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Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

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Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#51

Post by testplzignore »

mattnewton wrote: post #8
blobbers wrote: post #4

Pay to win on mobile?? This is revolutionary!!! /s

It’s more disappointing because I think people thought Nintendo was holding out on this kind of thing on principle. You had all the EA’s and Activisions of the world trying to replicate the economics of mobile casino apps in their AAA titles, but Nintendo was over in the corner still taking your $60 one time for a finished and complete game. Now its pretty clear that they are happy to sell their AAA brand titles to t…

This isn't even new for Nintendo. They get a large portion of the revenue from Pokémon Go (somewhere around 20%). The profit from that alone for Nintendo is probably north of $1 billion.

Much of that revenue likely comes from players buying egg incubators and raid passes, which both are essentially pay-to-win gambling. And just like Mario Kart Tour, there are hard caps on how much can be done per day without paying.

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#52

Post by frumper »

CE02 wrote: post #35

Great breakdown, enjoyable read. I think it highlights why more and more tech firms are hiring employees with psychology and economics backrounds. The attention economy combined with the ever-growing presence of a razor and blades style market with in-game purchases in pay-to-win games is insane. I understand it from a profitability perspective. In addition it allows for more enduring cashflows. From a less direct pe…

I remember a few SNES games being $79 at release. One example I remember buying was Street Fighter II.

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#53

Post by mxkopy »

yamtaddle wrote: post #46
mxkopy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Nintendo also doesn't do microtransactions or DLCs. I'm sure if they did that they could afford more sales. I'm wondering if not having microtransactions is just not profitable anymore.

Yeah, but other publishers that aren't heavy on microtransactions reduce prices more and have better sales, too. Though the other stores they sell through probably do get a lot of money through microtransactions, that's true. I think the main factor's that Nintendo's got this weird cheap-on-the-hardware-side-premium-on-the-software-side thing going on. Which seems to be working for them—I'm not complaining, just obse…

> I think the main factor's that Nintendo's got this weird cheap-on-the-hardware-side-premium-on-the-software-side thing going on.

So do you think this is the weird economics that's responsible for Nintendo shifting more to the 'standard' model of DLCs and possibly microtransactions? Because selling the hardware doesn't make as much sense nowadays?

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#54

Post by minimaxir »

shaunsingh0207 wrote: post #29
have_faith wrote: post #17

I don't know why people are surprised by Nintendo doing something like this. They pioneered releasing two of the same game at full price (Pokémon).

Noone buys both versions of the pokemon game though, its always been a nice novelty. Me and my mates always used to get opposite games so we could trade everything up. Its good fun.

> Noone buys both versions of the pokemon game though

Enough do that Nintendo offers a SKU for buying both versions simultaneously: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/pokemon-scarlet-and-...

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#55

Post by lesuorac »

mrguyorama wrote: post #50
lxgr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pokemon is different in that the two versions of each game contain all the creatures, but artificially exclude some from being caught in each title, which is absolutely a dark pattern. This is to get you to trade with your friends ! The same thing is true for the three starter Pokémon – the only way to log all three is to trade with other players. How would you even trade with yourself?

Many people had to buy a second console and the other game if they wanted to fill out the pokedex.

Definitely much better in the good ol' days where games didn't get patches and you could use glitches to get all 151.

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#56

Post by BizarroLand »

inkcapmushroom wrote: post #45
nathanwh wrote: post #14

Something about how this article was animated out hurt my brain to look at. It had a lot on page telling me about how much there was too much information on the screen of the phone which was nested inside the page. And then every arrow press would move around the dialog boxes (some of which jiggled to fight for my attention extra hard) and update the little avatar. The content was interesting but it felt kind of iron…

I liked that they took all the time to decry all these dark practices, and then hit you at the end with "Do you want a summary of the presentation? Click this button!" which I'm sure requires you to sign up for their email newsletter and start on their customer pipeline.

It's only bad when other people are doing it to you. When I do it, it's fine.

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#57

Post by zug_zug »

KhalPanda wrote: post #16

I (sadly) don't play any mobile games for this reason. _Every_ game seems to revolve around engineering you to buy to speed up progress. It's just one step worse (maybe two) than everything being a subscription. I prefer buying games(/software) once and being left to enjoy the game.

I can't help but think I'd buy 10x as many games on mobile if there was a way to filter out all in-app purchases (other than pay once: add-free forever no more asks to buy)

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#58

Post by bentley »

causi wrote: post #34
preinheimer wrote: post #10

First, that was an amazing breakdown of what's happening. If you enjoyed reading that you might like Folding Ideas breakdown of Fortnite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0 Second, I've personally become very wary of any mobile app that introduces multiple currency types. There's gold, and rubies, and power balls, and stardust! At some point pretty early on I decide it's not worth it to figure out how much…

Mobile games in general are garbage. Considering the number of games, you could just emulate console games for the rest of your life and in doing so only play games that were built as games, not exploitation machines.

It feels like there was a sweet spot in between the arcade era (where gameplay was tailored to get your quarters) and the mobile era (where gameplay is tailored to get microtransactions), where game designers saw the most success by providing a complete high‐quality experience in a single purchase.

There have been exploitative home console games and non‐exploitative arcade games and mobile games, but to me the overall opposite pattern seems to hold true. Then again, perhaps I’m being blinded by nostalgia for the home console games of my childhood!

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#59

Post by krustyburger »

mattnewton wrote: post #8
blobbers wrote: post #4

Pay to win on mobile?? This is revolutionary!!! /s

It’s more disappointing because I think people thought Nintendo was holding out on this kind of thing on principle. You had all the EA’s and Activisions of the world trying to replicate the economics of mobile casino apps in their AAA titles, but Nintendo was over in the corner still taking your $60 one time for a finished and complete game. Now its pretty clear that they are happy to sell their AAA brand titles to t…

I somehow doubt Nintendo would be moving in this direction if Satoru Iwata was still at the helm.

Re: Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money

#60

Post by bentley »

mrguyorama wrote: post #50
lxgr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pokemon is different in that the two versions of each game contain all the creatures, but artificially exclude some from being caught in each title, which is absolutely a dark pattern. This is to get you to trade with your friends ! The same thing is true for the three starter Pokémon – the only way to log all three is to trade with other players. How would you even trade with yourself?

Many people had to buy a second console and the other game if they wanted to fill out the pokedex.

I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t have complained if people did that, but trades with friends were how the game was marketed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Oh4YiMNNw

I was as big a Pokémon freak as anyone, lived in an extremely rural area, and still managed to complete the Pokédex without duplicate/paired games by trading with friends. (And nobody had to complete the Pokédex anyway! The games had a complete storyline without it.)

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