For almost the last decade, there is a trending behaviour in the gaming industry and it involves randomization, a.k.a. gambling. This is brought by corporatization and greed coming together in a digital world. This post mainly concerns teenagers but mostly aimed for conscious adults. I will explain you the current common applications in the gaming world first. Then i will familiarize you with one example game (Raid Shadow Legends) for some particular reason. Lastly, the most important part will be about the repercussions that this could have in our lives.
This term is relatively new and you may not be interested in gaming. So i will try to explain as simple as i can. Back in the 90's or 2000's, there were pc games that we just go and buy a finished product in the form of a CD or DVD from a store. This was the physical era. Then some of these games started getting online updates with the help of increased internet connectivity all over the world. This was the start of the online era and led to browser based gaming. You open your browser, login to a game and play on virtual items. This was soon replaced by online games. But there was a problem here. Selling online games were not as easy or profitable as today back then. So these games were developed by some of the rich companies but they have included the things called items.
This brought the online era and took some of the world by storm. You donwload some exe file into your computer and login the game and immediately connect with real players around the world. This required servers running in the background and that was costly. So these games have developed monetization strategy based on items. These items can be anything from a simple clothing to a car or some weapon, depending on the games context. You have to play the game regularly for a long time to get an item to help you achieve the goals in the game. Let me summarize it this way. There were racing games where you buy the cars with real money, now there are games where you have to play for hours to get the car. This is a paradigm shift.
And it didn't stop there. Mobile games on android and iphone has exploded recently, thanks to mobile phones being more available. They have carried this gaming logic to this day. You install a game on your phone, which is probably free, you login to game and get together with friends or random people online. Of course these games too relied on grinding mechanism. Because there were an era with unskippable loads of ads in the games, but it backlashed and that monetization strategy was kind of botched up. Therefore, they are usually hiding the goals in the game behind excruciatingly long processes. But there is always an option to pay for it. You can pay real money for ingame virtual items. This was the summary of the last 20 years in gaming. Now the term: Gacha. It is basically the strategy to turn players into payers. There are number of different methods to apply this logic in a game. Nowadays, one game has really mastered this approach and it is time to draw attention to it.
Now we know there are games that connects people. There are lots of games with ingame achievable objects called items. There are lots of games with some sort of progression system inside. These 3 main aspects of online / mobile games are the keys to keep players inside the game and to force them to pay for things or achievements. If you force them too much, they will walk away, simple as that. For more than a year, i have been playing a game called Raid Shadow Legends. Here is the idea of the game with daily terms: There are fighters in the game. You acquire them with stones. These stones have rarity levels and they get you good fighters or average fighters. Just like prepearing an army. Fighters also have 9 different gears to wear. These have their rarity level too. Also the each gear can make a different aspect of the fighter stronger. Each fighter have their own specific abilities too. And fighters and gears will level up over time. This is the core mechanic in the game. It is relatively simple.
Now you have to get more fighters and gears so you go against different enemies with different rewards. Then upgrade your fighters and gears, get new ones if you can and repeat the cycle. All this infrastructure is based on one key concept. Randomization. 99% of the achievements and developments are hidden behind these random probabilities. This is the newest method for the grinding mechanism that forces you to pay to achieve things. Furthermore, the game almost never lets you gain anything with certain probabilities. You buy a stone but that stone can get you a bad fighter. You pay for ingame money but upgrades are based on percentages. You get gear but gear properties are random. Anyway you get the idea.
This randomization makes you feel lucky. It gives you hope to get lucky. It strikes curiosity. And there is no way to buy achievements directly. This sounds familiar. Have you ever visited a casino? There you can only get coins to play a game, to get a chance to achieve things. What i mean is, the online gaming brought monetization strategies and it led to gambling based gaming. This is very widely accepted by greedy companies, i have seen advertisement videos for other games where people going crazy over some random rare item they get. This became the selling point for the games. A side note here, Raid is developed by a an Israel based company called Plarium and according to this video, they are involved in gambling world too.
This gambling logic has been adopted by pc games too. Normally you would expect to get a fully finshed game for 60 dollars. But no, they will have some sort of progression, probably very boring one, to get new characters or items inside the game. There is a term called loot box. It is basically a box that contain a random item. Yes, you pay 60 dollars and get a chance to get ingame items. There is a video about this behaviour in a youtube video down below. The story is a bit longer than that but you can watch the channel's different videos.
Also there are some regulations for looting in games. Some european countries have regulations for these games and decided that loot boxes resembles gambling. There is one more informative video, roughly says they same things with me, from Upper Echelon Games channel. He warns about another game called Genshin Impact.
A brief recap again. Greedy companies took advantage of the always accessible features of the internet, they have leveraged the big gap in this industry, they are taking advantage of the hope they give to their players and it is almost a new normal these days. Yes, normalization is the danger. I am not saying these companies are bad. They can implement whatever kind of monetization strategy they want, this is a free world. But i am witnessing the same type of games again and again. When you visit a game in google play or appstore, there are immediately maybe 10 other games with 90% same logic with a different story or interface, recommended to you. This should not be the default way to make games. This is a way to make money but greed turns this into a meta.
I should mention one side effect of this too. Some people are, well, just rich :D They buy expensive things in the game and give poor players hard time to advance sometimes. This also fueled the randomized achievements. You can't just buy things, that is not fare. But you can buy the privilage to get lucky :D Another side effect is capitalism. These games have sort of tournaments in them and people compete to get higher rewards. But the winner is always the higher spender.
The important question: What is the deceptive cover for gambling? "Free to play" and "we say no to pay to win." These games emphasize this heavily in their advertisements, too cover up the gambling logic inside. These games are heavly played by impressionable young kids or teenagers. Gambling, as you probably know, can turn into a serious addiction. Why nobody tells this is bad for our children and future generations. Why these games are not tagged +18? This is the part what bothers me. Our kids should not grow into a world where gambling is allowed and not regulated. Those companies are right about their games not being pay to win. It is not pay to win, it is not even pay to advance. It is pay to get a chance to advance. Again, the exact definition of a casino.
At this point, as i have mentioned at the beginning, i am concerned about the young generation and addressing the conscious adults. You should teach your kids about the history and the transition. You should warn them to stay away from these type of games. You should object this dangerous behaviour spreading all around the world. Because games are one of the fastest ways to reach people these days. Tell this to your kids: Achievement is nothing else then some superficial bits and bytes in the dijital world. This is not success or superiority. Play these games for about a month, don't spend any money and change to another game when you feel you are stuck. There are lots of alternatives. Don't support this behaviour by sticking to these games and paying for gambling. It will cause more reasons for you to pay. If you invest too much, you can't give up. My gamble is to see you at the next post :)
Leave a comment