How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year • Hacker News Board

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#61

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

ralusek wrote: post #30

mdorazio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Gambling has negative externalities suffered by families and friends of the addicts (and more people, if addiction drives the victim to crime). That's in addition to the fact that IMO at some point in addiction, you aren't really in a state of mind to give informed consent.

My current point of view is that once a problem becomes large-scale and systemic, to the point you can actually model it at population-scale, it needs top-down attention and top-down solutions. That usually means regulation - either new, modified, or existing but better enforced. In other words, once something grows to the point it wouldn't be out of place on a SimCity/Civilizations-style game dashboard, it needs SimCity/Civilization-style solutions. In yet different words, there ain't such thing as free will and informed consent if I can reliably predict that a population under influence X will have Y% incidence of $bad-thing.

See also: vaccines, smoking, air pollution, climate change, overfishing, and countless other things where people left to their own devices and their own local, small-scale perspective reliably and fully predictably end up doing stupid things.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#62

Post by ApolloFortyNine » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #58

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what you want is a "Warning, this game may be addictive" every time you load the game, then fine. But I do not think the government should be passing hate taxes on things they don't want you to do. People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar, and they're very likely to be going for animal based products at some point. I don't think it's the government's job to control the populace…

> People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar Where is sugar being regulated as tightly as tobacco?

I'm talking about the hate tax. It's not nationwide yet, but you see more and more people pushing for one every year.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#63

Post by lightsighter » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

bairrd wrote: post #51

ralusek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What would you define as the third party in cigarettes? Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition, yet I find it pretty hard to accept that the current legislation against cigarette companies hasn't done a world of good for humanity.

> Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition

Sure they do. If rates of lung cancer go up because more people smoke, insurance rates for the populace at large will also go up, thereby driving down expendable income for many consumers and depressing economic growth. All of society is the third party when it comes to people making poor decisions about their health.

As an aside, I realize this reasoning can certainly be abused as a justification to make any number of questionable but possibly legitimate behaviors illegal, but it doesn't make it less true in specific cases.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#64

Post by slowhadoken » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

I like casual games, they’ve designed interesting systems that handle micro managing. But a game that plays itself isn’t much of a game.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#65

Post by DanHulton » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

shados wrote: post #41

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #8

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.

Taking away people with gambling addictions, children, etc (all good reasons for these games not to exist at all), I've felt for a while that their success is a great example of disparity in disposable income. I'll be forward and be completely honest: I've spent several thousands of dollars on a single of these games. And I've played many of them. Some with just straight micro-transactions (eg: League of Legends skin…

The problem, is how do you identify which of your "whales" (industry term, and useful to identify the mindset of the industry) legitimately have that extra disposable income, and which of them are maxing out credit cards and spending money they don't have?

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#66

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:57 PM UTC

shados wrote: post #44

mattnewport wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's reasonable to draw distinctions among different types of games. Having spent much of my near 20 year career in the games industry, I'm saddened and disgusted by much of what has happened with the monetization strategies pioneered by mobile and free to play games. Maybe there's some grumpy old man syndrome at work but I also have a degree in psychology and the way these games are transparently optimized t…

> I'm saddened and disgusted by much of what has happened with the monetization strategies pioneered by mobile and free to play games. There's a lot to be said that its easier to attract 1000 people and extract $500 from 10 of them than it is to get 5 bucks from all of them. Even more so when you add piracy to the mix. Would these strategies have been a thing if so many people didn't flip their shit because a near AA…

Just because people don't want to pay them for their products doesn't mean they're justified in doing morally bankrupt things. The current tricks employed by video games, both mobile and AAA, amount to fully intentional and premeditated psychological abuse.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#67

Post by j-c-hewitt » Mon, May 06, 2019, 8:11 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #50

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, in the early/mid days of coin-up games, a skilled player could win a game with a single coin while having fun in the process and using their skills instead of simply waiting for stuff to happen.

Fighting games and head-to-head puzzle games like Bubble Bobble in a popular arcade were pretty cool like this in that people would line up to go up against the reigning champion who could go hours on a single quarter.

Sort of weird how most "social" games are both a( trash and b( almost entirely single player with a tacked on multiplayer 'tournament' mode in which you play single player against some other player's template. Even in turn based games that would not suffer from a mobile connection's latency, they still have you go up against the AI with another player's template.

Regression from the 1990s: absolutely pathetic. I wonder if legalization of internet slot machines would wipe out mobile gaming revenue and just expose it for what it is which is a workaround for laws against gambling.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#68

Post by maccard » Mon, May 06, 2019, 8:11 PM UTC

chipperyman573 wrote: post #22

mdorazio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why is $50/month an acceptable amount to spend on alcohol or coffee but not on games? Does it only apply to these style of games or do games like league of legends need to limit purchases too?

(I don't have an answer, fwiw, but I'm not overly keen on this solution)

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#69

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, May 06, 2019, 8:14 PM UTC

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #53

bairrd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you define as the third party in cigarettes? Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition, yet I find it pretty hard to accept that the current legislation against cigarette companies hasn't done a world of good for humanity.

If what you want is a "Warning, this game may be addictive" every time you load the game, then fine. But I do not think the government should be passing hate taxes on things they don't want you to do. People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar, and they're very likely to be going for animal based products at some point. I don't think it's the government's job to control the populace…

> They can force companies to make risks clear, but if the consumer accepts the risk, that should be that.

It doesn't solve anything when the problem is with externalities and prisoner's dilemmas.

Taxes on sugar and smoking can be argued on the grounds of increased load on national heathcare, at least in countries with publicly-funded healthcare. Taxes (or rather, pulling back on subsidies) on meat can be pretty strongly argued as effective means of reducing emissions and slowing down/mitigating climate change. Almost all situations where externalities are the problem share the exact same pattern: "it would be better if nobody did X, but since everyone does X, why should I stop and deprive myself of the value X gives me?".

Personally, I came to believe that the job - perhaps the main job - of the government should in fact be to act as a central coordinator, to prevent citizens from falling into emergent prisonner's dilemma-like traps.

As for regulating gambling and smoking and many other things you can see as "limiting freedom" - it's not like an individual decision leading to self-harm is always, or usually, an unique situation. Gambling isn't a random event, it's an exploitation scheme perpetrated fully intentionally by other people, who have literal textbooks describing the best way to fuck their fellow men and women over. It would be a pretty inhumane government that didn't take an interest in curtailing this.

Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

#70

Post by zimbatm » Mon, May 06, 2019, 8:18 PM UTC

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #49

aeternus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of those games are actually implementing gambling with their virtual currency. They have events where you buy an entry ticket using the in-game currency then either double/triple-up or lose-it-all as the result of some random event. I'm surprised this is even legal in the US, and not caught for app store TOS violations. It seems they've simply replaced the concept of casino chips with virtual currency. They do h…

As long as you don't have a way to exchange back for cash, it's likely protected under all the same laws that make Chuck E Cheese legal. And a lot of these basically copy the 'packs' mechanic from collectible card games, so those would have to be affected too, by any new law.

That's the beauty of it, they don't even have to hand money back to the user.

The trick is to make the user perceive value in whatever digital artifact their are providing. In the eye of the user it then becomes the same as money.

Make the user invest their time into the game. Time is money right? Create fake rewards for arbitrary actions. Then when they are properly hooked, ramp up the difficulty level to a limit where just paying a bit of money would make the game as fun as it was during the evaluation phase.