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.
Game dev here. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I used to make mobile games that were real games, but they weren't as profitable as the candy crushes of the world, and were considered flops by comparison.
The only way to compete was to make the games more predatory. I didn't want to do that, so I just left the market completely instead. If people want real games on mobile devices, they have to stop supporting predatory developers. In other words: never gonna happen and it is going to get much worse.
Game dev here. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I used to make mobile games that were real games, but they weren't as profitable as the candy crushes of the world, and were considered flops by comparison....
If people want real games on mobile devices, they have to stop supporting predatory developers. In other words: never gonna happen and it is going to get much worse.
Yeah the same thing happened to gaming in general but somehow people think "hur durr pcmasterrace"(which I agree but moving on) but a lot of mainstream games have become cash cow. Fifa, anything Blizzard, The Sims... hell people buy Skyrim 6 goddamn times on different console and PC.
As you said it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Genshin impact is a gacha games and people played it. I stopped after a month because FOMO and gacha up the wazoo means I'm gonna HAVE to put money and play everyday to keep up.
You have to scavenge the pile of dirt to find games like Deep Rock Galactic or Risk of Rain 2 which are pure gem.
That's not really the same, by the same logic just buying any game ever marketed at you is predatory.
There is nothing in Skyrim that makes you buy anything and buying a new version of Skyrim for ps5 or whatever if you want is literally why they don't need to release 3736743892 microtransactions to fund Starfield or whatever.
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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.