I’ll be doing a workshop in a few weeks, and I wanna raise awareness about predatory lootbox paytowin games. I wanna play live, an easy to start playing and understand game, that is so sneaky and predatory that some kid would very easily buy some microtransaction or lootbox without even realizing what they just did.
Basically I wanna play it like “Ohhh, look at this game, looks so fun, oh, what is this? more gems? lets see, Nooooo!!! I just bought a microtransaction, I won’t be able to eat for a month”
Do you have some recommendation for that purpose?
I mean, Roblox is a child labour ring.
Very good.
People have gone over the ptw mechanics for Diablo in some depth. It’s not exactly a kids game, but it has all the things. Kids are kind of a bad choice for the real predatory stuff, you might get them to give you a couple of grand once, but if you can hook an adult you get to hit them every month.
If it must be kid focused, have a look at those cutesy merge games. Or just hit a popular game and look at the ads it’s running.
Thing is, most of these games are kind of bad unless those little pleasure hits really work for you, so you might not find them ‘fun’. These aren’t supposed to work on everyone, rather they are designed to really work on a minority of people.
Roblox is industrial-scale child labour to sell microtransactions to children, normalising the idea at the earliest stage of their 𝑔𝒶𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓇.
Trove and Wizard 101 are pretty predatory, but kids might not see it that way until they accidentally do, but you can see it right from the start.
I got in pretty deep on Marvel Future Fight a couple years back. It really bothers me how a family friendly franchise will be packed with pressure points and gambling mechanics.
The game starts fine, as a short mission based story line, and progress happens fairly quickly. You play missions to get character bios (points) to unlock more marvel characters, and then you can build small teams for different missions.
As you start unlocking more characters, you also need to rank up the characters you own to make them more powerful. Again, the basic level upgrades are easy, as you collect material per mission, but as you start getting into the middle game, ranking a character happens through RNG.
You upgrade a character though multiple resource points, Rank, then Tier, then weapons, uniforms, gear, and crystals. There is no set “cost” for upgrading one part of a character. You build up a bunch of materials, and then you take a spin. There’s a random amount of progress made spending the material, and each upgrade path becomes its own slot machine, with its own materials to spend. You MIGHT get lucky and get a full upgrade to a power crystal in one turn, but more than likely you’ll need to burn HOURS of game time grinding to build up the materials, spend all the materials, and be left with nothing.
If you want to shortcut that progression, it can cost HUNDREDS of dollars to rank ONE character to a point where you can be competitive in online events and in guild play. You won’t be competitive with just a couple high ranking players, you need a FULL roster for the multiple events available.
At present, Marvel Future Fight includes over 250 playable characters. Each needs to be ranked and upgraded through multiple game mechanics, and new uniforms are regularly released that also require RNG mechanics to own and upgrade.
Whales will spend THOUSANDS of dollars at the start of a new event, and when new characters are released, to chase the game’s meta. Sure, you aren’t “buying a lootbox”, but players are spending money to build up resources, only to throw those resources away at multiple slot machines built into EVERY character. It’s one of the most insidious games I’ve ever played, and it’s marketed at kids and teens.
@vis4valentine Roblox & Fortnite
Cool, but they are heavy to install and I need an account (I never played Roblox or Fortnite before), and I want something simple and easy to install straight from play store, and that uses my saved card info from my google account.
Why not a video of it instead? Easy, predictable, can use many games that way
Could be, I’ll see.
My wife made me play fornite with her - they are actually pretty generous with skins etc. If you buy a battle pass once, it’s pretty easy to keep unlocking it in future seasons. Maybe that is predatory in some addictive way I guess… but persoanlly after avoiding fornite for years, I was pleasantly surprised how they let you earn things.
Another factor is how addictive the game is designed to be. A quick search led me to https://www.video-game-addiction.org/what-makes-games-addictive.html which covers some of the things. For example:
Games that hook players are often designed to be just difficult enough to be truly challenging, while allowing players to achieve small accomplishments that compel them to keep playing. In that respect, the design of video games is similar to the design of gambling casinos, which will allow players to have small “wins” that keep them playing.>
Going over addictive design elements like this can at least let people be more aware of why they keep wanting to play.
I mean, that quote just described game design for fun games though. A game that is fun will be addictive, but not in the same way gambling is. To most people, gambling isn’t fun. The act of sitting at a machine and repeatedly pressing the same button or pulling the same lever is not fun. The same repeated graphics are not fun. Repeatedly losing money? Also not fun. But, the prospect of winning big is exciting. This feeling, the desire to feel like you traded a small value for a large value and won big, greed, is exploited in many modern games.
A fun game presents a challenge, something just difficult enough for you to not steamroll it, but not so difficult that you want to quit the game. A fun game gives players rewards to incentivize them to keep playing, and generally, the best games reward players with better items or further level progress or additional story content. The reward never comes from the player spending real world money, but rather the time the player has spent in the game, or achieving some task, or being highly skilled. This is fun game design, and fun is addictive by design.
A game that exploits greed typically does so in ways that are hidden at a surface level. Generally, mechanics that are obfusicated from the player which involve rewards such as loot boxes that are purchased with a premium currency, this is the most obvious. Nobody blinks an eye if a blue uniform for your army guy is 400 crystals, because you can buy a pack of 200 crystals that gives you an extra 250 for free for $5 on your first purchase. But show that the blue uniform is $11, and people will complain. And I mean, yeah. Its the color blue. But now there is a problem. You have 50 crystals left. But nothing in the store is 50 crystals. Not to worry, you can buy another pack that gives you 550 more for only $10. So you buy it and get that cool golden scope that cost 350 crystals. But now you have a problem. You have 150 crystals left, and nothing in the store is… Wait, what is this? Lucky Chance? I can spend 10 crystals for the chance to get a legendary golden uniform? 0.01% drop rate? Yeah, I will just try 15 times. I didnt get it, but now the second pull costs me 15? No, Im good. But now what do I do with 140 crystals? You can see where this goes.
Also, the developers add a notification icon to the store page that doesn’t go away unless you click on something in the store. This is one of the big differences between a game that is fun and a game that exploits greed to make it feel like fun.
I saw this site the other day shared here, and it grabbed my attention.
Clash of Clans? Progress is time gated, but can be skipped with gems.
Literally any mobile game made in the past 5 years
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It’s not a game, it’s a gamified tool. It’s a sleep tracking app with gameplay elements to keep one interested.
I would classify it in the same mental bucket where I put activity and workout monitor apps that track steps or calorie goals.
Now, whether it actually produces consistent, net positive health results, I can’t say either way.
Pretty much. If they made a “Pokemon Fitness” that tracked steps or heart rate and calories burned, it would be the same thing. “Your steps were converted to fitness energy! Here are the Pokemon you met in your walk!”
It’s not even that, it’s a data-harvesting engine disguised as a gamidied tool.
Battle Cats
