That sounds like a slot machine, not a game.
How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
101–110 of 138 posts
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking away people with gambling addictions, children, etc (all good reasons for these games not to exist at all), I've felt for a while that their success is a great example of disparity in disposable income. I'll be forward and be completely honest: I've spent several thousands of dollars on a single of these games. And I've played many of them. Some with just straight micro-transactions (eg: League of Legends skin…
Do you feel happy with your purchases still? Is there any buyer's remorse? I'm interested to know how many people who weren't obviously exploited and could afford to spend hundreds or thousands on these games feel honestly satisfied with their purchases and wouldn't in retrospect have preferred to use that money for something else.
I have gone too far once or twice (out of hundreds....) where I felt bad about it. I've felt the same way about a major renovation once too though. It happens.
The key is in your last sentence: "wouldn't in retrospect have preferred to use that money for something else."
Unless I went and blew 50k on the game (which I fortunately never did and likely never will!), that's not even a question. Whatever money I'll spend on these, I -still- have to spend on something else. I only spend a tiny fraction of my disposable income. I (and many "whales") just have a LOT of disposable income. Very few people who go and blow 1500 bucks in a night on these actually empty their bank account (at least from my experience being part of a lot of gacha game communities. I obviously don't talk to all the whales).
I have a kind of "limit" I set myself, with zero expectations. When you blow enough money, statistically the odds of getting what you want are really high. I've gotten really unlucky at times, but usually I'll get what I was whaling for. And sometimes the game shuts down, and it's like, whatever, it happens.
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#103I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The t…
I never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with faster. Seems backwards
I agree. And again, if you spend serious cash, you can make your characters top tier. FEH has a vague PVP leaderboard so naturally those with the top tier units take the top tier slots on it. But if you’re not interested in invisible status seeking it’s pretty pointless
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#104What scares me about modern "casual" games like this one is their ability to extract money from people in a methodical, merciless way. There's no proper defense for most people. I fear our society will end up in a worse place because of businesses like this one.
I think if we could wrap our minds around what is happening psychologically in these games, most of them would be off-limits to children. What's interesting is that we've decided to define gambling according the rules of the game—in reality, "gambling" is probably more akin to a psychological state that can be induced by many different rulesets and experiences. Mobile games today are largely thinly-veiled attempts to…
I feel these games are less dangerous than gambling is. It seems to me gambling has a greater ability to suck money out of peoples pockets. It's also the case these games are doing nothing magic the gathering hasn't been doing for decades.
There is zero reason these games should not have 13+ restrictions however. Under 13 and you're too young to play these games. Don't care if this means there's a bit of a double standard.
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is $50/month an acceptable amount to spend on alcohol or coffee but not on games? Does it only apply to these style of games or do games like league of legends need to limit purchases too? (I don't have an answer, fwiw, but I'm not overly keen on this solution)
I'm of two minds about this solution (I like the "it'll immediately destroy the whole business model" approach), but I'll bite. There are couple of reasons: 1) Children are already restricted from consuming alcohol and coffee. 2) You can only drink so much coffee before your body asks you to stop, or gives up completely. It's not pleasant. 3) Coffee doesn't have this level of addictive properties (alcohol has, and as…
To try and shorten my response - I agree with you that the core issue is a predatory design, and that the addictions have differences to physical addictions.
However I still disagree that putting a $50 (for arguments sake) cap on the amount to be spent will even help. If that issue worked, it would work for alcohol too. Just because alcohol makes you ill doesn't stop people with an addiction from drinking themselves sick and waking up and immediately resuming drinking. Coffee may have been a bad example but tobacco is another reasonable comparison - limiting tobacco consumption to an arbitrary limit won't help people with a nicotine addiction.
There are many games out there (world of Warcraft for example) which impose weekly lockouts - no matter how much you play you can't progress past a certain point. What ends yo happening is people start at the lockout, burn through the allotted content as soon as possible, and then just wait a week and come back. Implementing a limit isn't going to stop people who are addicted to these games from finding 5-6-7 of them to make progress on to scratch that itch.
To address one of your claims directly:
> The proposal doesn't restrict the fun-giving part, only the addiction-inducing and addiction-exploiting parts.
Firstly how do you define which parts are fun giving and which parts are addiction inducing? There is a very fine line between engaging and enabling, and it's a fuzzy one. At their core, the majority of games are Skinner boxes, and everything else is dressing over that (even MP games). What is firmly in the camp of fun for many many people could easily be considered enabling for a large group of others. People enjoy progression systems in games, they are engaging and fun, and there are clear cases where these are abusive. I don't believe that saying "if you can get 20x more people addicted you can still earn the same" is the right way to punish those abuses though.
