Where was this article when candy crush became big? This article is literally 10+ years way too late. Mobile games to me are basically just one giant scam that forces you to pay or have a horrible time in comparison.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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It wasn't even that hidden back then, games like candy crush admitted to journalists that they changed the difficulty based on spending habits. The fact they might have that formula fine tuned even more shouldn't be surprising.
Mobile games to me are basically just one giant scam that forces you to pay or have a horrible time in comparison.
So they're the modern arcade games?
They are so much worse. I worked with a guy who was pretty damn cheap. I would sometimes pay for his coffe or lunch sometimes, but he would never even drop a cent for me. I didn't really care much, cheap guy, maybe poor, i had no idea. I talked to another guy about video games, and the cheapskate chimed in, saying: i would never play video games, it's a waste if time and money. I didn't think much of it, it made so much sense.
Another time the same co worker said something like: "the most he ever spend on a game was 60 dollars for a counterstrike skin". Cheapskate chimed in again, (he was also a bit of a one upper) hah, that's nothing, i spend 900 bucks on clash of clans last month.
We both were absolutely flabbergasted, and he started to panic a bit abd said: "you think that's crazy? My girlfriend spends way more on candy crush a month." It's been a while, but i think we calculated that the spend a combined 2000 to 3000 bucks on mobile games a month, for years.
Except the arcade games were at least upfront about it and didn't DELIBERATELY turn up the exploitation a few notches when a potentially EXTRA profitable player was detected by an algorithm made specifically for that purpose.
Maximizing corporate profiteering has become the best funded and least regulated scientific discipline in the world and it's not even close.
Just think what we could accomplish if we focused efforts elsewhere...
I remember watching some animated YouTube video years ago about what if we did things so n a way that made sense, like having farms in locations where there was plenty of water and we didn't ship cheap stuff around the world but I have been unable to find that video
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Ban the entire business model.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
There are 14,000 games released on Steam every year. What percentage do you believe contain in-game purchases? It's quite literally just the giant AAA venture capitalist backed studios that do this. Just don't buy them.
It's like saying if we allow AI art to continue soon there will be no more humans making art. People will always make art. People will always make games. If all the art you see is corporate slop that's a you problem.
Half the industry by revenue and growing.
'But indies!' means nothing, when you count two games with $43 in revenue between them, like that's twice as many games as Fortnite.
People will always make art. People will always make games. If all the art you see is corporate slop that’s a you problem.
Jesus, why can't people differentiate the content of games from the way they're sold? It's about the money. I'm not shitting on your favorite time-sink, for its art style. I'm angry about the fact it goads you toward paying twenty actual dollars to give your character an ironic t-shirt.
Yeah, no.
I like a bunch of games that do this. I've liked games that do this for 40 years.
I mean, technically you just banned all arcade games that ever existed. I liked a bunch of those.
And I like a bunch of free to play games. I spent a bunch of time playing Hearthstone. I'm gonna say that at least some of the millions of people in LoL would like to keep playing what they're playing. I am looking forward to a bunch of new characters in Street Fighter 6. I kinda don't want to go back to the days where I had to buy a second full price copy of Street Fighter 2 just to get access to 4 new characters.
I get that it sounds good to say this when thinking about the worst parts of the industry, but... yeah, no.
'But arcades!' Are renting someone else's hardware. Different thing. This did abuse not exist fifteen years ago.
'But free games!' Can just be free. Or pay-what-you-want. Or cheap. Or something you already own. How's your back catalog on Steam?
This Skinner-box horseshit where a game is """free""" but somehow makes a billion dollars is weaponized frustration. The handful of games that were re-released with tiny updates at full price are now the entire industry's goal, thanks to this specific abuse. (And they still got you chumps to buy three 3D versions of Street Fighter.)
You can pay the price of a whole-ass game for a hat.
Lesser versions of that aren't better, just lesser. The opportunity to spend one hundred dollars right the hell now is shoved in your face between rounds. Or dangled each time a lootbox animation juuust misses. Or crammed into your inventory, as a gift, mmyes, if only you bought a key.
If LoL wants to keep making money they can charge a subscription or sell expansions. Y'know - rational consumer purchasing decisions. Not playing keep-away and then tickling people's balls in a controlled environment where fireworks go off each time you click Confirm Purchase.
