, crypto and stock trading apps that are built like casino games on purpose, and now sports betting.
You just described the work of a better half of this forum, don't expect much sympathies. Of course most will say they don't / didn't work on the evil part like it somehow actually matters.
Last I checked it's trivial to not spend your time and/or money on such stupid apps.
checks his pixel 8a yep, there's no games installed here
The amount of people in both this and the reddit thread treating the poster like some minor without responsibility for their actions is pathetic.
This is a grown ass adult pissing their time and money away on mobile games. Then when they realize how totally reckless they've been, seek a f*cking refund? And people are calling for laws protecting this grown ass adult from themselves? We're clearly not talking about some eight year old people.
Quit expecting some nanny state to do your adulting for you and grow the fuck up.
I'll defer to the late George Carlin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pz8jO2Sht0&t=460s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leWjdWUR_KI&t=85s
It doesn't have to be either-or. We can expect grown adults to control their behavior, while at the same time deciding as a society that there are some industries/products that are harmful enough, and without any beneficial effects to offset that harm, that we just don't want them around tempting people who might have a weakness for them.
We already do that with lots of things, from hard drugs to prostitution to owning your own nuclear weapons. Some of us may disagree with some of those laws, but unless you're the most extreme libertarian who ever doffed a fedora, there's probably something that you'd say shouldn't be accessible to every random adult capable of poking at a phone.
[dead]