We should look at ways of reducing the reasons why people fall I to these traps, and look at regulating the monetisation methods of these games, otherwise they'll just change tack and appear in a slightly different form in 18 months time with creative workarounds (which have already been mentioned - multiple games with tie ins, gifting, streaks, external purchased to interact with the game)
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#106That sounds like a slot machine, not a game.
Many successful games can be reduced to a slot machine, even games that have a lot of solid gameplay or even outlets for creativity. The central mechanism of Minecraft is mining. Mining is repeatedly punching through rocks hoping that you'll get something cool behind the next rock.
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with faster. Seems backwards
Seems like a broken game.
For something like Fire Emblem I don’t think so as spending was neither required nor especially important for clearing all of the game’s content.
Although one observation I had was that money was used as a crutch by bad players who incorrectly assumed it was necessary. It’s a turn based strategy game with relatively little entropy so a lot of it is skill. A smart player would think about positioning and how to safely take out enemies. Dumber players were fond of saying how they favored defensive builds, or in other words, creating units that were strong enough to stand there and win on counter attacks. The issue with this was that as the game ramped up in difficulty this would gradually get more difficult to accomplish. So if you refuse to play the game intelligently you have to try to upgrade your characters with cash.
But then after a while you hit a wall where your characters are maximally strong (which is less than 10% better stats no matter how much you spend), you’re _still_ not going to be strong enough to handle the hardest content without playing smart.
So... money can help you get through the first 80% of content, but it won’t be enough and is not required for the last 20%... but then is required again for the side bit of absolute top tier pvp.
From a game design, I actually think this looks pretty healthy for the game’s integrity. Not the gambling habits it induces.
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#108I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The t…
I never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with faster. Seems backwards
The experience is intentionally boring (grindy) to encourage you to pay. And the infinitely-replayable endgame is never over.
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#109"There are more stat checks in the game and to get better in those stats you need to engage with the metasystems and monetize because the grind is so painful." A game that's optimized for monetization over fun is not the kind of game I want to play.
I can't believe this is the ONLY sentence in the article that directly addresses HOW the game even monetizes to begin with. So much for "How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year".
Re: How Idle Heroes Made $100M in a Year
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm of two minds about this solution (I like the "it'll immediately destroy the whole business model" approach), but I'll bite. There are couple of reasons: 1) Children are already restricted from consuming alcohol and coffee. 2) You can only drink so much coffee before your body asks you to stop, or gives up completely. It's not pleasant. 3) Coffee doesn't have this level of addictive properties (alcohol has, and as…
To try and shorten my response - I agree with you that the core issue is a predatory design, and that the addictions have differences to physical addictions. However I still disagree that putting a $50 (for arguments sake) cap on the amount to be spent will even help. If that issue worked, it would work for alcohol too. Just because alcohol makes you ill doesn't stop people with an addiction from drinking themselves…
Thanks for elaboration. I do agree with the concerns you brought up. I think the main point the $50 proposal has is this: the business model around alcohol/tobacco is targeting a normal distribution of sales. The business model of those predatory games is targeting a heavily skewed distribution, in which there's a long tail of people who just wasted a lot of their time and a bit of money, and a bunch of whales that dump disproportionate amount of cash into the games. The $50 proposal, even modified to $100 or $200, essentially cuts off 90+% of the earnings and destroys the reason for making these kinds of games in the first place.
As for the "fine line between engaging and enabling", two points. One, it's not just "enabling". Selling tobacco is "enabling", those games are actively designed to max out the addiction factor. Two, I agree the line is fuzzy, but I think the "you'll know it when you'll see it" argument does apply in this case. There is a meaningful difference between games optimized for being fun and an artistic expression - like most video games in 80s, 90s and 2000s - and skinner boxes thinly wrapped in a theme. It's hard to define what that difference is, because it ultimately is a difference of Colour[0], which is something hard to capture in laws. But I believe that we must try to discourage people from creating "games" of the "Skinner-box" colour.
To give random examples of games I spent ridiculous amount of time on as a kid: StarCraft and Fallout 1 and 2. They were "addictive" in the sense a good book or a good sports can be addictive. But they were first and foremost designed to be fun and tell a story, addictiveness was incidental. At no point they tried to use it to get more money from me/my parents.
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