Nintendo has such a great, family friendly brand. If I was in charge, I wouldn't want my brand to be anywhere close to being associated to this type of thing.
Grim to see even Nintendo who stand by their principles to such a degree elsewhere find themselves capitulating to garbage mobile profit models when on a phone.
iOS and Android app stores are where creativity, quality and talent goes to die. Whole thing could disappear tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.
And my fave games from that era are no longer runnable on modern iOS.
Shenzhen Solitaire is probably the only quality pay once game I could name on the current App Store. There was one other but the dev stopped paying for an App Store license.
they didn't initially. their first mobile game, Super Mario Run, cost $10 and had none of the usual manipulative mobile game elements. People did not buy it so they switched to the same F2P nonsense as everyone else for future games.
Super Mario Run was also always-online for no reason, you couldn't play without an internet connection.
And it wasn't a particularly impressive game. There's no shortage of endless runners on mobile, and Nintendo didn't do much to differentiate themselves, so it's no surprise nobody bought it.
I think the always-online thing is a DRM thing. I could be wrong, though.
As for the game itself: I've played it, and it's a pretty decent runner with the physics of New Super Mario Bros. Wii/U, but it's just not the same as the more full-fledged games. It's fun to pick up and play, but not groundbreaking or particularly special.
I was really disappointed by that choice. I had wanted to buy it for a plane trip I had shortly after it came out, but being online only, they lost that sale.
It seemed like an anti-piracy move because the game didn’t naturally need to be online. But I never thought iPhone app piracy was much of a concern.
The online-only aspect of it killed it for me. I lived in an area with spotty cell service when it came out, meaning a game that would otherwise be a great time killer was unplayable due to the DRM.
They have the data so they would certainly know better than me, but my anecdotal experience was just so wildly different. I bought it, and nearly everyone I know did. It was a great game, and did not of the scummy things that so many games did! The always online and the "won't run on rooted device" checks were very annoying to me, but it didn't exceed my tolerance threshold. I and many others praised them for just charging a one time payment for the whole game. My anecdotal experience made me very optimistic that Nintendo was going to prove that you didn't have to be scummy! Apparently not.
Yeah, but you only spent $10. The investors aren't going to stand for that crap when all these other companies are scamming their way to thousands. $10 or $4000 in revenue...take your pick. Gambling needs defined and outlawed in every way possible.
The recent supreme court ruling that released the sports gambling hounds has me gobsmacked with absolute disbelief.
From a legal standpoint, why is it a qualified use of government paternalism to outlaw gambling? We should not be asking the government to set laws based on morality.
Practically speaking, and apologies in advance for how obvious this argument is…when you ban gambling, it doesn’t disappear, it simply goes underground. Criminal actors benefit while the state is unable to enforce any protections or see any recompense. Moreover, it’s unclear what brightline exists between “gambling” and a ton of economic decisions. If I buy a plot of land because I think it might have oil, is that gambling? When I lock in an insurance policy, is that gambling?
I get it’s popular to immediately call for government enforcement whenever you experience personal moral outrage, but the real world contains far more nuance. Making gambling and some of its “sinful” corollaries like drug use illegal has never solved the problem, and has exacerbated it for the worst off.
I'm totally fine with allowing gambling at the condition that it be completely off limits to minors and it be properly labelled and easy to filter out. But now, what we see is games specifically targeting children are rife with gambling type mechanism to get the child to spend money. As for the App Store, sure they display that there might be micro transactions, but the hardly tell you if they are of the gem types or the "10$ to unlock full game" types. I also should be able to have an option in a menu somewhere to completely hide all those gambling type games. Right now, when I go look for games, I specifically filter for only the paid ones, yet those games still want to double dip and get you to pay micro transaction, which just discourages me from spending my money at all.
It is deemed a qualified use to limit gambling because gambling addiction hurts more than just the addict. Their family suffers, maybe society suffers because of crime. Limiting (not outlawing) allows for outreach, voluntary blacklists, escape for their family should they cross the line and other safety measures.
As for the brightline between economic decisions: yeah, the definition is not perfect. Poker isn't gambling for some definitions because it is 'a game of skill'. While buying a plot of land with oil is certainly a skill AND it is expected to generate profits. But we can't protect as m
well against hopeful stupidity.
Buying an insurance policy isn't gambling as it reduces risk. ...selling one is gambling if you didn't do the math though.
I think I agree on your take on gambling and some of its “sinful” corollaries, but aren't this and other dark patterns more about tricking and fooling people into something? At a casino I know it is money in, very likely no money out, maybe big money.
Here it is money in, for a chance to play better against.. what even humans, or just more virtualities?
I know i know, where to draw the line will be superhard or impossible, but this has the touch of plain betrayal to me, that classic gambling hasn't (as long as it is fair).
I don't fully disagree with you, but it's not so simple. I only paid $10, but I've paid $0 to all the others. Same for the people I know with one exception. It's got to be a small number of total users that spend thousands in a game, so it seems reasonable to think that the revenue could be comparable when everyone pays something.
You would be blown away at how many people without money spend $4000 in a short time.
I worked with a guy who spent thousands on World of Tanks when it launched 12years ago (free to play, and they didn't have anything that was pay-to-win or that resembled gambling). His income was about $40k and he had a family to support. I have since run into others who have blown similar amounts or more on mobile gaming. These people are slowly, quietly ruining their lives.
They added some daily bonus type stuff that may seem similar at first--I think they did that because it's what the mobile market largely expects, sadly--but there's nothing tied to payment, and it's pretty easy to just play the game.
I always found it weird how mobile phone apps/games trigger the "happy to pay £10 for a pizza, but not happy to pay £10 for hours of entertainment" attitude in people.
Is it perhaps because they spent a few hundred/thousand £ on the phone itself and see that as the complete price?
Mario Kart Tour makes far less money for Nintendo than Fire Emblem Heroes, which has a more traditional Gacha model (that is ironically not as pay-to-win unless you are doing high-end PvP)
I've never been into Nintendo but after having kids I kept hearing this about how great they are for families so I bought a Switch. That's when I learned what a greedy exploitative platform it is: overcharging for games, nickle and dimeing for everything, and abusing their fan's nostalgia. I definitely don't want to get my kids invested in their platform so I got rid of the Switch. Steam has more than we need anyway. (just wish Steam had better family friendly search filters, why is it impossible to search for games by ESRB rating?!).
I bought Super Mario Odyssey on release day in 2017 and it's never asked me for more money. In fact I think it got a few free content updates. It's the tightly-made, quality video game experience that it was when it came out.
That's when I learned what a greedy exploitative platform it is
I bought a game (Spelunky) on the Switch online shop. Nintendo then proceeded to send me constant emails about how my “coins are expiring.” So they award coins for purchases which you can save up to get “free” games, but then make them gradually expire if you don’t use them. What kind of high pressure sales tactic is this?
