Reminder that the hours played rule is only a limit for the automated refund system. You can request a refund for a game at any time for any reason. It just has to be manually reviewed and deemed justified by a person.
Don’t forget that they were hired by companies looking to make a profit off of exploiting the psychology of people and that the blame also lies with those who hired them for those jobs.
The same companies who have fought tooth and nail to prevent regulation to protect those exploited by these practices when politicians have actually cared enough to try to do something about it.
What’s the saying? Something like, “There’s plenty of fools in the game, and there’s a new one born every minute.”
I feel like the casual mobile gaming crowd falls into the same category. Regardless of how old they are, spending money on mtx is normal because they never knew a world where you just bought a game rather than downloading one onto your phone and putting up with both ads and mtx.
It’s like how words like “unalive” have entered common usage - people have gotten so used to obeying what advertisers want on the internet that it’s started dictating daily life, especially for younger people.
The unregulated gambling aspect designed to exploit human psychology to target vulnerable people to spend money that they probably can’t afford to spend is also a huge issue, but that at least would be easy enough to regulate, if politicians cared enough to do something about it.
The biggest portion of people buying this stuff aren’t “gamers” in the way that it’s often used around these circles. It’s the millions of people who buy coins for their Bejeweled clone of choice and have never owned a console in their life. And there’s so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world. I remember a Twitch streamer talking about how heartbreaking it was when AC6 came out and gave you the full color wheel plus multiple channels to customize your mech, and their chat was full of kids shocked that you didn’t have to buy skins or color packs. That’s how it used to be. You’d unlock skins by playing the game, not buying them in the store, but that hasn’t been the case in decades now.
And the often touted story of the whale with more money than sense is a myth. Do they exist? Sure. But the vast majority of money coming from mtx from gamers is from people who are psychologically vulnerable to addiction/gambling and people with a poor ability to comprehend finances like kids. These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way. From lootboxes to battle passes and seasonal content to daily quests and washing money through funny money currencies, it’s all been designed to prey upon people with addiction issues, ADHD, training young kids into gambling addicts, etc. It’s the Lotto tickets and pumping extra oxygen into the air of casinos and making sure there’s no natural light in there so you don’t realize how long you’ve been playing slots of the gaming world. Look at WoW, with its daily quests. They train players using Skinner Box techniques to continue logging into the game and paying the monthly subscription long after they’ve stopped enjoying it because it’s become a habit and they are afraid of falling behind.
Voting with your wallet isn’t going to fix it. You’ll never get your average Facebook mom to care enough not to buy Farmville tokens or whatever, and these companies will never stop abusing psychology on their own. Only industry regulation will stop this.
Yes, though the devs have stated that replacing it is something that they’re considering as there’s still been issues with cheaters and I think they said 2 out of every 150 players were having gameplay problems directly related to the anticheat. I don’t expect to see kernel level anticheat go away completely, but I hope that they’ll at least replace it with something less nasty like Easy Anti-Cheat.
You don’t ever have to deal with the bugs if you don’t want to. There’s an entire second war going on with the Automatons, and the devs have clearly left themselves room for at least 2 more factions. I guess the first game had another faction of aliens that isn’t in the game yet.
But I get it if the bugs are enough to put you off getting it, I had to essentially solo part of Elden Ring in co-op for a buddy because the hands in that game trigger his arachnophobia.
Except the whale narrative is largely a false narrative created by the game industry to avoid saying that the money comes from kids and gambling addicts.
Those people with more money than sense do exist and they make up a portion of the mtx money, but the vast majority is from people who probably can’t afford to make purchases like that (but do anyways because their brain can’t say no).
The industry has been honing these skinner box techniques for decades now - it’s what they used to get people to pay a monthly subscription for an mmo they only play when they log in to do their dailies.