I'm a huge proponent of platform owners getting out of the way when it comes to restrictions (at odds with my use of iOS, but it's a balance of priorities).
When will regulations catch up with this sort of thing? Do Apple/Google have a moral responsibility here? Apple expressly forbids gambling apps, but this is essentially a slot machine with a different mechanic. Apple (not as familiar with Google) have done a great job on iOS giving parents the options to restrict their children making unauthorised purchases, but the settings aren't hugely discoverable.
In this day and age, do we need to consider a digital restraining order that allows a spouse or close family member to block or limit digital addicts? Do Apple or Google have a duty of care here or does it rest with law makers? The concerning part is that these purchases are invisible. If I buy a $1 million boat, others will see that and can intervene. But digital purchases can rack up silently and cause massive damage without anyone realising.
I'm really not sure where I stand on the issue. One side of me says that "it's his money, he can do what he wants" whereas the other side says that society should protect it's weakest, and this man clearly has a gambling problem.
Actually, gambling apps are allowed in stores for territories where gambling is legal.
In the UK every bookmaker will have an app, and there are plenty of real-money casino and bingo apps available.
Of course, the difference here, is that the UK's gambling companies operate in a highly regulated environment. You can put in place deposit limits instantly that then take a week or more to lift, you can self-exclude (ban yourself from the bookmaker), and these are the measures the firms have put in themselves, the regulator is there to basically make sure they're following consistent rules and treating players fairly.
Money laundering regulations, appropriate licensing, etc. also all add up. The general view is that people should be free to gamble, but also have a regulatory framework to remove criminal elements and ensure players are treated fairly. It helps that the government gets to tax proceeds as well - an issue causing real headaches as they've become as addicted to the in-store FOBTs income as much as bookmaker shareholders have.
I've thought for a while that there was going to come a time when spending caps were likely going to be needed for in-game assets. But then, where do you draw the line? You could easily argue that webcam sites are potentially as addictive, exploitative and potentially have the same game behaviour that is so dangerous here.
TIL about the gambling restriction being region-specific.
I guess my question boils down to this: betting on horses and playing a casino slot machine are recognised as gambling and regulated as such. How, when and should apps like Game of War be considered in the same category?
I guess a (somewhat perverse) argument could be made that the defining characteristic of gambling is that you might (just maybe) get back more money than you put in. In Game of War you are absolutely 100% guaranteed to get back exactly 0% of your money every single time, and thus there is no gambling involved.
And to me it's a slippery slope because what separates stuff like Game of War and Farmville from your average AAA game with purchases for packs of things like skins.
Usually people don't group those because you're paying money for the former up front, but the mechanics are the same.
There's no slippery slope. The difference is easy to distinguish.
Is real money a substitute for skill at whatever decisions the game asks you to make? If so, you're being scammed.
Content expansions in AAA games are obviously not substitutes for skill.
Nor are cosmetic customization options like skins or accessories.
Cards in virtual card games like Hearthstone get a bit more interesting to analyze. There are better and worse decks, and it takes the right cards to build better decks. Spending money is a much faster way to get the right cards than doing daily quests. But there are two factors that keep Hearthstone out of scam territory. First, someone can get any card they want without spending money, and if they're really good in drafts, they can even do it relatively quickly. So, the more skill you have, the less spending money helps you. Second, there's a maximum that spending money can help you. Once you have the decks you want, whether you win or not comes down to skill (and some luck) in the exact same way as everyone else. You get no advantages over someone who built the deck they want without spending money.
So yeah, there's a simple framework to apply to make these decisions. Where's the slippery slope?
I wasn't referring to Content expansions, I was referring to games like Halo or Fifa where you can buy (or earn) a "pack" of "cards" that unlock (non-cosmetic) items that are in the base game that you use in actual gameplay.
In these mobile IAP-fests you can unlock anything with "enough play" and beat most challenges with "enough skill" but the idea is "enough play" is supposed to be so much that if you committed to it, you'd have better luck working a job to just pay for the items you unlock. And there's no difference between items earned and bought, just a difference in expected quantity one has access to. So those games pass both tests you mention.
You end up needing to add more and more constraints to have a framework that works on multiple genres and eventually you'll find you're making exclusions that aren't really fair.
what separates stuff like Game of War and Farmville from your average AAA game with purchases for packs of things like skins
Personally I see two potential criteria of separation.
1) to what extent does paying money increase my chance of 'winning'
2) To what extent does not paying money make the game less fun.
As long as I can have fun with just the base game and have a reasonable chance of 'winning' then I'm not too bothered. But once they start to make the base game more boring or unreasonably hard to 'force' people to upgrade then it starts to become an issue.
That's an interesting point, but here (and in a couple of other comments) I see mentions of gambling addicts.
I'm not sure it's gambling, even if the same receptors are being tickled. It definitely is an addiction, but I think it affects people who are 'collectors'. Maybe 20 years ago they would have got their fix of completeness by stamp collecting, or beanie babies. And I'm sure even then there were people who would happily pay through the nose just to complete a collection.
I see part of the problem originating from iOS users themselves. For some reason, a large number of people seemed to think it shocking that somebody would charge a few bucks for a game, even if it was clearly something you could have paid ten times the price for on a console a couple of years earlier.
So the games companies had to release free-to-play games, and realised to make money they had to target completists, and now we find ourselves with games that are essentially crippled after the first few levels; impossible to win through skill/practise, and only by buying new items can you hope to get any further.
> I'm really not sure where I stand on the issue. One side of me says that "it's his money, he can do what he wants" whereas the other side says that society should protect it's weakest, and this man clearly has a gambling problem.
A point of clarification:
It wasn't his money, it was his employer's money which he was already stealing. While the game certainly rewards spenders and that sort of business model raises some ethical questions, to say this guy has a problem seems off the mark just because he didn't spend 1 million of his own, hard-earned dollars, he spent 1 million stolen dollars that he likely would've stolen anyway and spent on something else equally unfulfilling. He didn't have a value attachment to the money because it wasn't his, so spending it on something dumb like this game wasn't difficult.
I feel like it's similar to one time when I got $100 in game credits for Origin and blew it all on Mass Effect 3 weapons packs. Normally I wouldn't spend that money but it was a gift and I didn't want anything else Origin offered at the time. No value connection beyond the sentimental, so spending it in a silly way didn't feel strange to me.
Now if we come across some minor CEO who gets bankrupted by one of these games...that's something more in line with what you're talking about.
Then one user buys up a big army and navy and hits a 'gambler addiction threshold' so Apple restricts the account. As a result the user has no air cover and his army gets wiped out. Litigation time!
When will regulations catch up with this sort of thing? Do Apple/Google have a moral responsibility here? Apple expressly forbids gambling apps, but this is essentially a slot machine with a different mechanic. Apple (not as familiar with Google) have done a great job on iOS giving parents the options to restrict their children making unauthorised purchases, but the settings aren't hugely discoverable.
In this day and age, do we need to consider a digital restraining order that allows a spouse or close family member to block or limit digital addicts? Do Apple or Google have a duty of care here or does it rest with law makers? The concerning part is that these purchases are invisible. If I buy a $1 million boat, others will see that and can intervene. But digital purchases can rack up silently and cause massive damage without anyone realising.
I'm really not sure where I stand on the issue. One side of me says that "it's his money, he can do what he wants" whereas the other side says that society should protect it's weakest, and this man clearly has a gambling problem.