I just had to stop playing this game because I was basically making no progress every day. It became less enjoyable and more of a chore every 10 hours. * Progress can be gauged by how far a team of heroes you construct can proceed in the "single player" stages of the game. Getting further into the single player campaign dictates how much experience/gold you will earn when not playing the game. * In order to make prog…
How often did you encounter maxed-out players? Did you see players that must have spent hundreds of dollars?
What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people. I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.
I'm with you on this and I think the problem really got started when Zynga began actively optimizing to monetize underlying addiction in its core users years ago. The real solution here is that we need legislation for "casual" games that puts addictive games into the same bucket as gambling, but doing that is going to be really difficult (how do you even legally define bad addicting gameplay?).
A really simple solution would be to cap the amount of money a user can spend on a single game in a certain time period after the initial buy-in (so games could still charge hundreds of dollars for Premium/GOTY/etc editions). Even something like $50/mo would stop whales
What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people. I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.
I think comments like this are too dismissive of how important and valuable games are in many people's lives. Personally, I fear the opposite, that over-regulation of rapidly changing industries based on fear and anecdata will make people's lives worse.
"games" is a broad category. Chess or Doom or Undertale never nickle-and-dimed anyone for $500.
I can't help but think you're purposefully trying to obscure that point.
These games are a modern version of slot machines. It's habit forming, and it burns time and money. tbf it's still slightly better than things that you see in a casino
Coin ups existed a long time ago too. Arguably you got even less value from those per dollar spent.
But with those, it only operated when it was fed coins. It's been shown that people spend less when they pay with cash than credit cards. Casual mobile games go beyond even credit cards and have users spend nebulous tokens. They go as far as they can to disconnect the play from the loss of money, and that's bad.
I see a significant difference between "have people pay for a fun service" and "engineer an experience specifically to be addictive".
"There are more stat checks in the game and to get better in those stats you need to engage with the metasystems and monetize because the grind is so painful."
A game that's optimized for monetization over fun is not the kind of game I want to play.
I'm with you on this and I think the problem really got started when Zynga began actively optimizing to monetize underlying addiction in its core users years ago. The real solution here is that we need legislation for "casual" games that puts addictive games into the same bucket as gambling, but doing that is going to be really difficult (how do you even legally define bad addicting gameplay?).
A really simple solution would be to cap the amount of money a user can spend on a single game in a certain time period after the initial buy-in (so games could still charge hundreds of dollars for Premium/GOTY/etc editions). Even something like $50/mo would stop whales
If it is a simple solution, then there likely is a simple work around.
In this case, large companies with multiple games can have cross game promotions. Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble.
I just had to stop playing this game because I was basically making no progress every day. It became less enjoyable and more of a chore every 10 hours. * Progress can be gauged by how far a team of heroes you construct can proceed in the "single player" stages of the game. Getting further into the single player campaign dictates how much experience/gold you will earn when not playing the game. * In order to make prog…
"You'll be lucky if $100 USD gets you an inch"
So even the pay-to-win part is broken and more like pay-to-lose.
These games are a modern version of slot machines. It's habit forming, and it burns time and money. tbf it's still slightly better than things that you see in a casino
Coin ups existed a long time ago too. Arguably you got even less value from those per dollar spent.
Ever carried around $20 in quarters in a fanny pack as a five year old? It's pretty heavy. There's a pretty low ceiling on how much you could spend back in the day and it was impossible to silently, digitally spend an unlimited quantity of your parents' money.
A really simple solution would be to cap the amount of money a user can spend on a single game in a certain time period after the initial buy-in (so games could still charge hundreds of dollars for Premium/GOTY/etc editions). Even something like $50/mo would stop whales
If it is a simple solution, then there likely is a simple work around. In this case, large companies with multiple games can have cross game promotions. Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble.
Sure, Blizzard does this a lot with their games. The idea behind it is more that it prevents whales, destroying the business model... the kids spending $100/mo are nothing compared to the people who spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on these games every month. That's who they're targeting.
What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people. I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.
I'm with you on this and I think the problem really got started when Zynga began actively optimizing to monetize underlying addiction in its core users years ago. The real solution here is that we need legislation for "casual" games that puts addictive games into the same bucket as gambling, but doing that is going to be really difficult (how do you even legally define bad addicting gameplay?).
More legislation? While I agree that many of these games are fundamentally indistinguishable from gambling, gambling laws themselves are a complete overreach by the state. In general, when it comes to regulation, the role of the government should be to interfere at negative third-party externalities. When individuals are impacted by things they didn't consent to or take part in, there is a case for the protection of their interests to not be impeded upon. But if all parties involved consent to a behavior, as is the case with gambling, that is not a behavior for the government to control. Just because people can make poor decisions doesn't mean that we need to criminalize them.