Coordinated by the European Commission, the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network (CPC) has launched an enforcement action against Star Stable Entertainment AB to ensure a safer, more transparent experience for players of the Star Stable Online game.
There are many many examples of predatory uses of in game currencies, but here are some big reasons devs use them besides being scummy.
Giving currency for free: giving people real money isn’t something any dev wants to deal with, so giving in game currency allows this to happen. This also applies to games where you can convert free currency to premium currency.
Local currencies: currency packages can be set to local prices without having to localize the in-game economy itself. This simplifies development a lot.
Weak promotion support on distributor platforms: believe it or not, iOS and android have incredibly weak promotion and sale support. By giving in-game currency, it gets around that failing of the platforms because the game can do whatever it wants with the in-game currency.
Transparency is good, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What baby? In game purchases? That’s not a baby, that’s a big shit somebody took in your tub. If transparency is too hard to implement, publishers should feel free to get rid of them altogether.
Giving currency for free: giving people real money isn’t something any dev wants to deal with, so giving in game currency allows this to happen. This also applies to games where you can convert free currency to premium currency.
But this is how gift codes work, no? You’re not giving money away directly. Just give a voucher for a real currency if you want to gift users.
The original poster was saying paid currency shouldn’t exist, so I think in that scenario, you could only have vouchers for a whole in-game item. So for example if an item costed $5, then yes you could give away codes to redeem that item.
There’s also an operational overhead to doing it that way compared to in-game currency though, because setting up products in google play/iOS can be kind of a pain compared to adding them to your own systems. Generally the dev wants as much to be under their control as possible because they have more flexibility that way compared to making products in the app stores.
Also worth noting that iOS will block your app if you provide ways to get products (meaning things that cost real money) through ways other than the app store. So that means the dev wouldn’t be able to ever give you something in the game itself if that thing can also be bought. They could only give coupon codes (these are manually generated) for products to use in the app store interface.
I’d be interested to hear an example of one you’ve seen because it might be a way to approach it that I’m not thinking about.
They can give items for free instead. Without currency they cant give you 90% of what you need and force you to overpay for extra.
A variable for a value is trivial. It already works perfectly fine in the store!
Sure sales on mobile… (sounds like Apple and Google would get some needed pressure to improve this area) but thats another problem, none of these purchases should be expensive enough to even warrant needing a sale in the first place.
The real reason they want in game currency is not any of these, it’s for the deception factor, avoiding refunds, upselling etc
Give store credit for free. Easy. Let them turn ingame currencies into store credit.
That might be difficult, i give you that, but given the amount of work companies put into their monetization schemes, i am sure a converter can be worked out. Or use dollar/euro/ruble/yuan equivalents, depending on the largest market near a smaller currency.
Store credit is not necessarily simple. There are tons of laws about that kind of thing that differ country to country and in the US state to state. For example in my state, gift certificates can’t expire, so once you give one away as the dev you have to track that on your books forever, even if no one ever uses it. In your free example it’s even worse, because the company has to write that money off as real money, because it can never expire. It’s basically the same as giving away real money from a bookkeeping perspective (at least in my state). Someone with more bookkeeping knowledge can probably give a better answer but that’s my limited understanding of that as a sole proprietor who does my own books.
I would also question if store credit is actually any less predatory than a premium currency. If the premium currency is transparent and easy to understand it’s basically the same thing, no? Hypothetically, if I’m a scummy developer, I could sell $5 in store credit, and then make all the items on the store cost $8. That’s the same result for the player as bad monetization schemes with premium currency. I know in your example you’re saying give it away, but somewhere in there the developer is going to need to make money. They can’t give credit away for in-game currency and hope to stay afloat as a business for long without some deeply predatory stuff going on like in roblox.
At the end of the day I think everything you’re saying is probably feasible in some form for a AAA dev, but not for small devs. Personally I’m also thinking about small devs without an army of compliance specialists and lawyers. I’d like indies to also be able to make money, not just the conglomerates.
For example, saying a system could be worked out to localize an in-game economy is a hand wave. Every game works differently under the hood and in how it paces things, and this would be a huge undertaking to implement and maintain (probably a nonstarter for a small team). It involves more than simple conversion.
Does someone from a weak currency country get different rewards by playing the game than someone from a strong currency? How does that work if that reward is a whole item, not a bit of currency? Do we really want capitalistic shenanigans to extend into the gameplay directly? Personally I prefer that stuff to be cordoned off in the in-game shop.
That’s my take on all that. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t work for a AAA dev, so take this stuff with a grain of salt. My experience comes from having to tackle all these issues as a tiny indie dev.
Store credit lets them manipulate you. They can say the minimum top up is $5. Then put the cheapest items at $3. Want two $3 items? You have to deposit at least $10! It goes on and on.
No. Just make it so you add items to a cart and purchase their exact value with real money, no in between, no scummy tactics.
(But if it was up to me, I would ban MTX altogether)
Depends what counts as an in game currency, does a game where you earn currency in-game and spend it in-game count as an in-game currency? What about if players can trade it?
We are talking about anything that has real monetary value, if you cannot obtain it through real money, then it’s not in the discussion. Of course it opens a whole new problem, where they could sell “boosts” to earning virtual currency etc. So that would have to be taken into account with the legislation.
They’re gonna have such a hard time parsing this for WoW… WoW gold is a major part of the game and they’ve been screwing with it for a while now, I don’t play it anymore but I heard about possibilities to buy tokens that you sell for gold in game but conversely you can also use the gold to buy game time or something? And then off course all the DLC stuff, it’s gonna be complicated for sure.
