Meet the men hiding their FIFA Ultimate Team addiction from their families
Meet the men hiding their FIFA Ultimate Team addiction from their families
A great article on video games gambling addictions.
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27 comments
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This stuff is why "it's optional" and "it's just cosmetic" are bullshit arguments.
If you can resist the urge, you're not the intended target. They don't make record profits from people who can spend somewhat rationally, even though those are the vast majority of users their contribution to profits is a drop in an ocean.
No, the only reason this model works so well is because it's exploiting the vulnerabilities of a small percent of big spenders.
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No fun unless everyone can handle their shit!
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Here's a fun suggestion, how about you unlock the desired players by playing the game? Could even put it into an immersive context, you beat brazil and subsequently unlock their players for your team.
What's so fun about buying a chance to get your player? Is it possibly the shiny colors and the happy soundeffects that are specifically designed to make your brain addicted?
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Gambling is fun. God forbid you enjoy games line MtG 🙄
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Sucker plays game for 80 dollars and demands to pay more
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Whales subsidize the cost of the game for everyone else. If there weren't whales, the cost goes up for everyone or the product diminishes. Reality isn't a magical realm where the company will not use ROI and net profit to determine what to make or how to price things, it's all interrelated and you don't get to hold everything else constant when asking for something to change.
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That doesn't make any of this okay.
I've spent €45 for a Mario game yesterday. Last I've checked that game costs roughly the same for everyone (except understandable variations in regional pricing). Not €45 once for me and $2,000 per week for some guy with an addiction problem.
Yet that game was made, and thousands more that didn't rely on gacha, lootboxes or whatever.
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People with a gambling addiction will find an outlet for it unless they get help controlling it, just like people with any addiction. Addiction is treated on an individual basis, not by banning an activity that the vast majority of the population can partake in with self-control.
We don't have tons of public numbers to be able to discuss the initial development, licensing, marketing, support and ongoing development, distribution and overhead costs vs initial costs, expansion and MTX income of games at a large scale. But you can be sure the companies that make the games have those numbers, and they're used for pricing and budgeting of future development. And that's before we open the can of worms that is discussing how much profit is ethical.
Maybe they could make less money, maybe they could not make certain features, but where does the ethical line fall when it comes to predatory features and marketing? Who needs protection? From who? How do you implement it without infringing the rights of others? Is it ok to let them gamble if there's a deterministic worst-case scenario? What if there's a limit on how much they can spend? What if purchases are purely only deterministic, but they're limited time exclusives that will never return? What about if you can earn them by playing or pay extra to just get them up front or faster? What about if they carve that feature out of the main product and sell it as an additional cost? These are all predatory in some way, but we don't need to ban them all when a person can make their own value judgments and interact with games in a way that brings them enjoyment. Otherwise, it's a slippery slope to asking why we even let people "waste" money on entertainment.
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And yet plenty drugs and medicine are controlled substances because they'd be so easy to abuse or hurt yourself with. We could just assign the same to ingame gambling, no? Since that's also on an individual basis, handle it the same all around?
So to buy a lootbox:
- Go to a doctor.
- Doctor prescribes you a daily dosage of say, 1 lootbox.
- Each day you can go to the pharmacy and pick up a pack of 1 lootbox code, you can have at maximum a store of 4 of them at home then pharmacies stop giving you more so you cannot stockpile. (going by the pills a friend of mine gets prescribed here)
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Hey dude socialists don't believe that people can make rational choices and it isn't worth engaging them in serious discussions
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you do realize you're just saying that the predatory business has to be predatory otherwise they couldn't operate their predatory business, right? It's like a sheep defending wolves because if they didn't eat sheep they wouldn't be able to continue eating sheep.
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No, whales subsidize the cost of a yacht for the CEO. The games could be paid just from the money you pay for them, if the companies weren't continuously being siphoned off the top by C-suites and shareholders.
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"Opiods are fun. God forbid you enjoy some drugs line [sic] OxyContin 🙄"
It's not really nice to call an addiction "fun". Especially if you were to ask an addict about that.
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I love me the occasional line of k or coke. Opioids aren't really my thing though 🤷♂️
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The only people who are against drugs are people who've never done drugs and people who were really bad at doing drugs
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So, do you consider paying for more rolls part of the fun?
Because the rest, including the hit of endorphin you get for a stroke of luck, could very well exist without it. But of course on EA's side getting people addicted has no point if they don't pay virtually unlimited amounts of money for more.
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Not this game in particular. I do gamble and love spending a few hundred every year. I'll regularly drop $10 or$20 on a mobile time killer when I need them.
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okayh so you're just scrambling to justify something thaṭ, deep down, you know is an addiction and not something good in your life.
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👌
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You do realize this whole thread and post is about gambling addiction yes? You're essentially doing the "I have a black friend, I can't be racist!" but for gambling addiction.
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👌👍
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27 comments