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It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

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Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#191

Post by seydor »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #105
seydor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night, and casinos do exist. What kind of game was your friend working on? Whales do exist but they are not the bulk of the revenue

> 10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night, and casinos do exist. Casinos are highly regulated. Lootbox are not in most countries. And I'm pretty sure minors can't enter a casino even with their parent's credit card... Made videogames with paid lootboxes 18+ only, problem solved.

is there evidence that any of the whales are kids? i guess there are exceptions , but most kids have a highly regulated budget, adults do not

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#192

Post by dymax78 »

bsnal wrote: post #153
x3ro wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like... all the actual... children who play these games? Should we stop treating those like children too?

Children have parents who know what their children are doing online. In any case, children don’t have access to credit cards or any other means to pay for in-game items.

There are plenty of children whose online behavior is oblivious to their parents, or they circumvent restrictions their parents placed.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#193

Post by matheusmoreira »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #186
matheusmoreira wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're just people with an addiction Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself. Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups…

> I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed. This is absolutely fascinating. It's something I kinda missed from Digital Vegan, thinking that extrication would be a matter only of self-mastery and access to good informatio…

EFF calls this adversarial interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

A digital civil war is preferable to surrendering to the designs of exploitative corporations. We should fight back on principle. We should block ads and tracking, scrape websites, reverse engineer private APIs, violate DRM technology, replace their proprietary apps with our own free software that we control, feed them false data to poison their data sets... We should do everything we possibly can to defeat any attempt to exploit us. We don't need their permission to do it either.

Turning things into crimes is the corporation's game. They're the ones with billions of dollars and expensive lobbyists. We shouldn't be trying to beat them in this space. We need ubiquitous subversive technology that neutralizes their exploitation whether the laws allow it or not. It shouldn't matter whether it's legal or illegal. We need technology that makes it impossible for them to exploit us in any way, and we define what is and isn't acceptable or exploitative.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#194

Post by voganmother42 »

Hermel wrote: post #74
Grollicus wrote: post #60

The worst thing (for me) about this is that whenever I go to the Apple App store I get bombarded will all these "games" that just try to make my life actively worse. I don't understand why they pollute their brand like that.

That's the key! The Play Store and the App Store do not even have a search filter for games without in-app purchases. I'm sure that is on purpose.

Apple arcade seems to fulfill this function ( albeit subscription cost instead of in app purchases )

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#195

Post by INGELRII »

Regulation proposal: Set maximum spending limit/time tied to the purchase price. The limit is tied to account and player character.

example:

1. free-to-play: $100/year.

2. other: 10×purchase price/year. For a $50 game the maximum spending is $500 per year.

This would not set hard limit. It would only mandate up-front investment related to the amount of in-game spending. A Whale who spends $10k a year would have to pay $1k to get started.

I think this would effectively kill addictive impulse for people who can't afford it. At the same time it allows games to create expensive games.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#196

Post by bsnal »

saiya-jin wrote: post #188
bsnal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a problem since children don’t have access to credit cards or any other means to pay for in-game items.

Until they steal their parents credit card, or somebody else's. Addicts tend to di desperate moves. Happened to friends, their son spent half of their montly salary in some stupid mobile game, took too long for them to find out

Why is that Blizzard’s problem?

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#197

Post by Hendrikto »

lordnacho wrote: post #76
AdvicePlz wrote: post #3

I knew someone who worked for EA as a UX researcher. He said that games like these are primarily targeting whales who will drop $10k on a game. They are the real money earners. The really sad part was the he said the most whales aren't super rich, they're just people with an addiction.

Are there enough of those guys vs people who will spend 10? I guess you need 1k of those people to make up one whale, but aren't there more little players by a lot? I guess I don't have the data. Also maybe you can get both at once by targeting the big guy.

The vast majority of users do not spent anything. This is no problem for the game developers, as they can serve as cannon fodder for the few who do invest money.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#198

Post by bsnal »

dymax78 wrote: post #192
bsnal wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children have parents who know what their children are doing online. In any case, children don’t have access to credit cards or any other means to pay for in-game items.

There are plenty of children whose online behavior is oblivious to their parents, or they circumvent restrictions their parents placed.

That seems like a problem with those parents, not blizzard or the government.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#199

Post by lekevicius »

It's even more frustrating, because the game is good. I really enjoyed playing the first 30 levels or so. Good story, good controls, very satisfying gameplay. If I could pay $60 and just have a "classic" Diablo on my phone, I might. But I won't spend a cent on consumable in-app purchases.

It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds and thousands of dollars".

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#200

Post by InvOfSmallC »

jimbob45 wrote: post #151
holoduke wrote: post #4

Lootbox games: I don't understand why these kind of games are not getting banned or heavily restricted. There is absolutely not a single positive thing about these games. Moral doesn't matter.

It seems like the online discourse stalled out at, “Well Pokémon cards are legal, aren’t lootboxes basically the same thing?”. I have my own opinion on that but I never saw a consensus rebuttal form against that point.

Yes and no, they’re collectibles and there is a market. So not exactly the same but I see the point in a way.
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