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I knew someone who worked for EA as a UX researcher. He said that games like these are primarily targeting whales who will drop $10k on a game. They are the rea

I knew someone who worked for EA as a UX researcher. He said that games like these are primarily targeting whales who will drop $10k on a game. They are the real money earners. The really sad part was the he said the most whales aren't super rich, they're just people with an addiction.

jiggawatts 4y ago
I've seen similar comments by several game devs, but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy. Think of some oil Sheik's son bored to death at home because it's too hot to go outside. But yeah, the "loot boxes" that are mostly gambling have been banned in many countries because they're targeted at young children.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Reminds me of EA Sports FIFA. The whole Build a team process is predatory and based on gambling + micro transactions
- spoiler 4y ago
  > I've seen similar comments by several game devs, but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy. This seems like naïve speculation to me. Think about the number/scaling of this. It would give them a few months worth of income at best? The sadder truth is that they're exploiting escapism and maladaptive coping (addiction, gambling) in people who also use escapism to cope/relax. Often times, those same people in desperate need of escapism are there because they struggle in real life, often financially too. So, the little reprieve they get from gaming negative impacts their physical lives. Diablo Immortal is a caricature of the depravity most games have become. A few games like Overwatch are not P2W, but even they have lootbox mechanics for cosmetic skins (you get boxes for leveling up and challenges, as you play, though). Blizzard literally can't help themselves.
  - kuang_eleven 4y ago
    The interesting thing is that you would think Blizzard would have known this. Literally the last game in the same Diablo series launched with a much-hated Real Money Auction House, which was eventually removed.
- j_4 4y ago
  To me this "ultra-wealthy" thing has always sounded like a convenient lie whale-game devs tell themselves to sleep soundly at night. These dark pattern black holes are made purely to form an addiction and turn it into profit, they don't care about who's on the receiving end. There's an increasing number of players who expect that either a) a game will take unlimited money and feed them dopamines in return, or b) they never have to pay a dime for anything because they're fully subsidized by the addicts. I have conflicted feelings about administrative regulation of this stuff, I just hate that things are this way, especially as an independent game dev. (I'll do the hustle - my first game Pawnbarian is a chess-flavored puzzle roguelike. On mobile it's an ad-free demo with a single $7 IAP for the whole thing. Out on Steam and Android, iOS will follow soon. j4nw.com/pawnbarian)
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long. Most long lived whales are likely to be from wealthy families, or the fun side addiction for a very wealthy individual. That doesn't change the fact that there are addicted people who spend a large percentage of their income on a game. Whales are one thing and addicted players are another.
    - j_4 4y ago
      I don't necessarily disagree, but for the purpose of my argument this is splitting hairs. Both audiences are functionally the same from the game design standpoint.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      Why do you think the mechanics of nonchemical addiction are different to chemical addiction? I certainly see plenty of nonrich people being addicted to drugs and essentially spend everything they have on drugs (the proximity to crime is obviously an additional factor)
    - patrec 4y ago
      > It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long. They don't have to. Repeatedly unearthing cow-clickers whom you can milk for $10'000 before sending them into financial ruin sounds like a much more viable business strategy to me than trying to build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click.
- aliswe 4y ago
  > but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy. sorry, but that's just sickening.
bloodyplonker22 4y ago
Right, most "super rich" people don't get "super rich" by doing super stupid things.
- taotau 4y ago
  True...ish, but i bet a percentage of them get rich by focussing on what they are good at and neglecting their families, just making piles of money available. There's probably enough kids getting 10K a month pocket money to make GPs stragetgy viable.
- lozenge 4y ago
  The Chinese proverb “rags to rags in three generations” says that family wealth does not last for three generations. The first generation makes the money, the second spends it and the third sees none of the wealth.
  - ctchocula 4y ago
    One explanation could be a difference between China and the West. Historically the West relies on primogeniture where the eldest son inherits a vast majority of the fortune and other sons need to move out and build a career for themselves. Classical China OTOH would split their fortune (which for 90% of folks was land since most were farmers) between their sons. Primogeniture encourages maintaining wealth across generations through the eldest son while the latter could mean the fortune gets spread out and eventually lost within 3 generations. For example, see research by Thomas Piketty about how ppl who were rich in 16th century Italy are still absurdly rich today.
  - bobnamob 4y ago
    That phenomenon probably has more to do with wealth being spread increasingly thin across ever-larger generations
    - b112 4y ago
      Maybe? Certainly more offspring was normal, the further back you go. So wealth division could more easily happen. But most cultures had the idea of the "first born", the official heir... for this very reason! Most of the loot, holdings, tended to go the eldest.
tjpnz 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Diablo Immortal is not available in Belgium and the Netherlands due to that: https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-immortal-wont-be-released-in-belgium-or-the-netherlands-because-of-loot-boxes/ https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-immortal-wont-be-released-in-...
  - droopyEyelids 4y ago
    What allows these countries to stand up for their population against billion dollar corporations?
    - tjpnz 4y ago
      Strong democracies with little to no tolerance for lobbyists.
- xuki 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
seydor 4y ago
10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night, and casinos do exist. What kind of game was your friend working on? Whales do exist but they are not the bulk of the revenue
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  > 10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night that's a very low bar to set...
- gspr 4y ago
  > casinos do exist. In many jurisdictions they don't. And where they do, they're often very heavily regulated.
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    While the stock market is much more accessible, operates in a less transparent way, and ruins more people for life than an actual casino.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - elif 4y ago
