A new competitor enters the Microtransaction fight!

If there's any justice in the world.

Another day another treatise on the awfulness of modern day video game microtransactions, however, this time it's coming from an official report with legislative power behind it. (A whole report? Golly.) Once again, UK Parliament (That's my home team.) have expressed interest in managing the avarice of games companies through restrictions and regulations. I have exposited my opinion on this before, and if you read my last blog on the matter you will know that I have given up all hope of this situation being solved amicably. Government supervision is the last thing anyone needs in a creative field, but honestly, how are they going to taint the medium any worse than the greedy big corpo's already have?

If you go online to Parliament.UK, you can find an extensive report, apparently the work of 9 months,  dedicated to "immersive and addictive technologies". This report defines 'immersive techonogies' as experiences that occupy the realm of digital or augmented reality; essentially meaning VR games and games like Pokemon GO and Ninantic's other cash grabs. They believe that the 'immersion' factor of these games makes them more likely to have an influence on behaviour. Interesting stuff, but I wanna focus on that second one, because that is where Parliament really starts to go for the game's industries' jugular.

'Addictive' technologies is rather self explanatory, referring to products or devices that people either have, or perceive to have, a dependency on. This goes into 'gaming disorder' and 'engagment metrics', all subjects for other blogs, but in Section 3 we get to the juicy stuff: "Financial harms of Immersive technologies." Whenever microtransactions are bought into the world of gaming, the usual arguments start up about; value, pricing and pay-to-win. (or P2W) Lately, as we've moved into the world of rampant monetisation, video games companies have attempted to pooh-pooh any potential backlash with carefully considered statements. "It's just cosmetics" is the, much parroted, phrase that adorns the press release of many an online storefront, whilst "They're time savers" or "It's about player choice." has begun to seep it's vile way into single player games too. Oftentimes gamers are torn between these artificial battle lines that developers have set up, waging between "It's not pay to win if it's just about looks!" and "It's not 'player choice' if the choice is between a fun game and a boring one". (Just look at the recent backlash regarding Fallout 76 and it's fridge to get an example of that.)

Parliament's report will hopefully put an end to much of that debate, as they delve into the murky world of customer manipulation in it's pure form. I will follow their example and establish for everyone that there are real life consequences to systems like these. A while ago I wrote a blog about a family who's children had emptied their parent's bank accounts on FIFA Ultimate team, all wasted on lootboxes for the promise of securing Lionel Messi (Which, due to FUT's lootbox setup, they never did.) Parliament offer a similar tale that pertains to a game that was an absolute blast-to-the-past for me, Runescape. The Report reads "We were contacted by a member of the public whose adult son built up considerable debts, reported to be in excess of £50,000, through spending on microtransactions in British company Jagex’s online game RuneScape."

From this, we can see that people have fallen for the trap of microtransactions before in incredibly serious ways. This is the reason why people gawk when companies like Respawn stand up for their ludicrous price points by saying; "the majority of people never buy them anyway!" That isn't the point. The point is that there as those that do and these people can be abused whilst playing the game. If you're comfortable with creating a product that has the potential/intent to harm or abuse your consumers, then maybe you shouldn't be working in creative fields. "But what can be done?" is the question that must be asked. "Surely if there were ways to cut down on abuse then games companies would have done so!" And they would have, if it wouldn't end up cutting into their bottom line.

The makers of Candy Crush Saga, King, spoke out against accusations that they were complicit in the fleecing and exploitation of it's customers. "we would send an e-mail out when a player’s spend was $250 in a week for the first time. It was an e-mail that said, “We notice you are enjoying the game a lot at the moment. Are you sure you are happy with this?” […] We got back, “I wouldn’t spend the money if I didn’t have it” and things like, “I’m fine, please leave me alone”. We felt it was too intrusive so we stopped doing that." That is all they have done for customer protection, by the by. So that's nice. King sent people emails for a bit until some people complained and then they resolved themselves of all protective responsibilities. (What heroes)

As it just so happens, there is a tool that would be very effective of limiting the exposure of this kind of content to those vulnerable to it. (I.e. Kids and those susceptible to problem spending.) You see, a while back, the Games Industry developed this thing called a 'ratings board', that would provide content guidelines for developers, shops and consumers. (All as a bid to prevent Government oversight.) With the stipulations that this board dictates (I'm specifically referring to PEGI, here) Video games that feature gambling must be labelled as such and be assigned an '18' badge. This would mean that children would not be exposed to the thrill of gamb- I mean loot bo- I mean 'Surprise mechanics' at a young age. (If you feel I was being condescending in that paragraph. Well spotted.)

