The Rise of Mobile Gambling Is Leaving People Ruined and Unable to Quit
vice.com
vice.com
I worry that typical mobile games are going to serve a funnel towards gambling for the kids who are growing up playing them. Like flavored vapes function for the tobacco industry.
Of course, that makes me wonder what the games I grew up on funneled me towards, but it seems like just maybe Mario games didn't have any ulterior motives beyond making you want to play more Mario.
Actually viable at the highest end of competition (top tier all modes) as free to play, but has earned more revenue than not only every other Nintendo mobile game combined, but also possibly the entire 30+ year old Fire Emblem franchise.
To summon a hero at maximum competitive scoring capacity (11 copies) with cash on a focus banner was usually $650-750, bit more over $1000 for a Mythic or Legendary - but bad variance could easily double those numbers, if not triple them. But playing the game for free you earned about $175 of that currency per month. Moreover, the game now averages 11 new heroes a month. It launched with 90-something, but now has nearly 850 different heroes.
So if you ignored paying, saved your currency, understood the numbers and sat on your hands… you could be right at the top, spending your currency on exactly what you needed for score (and nothing else), and making meta-viable, sufficient scoring units out of the piles of 3 and 4 stars you’d be buried in. After that, play well and you’d be ranked in the same tiers as the biggest whales.
But the core monetization model (outside of newer reasonable cost subscription stuff) was basically evil.
It's pretty depressing how the F2P formula has taken over.
The iPad was slightly more promising as a games platform, but it just isn't popular enough.
Unfortunately the loot box mechanic is so lucrative that all you have left in the market is unscrupulous companies.
It’s a natural consequence of gamers insisting that the content they love to consume cannot possibly cost what it does and the industry must be full of exploitative sharks.
Funnily enough, 15 years of this has not resulted in good games getting cheaper but rather good developers leaving the industry. Who could have seen that coming?
Like I can understand that not all states ever made gambling more or less completely banned, but most states only really had the lottery, possibly horse/dog racing, and tribal casinos (mostly because they can't prevent tribal casinos in the first place).
Now I know pre 2018, states could not generally legalize sports betting due to PASPA, but many states seemed to have no interest in legalizing say pure online casinos, which is something they certainly could have done if they wanted despite PASPA. Yet they don't.
We've built a perfect attention hacking mechanism and that's now being unleashed in service of all types of industries.
The only question now is which platform gets your limited attention.