Shares slide after China brands online games 'electronic drugs' | Hacker News Reader

Shares slide after China brands online games 'electronic drugs'

bbc.com

43 pointswalterbell13 comments

>teenagers had become addicted to online gaming and it was having a negative impact on them

Same for tiktok & other social media. "Maximizing engagement" is just corporate-speak for optimizing addiction.

Quite a lot of job postings in the valley have ‘Maximizing engagement’, or some variant, in their description…

Most apps are made to create a need and fill it at the same time. That's one way to "innovate" in that space.

I miss the days of dedicated game consoles for this exact reason. Smartphones becoming a universal do-it-all device broke the economics of portable gaming.

Nobody wants to pay more than $2-$3 for a game, which disincentivizes people from making complex games. So we get formulaic puzzle games for 'free', which are loaded with gambling-style mechanics that constantly nickel and dime you to upgrade to paid mods to beat harder levels.

I agree with this on the whole. I’d add the form factor of a phone works against anything complex also.

No D-Pad/Joystick or hardware buttons really makes it difficult to design anything that will hit that fun + complex loop well. I can see play.date/steamdeck rolling in sales, as the portable market has a huge back-catalogue and is underserved.

Ultimately, our utilitarian glass slabs are only really good for lists. Lists within lists.

Plenty of games sold for Switch, isn't it?

I would like to see some analysis of addictiveness of gotcha games vs games pre games as a service. I knew many people hooked to counterstrike in PRC internet cafes in the late 90s, but those titles seem like something one grows out of. These new games feel qualitatively different in terms of addiction, even though I think most people aren't susceptible to allow modern games get in the way of life, even if they are always in the pocket and engineered for addiction. But it would be interesting to see some numbers on population scale being affected by "electronic drugs". I do remember the one time I got into mobile games was Simpsons Tap Out on vacation and I ended up making spread sheets, setting timers to optimize farming. There wasn't even gambly loot boxes involved.

Interesting. This news dovetails well with the speculation of how China sees American style "tech" in this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28036847

They’re not wrong

China should just ban free2play games - that's where the addictiveness is concentrated. Require every game to have a minimum upfront price. It would be great for the industry and refocus publishers on creativity.

Doesn’t fix wow and esports addiction

Even better ban microtransactions.

They didn't call it "electronic drugs" which is sort of a correct translation but losing the context, they call it "mental opium". Which relates back to opium war.

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