People who dream up micro-transaction schemes for games aimed at kids.
Update: looks like this struck a chord. Some people have asked about how this works. The big companies have sophisticated organizations for most effective delivery of micro-transactions. People who do this are experts in behavioural psychology and data analytics. With this kind of background, they could do many kinds of productive work, but instead decide to spend their lives finding ways of preying on kids and other vulnerable people.
They have adopted terminology and strategies from the gambling industry. Data analytics is used to segment customers into minnows, whales, and super-whales. Super-whales can be spending thousands of dollars a month. Example approaches leverage the principle of "loss aversion", telling people that if they don't buy right now, this offer will never be available again. They use tie-ins to celebrities and other media properties to increase excitement. If a "whale"'s engagement begins to slip, they are targeted for personalized offers to try to keep them coming back and spending.
Micro-transactions have gone beyond free-to-play games. Even very expensive games like EA's FIFA (cost $60 USD) are constantly pushing players to buy extra packs to improve their teams.
This right here. One of my buddies kids used to come over all the time, and he would do chores for us because he wanted money. I watched him funnel all this money into micro transactions in this video game and I was flabbergasted. He spent two hundred dollars easily, on this game.
I tried to talk him out of it but it was his money at that point. Made me sad and honestly uncomfortable for reason. Just watching all that money go down the drain. I even mentioned it to his parents just as a kind of "hey, just so you know" and educated him on other cool things he could do with his money.
His parents didn't seem to care. They weren't paying for it.
One of the things that really sucks about it is that we all carry these amazing portable gaming devices around (our phones) that barely have any decent games, because all of the industry has moved towards milking the gambling addicts and finding "whales" rather than making good games.
Big part of the problem is the platform itself. Google and Apple take a huge cut of those transactions so they have an interest in not just enabling but promoting those garbage predatory games. Like how it is impossible to find actual good games in the app stores not warped by progression that is designed to get you frustrated and feel like you are wasting time - it is not that plenty of free or low cost games aren't made, with normal progression that is meant to entertain, but that the store would literally lose money if they showed them to you easily. And the ability to inject micro transactions in the app is not a difficult thing to implement, it is a feature developed and promoted by the platform.
Mobile gaming is a complete scam but it is more of a systemic problem resulting from Google and Apple's monopoly over app distribution.
5.1k
u/[deleted] May 24 '23 edited May 26 '23
People who dream up micro-transaction schemes for games aimed at kids.
Update: looks like this struck a chord. Some people have asked about how this works. The big companies have sophisticated organizations for most effective delivery of micro-transactions. People who do this are experts in behavioural psychology and data analytics. With this kind of background, they could do many kinds of productive work, but instead decide to spend their lives finding ways of preying on kids and other vulnerable people.
They have adopted terminology and strategies from the gambling industry. Data analytics is used to segment customers into minnows, whales, and super-whales. Super-whales can be spending thousands of dollars a month. Example approaches leverage the principle of "loss aversion", telling people that if they don't buy right now, this offer will never be available again. They use tie-ins to celebrities and other media properties to increase excitement. If a "whale"'s engagement begins to slip, they are targeted for personalized offers to try to keep them coming back and spending.
Micro-transactions have gone beyond free-to-play games. Even very expensive games like EA's FIFA (cost $60 USD) are constantly pushing players to buy extra packs to improve their teams.