9 ms·

Nintendo Asks Mobile Developers to Curb Microtransactions

155 points by Reedx 8y ago

dang 8y ago
Url changed from https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/nintendo-mobile-microtransactions-1203156557/ https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/nintendo-mobile-microtr..., which points to this.
neonate 8y ago
https://outline.com/Zu4cBe https://outline.com/Zu4cBe
Groxx 8y ago
Good. They're a plague on fun. This kind of thing is part of the reason I keep buying Nintendo products.
- thomasfortes 8y ago
  I don't have time to grind games anymore, so I simply don't play games that have microtransactions, if a game has good and complete DLCs, that's still okay, but I remember fondly the times where games came complete when you bought them. Also, they are predatory, so that's other reason for not support them, companies that try to sustain themselves using addicted "whales" deserve to fail as soon as possible. By the way, the most downvoted comment[0] on reddit history so far is exactly one when a big company (EA) tried to stuff a lot of microtransactions in a big brand name (star wars), fearing the backlash, disney intervened and told EA to remove them. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/?st=JH2MUORV&sh=5997c5a5 https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...
  - jhanschoo 8y ago
    Interestingly, a lack of time brought me to a different conclusion, and I'm certain this is the reason why "uncreative" and "unfun" microtransaction-heavy mobile games are still popular (the game in question is a mobile game). Note that I'm not defending microtransactions themselves, but the low-immersion simple and grindy mobile games that typically implement a microtransaction monetization model. Conventional games require a certain commitment of immersion and structured time. But when I have the energy to immerse myself in something and the available structured time, there are certainly more important or interesting things I would rather pursue than a traditional game. This is where mobile games come in. If I'm in an uncomfortable place when I'm prevented from or unable to do anything interesting, such as in public transport, it is comparatively pleasurable to grind a bit on these games. And there are quite a number of these slivers of time in my everyday routine. Mobile games are typically designed so that they are near-frictionless to hop in and do something without a heavy context switch. They fill an entertainment niche for me, and probably many others, that conventional games cannot provide. Previously, light games like Minesweeper or Solitaire filled this niche, but mobile games are of superior value since they offer a semblance of progression and community. Of course, among microtransaction-heavy games there are those that are more frustrating and exploitative. What I'm primarily playing is the game in question in the article, Dragalia Lost (DL), and I've had a pretty positive experience in the free-to-play and dolphin-friendliness monetization model of the game. Monetary purchases are typically priced out of the range of people who have little discretionary spending, and spending more money gives diminishing returns. It might be troublesome for someone with poor control, but for me I get as much of a kick calculating expected values of their different virtual goods on sale (and end up not buying them anyway) as playing the game itself.
- Kaiyou 8y ago
  Historicaly Nintendo has always been consumer hostile going all the way back in the 1980s when they invented region locking. I suspect this is more of the CD vs. cartridges thing, where Nintendo remains stubborn for a generation and then follows the trend anyway.
  - Groxx 8y ago
    yea, region locking is why the hardware I've personally bought was ds lite and then switch. region locking is abhorrent. that said, they've been pretty good about maintaining quality, both in hardware (durability) and software. switch is changing that with a ton of 3rd party stuff, but thus far their track record is dramatically, orders of magnitudes better than PS, PC, XBox, or mobile.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  Portaying Nintendo a kind of example to follow is a pretty poor choice though. They have created a lot of unethical business practices as well.
  - Groxx 8y ago