Inevitably: 'but people don't often go for subscriptions.' Yeah! It's almost like conscious choices are less generous than engineered decisions! Or: 'but budgets rely on that immense revenue!' Then they should shrink. Budgets follow revenue. Always always always. Whatever money these fuckers spent, they expect to extract from you, three times over.
Wait, in what world is a subscription a "rational consumer purchasing decision" where buying characters for a fighting game if you want them as they come out is not?
I would prefer to pay for in-game content of any kind, cosmetics included, over paying a subscription for a game. Any day. Especially if the content is characters, as is the case in LoL or Street Fighter.
And yeah, I bought three 3D Street Fighter games. And a bunch of characters for each. Even a costume or two. I am extremely on board with that. Money extremely well spent, as far as I'm concerned.
Hell, the SF6 community at the moment is begging for more cosmetics. They just announced a handful of horny-ass swimsuit costumes and people went ballistic. It's not my bag, but if people like them and they know what they're buying who the hell are you to tell them they're wrong, let alone that it should be illegal?
I mean, it's a straightforward enough transaction. You think bikini Cammy with tan lines is hot and will pay some money for that skin. I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like. Win/win in my book.
That's the problem with this train of thought. There's some stuff where you and I agree there are bad practices and we can probably agree on some common sense regulation for them. But if you're going to come at me with a maximalist approach that boils down to "games I don't like shouldn't exist" we're going to disagree.
Which, if nothing else, is a good reason for regulation of creative products to be relatively loose whenever possible. I was not on board with Hillary wanting to ban Mortal Kombat in the 90s because she didn't like hearts being ripped out and I'm not on board with people wanting to ban free to play games now. It made sense to have age ratings in the 90s and it makes sense to have that and other common sense regulations now.
None of this is ever about the game part of the game. Fuck entirely off with pearl-clutching over content. This is about a business model. I want people to sell the most addictive, transgressive, customizable bullshit you can imagine, so long as it is either a product or a service. Like anything else you buy. Imaginary shit inside a video game is neither.
You can insist, 'but it's new!,' except it's already in your game. You're looking at it, on someone else's character. This is a dividing line where Oblivion's infamous horse armor is completely above-board. It was a hundred kilobytes of not much, but it was unambiguously an expansion. You, the human being, received a file you did not have before. Not just permission to say your guy had what anyone else could already wear.
This business model reduces the game part of the game to bait on this hook. Whatever people want, or can be made to want, is dangled at ten bucks a pop, fifty items at a time. Eough rubes get gouged for hundreds or thousands of dollars, such that the total revenue exceeds what the studio would get, even if they sold everybody the full-price game three separate times.
I care about those victims. You delight in their exploitation.
Nothing short of banning the abuse would work. We're talking about game designers. Manipulating people into enjoying certain behaviors is literally their job. People finally recognized lootboxes are bad - so they sold gave away the boxes and sold keys. Or sold gems. Or insisted it's just cosmetics. Or-- none of it's fucking different! It's all the same shit! You're all being dragged against the grindstone, using the same tricks that make games fun in the first place. The whole product is an excuse to keep grinding away at you until you decide to open your wallet and look away.
If you want to say that certain types of business models, like paying for RNG where you don't know what you're buying, are predatory, I would be with you on that.
But your extreme hardline stance of "nothing should cost money ever" is not a reasonable place to draw the line. At least some of what you're railing against should be perfectly fine.
Nothing inside a video game. That part is not optional. I've dealt with too many cranks who see me arguing - JUST SELL GAMES - and then go 'you want it for free!' No, folks, you want it for free. You want to play endlessly-updated games, 'subsidized by teenage hormones.' You imagine that you would never be taken for ungodly sums of money.
Even if you're right, you're counting on other people being taken for all the money you're not paying, and more. That's what it means, when this abuse makes more money.
Predatory abuse is inseparable from this business model. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. You can be made to want whatever bullshit they're allowed to push. That's how games work. They mechanically convince you to value arbitrary nonsense.
edit: oh shit, I thought I hit submit on this five hours ago.
