European consumer groups on Thursday (12 September) accused the world's biggest video game companies of "purposefully tricking" consumers, including children, to push them to spend more.
It doesn’t invalidate what they’re doing in a karmic way, no. As for any legal precedent way, I’m genuinely concerned that it’ll very much be a “too little, too late” scenario. Many of us who have come from the school of Jim Fucking Sterling Son, or even those with their eyes open, saw how bad this could get a decade ago. It got bad enough to go to court where companies like EA produced pathetic stand-in excuses about “lootboxes” that manipulate the young, ill and weak-willed into spending insane amounts of money are actually “surprise mechanics” and thus totally different. Some countries were smart enough to put some amount of age limit on such things, others were even smarter and outright banned them but many just let it happen. It has kept happening and the biggest gaming corpos are now more than big enough to hire all of the lawyers in the world collectively and fight any claims off through the sheer force of printing money.
Yes, I’m possibly embellishing a little in that lot but after witnessing the gaming market slip further and further down the sinkhole the way it has with excuses of “it’s only cosmetic”, “it’s optional” and “it’s not required to experience the game”, I have every reason to think we’re not coming back from this.
It doesn’t invalidate what they’re doing in a karmic way, no. As for any legal precedent way, I’m genuinely concerned that it’ll very much be a “too little, too late” scenario. Many of us who have come from the school of Jim Fucking Sterling Son, or even those with their eyes open, saw how bad this could get a decade ago. It got bad enough to go to court where companies like EA produced pathetic stand-in excuses about “lootboxes” that manipulate the young, ill and weak-willed into spending insane amounts of money are actually “surprise mechanics” and thus totally different. Some countries were smart enough to put some amount of age limit on such things, others were even smarter and outright banned them but many just let it happen. It has kept happening and the biggest gaming corpos are now more than big enough to hire all of the lawyers in the world collectively and fight any claims off through the sheer force of printing money.
Yes, I’m possibly embellishing a little in that lot but after witnessing the gaming market slip further and further down the sinkhole the way it has with excuses of “it’s only cosmetic”, “it’s optional” and “it’s not required to experience the game”, I have every reason to think we’re not coming back from this.