I was really turned off. I can see how this would be highly manipulative to kids though.
Why is Nintendo doing this crap? They’re a privately owned, family-run company. They don’t have outside shareholders to please. They could just choose to be less profitable and focus on protecting their family-friendly brand. This excessive greed is highly unseemly.
For what it is worth, the Yamauchi family has been slowly selling their portion of the company for nearly a decade. (https://www.campdenfb.com/article/nintendo-heirs-sell-stake-...). The shareholder structure is the only thing keeping in control and they definitely care about how happy shareholders are. Luckily, the particular shareholders they are concerned with tend to hold for an extremely long period of time (Japanese banks and holding cos).
The coins, both the giving of and the expiring, are 100% a Japanese culture thing.
Most japanese residents can tell you near every store will have a points card system where you get 1% back in points. Or 0.5% for the stingy super markets.
What is lesser known is that by law such points, and even digital in-game currency, must expire else be considered money and regulated as such.
The coins are a "fun" value add thing. You can get small discounts on digital games if you use the gold ones. The silver ones can get you various digital/physical goodies. You're not missing out if you don't use them.
Why make them expire though? Even worse, they expire the coins gradually, stretching it out as long as possible, like radioactive decay. And they send you an email to remind you every time a few coins expire.
This is not fun! This is straightforward psychological manipulation! It’s taking people’s loss aversion [1] and grinding it as hard as possible for as much profit as they can. This is especially bad when you consider that they are a family-oriented company that primarily markets to children.
I don't believe that's true; unused gold coins expire at the end of the same month during which you acquired them, one year later. (I believe silver/platinum coins are similar, but only last six months)
So for example if you acquired 10 gold coins during July 2020 (it doesn't matter when or how many purchases or how spread they are through the month), all ten of those coins would expire simultaneously at the end of July 2021, while any coins you acquired later would remain. It's not a radioactive decay at all; it's a simple expiration date on each individual coin, like you get on coupons or other incentive programs.
The coins expire for the same reason that coupons expire, airline loyalty program miles expire, etc -- they're a liability on the company's balance sheet which potentially could build up infinitely if there wasn't some limit to how long they needed to be tracked and redeemable.
I never got such an email, so I guess you are subscribed to their newsletter? Just unsubscribe if that's the case.
Regarding e-shop: I'd never let my hypothetical children have access to any kind of e-shop where you can purchase without me having to confirm. Parental controls FTW.
The alternative is to uncheck “save payment method for future purchases”.
Do you mind elaborating on the "overcharging for games" part? Console games in the 80s were about $45, so games today are actually cheaper if inflation is taken into account.
Console games really benefited from economy of scale. The Legend of Zelda had an MSRP in 1986 of $50. That is $136 in 2022 money. You can preorder The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for $70, or roughly half the price.
Imagine how many more hours of labor goes into a modern game compared to a 1986 game. The 1986 game has nine people in the credits. Three people with the role "programmer". Two things kept prices in line. Reduced hardware costs, as the older carts are much more expensive. Increased sales, where more people buy the same software.
Throwing more people mostly making graphics, and creating movie like sequences where characters explain things isn't as hard with the tools available compared to making everything fit memory-wise making choices not faced today. Those three programmers interfaced with the hardware directly, solved os problems to get things working enough to put in a custom game engine they created into the smallest amount of memory before they can even start creating a world where there game could exist. The challenge today is how can I generate enough content to create a story to put into my unreal game engine. The 3d part, driver development, the memory management all is handled by something else.
Games for Nintendo consoles aren’t overpriced relative to games from past generations, but are expensive relative to PC games today. Sales promotions on PC platforms like Steam and GOG are more frequent and provide deeper discounts than Nintendo’s. And while AAA Nintendo games are roughly the same price as AAA games on Steam, old Nintendo AAA games retain much higher prices than old AAA games on Steam. (Example: Mario Kart 8 is nine years old and still sells for $60 not including DLC.)
A lot of the major Nintendo games are on sale this week (probably because of March 10 = MAR10), but even the oldest first‐party titles are only down to about $40 at the lowest.
Random question for the HN crowd piggybacking off your comment:
What age did you introduce video games to your kids?
My oldest is 5 and I let him tinker on the PS5 when I’m around playing things like Sonic or he really likes Astro’s Playworld.
We limit it to maybe 15-20 min a day but I swear it’s like I tell people I let him watch R-rated movies or something when I mention that I let him play video games at his age.
My youngest son was 3 or 4 when we played Everquest together. He sat on my lap so he could see the monitor and killed snakes in front of Qeynos for 10-15 minutes a night for a few months.
We constantly played console games and board games as a family. The kids got their own handhelds about 7-8. We supervised what games they could play until high school, and limited their game playing/TV until 16 based on their grades and good behavior. After that, they really didn't need limits as they were responsible enough.
I was far more concerned about them having a cell phone. We resisted as long as possible, and then started with dumb phones without a data plan.
Don't have kids yet, but I started playing at age 5, didn't notice any issues (although that may be in the eye of the beholder, ha)
I actually think video games did me a decent amount of good with reading and math skills. Lot of RPGs, minecraft, etc. I would definitely set time limits and try to push towards more "brainy" games
Yeah. Although it was good that I quit when I did, my time with world of Warcraft when I was 9 leveled up my typing and communication skills so fast. Since I'm particularly prone to min/maxing I also got some good experience with math and unintuitive systems and how to guage what was better. (Percent increase vs flat increase, hit speed vs hit damage, etc.)
My son has been playing various Mario games since age 5. He can hold his own on Mario Party and has finished Odyssey. When we were kids, I was playing GTA, Mortal Kombat etc, so my childhood wasn't necessarily a good example.
That being said, his reading and math abilities are quite good and we attribute that to videogames, and a healthy dose of Mo Willems books.
My kid is 4 and plays a few specific games that I allow. He loves ”fire boy & water girl” for example, and he used to play Super Mario Run but it was not turning well so I cut that. Sometimes we play SNES Mario games together but he usually finds them too hard. Also some Mario Kart on emulators, and some Minecraft.
We let our oldest start pretty young. He could beat Monument Valley at 3 and beat Shovel Knight at 5.
Our current limits for our 5 and 7 year old kids are one hour, three days a week.
In some ways it feels like letting them read visual novels. The media itself is usually great, I just worry about them getting used to the easiest forms.
The switch is also a UX nightmare. I can't believe the time and stress incurred to get profiles setup and purchase games. Completely drained my excitement. I have like four of them...all sit unused.
I think they tried to do things clean with games like "Super Mario Run", I think they really really tried and even when it did kind of work investors weren't happy seeing how games like Diablo Immortal was the highest grossing Diablo game ever and Nintendo wouldn't just take the money just sitting there in front of them.
