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'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#51

Post by codewithcheese »

djhworld wrote: post #12

The amount of crap in the app stores that encourage this sort of behaviour is truly, truly shocking. The gaming community often lambast companies like EA etc for loot boxes ("surprise mechanics"), which is definitely a problem that needs to go away, but from this article I suspect there's a lot of examples of absolute bottom of the barrel shovelware on the app stores that's raking it in from accidental purchases from…

2FA is one of those basic things that should be standard for all credit card charges. I want to have the change to approve or deny every charge. Is that so much to ask?

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#52

Post by xkcd-sucks »

davesmith1983 wrote: post #34
notus wrote: post #14

This is disgusting. Yes parents should be aware of these things but shifting the burden of locking down every system a child uses when this could be handled at the app store or financial processor level is ridiculous. It seems that some of these people are claiming that the game is not distinguishing well between fake and real currency. There are definitely games I've played where this is ambiguous as well. IMO there…

I am not defending EA (I think they are scumbags). But I remember kids back in the 90s getting hold of their parents credit card and spending money they didn't have. Everything old is new again ...

I remember getting my ass kicked for running up a huge 900-number hint-line phone bill on some Lucasarts adventure game

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#53

Post by eitland »

o_p wrote: post #13
darkpuma wrote: post #3

It's astonishing that the developers of games like this can sleep at night. Do they lie to themselves and pretend all the kids spending thousands of dollars are the children of Saudi royals or something? They must know that they're exploiting people who can't afford it. Edit: these developers know damn well if their target demo is children, and they know damn well that the phenomenon of children running up huge debts…

One would assume that children spending was authorized by their parents.

Somewhere before we cross >£3000 I guess most developers can understand this is not authorized by an adult mind.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#54

Post by pkaye »

_1qd4 wrote: post #37
madeofpalk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But still though, they gave the kid their credit card. If you don't want your kid to spend £3000 then don't give it to them? Not defending any particular app's behaviour. Without any first hand knowledge, I certainly believe that there are scummy games out there using dubious methods to get people to rack up IAP.

Compare this to the real world. You are in a store and your child heads to the counter with $3,000 worth of goods. He puts your credit card on the counter. At this point, the clerk would ask if mommy or daddy were around and probably would deny the purchase. But the digital world? Come right up little johnny!

How to tell the difference between an adult and a kid online assuming the adult gave their credit card to the kid?

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#55

Post by mythz »

This is why we have IAP's disabled on all devices and avoid any pay-to-win games. Unfortunately an overwhelming number of game developers are focused around gamifying IAP's for max addiction to extract max revenue where I've basically lost trust in trying out any new games that aren't personally recommended.

I'm looking forward to Apple Arcade as we'll finally have a curated collection of trusted Games we can access with a single subscription so game developers are compensated and they can just focus on creating good content/game play instead of tweaking their games with Dark UX patterns to maximize IAP's.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#56

Post by JD557 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #23
notus wrote: post #14

This is disgusting. Yes parents should be aware of these things but shifting the burden of locking down every system a child uses when this could be handled at the app store or financial processor level is ridiculous. It seems that some of these people are claiming that the game is not distinguishing well between fake and real currency. There are definitely games I've played where this is ambiguous as well. IMO there…

But still though, they gave the kid their credit card. If you don't want your kid to spend £3000 then don't give it to them? Not defending any particular app's behaviour. Without any first hand knowledge, I certainly believe that there are scummy games out there using dubious methods to get people to rack up IAP.

While I agree that parents should never give their credit card to their kids[1], note that this is not the case in some examples from the article:

> It was on his own phone and he managed to [...] enter his own children's bank card details and buy lots of in-game items.

> It turned out my wife had left herself logged into Google Play on her old phone that she'd given to our youngest daughter.

[1] I'm not sure if this is a cultural thing. At least in my coutry almost no one has a credit card (it's more common to use debit cards + virtual credit cards) so I find the concept of "giving your CC to your child" really weird.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#57

Post by aurea »

darkpuma wrote: post #3

It's astonishing that the developers of games like this can sleep at night. Do they lie to themselves and pretend all the kids spending thousands of dollars are the children of Saudi royals or something? They must know that they're exploiting people who can't afford it. Edit: these developers know damn well if their target demo is children, and they know damn well that the phenomenon of children running up huge debts…

It even goes beyond children. I was recently approached by a mobile gaming company that is looking for statisticians for their data science department. The large companies have entire task forces dedicated to figuring out how to extract even more money out of the ~1% that pays in these games. But of course they put it in slightly different terms.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#58

Post by thaumasiotes »

vorpalhex wrote: post #6

But how do you tell the difference between an adult and a kid with their parents password and bank card? If you trust your kid with your bank account and get burned.. isn't that kind of on you?

Well...

There is no way to distinguish between an adult and a kid with their parents' credentials.

If the precedent gets set that you can buy in-game currency and then reverse the charge on the grounds that that was your friend's kid, not you, what will happen?

All I see is that it becomes tougher to offer games that are monetized in this style, which seems like a positive effect. So assigning responsibility to the parent doesn't seem that important to me.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#59

Post by dx87 »

willk wrote: post #11
filoleg wrote: post #2

Another one of those oversensationalized outrage articles that can be boiled down to "I cannot put even a minimal effort in keeping an eye on my children, so I will blame someone else for it and make it their responsibility." There is literally a setting on iOS for that specific specific scenario, which allows to prevent in-app purchases[0]. And it is very easy and intuitive to set up too, so it isn't like it is hidd…

These games were not just on Apple's platform. I think these types of games are predatory. What is wrong with just selling a whole game? It is hard to find any game these days that comes out complete. Blizzard did it with Star Craft 2 and for that reason, I refused to buy it.

Companies do it because you make more money for less effort, it's called games as a service. Instead of having to develop a game from scratch every few years and hope the income lasts until their next release, they create a game that they can use as a platform for expansions and microtransactions to provide consistent income over 7-10 years. Young gamers are getting so used to it that I've seen them call people entitled and unreasonable for calling out the devs on missing features at launch. They'll say things like "The game just came out 2 months ago, why do you expect them to have already added feature X to the game?" As someone who started out with Nintendo games that had no possibility of having new features added, that mentality is baffling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_as_a_service

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#60

Post by dexterdog »

theturtletalks wrote: post #28
notus wrote: post #14

This is disgusting. Yes parents should be aware of these things but shifting the burden of locking down every system a child uses when this could be handled at the app store or financial processor level is ridiculous. It seems that some of these people are claiming that the game is not distinguishing well between fake and real currency. There are definitely games I've played where this is ambiguous as well. IMO there…

I know Apple asks for Face ID or Touch ID when making in app purchases. This seems like a deterrence, but not sure about Android.

And parents will just put the kid on the touchid or put their card on the kids phone to keep the kid from bothering them a dozen times a day for a tiny purchase.
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