Comment by wahnfrieden

The way the psychology of gambling has entered the games industry has indeed produced more money, but at the same kind of costs that the gambling industry has always created.

I don't advocate for killing this new gaming industry, just as I don't advocate for killing the more traditional gambling industry, but both need much stricter supervision than most markets because they attack a weak point in human psychology, and taken too far, they harm humanity more than they generate value.

In the end any "distortion" of the market requires a strong justification, but I think the justifications used against the gambling industry have always been pretty compelling, and they appear to apply just as well to modern games industry techniques.

Another way to put it is that the "value to society" of modern games techniques contains a negative externality: damage to the players comparable to that of gambling addictions. You could solve it with the equivalent of a carbon tax, though defining the cost of different tactics feels impossible, so I'd argue that the traditional gambling restrictions are a better fit (illegal in many places, illegal for children, legal limits, requiring various warnings and protections to discourage extreme behaviours, high taxes, etc).

Many families play boardgames with their children at home. Fewer visit blackjack tables. I think theres a fair argument that these broadly match the different financial strategies in the games industry. How much of this behaviour is parental wisdom and how much is limited accessibility thanks to legal restrictions is a hard question to answer, but I have a suspicion that the world would be a worse place with unrestricted gambling. But kids _do_ sit at home opening lootboxes as their parents watch tv, I'm not sure if the effects are much different.

Not anti-capitalist, quite the contrary, you deserve to be compensated for the fruits of your labor at a rate that the market will bear.

However, there's what the market will bear, and what the market can be coerced into paying. The latter is definitely more money than the former. The point at which you step into a game and then are psychologically manipulated into spending more than you otherwise would have, that isn't right. Building out gameplay loops that are only fun if you fork over more cash after you've invested considerable time into the application and leveraging the sunk cost fallacy to pull more cash out of your user, do you really respect your consumer at that point, or their wallet?

People are free to build what they want. I'm allowed to call it gross. I'm also allowed to say that those gameplay mechanics feel broken and not fun.

Run a thought experiment next time you play a game. If money was no object, and you were able to pay the developer the average value of their customer (total revenue divided by their total downloads), and in return, all purchase screens are removed, would that game be even more fun? In my experience, they'd usually wind up being a husk, a very generic, boring gameplay loop with nothing enticing. That's how you know that the enticement is actually manipulation.

Because it's common consensus that capitalism went way too far with games. Microtransactions and/or ads and dark patterns are endemic, diminishing enjoyment of games and unduly robbing people of attention/money. Online activation is a thing. And it's not that it's "fine not to do these things", because there are so many offenders, both high and low-profile, that it seems "all right" to do these things to developers who are still on the fence, which poisons the pool even more than it already is.

Capitalism is one of the words that are so general and used for so many phenomena it often becomes useless in a conversation. One can think some market behavior is unethical and to be opposed by individual action, but not see an acceptable political way to remedy this. I don't generally subscribe to this type of thinking, but it is a position. People also tend to see production of culture as something that should be different from producing/selling cars or potatoes.

Besides, people seem to call "capitalism" a set of laws and regulations that are good for current large capital holders, and freely extracting money from people if you have superior psycho/marketing and lawyer power. But there is a vast, vast space of possible regulatory conditions that would still be essentially capitalist in how economy functions.

For the same reason people turn anti-capitalism when it comes to art and music.

There's more reasons for a game to exist besides making big bucks.