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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'

#71

Post by jsgo »

I stopped buying FIFA/Madden/etc. games. The team building mode seems like it'd be fun, but oh damn, you only have x games you can use that specific player so you have to buy contracts which costs points and good luck trying to stack your team with various players by making good trades vs the spend funds approach.

Give me a game where I can play it and GM it in such a way that if I make Joe Blow look like a star, I can trade him for an actual star and repeat the process until I have the dream team I want or whatever without spending money, I'll buy the game again. The last Madden I bought was the one with Gronkowski in the opening animation and was just disgusted with the "fun" mode being weighted heavily against you just playing and having fun.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#72

Post by Konnstann »

megous wrote: post #63
o_p wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who spends the price of an iPhone (per month, for months on end) on some stupid game? One (game dev) would have to be very much full of it, to assume this is legit. And, that they never responded to the parents tells it all.

People who can buy an iPhone a month for months on end and not care. One of my friends is a whale, he just doesn't really care about the expense.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#73

Post by HenryBemis »

herpderperator wrote: post #38

I understand this isn't addressing the issue at hand, but having notifications sent to your phone whenever a purchase/swipe is made on a credit card is incredibly useful. It might be moot if the device receiving the notifications is being used by the person making the transaction, but I would recommend everyone to set up such a thing if their bank supports it. And, all banks should do this eventually! I get instant p…

Most banks in this world don't provide this service. This is why my "spending" debit card is Monzo because its all kicks ass!!! The second I spend £££, the Monzo app bleeps and shows me the amount and the store (with address, company logo etc.) I was shocked that big banks in the UK like Barclays, NatWest et al, don't bother alerting their clients immediately.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#74

Post by djhworld »

schnevets wrote: post #62
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…

I was just having an internal debate about the merits of a spending cap. I'm not usually one for such blunt regulation, but there really is no way to justify spending +$100 on mobile games daily unless an individual is addicted, deceived, or in some other way psychologically manipulated. Although society would probably benefit from similar caps in casinos, and I doubt that regulation will ever arrive be legislated.

I remember hearing about one guy asking his bank to essentially block any gambling transaction as he was an addict

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45652429

Obviously there are ways to cirumvent that but it seemed to help him.

I suspect it's harder to block these in app purchases at the bank level though, unless everything goes through Apple/Google pay and you block at that level

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#75

Post by m463 »

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…

A lot of this is due to dark patterns from day zero requiring a payment method to create an apple id and/or itunes account.

Apple has since relaxed this requirement, but it is like running a gaultlet to do something like remove your credit card from your account. There are also self-serving weirdnesses - somehow you can set up a child to "request a purchase" from a parent, but you can't set this up if they are 18 with a family account.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#76

Post by jsgo »

falcolas wrote: post #32
la_barba wrote: post #10

Giving a smartphone to an underage person is also like giving them a credit card, a phone that can be used to call any tolled number, a way to access inappropriate content, etc, etc.

Any gaming console today has the exact same issues, just hidden by it being a "gaming console". FIFA, specifically, is not a mobile phone game. It's a console game with gambling-alike microtransactions.

Madden, a cornerstone of gaming for a lot of people really, has it too with Ultimate Team or whatever.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#77

Post by Thiez »

hyayz wrote: post #44

>he managed to download Clash of Clans through a Google Play account, enter his own children's bank card details and buy lots of in-game items. Wait, why the fuck does a 12 year old child have a bank card?

Why not? How else are they going to learn how to handle money? Or do you believe children should receive every adult responsibility all at once on their 18th birthday?

Sadly these app publishers take advantage while these kids are still learning. The boy probably would never have spent £700 on the game if that had to be spent upfront. "Microtransactions" in games can't die soon enough.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#78

Post by Circuits »

subsaharancoder wrote: post #43

No child wakes up one morning and decides to do this, it's often a steady progression enabled by parents who have relegated their responsibilities to TV screens, video games and mobile phones. Casting blame on tech that they've let loose on their kids absolves the parents of any responsibility.

I agree. The burden of responsibility for how and when a credit/debit card is used is on the owner. Unless of course you are the victim of some kind of fraud.

"I gave my child my wallet and he spent all the money in it!!!"

duh?

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#79

Post by maze-le »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #4

Mobile free to play games now make up the majority of money made in video games today. It's strange then that most of these games aren't that interesting. Who are the players of these that make up the new class of gamers? It would seem that the payers are the exploitable - those able to be swindled with casino mechanisms. As an ex- free-to-play game developer and one who believes regulation often does more harm to co…

I almost fell into such a trap before. I knew about the mechanics, but I was willing to give the developers the benefit of a doubt. And so I started playing, and after a while started to acquire shortcuts with money. Once, twice and at the verge of the third time, I realized what I was doing and stopped immediately.

The money you use is never much, but that is just part of the design to make you throw out even more -- a few cents here a few cents there and suddenly a sizable amount builds up.

Now I am 33 and have a bit of experience with addiction. That helps identifying these traps -- Dopamine kicks are always the same, chemically induced or by stimulating your brain with rewarding gameplay. But to be sure, would I have been born 20 years later, I would definitely be hooked on that particular game and still throwing money out for -- not much but a faster reward-cycle.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#80

Post by jsgo »

freedomben wrote: post #24
acroback wrote: post #21

So people don't know how to supervise their minor kids and are now blaming games for it. Why is this even news?

How many kids do you have?

It's probably a bit easier for me as I'll actually play the games with my kids, but the ones my daughter are into are more in this vein. Roblox specifically with Robux or whatever. She has her own Apple account, child one, and when she attempts to make an in-app purchase, it must go through me. And I am aware before the prompt comes up because we've got an understanding that if I see a request for it and we didn't discuss it prior, it's going to be rejected.
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