      The stock market, by inflationary design, rewards >50% of the time. Gambling, by regulated design, rewards 45-49% of the time. Diablo Immortal, by comparison, is designed to reward 0% of the time.
- mafaa 4y ago
  Under 1% of users for over 50% of your mobile gaming revenue with a not single purchase model has been a good general estimate since 2010; I invite you to google an publicly available data on that. From what I've seen privately 50% is a vast understatement. And no, most of those users cannot afford what they spend.
- 4y ago
therouwboat 4y ago
I used to play a MUD thats been around for 30 years and has active playerbase of maybe 1-4k people and there were some players who would pay 20-40k for special wizard made items. It was run by a non-profit, so all that money went to keep the game running, but yeah, some people put a lot of money on these games.
ekianjo 4y ago
> they're just people with an addiction. Everyone has an addiction to something. You are lucky if its to something thats cheap and legal.
- xmodem 4y ago
  It depends on the timeframe obviously, but $10k is hardly cheap.
  - chii 4y ago
    it is cheaper than drugs. If you got to be addicted to something, i don't think these mobile games are the worst out there. Of course, the best outcome is not to be addicted.
    - Panoramix 4y ago
      What a strange logic. You can be addicted to hundreds of things a the same time, it doesn't justify what these videogames are doing.
    - xmodem 4y ago
      I'm not sure that "this thing isn't as bad as illegal drugs" is a winning argument. (I'm also not sure it's actually true, either - would depend on what metric you use)
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    10k a year is hardly a lot… As a Japanese gamer says, paying for games is like dining out. You get nothing useful after a good meal, and paying for games may as well be more useful.
    - allarm 4y ago
      > 10k a year is hardly a lot In my country 16k/y is a median salary. It’s heavily influenced by 1 or 2 major cities - the rest of the country earns much less, 10k/y is considered to be a decent salary. So no, it is a huge amount of money.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> they're just people with an addiction Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself. Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups reinforce each other's behavior. The goal is to get them to log in every day and invest in the game. People pay money to uncap their progression. This turns these games into spending competitions: whoever spends the most money wins the game. The corporation is the only true winner of course. I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed. The best part was my bot was statistically indistinguishable from a sufficiently addicted player due to the game's own design. I'd like to believe I helped destroy that game.
- chii 4y ago
  so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves. Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Hey, I love video games. They've given me thousands and thousands of hours of fun. Awesome games like Subnautica can bring joy to the world. The problem is the one time I tried mobile games I eventually started waking up at 3 AM because that's when some timer resets. At some point I started wondering where my life went so wrong. Then I started studying the design of these games and I realized they are designed to cause this sort of addiction and harm. They employ the same strategies as casinos and drug dealers. They straight up subvert the reward center of people's brains to the point they harm themselves and even destroy their own lives.
lordnacho 4y ago
Are there enough of those guys vs people who will spend 10? I guess you need 1k of those people to make up one whale, but aren't there more little players by a lot? I guess I don't have the data. Also maybe you can get both at once by targeting the big guy.
- Hendrikto 4y ago
  The vast majority of users do not spent anything. This is no problem for the game developers, as they can serve as cannon fodder for the few who do invest money.
Ekaros 4y ago
I wonder what we could do to legally balance this. Out right banning is bit questionable. But weekly or monthly spending reports? Some total number shown regularly to players?
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  You could just cap the maximum spend of any one player in any game (or group of players). Even if it was some stupid high number like $1,000, it would limit the blast radius. Also, banning loot boxes of course. Totally can be done.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  I think that the option in appstores to completely hide all games with in-app purchases would be enough. Like, if you don't know they exist, you can't get hooked. Probably banning advertising such games anywhere but on the AppStores, too.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I'm all for advertisement ban. Or at least limiting periods allowed. It gets either really funny, sad or scary however you take it when you see some games like Raid Shadow Legends advertised for years extremely prominently. At least when comparing to most other mobile titles... And then the places it is advertised. Like cooking channels...
Krasnol 4y ago
Star Citizen isn't even a proper game and still works perfectly living mainly from whales. We've passed some really unhealthy point in game development with this bonus money making...
phpisthebest 4y ago
Rich people are rich because they do not spend $10K on a digital downloads that have no actual value... The ONLY people that would do that, are people with an addiction
- concordDance 4y ago
  Tell that to the oil shiek's family...
- thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
  There are a lot of famous rich addicts. Or were.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
charlieyu1 4y ago
People who will throw massive money in games, won’t be happy about Blizzard.
wincy 4y ago
I uninstalled Diablo Immortal last night as the pull to spend money was getting greater in my mind. I’ve been very sick for a couple weeks and basically bed bound, so this game was mindless and seemed fun. I got to “max level” (which is nothing of the sort the game essentially has infinite progression), and Back when I worked a dead end call center job working 80 hours a week I spent basically $100 a day on a Japanese free to play mobile game. It consumed my life and I was super depressed anyway. I felt that same feeling last night to just spend $100 “for fun” and realized how bad this game was going to be for me. These games manage to tickle that hyper competitive part of my brain that wants to “win at any cost”. So I’ll spend money I shouldn’t on a game.
- jules 4y ago
  It's not just the money though. Even if you remove pay-to-win and move to an ad supported model, these games are still engineered to maximally waste your time. In fact, even games that are not designed to maximize your time spent in the game can be bad. The reward hits you get from games make you less likely to seek out other types of reward in your life. And even when you're not playing the game, your brain will be running a background task strategising how to maximize your results in the game.
baby 4y ago
I think it depends, I know a lot of rich people who spend a lot on skins and others. Like, a lot.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jiggawatts 4y ago

