Mobile gamers aren’t gamers. This is a phrase you’ll find many people repeating on the internet, and while it isn’t true, it’s not surprising that people feel this way. Gaming on phones and tablets often carries a bad reputation thanks to the prevalence of free-to-play titles that bombard users with mechanics that often mimic outright gambling, complete with aggressive micro-transactions and heaps of FOMO (the fear of missing out). The question is, how did all of this start, and who shoulders the blame?
The state of play
Mobile games make money. Lots of money. In 2022,Google earned $31.3 billion from gamingthrough the Play Store. Google’s take is 30% of whatever developers make, which means the mobile gaming industry on the Play Store was worth a whopping $104.3bn in 2022. To put that into perspective,Sony earned $27 billionfrom PlayStation in the same period, an amount that constituted a record-breaking year. Meanwhile, Steam, the largest games market on PC,made around $10 billion, andXbox earned $15.5 billion. Sony, the leader in non-mobile gaming, made $4bn less than Google, with Xbox and Steam struggling to make even half of what Google did.
Things are just as extravagant on Apple’s side of the pond.Apple earned $50bnfrom games last year, and adjusting for the fact that’s just 30% of the total, it makes gaming on the App Store worth $166.6bn in 2022. Apple is making nearly double what Sony makes from PlayStation from the App Store, and Sony’s numbers include hardware sales.
The problem here isn’t that big companies are making a lot of money; that’s how the world works. The problem is how that money is made, especially when it negatively impacts vulnerable people.
How all that money is made
Most of us know how money is made in gaming these days. Since Bethesda added purchasable horse armor to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in 2006, microtransactions have become a norm in gaming. These days, it’s news when a gamedoesn’thave microtransactions. While annoying, microtransactions aren’t bad in themselves. The problem is when they’re connected to chance and gambling.
Loot boxes are a lot like packs of Pokemon cards. You buy them without knowing what’s in them, and the chances of getting something great, or even good, are small. Loot boxes are the same. Items in the game are split into rarity tiers, and the chances of getting those rare items are incredibly small.
A dark pattern is a user interface that manipulates people into doing something they usually wouldn’t.
Things are worse on mobile. There’s a popular meme about people not wanting to buy something that’s $3 if shipping is $3, but they’ll happily pay $7 if they are told shipping is free. Being told something is free, even if it technically isn’t, is a tried and tested technique for making money. People are far less likely to spend $15+ to buy a game on their phone than on a gaming console. So, mobile games became free to play and heavily incentivized players to pay for power-ups and other in-game items.
Many games use a life system. In one example, you might be given five lives from the jump, and you use one up each time you play a level. Fail the level and need to retry? You need to use another life. The game gives you a free life every half an hour or so, but you’re using them faster than that timeframe allows for. This leaves you with three options: Stop playing until more lives unlock, watch an ad to get one for “free,” or buy one with in-game currency, like coins. How do you get in-game currency? You buy them with real money, mostly. A game will drip-feed you some coins, but you’ll often have to spend money to play the game consistently.
Dark patterns are another method frequently employed by these games. A dark pattern is a user interface that manipulates people into doing something they usually wouldn’t. A popular iOS game, Bubble Shooter, has a dark pattern that’s easy to explain. There are multi-colored bubbles on the screen, and you need to pop them by firing a bubble of the same color at the right area. Each level gives you a set number of moves to complete them. So, where’s the dark pattern? You can spend ten coins to get five more moves if you run out. However, the game sometimes lets you watch an ad to get three extra turns for free.
The dark pattern is when the game offers the free ad-supported option and when it chooses not to. The ad will show if you needmorethan the three extra turns to complete the level. This way, those free moves get you close to the end, and when it then offers five moves for ten coins, you’ll be more likely to buy them. However, if you run out of moves right at the end and you needlessthan three moves to complete it, you won’t get the option to recover by watching an ad. The game wants you to buy coins, after all.
That’s just a basic example of the methods used in these games; they get even darker the more you look into them.
Google and Apple’s role in things
Loot boxes and microtransactions have become more prevalent in the mobile gaming industry than any other, and Google and Apple bear a lot of responsibility for this. As highlighted by the lawsuits Epic leveled at Appleand Google, those two companies keep 30% of all revenue from an app in their respective stores (unless youmanage to score a sweetheart deal behind the scenes, of course).
So, when mobile games started packing themselves full of ads and microtransactions, did Apple and Google step in to stop it? Did they list these games lower in search rankings, which would more often reflect these apps and games' user review scores? No, and it’s not surprising. As mentioned earlier, these games make money hand over fist, and Apple and Google are more than happy to take their cut while promoting them across their stores. They do this despite the clear impact it can have on users.
Gambling can become an addiction, and regardless of whatever friendly-sounding name the companies give them, a lot of these systems copy known gambling mechanics, and those that don’t are still doing what they can to be as addicting as possible.
In November 2022,Loughborough University published a reportlooking at the financial and emotional harm these gaming systems have on children in particular. The way these in-game economies are designed makes it hard to keep track of your real-world spending, especially if you’re young, and it can lead to poor purchase decisions and a sub-par understanding of the value of money. One child mentioned in this report spent £464 in one week across 15 transactions in a mobile game. He was just 11 years old.
Just because that’s how businesses have operated for decades doesn’t make it acceptable, especially now that these companies can reach people 24/7 in their own homes.
There’s an argument to be made for the parent’s role in this. Proper parental controls can stop a child from spending money without permission from a parent or guardian. The issue is that this problem isn’t spoken about often enough outside of the industry, so many families don’t realize the risk surrounding mobile games until it’s too late. Parental responsibilities aside, should companies be allowed to target young and vulnerable people to make a profit? Just because that’s how businesses have operated for decades doesn’t make it acceptable, especially now that these companies can reach people 24/7 in their own homes.
Google’s unofficial motto used to be “Don’t be evil,” until it was changed to “Do the right thing” in 2015. Based on what we see in the mobile gaming space today, I’d argue the company has failed to live up to both of them.
