Comment by CivBase
5 years ago
The mobile games market is an excellent, concrete example of service providers which not only favor "short term trickery" over "long term quality", but actively reduce the long term quality of their services to engage in that trickery and are wildly successful for doing so.
Modern mobile games are chuck full of time gates, grinds, fake currencies, and many other dark patterns designed to physiologically manipulate their users. They usually give users just enough value for them to become invested. After that, the sunk cost fallacy keeps them "engaged" despite the terrible value proposition. Some users tough it out and consume a torrent of ads to keep playing for "free", while others fork over money for microtransactions to keep up with the game's demands without wasting so much time. Either way, it's a terrible experience for users that makes mobile game developers tons of money.
Ahh, that is a great example. Zynga (when I was a game player) did this a lot. But they also strike me as materially different in behavior than the massive tech companies that often are labeled as manipulative.
No disagreement from me that games, like gambling, use this technique a ton. I’m just not sure this menta mode applies to the decisions made by big tech.