The actual report is here:
https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z...I found this remarkable: "‘Lack of honesty and transparency’ reported among representatives of some games and social media companies in giving evidence."
Some quotes from the report:
> 62.We were contacted by a member of the public whose adult son built up considerable debts, reported to be in excess of £50,000, through spending on microtransactions in British company Jagex’s online game RuneScape. For example, bank statements showed that in one day the individual spent £247.95 by making five separate payments to the company. The resulting debt caused significant financial harm for both the player and his parents, whose evidence attributed the situation to the fact that Jagex has no limits on the amount of time or money players can spend on the game.118 This demonstrated to us that even companies with good policies to support some aspects of player wellbeing can fall short in other areas.
You don't take £50,000 from a player in microtransactions without realising something is fucked up.
> 65.With so many games featuring microtransactions, we asked other leading games companies what they do to prevent people from spending more than they are able to in a game. Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite: Battle Royale, said that although it has no specific cap on how much people can spend, purchases are limited to what is in the virtual shop and so the maximum anyone could spend would be about $200 a day.124 The company’s director of marketing suggested that it is an individuals’ responsibility to manage spending and that the company provides tools, including parental controls, “to allow players to make those decisions for themselves.”125 However, as we have already examined, parental controls are of limited effectiveness when it comes to adult players.
> 66.The games companies we spoke to were generally reluctant to accept that they might have a role or responsibility to intervene proactively if a player’s spending fell outside of normal patterns. Moreover, they said that it would be too difficult to determine what level of spending might be harmful. Alex Dale, senior vice president for King, the makers of Candy Crush Saga, told us that while it used to alert users when they reached a certain spending threshold, it had stopped doing so because of player feedback. He told us:
>> we would send an e-mail out when a player’s spend was $250 in a week for the first time. It was an e-mail that said, “We notice you are enjoying the game a lot at the moment. Are you sure you are happy with this?” […] We got back, “I wouldn’t spend the money if I didn’t have it” and things like, “I’m fine, please leave me alone”. We felt it was too intrusive so we stopped doing that.126
> 67.Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones told us that the games industry might learn from approaches in the gambling industry, which has much clearer, industry-wide protocols enabling people to self-exclude from spending.127 She told us that “gaming is several years behind gambling in relation to protecting the vulnerable”, a situation that the then Minister described, if true, as “lamentable”, adding that “the industry has a job to do.”128 When we asked Neil McArthur, Chief Executive of the Gambling Commission, whether games companies should be obligated to monitor how much people spend, identify people with a problem and proactively support them, he responded that, “this is an area where progress needs to be made.”129 His colleague Brad Enright went on to tell us that self-exclusion measures to protect players “could be adopted by the video games industry voluntarily to address some of the concerns about excessive time [and] excessive expenditure.”130 Yet the Royal College of Psychiatrists goes further in suggesting that:
> > There should be no in game spending by children. Children are less prepared to deal with the potentially addictive nature of some modern computer games and are less able to make informed decisions about spending.131
Apple, Google, and game makers need to understand what's happening here. This is a push towards regulation. They need to implement pretty effective self regulation or UK government will impose strong regulation upon the industry.