This is an interesting article where a game developer argues for regulation in the gaming industry against psychological warfare techniques used in ads and customer management.
http://positech.co.u...ents-please-stop-us/Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us.
This may not be popular, but its how I feel. First, some background and disclaimers. I run a small games company making games for the PC, strategy games with an up front payment. We don’t make ‘free to play’ games or have micro transactions. Also, I’m pretty much a capitalist. I am not a big fan of government regulation in general. I am a ‘get rid of red tape’ kind of guy. I actually oppose tax breaks for game development. I am not a friend of regulation. But nevertheless.
I awake this morning to read about this:
*** see link for graphic ***
Some background: Star Citizen is a space game. Its being made by someone who made space games years ago, and they ‘crowd-funded’ the money to make this one. The game is way behind schedule, and is of course, not finished yet. They just passed $100,000,000 in money raised. They can do this because individual ships in the game are for sale, even though you bought the game. I guess at this point we could just say ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, but yet we do not do this with gambling addiction. In fact we some countries have extremely strict laws on gambling, precisely because they know addiction is a thing, and that people need to be saved from themselves.
Can spending money on games be a problem? Frankly yes, and its because games marketing and the science of advertising has changed beyond recognition from when games first appeared. Games ads have often been dubious, and tacky, but the problem is that now they are such a huge business, the stakes are higher, people are prepared to go further. On the fringes we have this crap:
And one snippet:
This is not market research, this is not game design. This is psychological warfare.
More at the link.
I encourage you to read the entire article as it gets a lot better with some pretty shocking stuff if you're not already familiar with the industry inside.
FWIW - I've been doing a lot of work in the gaming industry for a long time, and I get to see some of the dirt, but certainly not all of it.
I know some other DCers are knowledgeable in Big Data and can help shed light on the subject. Hopefully they'll chime in.
The tl;dr is that gamers are massively outgunned by marketing departments with bots and Big Data.
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