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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

The revenues in mobile gaming overwhelmingly come from predatory in-app item sales. They aren't in the business of selling games to people who like playing games, they're in the business of psychologically exploiting people who are vulnerable to compulsive behaviours. The industry isn't shy about this - they openly brag about their pursuit of "whales" and their use of psychological manipulation. Frankly, everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.

https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mob...

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Slightly tangential, but I've been watching Duolingo go down this road for the past few years since one of Zynga's product people became their head of product. Duolingo was never the best way to learn a language, but it's increasingly become essentially useless as an educational tool as they push for more and more revenue from their "whales". Every aspect of the experience is shaped towards manipulating people into "engaging" for longer and keeping them coming back, ostensibly to make learning more effective but in practice at the expense of learning.

This blog post by their head of product is a great example of the problems in the industry—he talks gleefully about all the manipulative techniques he pulled in from Zynga, and doesn't seem to have any clue that he's sacrificed the mission in pursuit of relentless growth.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us...

>The team consisted of an engineering manager, an engineer, a designer, an APM, and me.

I feel for that lone engineer with 4 people breathing down the back of his neck.

But every time he gets a new order, there's a 0.0025% chance he will randomly get promoted to CEO, so it's all worth it.

Anecdotal- but my daughter wanted to use duolingo to "learn a new language". I said, sure... but no in-app purchases of any kind. After a couple of weeks, she no longer uses it. It turns out that you need to pay for gems and stuff, in order to continue practicing. Once you're out of hearts and gems, you can't do anything until it refreshes.

It's kind of sad, that in the pursuit of cashing in on their "whales" that they've essentially neutered it as an educational app.

This is only true if you're on the free plan. If you get Duo Plus (family plan and split it, for example), all the IAP become obsolete. You can practice/learn a language 24/7 without limits. The gems become completely irrelevant. I think this is a really fair model and great bang for the buck.

The problem is when the whole thing is structured around gems, etc. Duolingo is incentivized to structure it in such a way that it benefits the nature of microtransactions. It diminishes the educational value of the whole thing, subscription plan or not.

Mobile games are a pastiche.

The viewport is a small number of inches, the types of games are wholly different, the controls are awful.

These are not only different consumer segments, they're wholly different products. The FTC is making the right call.

If the category includes all mobile games, it should include video gambling machines as well.

Blurring the line between gambling and gaming.

they even call that section of the industry "iGaming".

Just because people make decisions that you wouldn't make yourself doesn't mean that they're stupid and emotionally manipulated.

Have you read any of the literature from the mobile gaming industry? I don't judge the people victimized by the industry, I judge the industry, and I do it based on the way they talk about their customers. They're very open about their exploitative practices and don't even really seem to see the problem.

In my other comment, I pointed to this post by Duolingo's head of product as a good example of someone talking openly about exploitative practices without even really seeming to see the problem. This is honestly mild on the scale of industry discussions of how to manipulate people into giving more money.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us...

I mean, at the end of the day it's opt-in deluxe entertainment, and games have been attacked on this vector for decades. They are by nature time wasters and they (console games) can arguably be money wasters depending on how many games or whay kinds of games you play. We did especially have an era of this with MMOs.

The game design patterns aren't new nor novel. Retaining players with repetitive grinds, using guilds to create peer pressure to stay, daily rotating events with a trickle of currency used to obtain desirable characters/gear. You could trace all that back to WOW and several Korean MMOs. The only difference is that they can reach a wider audience now, some of which they drew in from the console market.

I've worked in it for many years, and I've been a happy customer as well, spending a lot of my money on those games. I get a game, I figure out I like it, spend a few hundreds on it in a span of a few months, and move on after it bores me, with perfect return on investment. I've tried spending the same money in casinos, but they are just too boring — I usually can't even get myself to burn down the money I've decided to spend, so I take don't get the gambling comparison: mobile games a simply better as entertainment.

One of those rare sentences that can be both a game design doc and a casino defense...

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