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How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year

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

#91

Post by njarboe »

logfromblammo wrote: post #79
DanHulton wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We have "qualified investors" for the worldwide casino that is the equities market, to ensure you can't gamble more as an early investor than you could afford to lose.

Any adult in the US can invest in equities. The equities just have to be listed and approved. It is all the other type of equity investing (angle, VC, etc) that you are not allowed to do (and where all the growth is moving to) if you are not a "qualified investor".

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

#92

Post by kingdomcome50 »

ralusek wrote: post #80
TeMPOraL wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of cases to be made for the prohibition of alcohol and cigarettes altogether, Prohibition of alcohol wasn't a problem because mitigating social issues caused by its abuse is a bad idea. Prohibition was a problem because it was a bad tool for the job ; it didn't solve the issues it was meant to, and caused many more of its own. Drugs, pornography, prostitution and violent video games aren't the prob…

Human trafficking violates consent. Violence violates consent. Sexual abuse violates consent. The government has a role in preserving consent in transactions. The third-party negative externalities I mentioned fall within the purview of government responsibilities precisely because they have an impact on those who have not consented. Gambling does not violate consent. Drug usage does not violate consent. Prostitution…

While I agree with your views here, it is incredibly important to understand that "consent" is not as black and white as you are painting it above. In many ways it suffers from the same problems as attempting to define what is "good" -- in that what qualifies an individual to be able to give consent or what consent even looks like can be arbitrary and subjective.

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

#93

Post by largespoon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75
maccard wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I'm of two minds about this solution (I like the "it'll immediately destroy the whole business model" approach), but I'll bite. There are couple of reasons: 1) Children are already restricted from consuming alcohol and coffee. 2) You can only drink so much coffee before your body asks you to stop, or gives up completely. It's not pleasant. 3) Coffee doesn't have this level of addictive properties (alcohol has, and as…

I would add time and attention as an important distinction.

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

#94

Post by njarboe »

fwip wrote: post #31
ragona wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about this often. I contend that we are getting better at extracting money from people. Is there some sort of line we will cross at which point the majority of people are psychologically unprepared to resist spending their money in a way that causes them financial harm? We understand that friction causes consumers to consider their purchase more carefully, so we've worked hard to lower friction, and this has…

> the bulk of the economy is simply driven by overriding our better instincts Not to take away from your point, but you could probably argue that advertising pushed us past that point decades ago.

And easy credit makes it much worse when you can go into debt to buy something you don't need or really want.

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

#95

Post by askafriend »

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.

I'm guessing this is why Apple decided to release their Apple Arcade subscription product [0].

Parents could buy the subscription and know that their kids would have access to quality games that don't employ these dirty mechanics and work off-line, with no ads.

I think the subscription will do well for this one reason alone.

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/apple-introduces-appl...

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

#96

Post by b_tterc_p »

I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The top tier players are an order of magnitude more powerful, but that costs thousands of dollars. And, on top of that, this gap can be crossed with about a year of play, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I’m fine being top 95% rather than top 99%. In both games I have reached a point where I not only am fully capable, but am fully capable with tons of resources that would otherwise cost lots of money and I simply haven’t used because the value props of events people are lured into are deceptively low.

I like these games, because they offer a small amount of tasks to do and a super long term scale sense of progression to plan out. It’s not pay to win, it’s pay to win quickly. You can beat everything freely without much trouble (or course other games won’t be so generous perhaps. I would guess idle heroes to be more of a financial grind)

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

#97

Post by UnFleshedOne »

ralusek wrote: post #80
TeMPOraL wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of cases to be made for the prohibition of alcohol and cigarettes altogether, Prohibition of alcohol wasn't a problem because mitigating social issues caused by its abuse is a bad idea. Prohibition was a problem because it was a bad tool for the job ; it didn't solve the issues it was meant to, and caused many more of its own. Drugs, pornography, prostitution and violent video games aren't the prob…

Human trafficking violates consent. Violence violates consent. Sexual abuse violates consent. The government has a role in preserving consent in transactions. The third-party negative externalities I mentioned fall within the purview of government responsibilities precisely because they have an impact on those who have not consented. Gambling does not violate consent. Drug usage does not violate consent. Prostitution…

Would you change your position if at some point there exist a technology that modifies consent with a certain success rate so a bad actor in a free market can reliably make a significant number of people act against their interests but out of their own "free will".

Is this a matter of competence or a matter of principle?

If I can talk to some people and without threats or deceit convince a good number of them to hand me over all their savings (using a zeroday in wetware for example), does the government has a right / responsibility to stop me?

I expect ad-tech and other persuasion techniques will only become more effective. At what point do we declare regular people unable to consent similar to the way we say children and few other groups can't legally consent?

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

#99

Post by jbattle »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #96

I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The t…

I never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with faster. Seems backwards

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

#100

Post by ngold »

jbattle wrote: post #99
b_tterc_p wrote: post #96

I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The t…

I never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with faster. Seems backwards

Seems like a broken game.
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