I see this game as a capitulation and it's akin to seeing Santa Claus dying.
I would support a law against this entire business model on digital app stores, not necessarily a total ban, but something. No company can resist the temptation unless they are forced to. Google and Apple are making tons and tons of cash off unfettered addiction. Good luck though - there's an entire industry making a lot of money off this and a lot of decent jobs that depend on addicts feeding the system.
I swear Pokemon Unite has 5 different currencies. Gems, Tickets, Coins, Fashion Tickets, Holowear tickets. But then there are other items / collector things which can be used to spend on other stuff, like energy.
Its super confusing and hard to explain, because it doesnt make sense!
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 things /actually/ cost and delete the thing. My understanding is that the math shows companies that microtransactions are the winning move over and over again. I hope that eventually there's enough grumpy consumers both parties become worth serving better.
Multiple currency types are a key part of freemium / microtransaction games, but there are other reasons to have multiple currency types, and it’s becoming more and more common across all types of games.
In a sense, games are often about managing resources. Currency is a resource. If you have one currency type, you can come up with a dominant strategy that maximizes production of that particular currency type. If you make multiple currency types, which are difficult / inefficient to exchange for each other, it encourages people to interact with more portions of the game. You can also have certain currency types tied to key parts of the game’s progression.
Take a look at games like Hades or Control. Hades has obol, darkness, gems, chthonic keys, ambrosia, titan’s blood, diamonds, and nectar. That’s 8 different currency types, the way I count it. No microtransactions—you purchase the game and play it until you are satisfied. There are a ton of game design reasons why those different currency types exist, rather than using a single currency type.
The freemium / microtransaction model just needs one more currency type—something that is slow to acquire, but you can buy it with cash, that directly translates into gacha or something similar, and can be easily converted to other currency types. If Hades had microtransactions, it would probably just have 9 currency types instead of 8.
I think multi-currency systems can be used to juice microtransactions pretty hard still. For example League of
Legends gives players free "chests" and free "keys" as a slow-drip, and you can open any chest with a key to get some random loot. If your chest count doesn't match your keys you can buy more of either using real cash. So basically multi currency systems can be used to keep players intentionally in a state of imbalance. It also makes it so their money doesn't go as far in the game if you have to buy separate blue yellow and red coins instead of just yellow coins like it sounds like in your Hades example (just having 9).
Sure, but multi-currency systems juice anything. Control, for example, has tons of different materials used for upgrades and crafting. In order to get the right mix of upgrades, you have to travel to all different parts of the game world. Nier has something similar.
By comparison, there are plenty of games (especially older ones) with only one or two currencies. Maybe you just find the one place in the game world that lets you grind out those currencies the fastest, and you do that over and over until you’re sick of it.
You setup a strawman (perhaps unintentionally) with this sentence:
> Currency is a resource
by ignoring the context of the comment you replied to, and the rest of your comment just builds upon that.
Currency in this context is not just a resource, it's specifically resources tied into a system of microtransactions.
So that includes currency you buy directly with money and currency that is accepted alongside purchasable currency. Having Rubies, Emeralds, and Gold as three different currencies obviously doesn't mean anything special in isolation. Why would having X resource types in a game be special or predatory in isolation?
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What makes it predatory is when only Rubies and Gold can be purchased with money, and some items can be purchased with Emeralds or Rubies, and the pricing for Rubies and Gold are different... the end result is muddying the actual costs of items, and making it more difficult for players to only spend once.
The main MO behind systems like that is to make one currency more important at the start, for example, by letting it get you ahead on core mechanics. Then in the later game having content like skins and characters be locked behind another currency which you're now encouraged to buy having naturally accumulated enough of the first currency through gameplay.
To be honest I’m baffled by this comment. I’m not really trying to argue against anybody or against any specific viewpoint so the idea that I set up a strawman has me confused.
If you’re talking about rubies, emeralds, and gold, can you explain where those come from? Maybe provide a link?
As far as I know, in Mario Kart Tour the key limited currency is rubies. You can exchange rubies for coins, fire them into a pipe to get gacha, or various other things. This is similar to the other freemium games that I’ve played. Maybe my understanding of Mario Kart Tour is incorrect or incomplete.
Yes, there are multiple forms of currency, but only rubies are really limited. The other currencies can more or less be earned freely by playing the game (if I understand the game correctly). The ruby economy exists to get you to spend cash on the game. Likewise, in Hades, the weird economy of titan’s blood, diamonds, and nectar is what encourages you to complete the game using different combinations of weapons and heat levels.
> So that includes currency you buy directly with money and currency that is accepted alongside purchasable currency
Mario Kart Tour is letting you trade one currency that is paid for another that is earned. That "taints" the currency that can be earned by allowing them to use it to hide the real cost of an item.
And to top it off here Mario Kart is artificially limiting how many of the "earned" currency you can actually earn per day.
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You're also getting caught up on non-existent currencies that were named as digs at pay-to-win shovelware... this isn't about a literal game with "Rubies Emeralds and Gold"* it's about how currency X Y and Z are intermeshed to keep people buying.
* Rubies is one of the premier cliched names for premium currency in a P2W game, it's not unique to MK...
> You're also getting caught up on non-existent currencies that were named as digs at pay-to-win shovelware... this isn't about a literal game with "Rubies Emeralds and Gold"* it's about how currency X Y and Z are intermeshed to keep people buying.
Okay, what you said was unclear and I asked for clarification. I guess if you were trying to get me to fall into a trap, you won.
I did read the whole article. It was your comments that confused me. Maybe I just don’t understand what you’re saying, or maybe you’re just bad at explaining things clearly. I’m not sure. You are free to either clarify your point, or mock me for not understanding what you wrote, and it sounds like you’re choosing the second option.
There's a third option you omitted: That the first comment was clear, that the second comment clarified, that other commenters have clarified, and you still don't grasp it, so I'm not inclined to keep spoon feeding you this.
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.
> There's a third option you omitted: That the first comment was clear, that the second comment clarified, that other commenters have clarified, and you still don't grasp it, so I'm not inclined to keep spoon feeding you this.
To be clear, your behavior in this thread is inappropriate. You are expected to disagree with people without talking about “spoon-feeding” people explanations, or acting like the person you are talking to is some kind of idiot child.
> 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, …
The cap for gold is relatively high. It’s not unlimited, it’s just high. That’s what I’m talking about. You farm it by playing every day, doing the daily quests / challenges, and you get a decent number of coins. This is different from rubies, which are more limited. Rubies you get like, once every 5 levels or something, and when there’s a new tour. Not often.
> 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.
Again, your behavior in this thread is inappropriate. It is wrong to make conjectures about whether the person you’re talking to is a “victim” of “what the rest of us see as predatory”. You should not behave this way.
