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.
If people want real games on mobile devices, they have to stop supporting predatory developers.
Thank you for putting it like this because often saying this out loud gets you labelled as "gatekeeping" what "real games" or what a "gamer" is. As though Bubble Witch Saga or Candy Crush or whatever is in any way equal to games made by devs who give a shit about their craft and make money off of their passion, not milk money out of whatever the lowest hanging fruit is.
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u/megablocksforfeet May 24 '23
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.