However, the 'age rating' system was proven pointless after NBA 2K20 unveiled their gambling themed trailer and still got away with a '3' rating. ("Sports games have always been rated 3, why should this one be any different") The part that really gets me is, even if we buy the age old "It isn't technically gambling because you can't cash out!", excuse, the trailer still clearly shows that the game features gambling-esque imagery, which is grounds for a 'Teen' rating under Pegi's own stipulation. Heck, YouTuber YongYea pointed out that Pokemon Red and Blue was labelled 'Teen' for that very reason, and that game didn't even have any microtransactions! (Just an ingeniously clever marketing ploy to get you to buy the game twice.)

I would encourage interested readers to take a look at the article through this link Here and see just what it is that Parliament has to say about the greedy aspects of the gaming industry. (Again, the juicy parts are in section 3.) I'm not yet sure if anything will actually come of it (Especially with the politically tumultuous time that the UK is suffering through right now.) But it's always fun to see someone shine a flashlight under the friendly facade of AAA gaming and watch the cockroaches scurry. As you have likely noticed, this is topic I could talk about until the sky falls down (Falling Skies; great show! Kinda tapered off in the later series...) but I find that situations like this are best left for the observer to look through and come to their own conclusions. Besides, after reading through all of the industries' clandestine action and motivations, I need a bath. 

Moblie Games: wide as a lake, shallow as a slip'n'slide

Fishing for wallets

Well, I talked about the insidious practice of microtransactions yesterday, might as well prolong this depressing dive into the cooperate-driven side of games with a new target: Mobile gaming.  Most gamers in the world are, in fact, mobile gamers. Techjury estimates that there around 2.2 billion active Mobile users in the world today. With this in mind, why is it that there are practically no worthwhile games on the mobile marketplace? You'd think someone would have made one on accident by this point! But somehow, even after all this time, all the worst practises in the gaming world stem from the Mobile market, wherein they are called 'feautres'. Microtransactions: Birthed by the Mobile market. Artificial time gates: A literal requirement for any modern mobile game. Lootboxes: They perfected those systems long ago.

Mobile games are characterized most prominently by the way how they are generally lacking in gameplay. That isn't a comment on the restrictions of the mobile platform but rather a condemnation of the apathy of big budget mobile developers. Modern day smart phones are leagues more powerful than many of the consoles back in the day. Last time I checked (Which was 4 years ago) my old smart phone could run a Gameboy, N64 and Gamecube emulator with decent performance allround. (Though things did get a little choppy for some Gamecube games.) With that in mind, where is our high quality mobile game? Where is our Twilight Princess, or Resident Evil? And I'm not talking about ports, I'm taking original high quality properties made for the phone.

It's not that the companies aren't there to make the games. Square Enix have published original mobile games before, Bethesda have done it twice and Epic have now stepped in. However, none of them would ever waste the time to develop a worthwhile original title for the mobile market, because they know they don't need to. Mobile customers are nowhere near as discerning as customers on any other platform, so developers know that they can get away with putting out shallow, structureless wastes of drive space, and make more money than they could ever do with a dedicated project. As a result, the best mobile games on offer are all ports of console and PC titles. All mobile originals are trivialized, 'casual' experiences that are hyper focused around the pursuit of recurrent monetisation.

For clarity's sake, I'll say that I don't hate the mobile market just because it is 'casual', like some do. I like it when a more casual audience have a little gateway into gaming. The way I see it, the more people playing games the better. My umbrage comes from the fact that mobile games are, almost universally, bottom-of-the-barrel exploitative trash blatantly designed with the intention of fleecing as much as humanly possible from its players. It is embarrassing, as a gamer, to think that the face of your hobby, the only example that the public sees, is a platform that features the most ugly, cynical corporate cash grabs that the industry has to offer. What's worse, those same crappy mobile rip-offs account for the lions share of video game revenue! Ever wonder how much money King make off of Candy Crush? Too much money, is the answer.

How does the mobile market manage to make so much money, year after year, whilst distributing nothing but low effort garbage? Through psychological manipulation, obviously. King and it's competitors recently admitted (In a roundabout, deceitful way) to hiring the services of 'Psycology' experts in order to help them design their games with all these tips and tricks to mind. I mentioned something about 'psycology tricks' yesterday when talking about the way that Lootboxes are designed to provide a hit to your dopamine levels. But just so everyone is on the same page, I should likely explain exactly what I mean by that.