    they do. and some of it has been curbed by the japanese government (a somewhat effective block on gacha games, for instance), which nintendo then supports anyway in other markets (though at far, far more friendly rates than competitors, from my experience). but compared to the other consoles or mobile? PC might compete and win, but it's a bit of a different beast in this respect.
Razengan 8y ago
Somewhat ironic, considering that I just saw their own 3DS Badge Arcade, which costs $1.00 for 5 plays of a highly luck-dependent claw machine game, to win icons that you can decorate the home screen with (and sometimes custom themes.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Badge_Arcade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Badge_Arcade
- mzs 8y ago
  Which was released in '14, so possibly corporate position has evolved.
  - jerf 8y ago
    I think Nintendo corporate position has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. As is typical in the console industry, the breathtaking success of one generation, the Wii, gave Nintendo a bad case of the swaggers and they made a lot of fairly arrogant decisions for a while. The breathtaking failure of the WiiU restored a lot of humility to them, and you can see that in their Switch performance. It seems a console maker can sometimes survive one generation of significant success without going too crazy, but I'm not sure there's ever been one that has survived two without getting bitten by their own arrogance. We'll see if Nintendo's humility survives the Switch.
- ntkachov 8y ago
  As someone who played a lot of that game I can tell you it was not luck dependent at all. Entirely skill based, there was even a daily practice mode which would net you free plays. If the claw grabbed the piece it wouldn't drop it unless it got to the end. Most boards could easily be done with 5 plays. Nintendo has kept scummy micro transactions to a minimum for as long as I can remember. Even Pokemon Picross had a maximum spend on micro transactions (after $40, any further premium currency was free)
  - Razengan 8y ago
    The first and only time I tried it, 3 of my 5 free plays resulted in the claw dropping the better badges after picking them up, before reaching the end.
skrebbel 8y ago
I grew up when games were entire games. I very much hope that this whole microtransaction racket will be over by the time my kids are big enough to get their own console (or whatever people game on by then). What a customer-hostile clusterfuck, these people ruined a totally good industry.
- koonsolo 8y ago
  It depends on the game I guess. I'm also an old-timer (39yo, started on C64), but there are some in-app purchase games that I like(d). Team Fortress 2 was one of them. Even if you didn't pay, it was still fun and free. In the end, I did pay for a few things, so the business model seemed to work. Now I'm hooked on Crossout, which is also free to play. Basically you can grind your way through it, or speed up the process by buying packages. The packages are extremely expensive though. When you hear microtransactions, you (and I) immediately think of those nasty Facebook games, or annoying mobile games. EA pulling some nasty tricks is also part of that (Pay extra to play Darth Vader). But there are games out there that are able to pull it off decently. The real problem is that the original model was simpler: Pay X, you get the game. Now the model is more complex, and you never know what you are going to get: Pay X, and maybe the game will be fun up to a certain point, where you have to pay again. But then again maybe not. You will find out once you sunk in a lot of money already. So in the end, you will never know how much the experience will cost, and that is the real issue.
  - mikorym 8y ago
    You are 10 years my elder. If you programmed on the C64, is there any lessons/insights that you would teach to someone 10 years younger than you are? I have heard cool things, like an actual complete user manual, including how to program registers. I don't think I would download a C64 emulator in my spare time and actually see how it worked for myself.
    - IronBacon 8y ago
