[tjpnz]

Time to start regulating these games in the same way we regulate gambling.

They shouldn't be sold to children. They're not Kinda eggs nor LOL Surprise and should never be brushed off as surprise mechanics. They're glorified slot machines, through and through.

[ArmandGrillet]

Diablo Immortal is not available in Belgium and the Netherlands due to that: https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-immortal-wont-be-released-in-...

[droopyEyelids]

What allows these countries to stand up for their population against billion dollar corporations?

[tjpnz]

Strong democracies with little to no tolerance for lobbyists.

[xuki]

Apple/Google revenue will see a big decline if those games are regulated. Most if not all the top grossing games on mobile follow the same spending pattern, and a big chunk of app stores' revenue come from those games.

[still_grokking]

And that's exactly the reason almost all mobile game are utter trash.

Of course that was caused because the app-"economy" was broken from day one on: You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those. So you have to make the software "free" and sell your user's data, or charge one or two bucks and use some other immoral scheme to get your actual costs covered.

On a broken market there are only broken products… Simple as that.

[ThatPlayer]

My thoughts on the mobile gaming market are similar. There's great plenty of good ports of games like Slay the Spire, Civ VI, or even XCOM II. Problem is the majority of interested parties already have 'better' devices they'd prefer to play it on, so the prospect of paying even the discounted price that these ports have is too much.

So now you're left with people who haven't tried better games, and with all the good-enough free ones, how can even a discounted price full game compete?

[wincy]

Absolutely, I own Civ 6 on mobile because it was discounted on Christmas or something. I got most of the expansions for cheap on my PC/MacOS hybrid purchase from Steam. Then I’m expected to pay the full fat $40 for the “new” (came out in 2019) Civ 6 expansion on mobile. No way.

[xenadu02]

> You couldn't and still can't call out fair prices on mobile software. People weren't and aren't willing to pay those.

I'm not sure if that is strictly true. Prices did vary a lot in the beginning. However scale created a race-to-the-bottom situation for the exact reason you cited: most people wanted to pay less. The market was flooded with apps and games at the minimum price which created a strong expectation among the bulk of buyers.

Consumable IAP is what really enabled the gambling-like mechanics. That was discovered not long after the implementation of IAP and very quickly the game devs that converted to free + consumable IAP started making all the money. IIRC it was an open secret in mobile games many many years ago that the optimal strategy was to make the early game easy to cast a wide net, then slowly ramp up the pay-to-win mechanics to milk the whales as much as possible. You don't really care if everyone else quits - so long as most people get X% of the way through before they do. Then you tweak X% to optimize for catching the most whales.

The super critical aspect is the deliberate ramp. You have to get as many people into the early part of the funnel as possible so some of them will become invested enough to become whales. This also means you absolutely must make the game miserable for 90% of your players but only after they've made a significant investment.

[caf]

"Apple and Google are really gambling companies" was not exactly the hot take I expected to see today (I am not disagreeing!).

[realusername]

That's exactly what they don't want you to realise, they are doing a lot of branding to try to make politicians forget that they get most of their appstore/playstore money from glorified gambling.

[martin-adams]

It does sadden me that Apple/Google are happy to take that revenue

[ajsnigrutin]

Oh no!

Anyway...

[weberer]

The point is that those companies give millions of dollars to politicians per year, so they're seen as somewhat "untouchable"

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/summary?id=D00...

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/summary?id=D00002...

[moomin]

Not being funny, but I won’t buy my kids LOL surprise and they know exactly why.

Whether or not this choice of mine is useful is hard to tell.

[wincy]

You have to be vigilant as a parent. I didn’t realize until my late 20s that Diablo 2 primed me to love slot machines and gambling. It’s something I have to avoid.

[SalmoShalazar]

Funny you say this. I’ve been playing a bunch of D2:R lately and it is honestly pretty miserable. It is full stop gambling. Grinding out mephisto runs over and over again, hoping for that nice drop, getting a minor rush of excitement when an unidentified ring drops or whatever. Just totally mindless nonsense.

[bcrosby95]

They're not much different than receiving a present.

[bsnal]

That’s not a problem since children don’t have access to credit cards or any other means to pay for in-game items.

[wincy]

My nephew stole my sister’s credit card and made $2000 in Fortnite purchases before he was caught. What’s insane is after the chargeback they DIDN’T revoke the items. He got to keep them. Then his account got stolen later because he’s a dumb kid but that’s a different story. Such a bad lesson to teach a kid.

[saiya-jin]

Until they steal their parents credit card, or somebody else's. Addicts tend to di desperate moves. Happened to friends, their son spent half of their montly salary in some stupid mobile game, took too long for them to find out

[bsnal]

Why is that Blizzard’s problem?

[ClumsyPilot]

Why do you go to jail for selling alcohol to kids?

[bsnal]

Because you know that they are kids. Blizzard has no way to know that some players might be kids.

[ClumsyPilot]

If you don't ask for ID, you don't know for sure - maybe they are adults with impaired growth.

[enneff]

Except they market their games to kids in myriad ways.

[ClumsyPilot]

This is not only morally abhorrent, but also factually wrong - you can have a proper bank account with card from 16, and you can have pre-paid cards even earlier