There are a lot of games out there without microtransactions that have the same kind of currency as the gold coins in Mario Kart Tour. These coins are not primarily there to manipulate you into spending real money—that’s what rubies are for. The purpose is to manipulate you into play the game regularly—you get rewarded for playing the game consistently, every day. I’m making a distinction between the currencies which are there to manipulate you into playing the game, and the currencies which are there to manipulate you into spending money. Obviously there’s not a hard line here between the two types, but I think that they are distinct enough.
It would be nice if we could just disagree and have that conversation. Again, it’s inappropriate to conjecture that I misunderstand something because I disagree with you on some point. Disagreement is normal, your behavior in this thread is not.
Interpreting things as inappropriate is your prerogative.
When you're still saying things like
> You farm it by playing every day, doing the daily quests / challenges, and you get a decent number of coins. This is different from rubies, which are more limited.
While not realizing the entire crux of the issue is "a decent number" is a completely arbitrary limit designed to encourage compulsive engagement and monetary spend, which is something that is predatory... implies that you have fallen for it hook line and sinker and are now simply incapable or unwilling to see it from any other viewpoint than "acceptable".
I mean, it’s my prerogative to interpret something as inappropriate, but you’re not stupid, and you I think you know that your behavior is inappropriate. You’re just trying to manipulate me into getting angry or something. You’d have better odds selling me rubies.
In Mario kart, the dollar -> ruby -> gold -> toad chain (from the OP) is designed to obfuscate the cost and get players to spend more money than if it was just dollar -> toad.
Multiple currencies (that can be indirectly bought for dollars) is thus a symptom of a game designed to remove my money.
You seemed to be suggesting that we should not be skeptical of this, because similar game design elements can be used for other reasons.
That matches my original understanding of how the game works, but I have a different interpretation of why it works that way.
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).
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!
I actually think a ton of games from the "16-bit" era up to the first generation to heavily feature online services and game downloads (PS3/Xbox360/Wii—yeah, yeah, I know even the NES had a game download system in Japan, the Dreamcast had a modem, and so on, but you know what I mean) are still damn good, and my nostalgia consoles are the Magnavox Odyssey2 (I'd not... suggest any of those games to a modern gamer without the benefit of nostalgia) and the NES (I'd advance, IDK, maybe ten or fifteen total games on there as still worth playing for sheer fun reasons, not due to historical importance or whatever, despite personally loving perhaps a hundred of them).
Like, Super Metroid is just fucking great. Timeless. That goes for a lot of those games from the early 90s through early 2000s. Symphony of the Night? A masterpiece and still absolutely worth playing. Some of the Final Fantasy games? The series has veered into a different genre, so it's hard to compare those with earlier entries, but mid-period FF games are totally on par with or better than many trad JRPG-style games still coming out. Chrono Trigger? Still excellent. Most of the Gamecube-era Nintendo multiplayer games are about as much fun as their modern versions, still. Some fighting games? Mid-period entries in those series are often better than the newer ones. And so on.
Most of those I didn't play back in the day, so I don't think nostalgia's blinding me.
Theoretically plausible for an American developer, but it’s worth pointing out that in that era (and maybe still today) video game rental was illegal in Japan.
I think that's the reason for the quality of GBA games - at that time the industry already had lots of knowledge on how to create fun experiences and the hardware was capable of providing nice simple 2d graphics
> 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.
And if you run out of console games to emulate, there is a thriving rom hack community that has created some truly astonishing games (New Super Mario World 2: Around the World, Hyper Metroid, etc.)
Once you get Nethack/Slashem, text adventures and some who-knows-ware licensed games such as Daikatana for Game Boy Color and patched Chinese bootlegs such as Resident Evil and FFVII for the NES, most modern games feel like overpriced propietary crap.
Some arcade games were much worse than others, some of them were basically on a timer, draining your health the entire time so no matter how well you played you'd have to keep dropping quarters in to continue. There were also games that outright cheated in terms of difficulty to extract more money from players. I avoided those kinds of games, but some kids were hooked on them.
The difference is that even the worst arcade games were only a problem for the limited time you spent in the arcade. They weren't sitting in your pocket 24/7 sending you notifications begging you to get back to the game or leaving constant threats that you're missing out on something. Arcade games had only a single currency, quarters or tokens, and those could be freely exchanged and never expired. You didn't need 30 tokens to play, while the arcade would only sell you tokens in a non-refundable pack of 50, but that sort of scam is commonplace in mobile titles. The arcade games weren't collecting massive amounts of your personal data and selling it to data brokers either.
Mobile games are so much more abusive than even the most exploitative arcade games were and people weren't happy about constantly plugging quarters into the arcade games either! That's a large part of why the console market took off. Sadly, it seems like we're coming full circle and even major console titles now sometimes look (and act) like shitty free to play mobile games.
There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
While this doesn't stop me from picking up new stuff occasionally, I have used this fact to crowbar myself off the content treadmill. Why look forward to the movie coming out in six months when my movie backlog is already as tall as I am? Why play these addiction-based mobile games when I've got enough mobile games that don't do that?
Granted, in the case of mobile games, one is really reduced to filtering through the pile to find one that doesn't work this way, but on a moment-by-moment basis, you don't need a thousand good choices... you just need the one. My phone isn't loaded down with games, but the Slay the Spire that is on it, has zero microtransactions, and basically has the same gacha mechanics embedded into it even if you need that sort of thing, is pretty sufficient for most times I've been reaching for my phone lately.
There is a local arcade I've been to a few times, but it's a price to buy in and everything inside is free play after that, so you don't have to worry about the arcade mechanics draining your wallet either.
> There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
This is why doom & gloom reactions about anything that might slow media publishing don't make any sense to me. I'd have to be insanely dedicated to make it through the backlog of very-likely-to-be-good stuff I want to experience for basically any medium, just of what's already been published/recorded/whatever. Like, tens-of-hours-per-week dedicated, for decades, just to make a single pass over all of it. "We can't reform copyright, what if novels stop being written and movies stop being made!" Well... it'd harm my quality of life basically not at all, so, that just doesn't seem like a huge problem to me (putting aside that a huge amount of writing is free anyway, and has a large audience—see: fan fiction).
Maybe I'd finally get through my list of pre-WWII films I want to watch, at least, before kicking the bucket. Catch up on the titles from the first few thousand years of the written word that are still on my to-read list. Big deal if very little more is published, it'd be impossible to run out of great material as it is.
It's even true for the young medium of video games! I'm still likely gonna have probably-good games on my to-play pile that were already published by today in 2023 if I live until 2070, even if zero more games are published starting this second. "What if this reform means less stuff gets published?" God, I just do not care. Hell, if a reform stops most new publishing but makes older stuff cheaper and more widely available, it might be a win for me, overall. Running out of content to "consume" is a complete non-issue regardless of what happens to those industries in the future. There are several lifetimes worth of good-to-great content already.
