I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
Where was this article when candy crush became big? This article is literally 10+ years way too late. Mobile games to me are basically just one giant scam that forces you to pay or have a horrible time in comparison.
It wasn’t even that hidden back then, games like candy crush admitted to journalists that they changed the difficulty based on spending habits. The fact they might have that formula fine tuned even more shouldn’t be surprising.
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Except the arcade games were at least upfront about it and didn’t DELIBERATELY turn up the exploitation a few notches when a potentially EXTRA profitable player was detected by an algorithm made specifically for that purpose.
Maximizing corporate profiteering has become the best funded and least regulated scientific discipline in the world and it’s not even close.
Just think what we could accomplish if we focused efforts elsewhere…
I remember watching some animated YouTube video years ago about what if we did things so n a way that made sense, like having farms in locations where there was plenty of water and we didn’t ship cheap stuff around the world but I have been unable to find that video
They are so much worse. I worked with a guy who was pretty damn cheap. I would sometimes pay for his coffe or lunch sometimes, but he would never even drop a cent for me. I didn’t really care much, cheap guy, maybe poor, i had no idea. I talked to another guy about video games, and the cheapskate chimed in, saying: i would never play video games, it’s a waste if time and money. I didn’t think much of it, it made so much sense.
Another time the same co worker said something like: “the most he ever spend on a game was 60 dollars for a counterstrike skin”. Cheapskate chimed in again, (he was also a bit of a one upper) hah, that’s nothing, i spend 900 bucks on clash of clans last month.
We both were absolutely flabbergasted, and he started to panic a bit abd said: “you think that’s crazy? My girlfriend spends way more on candy crush a month.” It’s been a while, but i think we calculated that the spend a combined 2000 to 3000 bucks on mobile games a month, for years.
Mobile games to me are basically just one giant scam that forces you to pay or have a horrible time in comparison.
There are so many ports of PC games that are far better than the “exclusively mobile” category of games.
This is primarily why I don’t bother discussing game balance in live service games. They will never balance the game to have a level field between the items and characters. They will always balance the game to keep you playing and spending money on mtx.
Most players thinking of quitting a game, generally are losing often. The game will notice this, and then give you a win. It’s always been noticeable, but some games, like The Finals, are super egregious with it because it shows everyone’s MMR right off the bat and you will be able to tell if you will win or lose a match right as it starts when you see that your team is 5 times higher ranked than the other 2 teams, or vice versa.
They are also constantly changing game balance. So a game that might have been fair at release can change into a pay2win hellhole
This site is fake, it doesn’t have Dead By Daylight at the absolute top of dark pattern design, and says DBD Mobile (now shut down) is only -1.43?
Also, why would anyone need an account for this? Isn’t this just a database? What, does it have a linked forum?
“SEO experts” skew results for pay. They are doing mobile games for now, because they are particularly egregious “dark pattern” games.
Piracy FTW.
Again. 🤷🏼♂️
Well, that’s something:
Another developer stated: ‘Well, we ended up with a model that basically targeted members of the Saudi royal family and charged them 100x what regular players would pay for the same microtransaction, and it worked…’
curious about their opinions on games like apex legends that is absolutely a free to play game, but has a way to pay for characters instead of using the in game method.