      > I have heard cool things, like an actual complete user manual, including how to program registers. I think that was the Apple II. I should still have the C64's user manual tucked somewhere, but it didn't described the internal architecture. I recall there were a couple of examples in Basic to move sprites and to produce sound from the SID "poking" (the PEEK and POKE Basic instruction) values to a few registers.
alias_neo 8y ago
As a life-long gamer, I was almost ready to give up on the fun kind of gaming experience I knew as a child, thankfully the Switch came along and it even got my wife back into gaming, who hasn't gamed since N64. I hate micro transactions with a passion, because I _know_ they exist to keep taking money off of you just to get an enjoyable experience. The only game I buy micro for is PoGo because my wife enjoys it and it's something we can do together, outdoors, but PoGo doesn't even need you to buy them if you're in a well populated area.
Cypher 8y ago
Also get rid of ads that get kids to click on them as they play...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rkangel 8y ago
There is a flipside to this. In the last few months I have started playing two new games - Apex Legends and Rainbow 6: Siege. Total cost for those two games is £8.50. They are both supported by microtransactions for cosmetics, leading to no cost for Apex, and a low price for R6 (which is admittedly also a 4 year old game). As someone who has gone from a significant income to a non-existent one due to founding a company, I quite like that my gaming is subsidised by those who are willing to spend lots of money on cosmetics.
- thanatos_dem 8y ago
  Don’t you need to pay to unlock characters in Rainbow 6? Not sure that counts as cosmetic. Definitely seems like paywalling game content.
  - rkangel 8y ago
    Yes, did oversimplify the situation. Both Apex and Rainbow have additional characters that aren't initially unlocked. In both cases, they can be unlocked through a currency earned in game, and you don't have to pay cash. Apex launched with 6 unlocked and 2 locked. After a couple of weeks of play I almost have 1 more unlocked. R6 you start with none, but can get the 'original' 20 operators unlocked pretty quickly (~15 hours of play). There are another 40 or so that take much more 'renown' to unlock, and I may spend some cash on some of them if I continue to play the game. There is enough learning at the moment that I feel no need for that. The result is I think a beneficial incentive. It's not '£50 whether good or bad, 5 hours or 100 hours' classic purchase model, the profits there are a result of marketing as much as game quality. Instead it's 'low or no barrier to entry, and money will only continue to come in if I continue to be engaged with the game'. I may end up spending more money on a game (over time), than I would compared to a purchase price, but that will only be on games that are rewarding me for a decent duration. To me, this means developers are incentivised to make engaging, interesting games that are worthwhile in the long term!
snarfy 8y ago
“Nintendo is not interested in making a large amount of revenue from a single smartphone game,” one CyberAgent official said. “If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more.” Yes, they would have made more, at the expense of the entire industry.
- EdgarVerona 8y ago
  When we see a statement like the one that CyberAgent official made, I can't help but think of the Banality of Evil. We're so focused as a society on economic growth - and surely, these employees have financial targets and objectives they've been given that add to that on a personal level for them - that thinking about the ethical implications of an exploitative business model seems unnecessary, and even foolish. "There's no time for that," one might say, or "that's not under the jurisdiction of my job title." Well, bad news: it's not under the jurisdiction of anyone's job title. And not considering it brings us to... well, where we are today.
EdgarVerona 8y ago