I've seen similar comments by several game devs, but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy. Think of some oil Sheik's son bored to death at home because it's too hot to go outside. But yeah, the "loot boxes" that are mostly gambling have been banned in many countries because they're targeted at young children.

hackernewds 4y ago
Reminds me of EA Sports FIFA. The whole Build a team process is predatory and based on gambling + micro transactions
spoiler 4y ago
> I've seen similar comments by several game devs, but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy. This seems like naïve speculation to me. Think about the number/scaling of this. It would give them a few months worth of income at best? The sadder truth is that they're exploiting escapism and maladaptive coping (addiction, gambling) in people who also use escapism to cope/relax. Often times, those same people in desperate need of escapism are there because they struggle in real life, often financially too. So, the little reprieve they get from gaming negative impacts their physical lives. Diablo Immortal is a caricature of the depravity most games have become. A few games like Overwatch are not P2W, but even they have lootbox mechanics for cosmetic skins (you get boxes for leveling up and challenges, as you play, though). Blizzard literally can't help themselves.
- kuang_eleven 4y ago
  The interesting thing is that you would think Blizzard would have known this. Literally the last game in the same Diablo series launched with a much-hated Real Money Auction House, which was eventually removed.
j_4 4y ago
To me this "ultra-wealthy" thing has always sounded like a convenient lie whale-game devs tell themselves to sleep soundly at night. These dark pattern black holes are made purely to form an addiction and turn it into profit, they don't care about who's on the receiving end. There's an increasing number of players who expect that either a) a game will take unlimited money and feed them dopamines in return, or b) they never have to pay a dime for anything because they're fully subsidized by the addicts. I have conflicted feelings about administrative regulation of this stuff, I just hate that things are this way, especially as an independent game dev. (I'll do the hustle - my first game Pawnbarian is a chess-flavored puzzle roguelike. On mobile it's an ad-free demo with a single $7 IAP for the whole thing. Out on Steam and Android, iOS will follow soon. j4nw.com/pawnbarian)
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long. Most long lived whales are likely to be from wealthy families, or the fun side addiction for a very wealthy individual. That doesn't change the fact that there are addicted people who spend a large percentage of their income on a game. Whales are one thing and addicted players are another.
  - j_4 4y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree, but for the purpose of my argument this is splitting hairs. Both audiences are functionally the same from the game design standpoint.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    Why do you think the mechanics of nonchemical addiction are different to chemical addiction? I certainly see plenty of nonrich people being addicted to drugs and essentially spend everything they have on drugs (the proximity to crime is obviously an additional factor)
  - patrec 4y ago
    > It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long. They don't have to. Repeatedly unearthing cow-clickers whom you can milk for $10'000 before sending them into financial ruin sounds like a much more viable business strategy to me than trying to build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click.
aliswe 4y ago
> but at least some of them said that they make most of their money from the kids of the ultra-wealthy. sorry, but that's just sickening.