It is not pay-to-win. There is no way to use actual money to improve your chances of winning. The only things you can buy are cosmetics, and there are no randomized lootbox/gambling mechanics.
There have been some cosmetics that give a slight advantage (blending in with the background too much), but they're pretty good about updating these to reduce the impact they have. Basically, those articles are complaining about the game being pay-to-win by accident.
Don't get me wrong though. Fortnite does use the psychological tricks described in the video to make you want to buy things, and I'm sure the tricks are very effective at separating kids from their money, so he's not entirely off the mark. I just think it's a bit better than most free-to-play games, and it would have been fair to also call out some of the tricks that Fortnite won't do. I play the game and I feel like I've gotten way more enjoyment out of it than the $10 I spent on a battle pass.
But maybe this is just an indication of how much worse it's gotten in the 3 years since the video was made?
>In order to have 100% chance of getting Peach, I'd have to spend more than ~$3,400...
I don't think the author understands probabilities. They mention the probability of getting Peach in each roll is 0.25%, but assuming that each roll is independent, there's no way to guarantee (ie. "100% chance") that you get Peach, because it's possible to fail each roll no matter how many times you roll. If we take the author's dollar amount and work backwards to see what the overall probability is we end up with 91.2%, which is high but nowhere near 100%.
They're not independent. (At least the last time I played,) they pull prizes out of the pool when you win them. So if there is 1 Peach in a 100-prize pipe, at most you have to buy 100.
Source? I searched around and the first source[1] seems to confirm what you say
>you can only receive a certain number of rewards from each rarity level per 100 Pipe uses
but further down it says
>Additionally, as long as you haven’t exhausted the quantity by rarity for its category, you can receive duplicates of a reward from the Pipe.
However, it also says
>In fact, you’re guaranteed to receive at least one reward of each type by the time you’ve used 100 Pipe pulls — though the exact reward you’ll get is random for all categories except High-End Spotlight.
I agree that each roll isn't independent and you can't model it as such, but I don't think there's any mechanism to guarantee you a prize given enough rolls, and I still suspect the author messed up the math.
Because of this kind of practice, I act as a content curator for my kids. I do my best not to shelter (challenging, but doable), but to educate and train them to spot these kind of subtle (and not-so-subtle) schemes. Are you playing the game, or is the game playing you?
It's half an inside joke and half serious in our house, but I quote WOPR in War Games to the kids every so often:
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
The good news is that there are loads of great alternatives to these casino-like experiences, and it's just a matter of avoiding this stuff, and choosing the good.
It's rather sad even Nintendo has devolved to this sort of mobile gaming trap too, you would think the old guard would have some respect for themselves to purposely NOT contribute to this modern epidemic.
I play no mobile games, they're all some cash trap like a vacuum cleaner, and simply not fun when you realize you'll never truly win anything unless you pay and pay hard. What do YOU really get for the money?
I guess knowing you're paying for Nintendo's old guard's retirements and health care.
> It's rather sad even Nintendo has devolved to this sort of mobile gaming trap too, you would think the old guard would have some respect for themselves to purposely NOT contribute to this modern epidemic.
They tried with Super Mario Run (https://supermariorun.com/en/), which was a premium pay-once game introduced by Miyamoto himself at an Apple keynote.
That didn't work, then Fire Emblem Heroes made a billion dollars.
An interesting game that Nintendo made early on in their mobile saga was Dragalia Lost [1], which was probably the most generous 'gatcha' [2] mobile game ever released.
It was so player-friendly, that it underperformed for much of it's 4 years, and ultimately shut down in November 2022.
It was unfortunate that mobile gaming is in the state that its in, but Nintendo had some good ideas in the mobile space.
> It's rather sad even Nintendo has devolved to this sort of mobile gaming trap too, you would think the old guard would have some respect for themselves to purposely NOT contribute to this modern epidemic.
Nintendo is no better than any other game publisher, they're just behind on predatory industry trends by 5-10 years, that's it. They're just now entering the "cut out content from games to sell it as DLC that you announce before the game is even released" phase that the western gaming industry went through ages ago, and even adopted the more recent "live service multiplayer game with endless daily grinds and battle passes that demands your constant attention" model with Splatoon 3.
I have like 4k hours on Splatoon and I have to say that while you're not wrong, I wouldn't quite characterize it as doom and gloom. 2 was worth $60, the DLC content was worth... what was it even? The 3 DLC is $25. Anyway, the 2 DLC was worth the much larger more difficult higher replay value solo content. All of 3s content is achievable if you play it often and none of it is in any way "needed". If anything they've loosened things up a bit by making gear easier to customize, making it easier to acquire the stuff with which you do the customization. Even people with half the time as me at the end of 2 had maxed out their money and owned everything. What's the point in having money if it's trivial to buy everything? While now they have pass mechanics in place, previous seasons content is available in new seasons albeit from a gacha machine.
I guess what I'm trying to say is yeah they have the essence of some problematic mechanics at work but if anything I find navigating them to be rewarding and not limiting. In this case they're not even really behind the industry, they're kind of lateral just lacking real money. I think this is an interesting position to be in, my big concern is they may be training players to feel good about these systems and then in S4 they allow you to put real money in...
What sucks is that they've gone back and added so much of this junk to older games too. Games like Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds used to just be skill based journeys through increasingly difficult levels. The last time I opened one of those games I hardly recognized them.
What's particularly galling is that many of those games had a reasonable up-front cost with an unwritten agreement you were buying a complete product, then as time and updates have gone by, they've totally junked the original product you paid your money for. I'm basically done with anything on mobile that has IAP or potentially might at a future date.
> Games like Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds used to just be skill based journeys...
And in the case of the original Angry Birds, Rovio even removed it from the app stores (and renamed it for past purchases to "Red's First Flight") because of the "game's impact" on their portfolio and business model.
I don't play a lot of games, probably so few that even spending on this is a "waste", but this is why I subscribe to Apple Arcade. IAPs and upsells are completely banned and each game in that separate market is included. (I would even consider paying a bit extra to get games through there, treating Apple Arcade like a Costco membership.)
There are some games in there, like the Star Trek one, that are clearly IAP-infested outside of Apple Arcade. You can see the inflection points and the spots where you'd be prompted to "buy" more "transporter power" or whatever. But like watching an American TV show on British TV, where the action fades to black (for a commercial) then comes right back, these are both jarring and interesting. The game would be perfectly playable, and arguably more interesting, without these points but the developers wouldn't be able to hook their whales so they exist elsewhere.
When browsing a listing in the App Store, I always used to jump immediately to the in-app purchases section and pattern-match for two things: “1 month, 3 months, 1 year…” in the case of apps, or “10 gems, 50 gems, 150 gems…” in the case of games. Either would be an instant disqualification.