Great to hear. So are they going to start by removing slot machine microtransactions from games like Fire Emblem Heroes? I would love to see big, AAA studios step forward and be brave enough to say that variable ratio schedule-based microtransactions are morally objectionable, and that - even if they've used them before - they have changed their minds and are no longer willing to normalize the practice in the industry. But then they have to put their money where their mouth is and actually stop using it. (To note, thanks to the paywall I can't actually read this article. I read another site's summary of it. So if they are removing variable ratio schedule microtransactions from Fire Emblem Heroes and other games that they control, good on them!) Here's a telling quote from the summary I read: “Nintendo is not interested in making a large amount of revenue from a single smartphone game,” an official at CyberAgent told the Journal. “If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more.” THAT speaks to the heart of the conflict that exists in the industry. There are some people who genuinely don't see the use of variable ratio schedules in microtransactions as ethically compromising, and see not using them as "leaving money on the table." It is this attitude that we need to be aware of: not just as consumers, but as creators of products. Software engineers, designers, producers: we need to think carefully about how the products we make can affect people, and how it can harm them. Creating a product cannot just be about maximizing profit. Software Engineers, at the very least, are bound by a duty to think about and attempt to mitigate the harm brought about by their creation. (See IEEE and ACM code of ethics) "If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more" makes me glad that they didn't manage the game alone. It implies that no one in that company is asking themselves about their ethical duties as the creator of a system designed to take advantage of common human psychological weaknesses. When we boil the question of variable ratio schedule microtransactions down to just "did we leave money on the table," we are saying something about what we picture as being our duty to those affected by our products. And it's not a pretty statement, even if it is unintentional. I'm sure that the people who made that statement don't consider themselves to be "bad people," and I won't even go so far as to say that they are "bad people:" but it does make me think of Hannah Arendt and "The Banality of Evil." It's very easy to get so caught up in what you're assigned to do, what your business/organizational/state goals are, that you lose sight of your other ethical duties. Doing what's right isn't about justifying whatever you can think to create, or even whatever people won't happen to notice or complain about (i.e. what you can get away with). It's about doing an honest evaluation of the ways in which the products you make can hurt people. It's about expressing some level of empathy - thinking seriously and honestly about how you would feel and what would happen to you if you were one of the people that were to fall into harmful cycles that the product encourages. And it's about accepting that - even if you believe that the person falling into it had a "choice," that you were intentionally injecting yourself into and influencing that choice through techniques that we as a species know to be psychologically manipulative. (and indeed, we know they are effective as tools of psychological manipulation because if we didn't, we wouldn't be using them)
el_cujo 8y ago
I'd be much more willing to pay $10 for something that resembles an actual game than get some branded gacha crap that's free to download but really has no gameplay beyond being a slot machine that doesn't put out money. Its hard for a lot of people to fathom that those types of games actually make a lot of money. Even for something like Pokemon Go, which in my opinion is pretty playable without paying money, I have two friends who put over $100 into the game. Microtransactions prey on people who lack self-control, I guess I'm just lucky I'm not predisposed to that kind of thing.
- Aissen 8y ago
  Nintendo tried it both ways. FireEmblem Heroes, micro-transaction (gachapon) based, made more money than Super Mario Run ($10, one time only buy). I'm amazed that they are still very careful with their experimentations, and not switching everything to the free-to-play model. Let's hope they continue this way.
goalieca 8y ago
People complained about Mario run costing 10$ for the complete game. Quite frankly, i enjoyed it a lot and feel that 10$ was a good price and there was no grinding or waiting. It was focused on fun. But i think people are just not used to paying for phone games.