bloodyplonker22 4y ago

Right, most "super rich" people don't get "super rich" by doing super stupid things.

taotau 4y ago
True...ish, but i bet a percentage of them get rich by focussing on what they are good at and neglecting their families, just making piles of money available. There's probably enough kids getting 10K a month pocket money to make GPs stragetgy viable.
lozenge 4y ago
The Chinese proverb “rags to rags in three generations” says that family wealth does not last for three generations. The first generation makes the money, the second spends it and the third sees none of the wealth.
- ctchocula 4y ago
  One explanation could be a difference between China and the West. Historically the West relies on primogeniture where the eldest son inherits a vast majority of the fortune and other sons need to move out and build a career for themselves. Classical China OTOH would split their fortune (which for 90% of folks was land since most were farmers) between their sons. Primogeniture encourages maintaining wealth across generations through the eldest son while the latter could mean the fortune gets spread out and eventually lost within 3 generations. For example, see research by Thomas Piketty about how ppl who were rich in 16th century Italy are still absurdly rich today.
- bobnamob 4y ago
  That phenomenon probably has more to do with wealth being spread increasingly thin across ever-larger generations
  - b112 4y ago
    Maybe? Certainly more offspring was normal, the further back you go. So wealth division could more easily happen. But most cultures had the idea of the "first born", the official heir... for this very reason! Most of the loot, holdings, tended to go the eldest.

tjpnz 4y ago

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 4y ago
Diablo Immortal is not available in Belgium and the Netherlands due to that: https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-immortal-wont-be-released-in-belgium-or-the-netherlands-because-of-loot-boxes/ https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-immortal-wont-be-released-in-...
- droopyEyelids 4y ago
  What allows these countries to stand up for their population against billion dollar corporations?
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    Strong democracies with little to no tolerance for lobbyists.
xuki 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

seydor 4y ago

10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night, and casinos do exist. What kind of game was your friend working on? Whales do exist but they are not the bulk of the revenue

black_puppydog 4y ago
> 10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night that's a very low bar to set...
gspr 4y ago
> casinos do exist. In many jurisdictions they don't. And where they do, they're often very heavily regulated.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  While the stock market is much more accessible, operates in a less transparent way, and ruins more people for life than an actual casino.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - elif 4y ago
    The stock market, by inflationary design, rewards >50% of the time. Gambling, by regulated design, rewards 45-49% of the time. Diablo Immortal, by comparison, is designed to reward 0% of the time.
mafaa 4y ago
Under 1% of users for over 50% of your mobile gaming revenue with a not single purchase model has been a good general estimate since 2010; I invite you to google an publicly available data on that. From what I've seen privately 50% is a vast understatement. And no, most of those users cannot afford what they spend.
4y ago

therouwboat 4y ago

I used to play a MUD thats been around for 30 years and has active playerbase of maybe 1-4k people and there were some players who would pay 20-40k for special wizard made items. It was run by a non-profit, so all that money went to keep the game running, but yeah, some people put a lot of money on these games.

ekianjo 4y ago

> they're just people with an addiction. Everyone has an addiction to something. You are lucky if its to something thats cheap and legal.

