Predatory Gaming Practices

The blog post's headline is "Predatory Tactics In Gaming Are Worse
Than You Think".
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/predatory-tactics-in-gaming-are-worse-than-you-think

And the article then straightforwardly follows up on that topic. If
you wanted to get an idea of some of the tactics used by game
developers -especially in the mobile arena- then this is a good primer
on the subject. I particularly enjoyed the bit where one developer
admitted that -through data-harvesting- they identified members of the
Saudi royal family and changed the MTX pricing /just for those users/
to over a hundred times what other people paid.

Still, very little of what the article said actually surprised me. The
data-harvesting, the actively designing games to be grindier and less
fair -sometimes on the fly, in reaction to how often or well you play-
isn't really news to me (although whether this is just because it's a
topic I follow or I'm just too cynical is hard for me to judge, though
;-)

Still, it is a reminder of what many publishers WANT gaming to be
like; an experience designed not to provide a fun experience, but one
that can nickle-and-dime you for every step you take, offering only
just enough reward to keep you from quitting and playing something
else. And their solution to player disatisfaction is not to improve
the experience, but to worsen the experience of OTHER games so that
there IS no escape to better games; they want EVERY game to be equally
miserable.

For the most part, a lot of these tactics are common only in mobile
gaming, but there are frequent attempts to push it into console and PC
gaming too. Not just in the obvious "it's a port of a mobile game",
but the expensive AAA experiences too (and don't think the Indies are
immune either. Heck, some of the worst mobile games /are/ Indie
titles!). But the big-name developers are incredibly interested in
pushing the mobile strategy to PC and console. After all, do you think
Microsoft bought Activision merely to acquire "Call of Duty" and
"World of Warcraft"? No, they wanted to grab King Digital Media and
all the experience the creators of "Candy Crush" (and similar
exploitative titles) had in milking gamers for every penny they could
grab.

It's why I bring articles like the above to the attention of gamers,
because people need to know what's going on in order to see when it
happens in PC/console titles and say, "No, that just won't fly".
Because while these strategems already have a foothold in PC/consoles,
it isn't (yet) a dominant feature, and even that foothold can be
rolled back if enough people resist. We don't have to accept this sort
of thing, but if we don't see it in all its horror then we won't
recognize how much we're being abused.