I say “used to” as I gave up browsing the App Store.
I've barely touched the App Store in the past few years while I used to peruse it regularly. Now instead of browsing for top selling games like I used to, I'm back to using a search engine or reading reddit threads for suggestions.
App stores are too polluted with garbage now, they went from being a unique selling point of mobile platforms to entirely useless and I think IAPs are largely to blame.
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)
This is why I love Apple Arcade. No ads, no in app purchases, and plenty of classic and big name games too. They aren’t all good, but there’s plenty there to make it worth it.
The best game I've seen for this is WazHack. It is free to download and play, but only to a certain depth. From there, if you want to go further, you pay for whatever type of character you want to use. If you only want to use one type of character, like barbarian, it costs 1$x. If you want to play all 8, it's 8$x.
Straight forward, you can play it to see if you like it, you can play the different characters to see if they match your play style. No other purchases needed.
It should be noted that the pipes (loot boxes) have recently been replaced with a shop where you directly pay for things using rubies instead of gambling. [1]
That being said, the prices in the shop are quite expensive from what I've heard from people who play the game.
For emphasis, the reason that many games recently are switching from the loot box model to the non-loot-box model (such as Overwatch 2), even at the point of putting microtransactions at super high prices, is several countries such as Belgium have banned loot boxes and there could be pressure to ban them elsewhere.
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 ironic that a product psychology website was this mentally taxing to use.
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.
I think it's fair game to try to build a product and tell people about it in a healthy way. The person has made some content that you found enjoyable enough to consume until the end. Giving you a prompt on how you can find more doesn't seem dark at all to me. If you aren't interested, no big deal -- you just close the tab like you would have anyway.
It's pretty well executed on desktop. Maybe revisit it, if you're interested in the visuals or want to learn about how that Mario Kart title drains your wallet.
I am on desktop, and on a technical level, its well executed. But it was so much more exhausting to read than a simple text article with pictures.
I initially visited the site, saw how the navigation etc worked, figured it wasnt worth the read. Only after reading some comments here I figured I'd bear through it. Wasnt worth it in the end imho
Am on desktop, and was genuinely interested in learning about the subject, but stopped reading 1/3 through because I didn't want to have to keep clicking and watching an animation after every sentence.
Oh well. Someone else will complain they didn't want to read a multi page article on the topic, and others will complain about having to watch a video that doesn't let them move at their own speed. Can't make everybody happy.
This was a really great writeup and an amazing way to present it.
My hunch is, there is another dark pattern hidden which he didn't discuss yet: the quantities in which you buy gems. You'll often land just one or two gems short of the number you actually needed. Then you can either buy the 3 gem pack for the worst relative price or buy another larger pack, encouraging you to come back later.
It seems hard to really spend all your gems and come out at zero. Usually there is a small amount left that on its own is useless but lures you into buying more.
This is a fairly common tactic when you have intermediate in-game currencies that you actually use to buy stuff in the game. For example, you can only use gems to buy stuff in-game, and most items in-game are worth a multiple of 200 gems. But when you buy the gems with cash, they're somehow only offered in multiples of 500 that are also not multiples of 200. You end up buying a few extra that maybe you didn't want, and they can later hook you in with the 'well, you already have some in your wallet' approach.
Sadly, people play and buy these games as evidenced by the dumpster fire that was Diablo Immortal. I love Diablo, but there was no way in hell (lol) that I'd download that game and even play for free.
I feel like these mobile games need regulating heavily, but it's also down to use to not support these games.
> but it's also down to use to not support these games.
Not really true. Gambling is heavily regulated for a reason, it's just that these games haven't been officially categorized as gambling under existing gambling laws (yet).
If you ever meet a gambling addict, try telling them to "just stop gambling" and see how well it works. There's something about the human brain that's highly vulnerable to this particular vice.
1. Technology has moved faster than regulation (a given).
2. There was a massive secular culture war victory in the west for shutting down those who decry vice and immorality among the religious, to the point that it's associated with mostly negative things: elitism, bigotry, patriarchal thinking, etc. It's simply not cool to say "gov't should regulate phones cause they are vice dispensary machines." Think of Helen Lovejoy from the Simpsons. So many times I've seen people here comment that "Elvis caused a moral panic" too or whatever basically agreeing with that point while we all work trying to get our cut.
I don't know, maybe it takes a generation going through adolescence with these things everywhere for anything to happen. Maybe these industries will self police, but I don't get why any of us would want to work on games like this, or give them to our children.
If you ask a therapist who specializes in addiction, they will likely say that gambling addictions are the hardest to treat. The reasoning is that when one gambles, one actually wins sometimes, even after many years of gambling. It’s that occasional reward that makes it difficult to treat.
Drug and alcohol addiction, after years of abuse, do not result in “wins” of any kind (NB I did not say in the beginning of the addiction… but years later)
Completely agree with you, and I didn't mean it like that although I see it came across that way. I'm very in favour of these games being highly regulated.
I really just meant in the sense of "normal" gamers in general, for example I've got friends who bemoan how the latest game they just bought runs like crap on their high-end PC and I'll say "stop preordering games" and they'll come up with some poor excuse as to why preordering is not the reason for these issues.
They'll complain about Diablo Immortal but download it and buy at least the first couple of packs you get offered.
I don't have specific numbers, but that's definitely how a certain type of really successful mobile game works: they're nominally very cheap (typically free) but offer lots of ways for the diehards to pay: skipping past grinds, bonuses/enhancements, more pulls or better odds on random chance elements, piles of expensive optional cosmetic items, and so on.
It's a shame the game is so predatory with its monentisation tactics, since the actual content (tracks, characters, items, etc) is actually rather good. It's just most of it is buried under this pay to win, limited time bullshit.
Still, at least Nintendo does provide a way to get this stuff without being subject to Tour's lootboxes. The Booster Course Pass DLC for 8 Deluxe on Switch offers much of the same content, except it's a simple one time purchase and in a game that isn't trying to exploit you at every turn.
They've been pretty good so far. Mario Kart Tour is 4 years old at this point, Fire Emblem Heroes is 6 years old. We've seen 3 non-spinoff Fire Emblem games since the release of Heroes and AFAIK they aren't microtransaction filled nonsense.
What feels most offensive to me is that people’s previous digital purchases of classic games through Virtual Console are permanently stuck on their Wiis and 3DSes, and can’t be transferred to the Switch, which only supports emulating classic games through paid subscriptions.
Compare that to the PC market. I signed up for Steam in 2010 to buy Orange Box—Half‐Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal—for $10, and for over a decade that entire game pack has remained downloadable and playable on every PC I’ve owned, including most recently the Steam Deck.