xmodem 4y ago
It depends on the timeframe obviously, but $10k is hardly cheap.
- chii 4y ago
  it is cheaper than drugs. If you got to be addicted to something, i don't think these mobile games are the worst out there. Of course, the best outcome is not to be addicted.
  - Panoramix 4y ago
    What a strange logic. You can be addicted to hundreds of things a the same time, it doesn't justify what these videogames are doing.
  - xmodem 4y ago
    I'm not sure that "this thing isn't as bad as illegal drugs" is a winning argument. (I'm also not sure it's actually true, either - would depend on what metric you use)
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  10k a year is hardly a lot… As a Japanese gamer says, paying for games is like dining out. You get nothing useful after a good meal, and paying for games may as well be more useful.
  - allarm 4y ago
    > 10k a year is hardly a lot In my country 16k/y is a median salary. It’s heavily influenced by 1 or 2 major cities - the rest of the country earns much less, 10k/y is considered to be a decent salary. So no, it is a huge amount of money.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> they're just people with an addiction Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself. Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups reinforce each other's behavior. The goal is to get them to log in every day and invest in the game. People pay money to uncap their progression. This turns these games into spending competitions: whoever spends the most money wins the game. The corporation is the only true winner of course. I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed. The best part was my bot was statistically indistinguishable from a sufficiently addicted player due to the game's own design. I'd like to believe I helped destroy that game.

chii 4y ago
so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves. Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Hey, I love video games. They've given me thousands and thousands of hours of fun. Awesome games like Subnautica can bring joy to the world. The problem is the one time I tried mobile games I eventually started waking up at 3 AM because that's when some timer resets. At some point I started wondering where my life went so wrong. Then I started studying the design of these games and I realized they are designed to cause this sort of addiction and harm. They employ the same strategies as casinos and drug dealers. They straight up subvert the reward center of people's brains to the point they harm themselves and even destroy their own lives.

lordnacho 4y ago

Are there enough of those guys vs people who will spend 10? I guess you need 1k of those people to make up one whale, but aren't there more little players by a lot? I guess I don't have the data. Also maybe you can get both at once by targeting the big guy.

Hendrikto 4y ago
The vast majority of users do not spent anything. This is no problem for the game developers, as they can serve as cannon fodder for the few who do invest money.

Ekaros 4y ago

I wonder what we could do to legally balance this. Out right banning is bit questionable. But weekly or monthly spending reports? Some total number shown regularly to players?

doctor_eval 4y ago
You could just cap the maximum spend of any one player in any game (or group of players). Even if it was some stupid high number like $1,000, it would limit the blast radius. Also, banning loot boxes of course. Totally can be done.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
I think that the option in appstores to completely hide all games with in-app purchases would be enough. Like, if you don't know they exist, you can't get hooked. Probably banning advertising such games anywhere but on the AppStores, too.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I'm all for advertisement ban. Or at least limiting periods allowed. It gets either really funny, sad or scary however you take it when you see some games like Raid Shadow Legends advertised for years extremely prominently. At least when comparing to most other mobile titles... And then the places it is advertised. Like cooking channels...

Krasnol 4y ago

Star Citizen isn't even a proper game and still works perfectly living mainly from whales. We've passed some really unhealthy point in game development with this bonus money making...

phpisthebest 4y ago

Rich people are rich because they do not spend $10K on a digital downloads that have no actual value... The ONLY people that would do that, are people with an addiction

concordDance 4y ago
Tell that to the oil shiek's family...
thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
There are a lot of famous rich addicts. Or were.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

charlieyu1 4y ago

People who will throw massive money in games, won’t be happy about Blizzard.

wincy 4y ago

I uninstalled Diablo Immortal last night as the pull to spend money was getting greater in my mind. I’ve been very sick for a couple weeks and basically bed bound, so this game was mindless and seemed fun. I got to “max level” (which is nothing of the sort the game essentially has infinite progression), and Back when I worked a dead end call center job working 80 hours a week I spent basically $100 a day on a Japanese free to play mobile game. It consumed my life and I was super depressed anyway. I felt that same feeling last night to just spend $100 “for fun” and realized how bad this game was going to be for me. These games manage to tickle that hyper competitive part of my brain that wants to “win at any cost”. So I’ll spend money I shouldn’t on a game.

jules 4y ago
It's not just the money though. Even if you remove pay-to-win and move to an ad supported model, these games are still engineered to maximally waste your time. In fact, even games that are not designed to maximize your time spent in the game can be bad. The reward hits you get from games make you less likely to seek out other types of reward in your life. And even when you're not playing the game, your brain will be running a background task strategising how to maximize your results in the game.

baby 4y ago

I think it depends, I know a lot of rich people who spend a lot on skins and others. Like, a lot.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]