155 points by Reedx 8y ago

dang 8y ago

Url changed from https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/nintendo-mobile-microtransactions-1203156557/ https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/nintendo-mobile-microtr..., which points to this.

neonate 8y ago

https://outline.com/Zu4cBe https://outline.com/Zu4cBe

Groxx 8y ago

Good. They're a plague on fun. This kind of thing is part of the reason I keep buying Nintendo products.

thomasfortes 8y ago
I don't have time to grind games anymore, so I simply don't play games that have microtransactions, if a game has good and complete DLCs, that's still okay, but I remember fondly the times where games came complete when you bought them. Also, they are predatory, so that's other reason for not support them, companies that try to sustain themselves using addicted "whales" deserve to fail as soon as possible. By the way, the most downvoted comment[0] on reddit history so far is exactly one when a big company (EA) tried to stuff a lot of microtransactions in a big brand name (star wars), fearing the backlash, disney intervened and told EA to remove them. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/?st=JH2MUORV&sh=5997c5a5 https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...
- jhanschoo 8y ago
  Interestingly, a lack of time brought me to a different conclusion, and I'm certain this is the reason why "uncreative" and "unfun" microtransaction-heavy mobile games are still popular (the game in question is a mobile game). Note that I'm not defending microtransactions themselves, but the low-immersion simple and grindy mobile games that typically implement a microtransaction monetization model. Conventional games require a certain commitment of immersion and structured time. But when I have the energy to immerse myself in something and the available structured time, there are certainly more important or interesting things I would rather pursue than a traditional game. This is where mobile games come in. If I'm in an uncomfortable place when I'm prevented from or unable to do anything interesting, such as in public transport, it is comparatively pleasurable to grind a bit on these games. And there are quite a number of these slivers of time in my everyday routine. Mobile games are typically designed so that they are near-frictionless to hop in and do something without a heavy context switch. They fill an entertainment niche for me, and probably many others, that conventional games cannot provide. Previously, light games like Minesweeper or Solitaire filled this niche, but mobile games are of superior value since they offer a semblance of progression and community. Of course, among microtransaction-heavy games there are those that are more frustrating and exploitative. What I'm primarily playing is the game in question in the article, Dragalia Lost (DL), and I've had a pretty positive experience in the free-to-play and dolphin-friendliness monetization model of the game. Monetary purchases are typically priced out of the range of people who have little discretionary spending, and spending more money gives diminishing returns. It might be troublesome for someone with poor control, but for me I get as much of a kick calculating expected values of their different virtual goods on sale (and end up not buying them anyway) as playing the game itself.
Kaiyou 8y ago
Historicaly Nintendo has always been consumer hostile going all the way back in the 1980s when they invented region locking. I suspect this is more of the CD vs. cartridges thing, where Nintendo remains stubborn for a generation and then follows the trend anyway.
- Groxx 8y ago
  yea, region locking is why the hardware I've personally bought was ds lite and then switch. region locking is abhorrent. that said, they've been pretty good about maintaining quality, both in hardware (durability) and software. switch is changing that with a ton of 3rd party stuff, but thus far their track record is dramatically, orders of magnitudes better than PS, PC, XBox, or mobile.
ekianjo 8y ago
Portaying Nintendo a kind of example to follow is a pretty poor choice though. They have created a lot of unethical business practices as well.
- Groxx 8y ago
  they do. and some of it has been curbed by the japanese government (a somewhat effective block on gacha games, for instance), which nintendo then supports anyway in other markets (though at far, far more friendly rates than competitors, from my experience). but compared to the other consoles or mobile? PC might compete and win, but it's a bit of a different beast in this respect.

Razengan 8y ago

Somewhat ironic, considering that I just saw their own 3DS Badge Arcade, which costs $1.00 for 5 plays of a highly luck-dependent claw machine game, to win icons that you can decorate the home screen with (and sometimes custom themes.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Badge_Arcade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Badge_Arcade

mzs 8y ago
Which was released in '14, so possibly corporate position has evolved.
- jerf 8y ago
  I think Nintendo corporate position has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. As is typical in the console industry, the breathtaking success of one generation, the Wii, gave Nintendo a bad case of the swaggers and they made a lot of fairly arrogant decisions for a while. The breathtaking failure of the WiiU restored a lot of humility to them, and you can see that in their Switch performance. It seems a console maker can sometimes survive one generation of significant success without going too crazy, but I'm not sure there's ever been one that has survived two without getting bitten by their own arrogance. We'll see if Nintendo's humility survives the Switch.
ntkachov 8y ago
As someone who played a lot of that game I can tell you it was not luck dependent at all. Entirely skill based, there was even a daily practice mode which would net you free plays. If the claw grabbed the piece it wouldn't drop it unless it got to the end. Most boards could easily be done with 5 plays. Nintendo has kept scummy micro transactions to a minimum for as long as I can remember. Even Pokemon Picross had a maximum spend on micro transactions (after $40, any further premium currency was free)
- Razengan 8y ago
  The first and only time I tried it, 3 of my 5 free plays resulted in the claw dropping the better badges after picking them up, before reaching the end.

skrebbel 8y ago

I grew up when games were entire games. I very much hope that this whole microtransaction racket will be over by the time my kids are big enough to get their own console (or whatever people game on by then). What a customer-hostile clusterfuck, these people ruined a totally good industry.