Yeah, amiibo content is definitely on the exploitative side. Most of the things you get with it in games like The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild should have been available in the base game, and it irritates me that quality of life features in games like Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda Skyward Sword are locked away in the same way.
It's very much on disc DLC, except with a plastic figure associated with it.
Yeah this isn't even subtle. They aren't even hiding the pointlessness of the free to play coin grind by limiting it to 300 coins per day. And I'm somewhat sure there is more math in there that a limited time offer for X days needs like 290X - 310X coins to unlock to make it look somewhat grindable but it's not.
And from a players perspective, this is even more strange. Look at how much players stick to a good racing game, like trackmania or the new zeepkist and such. Just be straightforward, bring out cosmetic DLC and some free functional thing every few month for a few bucks and it's an honest thing.
I played an ultra exploitative game for "fun" for a bit, these things are WILD.
It should be illegal, it competes not with other games, but with beer/tobacco/casino aka predatory to those with addictive disorders.
it's called cookie run kingdoms and it triggers me on two points, not only it's exploitative model it's at the same pushing sugar, I called myself diabetical or something to raise however slim hope of awareness.
What sort of nonsense website is this. It tells you that it works best in landscape mode when on mobile, but switching to landscape renders half of the page off screen.
How many people use Lynx? Regardless the ones who do are more likely to be NEETs living in their parent's basement and less likely to hire you as a growth consultant a la the author.
At some point you have to deprecate. It's delusional to expect people to find a way to both accommodate their vision and support your stallmanesque compulsions.
What kinds of internal pressures is Nintendo feeling to OK this kind of design? The current gaming market has been lambasted for these practices since Bethesda tried to charge $2 for horse armor, but nearly every AAA title has some sort of micro-transaction system now. I don’t think it’s going away, but I do think Nintendo was wise to not try this in a flagship title.
I guess gaming did start off with literal nickel-and-diming at the arcade. I’m glad I experienced the golden age of gaming where buying a game was the only transaction needed for 50 hours of enjoyment.
It would be interesting if someone could check if the game is available in Belgium, where loot boxes are illegal.
And if it is available, is Nintendo blatantly ignoring the ban pretending that "firing the pipe" is not a loot box? Or have they tweaked the in-game economic mechanics to be compatible with the Belgian law?
I ignore games that require connectivity or have purchases that can be done more than once. One-time purchase to remove ads or to unlock levels is fine. Anything else hints that the game would be manipulative trash.
It's nice that iOS shows the list of purchases on the app page. If only it had a filter too.
The submission yesterday on TV streaming systems all being jank/getting worse[1], Mario Kart getting the rough treatment: it's all so much enshittifcation.
I feel like I should get a decent sized rubber stamp: #enshittification[2]. Alas that I cant stamp it that all over web pages & apps.
Yeah, I know the format might not be everybody's cup of tea, but they have some pretty decent breakdowns and a lot of great information that would be great tools in any product or designers toolbox.
There’s a (short) list of countries where loot boxes are illegal [1].
Japan is on that list as well, though I think the Mario Kart micro transactions and gambling like mechanisms are still legal.
Belgium probably has one of the strictest laws: “Looking at various games, such as FIFA 18 and Overwatch, Belgium determined that the randomized risk/reward system innate to loot boxes is tantamount to gambling.” Mario Kart Tour, for example, is simply not available there.
You oughtta see what Roblox is doing. Nothing else quite like encouraging loot crates, minors working on semi-business ventures, stock markets, AND foreign exchanges.
Kids have lost tens of thousands of dollars on their platform. And I'm guessing if they were sued, none of it is binding, because minors.
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 perspective I remember vividly when my mom would be shook at the idea of a $30 Pokemon game for the DS. Now we pay $60 for a game and expected to pay up to $60 in DLC's not including ingame currency purchases. Oh how times have changed.
Oh that tin!
I was so excited with my purchase--having saved up for months to get it at launch--that I missed my stop on the bus home. I had to get off about a mile away and ran to my SNES like I'd never ran before.
I think DLC is a matter of inflation. publishers don't want to raise sticker prices, but their input costs are actually increasing, so they need to increase prices directly somehow.
Also, expansion packs for AAA games have always been a thing, and it's always felt kind of painful to buy them.
Another reason to produce DLC is that it keeps market attention on your existing game (thus diverting eyeballs from your competitors) without having to devote the resources required to develop a whole new game since most of the base is provided by the previously finished game.
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.
What ever happened to just playing a game, without having to install deamon programs on your PC, without having to consent to them tracking you, without having to create fifteen new accounts, without having to endure in game ads, without having to constantly be reminded that I don’t have the special in game currency that is the only way to get that pink hat?
Of course I understand what has happened. But it’s kind of taken the fun out of gaming. Or maybe I’m just old, grumpy and nostalgic.
Nowadays I've just taken a hard stance against all of this crap. Any game I see where the previews let you immediately understand there's going to be a bunch of these dark patterns to hide the fact they're just gambling aimed at kids, I don't ever look at again. Luckily, beyond mobile apps there's still a thriving market of Just Games, particularly indies, and they're better than ever.
Much of the text (the last few words of each chat bubble) is unreadable in Firefox for Android due to misalignment issues (falls outside the chat bubble).
In both Chrome and Firefox, global dark styles (whether built-in or via Dark Reader) also render the chat bubbles unreadable due to contrast issues (the text color gets set to something very light, but the chat bubble backgrounds remain white).
That sucks because the design otherwise seems cute and fun to me. :(
"super mario run" is another mobile game by nintendo, you pay 10 dollars and it's yours forever. plenty of content, extremely well crafted and fun. I download it in 2016, and i still use it to this day.
but people criticized it for having to pay up front. and it was a commercial failure.
so, people gets what they deserve i guess.
(btw, "super mario run" is still updated, if you have kids just buy it, it's well worth the money)
I downloaded it because I wanted to see how addictive it is. I noped out of there and uninstalled immediately when it said I need to link my Nintendo account. I don't have a Nintendo account and I hate signing up for things and getting spammed.
This is the sad tale of gaming even 10 years ago. The first games that had in-game currencies, like MMOs had a lot of these elements, albeit not as sophisticated as what was laid out here.
For me, and I wonder for other people, when you play one of these games you come to a point where you either keep playing or stop. Is the game fun? Is progression reasonable? Is this achievable without dumping huge amounts of cash into it? If any of those is "no", I quit.
The problem is that newer games pop up and I'm sure they're going to get even more subtle about getting you to part with your money. Pretty gross.
They got rid of this pipe gambling thing last year. How old is this article?
Nowadays you just outright buy whatever character you need with rubies. Rubies can be earned by playing normally, or you can buy rubies for money. The prices for characters is a little bit steep but not so bad you can't earn enough rubies free each tour to buy what you need.