Yeah, same with OSRS, you buy a bond which you can turn into 1 week membership, or trade it other players. Which is honestly fine, it lets people get membership without spending real money, but I’d rather none of the better/fairer systems exist if it means removing the egregious ones. Really we just want to target systems that make you buy a virtual currency to just sell you microtransactions, but how do you write legislation for that? It’s very tricky, which is why it’s probably never going to happen.
In-game purchases should display the exact cost in the local currency. In-game currency should be completely banned.
There are many many examples of predatory uses of in game currencies, but here are some big reasons devs use them besides being scummy.
Transparency is good, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What baby? In game purchases? That’s not a baby, that’s a big shit somebody took in your tub. If transparency is too hard to implement, publishers should feel free to get rid of them altogether.
But this is how gift codes work, no? You’re not giving money away directly. Just give a voucher for a real currency if you want to gift users.
Can you give me an example of one you’ve seen?
The original poster was saying paid currency shouldn’t exist, so I think in that scenario, you could only have vouchers for a whole in-game item. So for example if an item costed $5, then yes you could give away codes to redeem that item.
There’s also an operational overhead to doing it that way compared to in-game currency though, because setting up products in google play/iOS can be kind of a pain compared to adding them to your own systems. Generally the dev wants as much to be under their control as possible because they have more flexibility that way compared to making products in the app stores.
Also worth noting that iOS will block your app if you provide ways to get products (meaning things that cost real money) through ways other than the app store. So that means the dev wouldn’t be able to ever give you something in the game itself if that thing can also be bought. They could only give coupon codes (these are manually generated) for products to use in the app store interface.
I’d be interested to hear an example of one you’ve seen because it might be a way to approach it that I’m not thinking about.
I guess there are no examples (yet?) because until now everybody was using in game currencies to deal with that.
But could you not give a player a voucher that says “-5€ on your next checkout” ? And then they get exactly that.
Not in google play or iOS I don’t think. Someone else may know more, though.
They can give items for free instead. Without currency they cant give you 90% of what you need and force you to overpay for extra.
A variable for a value is trivial. It already works perfectly fine in the store!
Sure sales on mobile… (sounds like Apple and Google would get some needed pressure to improve this area) but thats another problem, none of these purchases should be expensive enough to even warrant needing a sale in the first place.
The real reason they want in game currency is not any of these, it’s for the deception factor, avoiding refunds, upselling etc
Also in some games players can trade the currency
Even 2 isn’t difficult. If they can set a price on the currency itself then they can set it on each item trivially.
Store credit is not necessarily simple. There are tons of laws about that kind of thing that differ country to country and in the US state to state. For example in my state, gift certificates can’t expire, so once you give one away as the dev you have to track that on your books forever, even if no one ever uses it. In your free example it’s even worse, because the company has to write that money off as real money, because it can never expire. It’s basically the same as giving away real money from a bookkeeping perspective (at least in my state). Someone with more bookkeeping knowledge can probably give a better answer but that’s my limited understanding of that as a sole proprietor who does my own books.
I would also question if store credit is actually any less predatory than a premium currency. If the premium currency is transparent and easy to understand it’s basically the same thing, no? Hypothetically, if I’m a scummy developer, I could sell $5 in store credit, and then make all the items on the store cost $8. That’s the same result for the player as bad monetization schemes with premium currency. I know in your example you’re saying give it away, but somewhere in there the developer is going to need to make money. They can’t give credit away for in-game currency and hope to stay afloat as a business for long without some deeply predatory stuff going on like in roblox.
At the end of the day I think everything you’re saying is probably feasible in some form for a AAA dev, but not for small devs. Personally I’m also thinking about small devs without an army of compliance specialists and lawyers. I’d like indies to also be able to make money, not just the conglomerates.
For example, saying a system could be worked out to localize an in-game economy is a hand wave. Every game works differently under the hood and in how it paces things, and this would be a huge undertaking to implement and maintain (probably a nonstarter for a small team). It involves more than simple conversion.
Does someone from a weak currency country get different rewards by playing the game than someone from a strong currency? How does that work if that reward is a whole item, not a bit of currency? Do we really want capitalistic shenanigans to extend into the gameplay directly? Personally I prefer that stuff to be cordoned off in the in-game shop.
That’s my take on all that. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t work for a AAA dev, so take this stuff with a grain of salt. My experience comes from having to tackle all these issues as a tiny indie dev.
Store credit lets them manipulate you. They can say the minimum top up is $5. Then put the cheapest items at $3. Want two $3 items? You have to deposit at least $10! It goes on and on.
No. Just make it so you add items to a cart and purchase their exact value with real money, no in between, no scummy tactics.
(But if it was up to me, I would ban MTX altogether)
Depends what counts as an in game currency, does a game where you earn currency in-game and spend it in-game count as an in-game currency? What about if players can trade it?
We are talking about anything that has real monetary value, if you cannot obtain it through real money, then it’s not in the discussion. Of course it opens a whole new problem, where they could sell “boosts” to earning virtual currency etc. So that would have to be taken into account with the legislation.
They’re gonna have such a hard time parsing this for WoW… WoW gold is a major part of the game and they’ve been screwing with it for a while now, I don’t play it anymore but I heard about possibilities to buy tokens that you sell for gold in game but conversely you can also use the gold to buy game time or something? And then off course all the DLC stuff, it’s gonna be complicated for sure.
Yeah, same with OSRS, you buy a bond which you can turn into 1 week membership, or trade it other players. Which is honestly fine, it lets people get membership without spending real money, but I’d rather none of the better/fairer systems exist if it means removing the egregious ones. Really we just want to target systems that make you buy a virtual currency to just sell you microtransactions, but how do you write legislation for that? It’s very tricky, which is why it’s probably never going to happen.