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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'

#201

Post by em-bee »

makecheck wrote: post #194

One very simple set of rules could be: 1. your app may not accept in-app purchases more than once per month, and 2. the in-app purchase cost must not exceed 10% of the original purchase price. And then 3., there should be a lifetime maximum on purchases, i.e. you can finally “pay enough”. Instead of these or really any other sane constraints, we’ve somehow made it worse by now preferring subscriptions !!! And even mo…

point 2 won't work. the whole reason for in-game purchases is that you can spend more than the initial cost of the game which is often free initially. (what's 10% of free?)

i'd go with a monthly limit. one that doesn't break the bank, but one that also isn't to low to make it not worth it for the game developer.

how about $10 per day and $50 per month?

then you can spend your weekends playing away and buying to your hearts content. and if you instead do that every day, well then, you are going to have to ask yourself: home come that at the end of the money, there is so much month left over?

another measure would be the cost of a pack of cigarettes. at what point does smoking affect you financially? i think there may be studies for that. that same number ought to apply to games.

now there is still the problem of multiple games. so maybe another cap for overall spending. but that is trickier. how does that cap distinguish game spending vs using an app to buy groceries online?

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#202

Post by elamje »

fkdo wrote: post #185
elamje wrote: post #182

Games can be an escape, just as book reading can be an escape. The problem lies in that the book ends, but the game goes on for months, years, or decades. Many people bring up the positivity of quitting, or minimizing, social media. The same thing could be extended to gaming. I have quit social media, only using twitter to follow my interests, and quit gaming back in high school. Both of which took many, many weeks a…

> I have quit social media The comments section of Hacker News is social media.

I guess I have just replaced it then :/

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#203

Post by em-bee »

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?

i'd never. i'd get a separate bank account for the kid instead. i even got a separate account for my own online payments.

banks need to make that easier. essentially, if we even want to allow children sto spend money online, we need to start handling allowances online too. automatically transfer $10 every week to my sons account, for example.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#204

Post by zajio1am »

Seems to me that main problem here is that consumers have insufficient control about their payment card transactions. Why card transactions can be initiated by merchant without explicit authorization of each transaction by the customer?

If merchant-initiated transactions are desirable (e.g. for periodic payments), why there is no explicit confirmation for number and size of allowed transactions per time period for given merchant, like it is standard for regular direct debit bank transactions?

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#205

Post by em-bee »

mac_was wrote: post #133
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?

Did you read the article at all? A game says it is for 3 years old and above and it uses trickery to manipulate a 5 year old into thinking that real money is just game coins. How are you supposed to control that?

by outlawing it outright. the law should then provide that they can ask for all money spent to be returned. this should apply to all games targeted at children, even if an adult plays it.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#206

Post by foxfired »

Most parents do not spend time playing the games their children play (HN is an outlier here). I see parents giving their phones to their children with an active credit card on file. Its not really the parents fault, how could they know?

All the games start as fun and innocent. It's when the child get past level twenty that the difficulty kicks in. You have to pay to make any significant progress. Most kids don't know any better, all they do is press the button to progress. The parents don't know any better, all they did was give the phone to their restless child.

The game developer however, designed it specifically to trick both parent and child.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#207

Post by em-bee »

HenryBemis wrote: post #65
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.

I use a "7 accounts setup" for my finances. One of my accounts is labelled "Internet" and has no more than £50-£100 at any given moment. It is the card used for Paypal, Amazon, Spotify, etc. If that card gets compromised I won't lose more than that, and my bank will most likely return the funds (yes even if it's just a Debit Card). If the account runs low then Spotify won't get paid in time and I won't cry about it :…

sadly, because of to much fraud i guess, china now doesn't allow more than one account per person (it's actually per bank, but i suspect only because it's not easy to enforce across multiple banks)

with that restriction in place, 2 or 3 accounts is manageable, but 7 almost impossible.

ideally the bank should allow to split your account into sub-accounts. so that nominally (for tax and monitoring purposes) you still have one account, but for money management purposes you have multiple.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#208

Post by syndacks »

opportune wrote: post #181
hardwaregeek wrote: post #167

I strongly believe that video games today are comparable to alcohol in the 60's. Y'know, how people in the 60's would say "Oh Johnny just likes his liquor" when Johnny's drinking at 9AM, drunk at 10 and hungover by 2. Right now we have people who are facing serious problems with video games, and yet we brush them off casually and callously. I can't count the number of stories on reddit about playing video games all d…

I think, like with other addictions, you need to take a holistic view of video game addiction that also includes the circumstances of the addicted people during their transition from casual use, to abuse, to addiction. Why? Because most people don't get addicted to video games, just like most people don't get addicted to alcohol. And while you might be able to chalk some of it up to addictive personalities (predispos…

>Because most people don't get addicted to video games, just like most people don't get addicted to alcohol

So, uhh, what _do_ they get addicted to?

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#209

Post by em-bee »

_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!

it's not spending $3000 at once, but $5 at a time. imagine a large store with 10 cashiers, the kid coming to each cashier once per day. that means over the course of a week the kid can spend several hundred dollars without anyone noticing anything unusual.

Re: 'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

#210

Post by jachee »

syndacks wrote: post #208
opportune wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, like with other addictions, you need to take a holistic view of video game addiction that also includes the circumstances of the addicted people during their transition from casual use, to abuse, to addiction. Why? Because most people don't get addicted to video games, just like most people don't get addicted to alcohol. And while you might be able to chalk some of it up to addictive personalities (predispos…

>Because most people don't get addicted to video games, just like most people don't get addicted to alcohol So, uhh, what _do_ they get addicted to?

Dopamine is the only thing that truly makes me happy.
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