Re: Predatory Gaming Practices

On 26/06/2024 03:33, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

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.

<snip>
I did watch a video a few years ago from a company touting their tech for identifying spending habits (in particular whales) and then tailoring their game experience to get as much money out of them as possible. At the time I put it more down to hype as surely people just wouldn't accept effectively being duped. How wrong I was.
I could understand it in the early days of MTX when it wasn't entirely obvious the tricks be played but now there really should be no excuse.