koonsolo 8y ago
It depends on the game I guess. I'm also an old-timer (39yo, started on C64), but there are some in-app purchase games that I like(d). Team Fortress 2 was one of them. Even if you didn't pay, it was still fun and free. In the end, I did pay for a few things, so the business model seemed to work. Now I'm hooked on Crossout, which is also free to play. Basically you can grind your way through it, or speed up the process by buying packages. The packages are extremely expensive though. When you hear microtransactions, you (and I) immediately think of those nasty Facebook games, or annoying mobile games. EA pulling some nasty tricks is also part of that (Pay extra to play Darth Vader). But there are games out there that are able to pull it off decently. The real problem is that the original model was simpler: Pay X, you get the game. Now the model is more complex, and you never know what you are going to get: Pay X, and maybe the game will be fun up to a certain point, where you have to pay again. But then again maybe not. You will find out once you sunk in a lot of money already. So in the end, you will never know how much the experience will cost, and that is the real issue.
- mikorym 8y ago
  You are 10 years my elder. If you programmed on the C64, is there any lessons/insights that you would teach to someone 10 years younger than you are? I have heard cool things, like an actual complete user manual, including how to program registers. I don't think I would download a C64 emulator in my spare time and actually see how it worked for myself.
  - IronBacon 8y ago
    > I have heard cool things, like an actual complete user manual, including how to program registers. I think that was the Apple II. I should still have the C64's user manual tucked somewhere, but it didn't described the internal architecture. I recall there were a couple of examples in Basic to move sprites and to produce sound from the SID "poking" (the PEEK and POKE Basic instruction) values to a few registers.

alias_neo 8y ago

As a life-long gamer, I was almost ready to give up on the fun kind of gaming experience I knew as a child, thankfully the Switch came along and it even got my wife back into gaming, who hasn't gamed since N64. I hate micro transactions with a passion, because I _know_ they exist to keep taking money off of you just to get an enjoyable experience. The only game I buy micro for is PoGo because my wife enjoys it and it's something we can do together, outdoors, but PoGo doesn't even need you to buy them if you're in a well populated area.

Cypher 8y ago

Also get rid of ads that get kids to click on them as they play...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rkangel 8y ago

There is a flipside to this. In the last few months I have started playing two new games - Apex Legends and Rainbow 6: Siege. Total cost for those two games is £8.50. They are both supported by microtransactions for cosmetics, leading to no cost for Apex, and a low price for R6 (which is admittedly also a 4 year old game). As someone who has gone from a significant income to a non-existent one due to founding a company, I quite like that my gaming is subsidised by those who are willing to spend lots of money on cosmetics.

thanatos_dem 8y ago
Don’t you need to pay to unlock characters in Rainbow 6? Not sure that counts as cosmetic. Definitely seems like paywalling game content.
- rkangel 8y ago
  Yes, did oversimplify the situation. Both Apex and Rainbow have additional characters that aren't initially unlocked. In both cases, they can be unlocked through a currency earned in game, and you don't have to pay cash. Apex launched with 6 unlocked and 2 locked. After a couple of weeks of play I almost have 1 more unlocked. R6 you start with none, but can get the 'original' 20 operators unlocked pretty quickly (~15 hours of play). There are another 40 or so that take much more 'renown' to unlock, and I may spend some cash on some of them if I continue to play the game. There is enough learning at the moment that I feel no need for that. The result is I think a beneficial incentive. It's not '£50 whether good or bad, 5 hours or 100 hours' classic purchase model, the profits there are a result of marketing as much as game quality. Instead it's 'low or no barrier to entry, and money will only continue to come in if I continue to be engaged with the game'. I may end up spending more money on a game (over time), than I would compared to a purchase price, but that will only be on games that are rewarding me for a decent duration. To me, this means developers are incentivised to make engaging, interesting games that are worthwhile in the long term!

snarfy 8y ago

“Nintendo is not interested in making a large amount of revenue from a single smartphone game,” one CyberAgent official said. “If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more.” Yes, they would have made more, at the expense of the entire industry.

