A huge loss to and a massive vote of no confidence in MSR Cambridge.
Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.
>Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.
Have you seen kids these days? Video games are an addictive substance like cigarettes or alcohol.
(Yes, I know you played Mario Brothers as a child and turned out fine. So did I. But the stuff we had back in the day is extremely tame and weak compared to the hard stuff they peddle today.)
That's still in the area of D&D - social rewards encouraging large amounts of time. Modern psychological tricks used to encourage addiction and over-spending, especially in kids and neuro-atypical people are newer, and were a "great" contribution from the likes of Zynga or King.
The "addictive" factor comes from micro-transactions with randomized returns on investment ("loot boxes"). Kids get sucked into chasing the most valuable skins for characters, weapons, etc. This either results in them spending an inordinate amount of time playing the game (increasing odds of paying money) or just paying money directly to purchase in-game loot boxes that have fractional chances of dropping the rarest gear.
It's not "all games" that are problematic in this way; it is games which are monetized through micro-transactions with loot boxes. It's essentially legal gambling for kids, and it's absolutely a problem that we should be taking more seriously.
There's still something to be said about the addictive nature of microtransactions, but loot boxes haven't been relevant to the discussion as far as fortnite goes for a few years.
They had to do that legally. But that was only in the unpopular save the world stuff, I think the break out battle royale mode or later creative modes never had them.
Didn't say I agreed. But there's an argument to be made that by making the game addictive, keeping players in the game encourages them to spend money on skins and whatever else they sell.
I'm personally pro-entertainment, pro-culture, etc... Tons of things we spend money on in life is entertainment and frankly, useless. But it's fun.
That depends on how you define "win". As a gacha player myself (Genshin Impact), a lot of people roll because of FOMO and because they want to own a thing, not necessarily because they're going to "win".
Heck, I main Yoimiya, and she's not exactly part of the meta. Maybe I'm a sucker (no, I definitely am), but I'm not paying to "win" in the usual sense. There's plenty of exploitation to be had without attaching a competitive advantage.
Advertising and game design technicques to encourage vulnerable people to spend inordinate amounts of time and money on a game are the real problem. This leads to the current situation of most hugely successful games today, where the vast majority of players spend nothing or next to it, while a small minority of "whales" literally spend thousands of dollars monthly.
What?