You know, I went into this article kind of on the side of the game publishers, but this argumentation just had me rolling:
major developers like Microsoft, Sony, and Epic Games are pushing back, arguing their creations are protected forms of artistic expression, not addictive products.
Their CEOs do nothing but respond to stakeholders all year long, but now all of a sudden, they put on their beret hats and go excusez-moi, this is artistique.
These loot boxes are merely a highly artistic statement on the uncertainties in life and a run away capalitalistic society! We are as shocked as anyone that people have got addicted and lost thousands of dollars to our uhhhhh art, yeah.
The big issue to me is that the pricing of digital items is completely unrelated to the cost of creation. And it targets children who don’t know better.
“Officer, this meth I’m making is just artistic cooking! It’s not MY fault it’s addictive”
Just tell all your customers that it’s “for entertainment purposes only.”
“The loot boxes are an… evocative display of the perils of hmmm… taxation, so they need to cost 9.99 for… uhhh… reasons.”
It’s well known that Epic and Blizzard hired psychologists specifically to make their games more addictive. I would be very surprised to find out that Microsoft and Sony didn’t.
The white paper about creating addictive games that I read years ago while addicted to wow was written by someone at Microsoft.
Against age verification: Beer brewers say you can’t limit us for making drinking beer too entertaining.
Sure, you can make games as entertaining as possible!
But no in game money or data harvesting. Very, very simple rule to enforce for single player games: no online connection needed.
I feel like if I was a subject matter expect in these law suites it would be over in a week.
Dark patterns are bad, and I think they should be discouraged somehow. It has nothing to do with entertainment.
I really miss the pre-internet days when I’d buy a game, never worrying that the company’s server would be offline, that they’d sunset support rendering the game unplayable, harvest my data, or engineer the game to coerce me into buying extras.
If Nintendo doesn’t do something silly like brick switches when they retire the platform, at least we should be good there when it comes to physical releases. Diablo 2 resurrected, while digital only and requiring an internet connection, has an offline mode but only on nintendo switch. Also GOG.com has a bunch of stuff.
We are definitely not as well off as we once were in this regard though. Ah… The good ol’ days…
Let’s see if we can get a legal precedent that addictive = entertaining. That could have “interesting” ramifications. (For the record, I don’t agree at all that they’re the same thing)
By entertaining do they really mean manipulative and addicting like drugs but don’t want to say it like that because it sounds bad?
