yamy said:
Hero in a half shell said:
I find depressingly that more and more the videogames industry is looking more and more like casinos.
We are buying less and less of our games, and getting more and more held back in DLC packs, and artificially placed behind payways or frustrate-or-pay methods.
It's dishonest, and possibly damaging considering the generally young audience of videogames.
Can you explain how it's damaging?
Arcades pre-dates all of the things you've listed. And as Rob said in the article arcade games share alot of similarities with gambling. Yet we don't see a generation of chronic gamblers in kids that grew up playing the games.
I don't agree with some of the industry practices but I don't see how it's damaging to children.
Specifically referring to the damage these games may be doing to young children, I honestly don't know. The research into finding out what effect (if any) these games are having in young children is still ongoing, so I cannot say.
but what we do know is that they have already led to many cases of literally thousands of dollars being spent on these microtransaction games: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020706073.html
We do know that the developers refer to techniques and even use professional lingo found in gambling casinos:
http://www.polygon.com/2012/11/1/3587102/high-rolling-whales-sometimes-spend-thousands-in-free-to-play-ios-and
We know that these practices have caught the attention of both the FTC and the EU, and both have launched investigations into these practices: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2011/02/ftc_chairman_to_probe_apple_ip.html
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-02/28/european-commission-microtransactions
Microtransactions have already caused a lot of harm to a lot of people. That's all I can really say about that until further research comes through.