EdgarVerona 8y ago
When we see a statement like the one that CyberAgent official made, I can't help but think of the Banality of Evil. We're so focused as a society on economic growth - and surely, these employees have financial targets and objectives they've been given that add to that on a personal level for them - that thinking about the ethical implications of an exploitative business model seems unnecessary, and even foolish. "There's no time for that," one might say, or "that's not under the jurisdiction of my job title." Well, bad news: it's not under the jurisdiction of anyone's job title. And not considering it brings us to... well, where we are today.

EdgarVerona 8y ago

Great to hear. So are they going to start by removing slot machine microtransactions from games like Fire Emblem Heroes? I would love to see big, AAA studios step forward and be brave enough to say that variable ratio schedule-based microtransactions are morally objectionable, and that - even if they've used them before - they have changed their minds and are no longer willing to normalize the practice in the industry. But then they have to put their money where their mouth is and actually stop using it. (To note, thanks to the paywall I can't actually read this article. I read another site's summary of it. So if they are removing variable ratio schedule microtransactions from Fire Emblem Heroes and other games that they control, good on them!) Here's a telling quote from the summary I read: “Nintendo is not interested in making a large amount of revenue from a single smartphone game,” an official at CyberAgent told the Journal. “If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more.” THAT speaks to the heart of the conflict that exists in the industry. There are some people who genuinely don't see the use of variable ratio schedules in microtransactions as ethically compromising, and see not using them as "leaving money on the table." It is this attitude that we need to be aware of: not just as consumers, but as creators of products. Software engineers, designers, producers: we need to think carefully about how the products we make can affect people, and how it can harm them. Creating a product cannot just be about maximizing profit. Software Engineers, at the very least, are bound by a duty to think about and attempt to mitigate the harm brought about by their creation. (See IEEE and ACM code of ethics) "If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more" makes me glad that they didn't manage the game alone. It implies that no one in that company is asking themselves about their ethical duties as the creator of a system designed to take advantage of common human psychological weaknesses. When we boil the question of variable ratio schedule microtransactions down to just "did we leave money on the table," we are saying something about what we picture as being our duty to those affected by our products. And it's not a pretty statement, even if it is unintentional. I'm sure that the people who made that statement don't consider themselves to be "bad people," and I won't even go so far as to say that they are "bad people:" but it does make me think of Hannah Arendt and "The Banality of Evil." It's very easy to get so caught up in what you're assigned to do, what your business/organizational/state goals are, that you lose sight of your other ethical duties. Doing what's right isn't about justifying whatever you can think to create, or even whatever people won't happen to notice or complain about (i.e. what you can get away with). It's about doing an honest evaluation of the ways in which the products you make can hurt people. It's about expressing some level of empathy - thinking seriously and honestly about how you would feel and what would happen to you if you were one of the people that were to fall into harmful cycles that the product encourages. And it's about accepting that - even if you believe that the person falling into it had a "choice," that you were intentionally injecting yourself into and influencing that choice through techniques that we as a species know to be psychologically manipulative. (and indeed, we know they are effective as tools of psychological manipulation because if we didn't, we wouldn't be using them)

el_cujo 8y ago

I'd be much more willing to pay $10 for something that resembles an actual game than get some branded gacha crap that's free to download but really has no gameplay beyond being a slot machine that doesn't put out money. Its hard for a lot of people to fathom that those types of games actually make a lot of money. Even for something like Pokemon Go, which in my opinion is pretty playable without paying money, I have two friends who put over $100 into the game. Microtransactions prey on people who lack self-control, I guess I'm just lucky I'm not predisposed to that kind of thing.

Aissen 8y ago
Nintendo tried it both ways. FireEmblem Heroes, micro-transaction (gachapon) based, made more money than Super Mario Run ($10, one time only buy). I'm amazed that they are still very careful with their experimentations, and not switching everything to the free-to-play model. Let's hope they continue this way.

goalieca 8y ago

People complained about Mario run costing 10$ for the complete game. Quite frankly, i enjoyed it a lot and feel that 10$ was a good price and there was no grinding or waiting. It was focused on fun. But i think people are just not used to paying for phone games.