Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

Rubies are the limited currency here. These are handed out according to a timed schedule (slow drip) or at a slow enough rate that you don’t want to wait for them. Playing the game more is not a good strategy for getting more rubies, because it’s either too slow or simply doesn’t work at all.

Gold can be farmed. You just need to be decent at playing the game. Anything with a cost in gold can be purchased through ordinary gameplay. People playing the game will tend to play the game -> win gold -> get toad, rather than going the dollars -> rubies -> gold route.

The rubies -> gold exchange is there for people who are unskilled, impatient, or otherwise unwilling to play the game to earn gold. To be honest, I don’t think this exchange is there to obscure the dollar cost of buying characters in coins, because you’re supposed to be buying better characters with rubies in the first place.

I don’t play Mario Kart Tour, but a friend sat me down and explained all the predatory mechanics it has to try and get you to spend money. He went into detail about how the pipe works, the different currencies, etc. My own experience is with a game called Mahjong Soul. Mahjong Soul has jade and coins (and some other irrelevant currencies). Jade is the dollar-equivalent currency. You can’t earn it through gameplay. You can exchange jade for coins, but since you can earn coins by playing the game (daily quests, winning matches, etc) you are probably not going to make that exchange. You instead spend the jade on summons to earn new characters and outfits.

This is just the general formula I’ve observed. Any normal game will have currencies 1..N which can be earned through gameplay. The freemium / microtransaction games will often just add some dollar-equivalent currency, like rubies in Mario Kart Tour, or jade in Mahjong Soul. That dollar-equivalent currency can be exchanged for gacha (in both games) or exchanged for inferior, farmable currency (in both games).

Sad that gaming these days has devolved into the state it has. I love gaming, and have loved gaming since I got a SNES at age 5. Micro-transactions suck, and constantly make me feel like I'm paying to let the developer get away with not finishing the actual game, rather than me paying for a fully developed game.

Nintendo, in this case, is being fucking lazy by allowing this to tarnish their brand - they are owned by 1. a family that is probably worth a few hundred million (the Yamauchi family) and has no need for a quick buck, and 2. the Saudi PIF, which has trillions of dollars at its disposal and zero need for a quick buck.

To this day I play almost zero mobile games, the one exception is the LiChess app, which is free and has zero IAPs. Occasionally I'll do the daily New York Times Crossword mini and Wordle, which is also free.

Disclaimer: when the game in question came out, I put a few good hours into Mario Kart Tour, and enjoyed the core game itself, but hated the lootbox experience.

On a complete side note: does anyone else feel that gaming, especially since the advent of mobile gaming, has really changed for the worse? It seems nobody plays together anymore, which was a big part of my childhood, teenage, and college years.

For example, you clearly did not read the whole thing, or definitely didn't understood what you read, when your other reply was

> Rubies are the limited currency here. These are handed out according to a timed schedule (slow drip)

> Gold can be farmed. You just need to be decent at playing the game.

When something like 5 slides are spent explaining the coin system, explaining that they are also drip fed by capping how many players can earn per day, that coins can not be unlocked just by playing well: some of the objectives require using specific locked characters.

And looking this up myself to verify it's even worse: There are paid passes that don't remove this limit but only increase it?! So you pay to still be capped on your daily progression??

It almost seems like you're a victim of this type of game and so for you, what the rest of us see as predatory, you see as perfectly normal. You keep saying things like "just for the impatient or unskilled" without understanding how little of this system has to do with being a test of skill, and how much of it has to do with extracting more money from people.