Firstly, I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, so I will be using very general language as I go on with this explanation. It's not for your benefit, it's for mine. As I understand it, dopamine is a chemical in your brain that provides pleasurable sensations when it is stimulated. Similar to adrenaline, dopamine levels can rise and fall due to random external stimulus that we go through in our daily lives. Every now and then we conduct actions that get us little hits of dopamine, this makes us feel happy and excited, feelings that most people want to experience more, so we are drawn to seek more experiences that reward us with the same sensations. One way that Dopamine can be stimulated is by completing a hard task, clocking off at the end of a hard days work, hitting 'publish' on a finished blog, or buying a Lootbox. You'll notice, whenever you watch a digital box opening in one of these games, that are often accompanied with a flashy show, sometimes with sparkly animations. They'll hold off on showing you exactly what you've received straight away in favour of a little bit of pageantry that is designed to build anticipation. All of this hits up on your Dopamine levels to get you feeling excited and happy. After a while you start associating that exciting feeling with opening loot boxes so you seek out some more and then you end up hooked.

Of course the topic of dopamine it is a lot more complicated than I make it seem. It would have to be, seeing as how dopamine exploitation is at the heart of gambling and addiction. People pen dissertations on lighter topics then this. I'm just some sleep-deprived fool sitting at desk trying to make sense of the world. But from the little bits I've read and heard on the issue, the process of dopamine exploitation is similar to the training of Pavlov's dogs; positive reinforcement breeds recurrent habits. This may seem like a gross over-simplification but we are, at the end of the day, all still just animals, thus we are still susceptible to many of the primal weakness' of our less evolved brethren. Mobile game's companies know this all too well, and they also know exactly how to exploit this in order to fill their pockets.

Mobile game's companies don't just throw all their eggs into one basket, however. Dopamine can lessen in effect the more you are exposed to it, meaning that the best way to get players coming back again and again to regulate their game time. How do you manage this without literally standing over players with a stopwatch? Digitally standing over players with a stopwatch, of course! Many 'free-to-play' games make use of, the aforementioned, 'artificial time gates' to stop players from experiencing too much and satisfying their dopamine urges. Remember when you play a mobile game and you always end up having to wait for some ridiculous energy bar to fill before you do an action? That isn't just there to annoy you into spending money on a 'skip'. That functions as a timed gate to make sure the player comes back tomorrow, and the next day and so on.

Those are all main tactics of the 'high effort' cash grabs, what about that low-effort garbage that I was talking about earlier. Well, if you've ever gone on the Android/Apple store and done a bit of experimental downloading here and there, chances are you've noticed something. Many of the games on the mobile market are the exact same game with a different skin.You've seen the archetypes: City builders with obnoxious amounts of resource management, amateurish platformers with bright aesthetics and endless darn battle royale games. Now, I'm not going to sit here and lament on the lack of creativity displayed in Mobile stores, (although that is a huge problem) when I can just point to how some of these games feel like they were made from a template. That's because they were.

With a two second google search, you can find a handful of 'City Builder templates' for the enterprising mobile developer. An easy how-to guide that requires little more from the purchaser then to change some assets before slapping it up on the mobile store. Not that there is anything wrong with templates and guides themselves. They are actually great tools for budding developers to figure out how to assemble a game. But they are best utilized as tutorials not easy-build-it kits. After a whilse of searching, I haven't yet found the exact template that a lot of the high-fantasy city builders use, but you can be sure that it exists. As long as both Apple and Google refuse to take their mobile marketplace seriously and start actually regulating it proactively, consumers will continue to be met with this barrage of copy-and-paste time wasters, and all those small indie gems that I am told actually exist will remain buried.

You may have picked up on the fact that I am more than a little passionate about the absolute state of the mobile marketplace. That's because I vividly remember the days when I wanted to play games but was lacking a console. I would browse the mobile game store and find fun little games that I would share with my friends.(Back when I had those.) When I look at the mobile store today, I see none of those cool, imaginative little games that made mobile gaming worthwhile. The store front is dominated by cash grabs, big budget ones and build-a-game ones. Were I a console-less child seeking gaming fun on mobile today, I wouldn't be surprised if child-me went off of games all together; and then went outside and did something active like >shudder< sports!