Another decent strategy is to pick a tour where you will just let things slide and you just grind coins and rubies.
I haven't spent a cent and I've been playing for almost 2 years.
It told me about keyboard navigation although I was viewing on an iPad. That said, it worked great. They showed restraint in asking for an email only at the end.
I had the same thing when I was playing Sonic Racing on iOS. I have it through Apple Arcade, but it’s so clearly designed as a pay to win game.
The quality of your racing is unrelated to the result, and your opponent’s behavior is either a previous race someone else did, or otherwise completely made up.
Sort of funny that after all those slides, building up a narrative about the way a product that seems fun can be deceptive, it turns out this presentation itself is just ad for his email list.
I feel like most of the fault lies on Apple and Google, which explicitly incentivize these types of extremely profitable games, for obvious reasons. Further proof that the app stores need to be regulated, since they're not going to do the right thing on their own.
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 the mobile casino people. And people worry that means that maybe Nintendo isn’t principled on this issue, just conservative and slow to adopt these things in the same way they were slow and conservative on online multiplayer. If that’s true, maybe soon after showing crazy profits this kind of crap is coming for all of their beloved franchises in mainline titles on Nintendo hardware.
Although it’s not their usual style of game design, this is not new even for Nintendo. The first blatant instance I can recall is Pokémon Picross (2015) on the 3DS, which was free to download, but unlike normal Picross, limited how many blocks you could fill in per day—of course, you could pay real money to get more. It was really a shocking cashgrab considering how high‐quality Nintendo’s previous Picross games were.
> maybe soon after showing crazy profits this kind of crap is coming for all of their beloved franchises in mainline titles.
It's possible, but I'd worry more if it starts showing up on their own consoles, instead of mobile titles that exist mostly to get people interested in playing on Nintendo's own hardware.
Which isn't to say that Nintendo doesn't do weird things with DLC elsewhere—there was a 3DS game where you could purchase minigames with real money, but let you haggle with the seller in-game to get a better price.
That’s what I mean. I worry about DLC packs for the new Zelda that gate out core content instead of mostly supplemental stuff like the BotW dlc. You could imagine them selling the master sword DLC again and making some dungeons just not work without it because weapon durability is too low or something
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.
Have you noticed that their old games are barely discounted from the price they were originally at when they released? Super Mario Galaxy is still $60, for example. I wonder if Pandora's box has been opened and everyone wants in on those insane P2W margins, or if the old way of doing things just isn't profitable anymore. And if the second option, why? Why don't they just charge $65?
That's just Nintendo. Old games from other companies are still cheap, especially on platforms other than the Switch. PC in particular.
Nintendo's store also runs less-frequent and worse sales than others. Other stores, a two-year-old game might still be $50 full price, but it'll go on sale half-off multiple times per year. Not so much on Nintendo's store. Doubly so for first-party stuff. 20% off is a steep and rare sale for those, even older titles.
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 observing, no other companies seem to have carved out a niche quite like that, so it's a distinctive characteristic of Nintendo.
> 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?
Microtransactions are new and worrisome. DLC, they've so far treated more like traditional expansion packs (from what I've seen), rather than short-changing the core game so they can easily soak buyers for extra money for what should have been the full version to begin with, as has become standard practice in much of the rest of the industry. I didn't notice e.g. base Mario Kart coming with notably-few tracks or anything (we've paid for zero of the DLC for that, and have plenty of tracks, don't remember Double Dash or other older ones having more)
Mario Kart 8 is an interesting case actually, because 16 of the 48 courses in the base Switch version (a full third) were originally paid DLC when Mario Kart 8 was on the Wii U.
That doesn’t mean Mario Kart 8 is a bad deal! I think even the new paid DLC is a great value to keep adding high‐quality material to an existing game. It’s pretty fascinating to see how Nintendo has managed to keep a 2014 game going, and still succeeds at convincing people to buy it for $60—it still sells like hotcakes.
No, I mean we haven't paid any extra for MK8 on the Switch beyond buying the base game, and it seems to have plenty of tracks. We can scroll to another screen with more tracks we don't have that tell us we have to buy them if we try to use them, but there are lots in the game itself. I do have whatever the subscription is that backs up your savegames and such, but it's not getting us access to those tracks.
Didn't know some of the base-game tracks had been DLC on the Wii U—I skipped that console, like ~everyone else, it's the only Nintendo console I don't have in my house right this second in fact, unless you count the Virtual Boy.
> That doesn’t mean Mario Kart 8 is a bad deal! I think it’s a great value to keep adding high‐quality material to an existing game. It’s pretty fascinating to see how Nintendo has managed to keep a 2014 game going, and still succeeds at convincing people to buy it for $60—it still sells like hotcakes.
I mean, I'd happily have paid $60 for Double Dash on the Switch, instead, and that's ancient at this point. It's just as fun as the day it came out, and I like some of its features better (the second seat "gunner" role was great for playing Mario Kart with my kids when they were too young to steer the kart very well—though these days they can drive the karts themselves, no problem). Emulating it in such a fashion that everyone else in the house can just pick up and play is a bunch of work and requires dedicating some hardware to it. Keeping the Wii or Gamecube plugged in is annoying and I don't really have any TVs set up for easy plugged-in-controller play anymore, making it even worse (never liked the Wavebird and such, personally).
Hell I'd pay $60 to get Blur on the Switch (or PS4/5...) and that's not even a Nintendo title.
Nintendo started doing DLCs after 2017. Which again makes me wonder if they're doing it because everyone else is, or some weird economics is making it unprofitable to not do it.
I really don't see an issue with Pokémon moving to a DLC model. They're essentially replacing the updated rerelease they used to do (Platinum to Diamond/Pearl, Emerald to Ruby/Sapphire) with just releasing more content for the same game.
Mario Kart is also mostly course packs. Fun, but not vital.
How is that comparable? iPhones, cars, clothes and much more are available in more than one color as well.
If anything, the different color editions made trading among friends more interesting. I don't know anyone that actually bought both color editions of the same generation game.
> How is that comparable? iPhones, cars, clothes and much more are available in more than one color as well.
The iPhone, the car, the clothing, etc., are all functionally identical and frequently, but not always, cost the same amount. 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.
> I don't know anyone that actually bought both color editions of the same generation game.
I'm not sure when they started the practice, but the most recent revision of Pokemon includes a SKU that includes both colors.
> 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.
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.)
That was something that played on Pokémon as a social phenomenon. And, more than that, you didn't absolutely need to do that to play and enjoy the game. It was a multiplayer element. If you were a diehard, yeah, you could buy a second Game Boy and a second game, but that would require playing the full game twice to get all the exclusives in both. That was beyond what the developers expected the player to do. All of that would make the game harder!
On the other hand, players of FTP games are encouraged to make micropayments, which make those games "easier."
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.