I do want updated games, yes. My favorite games wouldn't be my favorite games if 1.0 was all we ever got.
Some games have predatory models, and I do oppose that. But only when it actually is predatory. I take issue with how you're trying to say nothing should ever be sold, even when what's being sold is perfectly fair.
I don't "delight in their exploitation", I am one of the people who buy this stuff.
I am not a victim just because you decide I am. I have some say in this.
So hell yeah, bait me, daddy. To this day, Dragon Ball FighterZ is probably the best gaming experience I've ever had. I was there at ground floor, bought every character, watched every tournament, got competitive. I ended up with three copies of the game, all 100%-ed and with hundreds of hours of play.
And the only thing that bums me out is that they had to bail out of it early, presumably to go make Marvel Tokon.
I will be on ground floor for Tokon, and I will be funding that mouse engine with a bunch of piecemeal cash, I'm sure.
And I need you to listen to me when I tell you that it's going to be on purpose, that I'm not a victim, that I hope that treadmill lasts for a good long while and that the game is good enough to support it.
So please spare me the benevolent outrage. I don't need your protection from my own taste. I would very much appreciate an offline-playable version of the game I can buy with all the DLC down the line, like I did for Marvel vs Capcom 3 or Street Fighter IV, and thanks to the weirdly wholesome interaction between developers and the FGC I may actually get that at some point to support tournament play. But otherwise? Nobody is complaining. You can go save somebody else.
And hey, I say this being a big fan of single player games, and a big supporter of physical media and game preservation. But you come here to tell me that some of my favourite games —and I'm talking game-changing experiences I cherish deeply— should have been illegal and I just don't know better? Yeah, not gonna fly, Hillary.
I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like.
Uh huh.
So hell yeah, bait me, daddy.
Nope, pulling the chute on this conversation.
That's somehow worse than the continued lying about banning games when I am talking about a bu-si-ness mo-dellll. Go fuck your strawman alone.
We're saying the games we like couldn't exist without the business models you want to ban. How does something like Dragon Ball FighterZ continue to expand if you are forbidding them from selling anything that would make character expansions possible?
If you want to say "nothing should cost money ever", then the natural outcome of that is that we just don't get new characters anymore. In effect, you are banning these games by making it impossible for them to exist like this.
Stop lying about what I said. "Nothing inside a video game" does not mean "nothing ever."
And you know goddamn well that fighting games had incremental re-releases, decades before this abuse was possible.
Or, sell actual expansions. You want characters to cost twenty bucks each? Fine, sell that like a game, not like a fucking hat. If it's on your hard drive, in your game, you already fucking have it, and charging real money is a scam.
Or, if you want continuing revenue for an online service - make it a service. Sell subscriptions. Oh sorry, do people not like that? Yeah no shit, because it's up-front about how much it costs, rather than luring people in and gouging them for untold sums.
Or, a game comes out, and plainly exists, and doesn't become the version that's squeezed a billion dollars out of ten percent of players over ten years. Oh well! TF2 without this bullshit would still be TF2. People would still be playing 2fort, forever, the same way they're still doing Ryu vs Ken on Street Fighter 2 Turbo. I do not respect the dishonest conflation of 'FighterZ doesn't get to expand forever' with 'FighterZ would be banned.'
Zero thought for all the games that genuinely don't exist, because publishers killed projects to demand live-service flops. Zero thought for all the novel software people could have spent money on, instead of dropping hundreds in one game that barely changes year-to-year. You're stuck on what exists, as if any change would mean all of it disappears, and you're magically robbed of that past.
Nah, some thoughts.
But not everything is black and white. And in the spectrum of grey there are plenty of in-game sales that are better than the alternative.
Again, I would much rather buy the characters one by one and have the all-in-one box come out later than have to wait for the big box and pay full price for it.
I am genuinely baffled about why you think that's worse than "pay me for the game every month or I take it away". I am even more baffled by how you think that distinction is somehow logical beyond personal preference. Your being adamant about this doesn't make it make sense.
Charging for anything inside a game is like applying a dollar value to soccer goals. It's a category error, exploited for profit. I am fundamentally opposed to this system of manipulating people into wanting arbitrary nonsense and then charging actual money for it. Your glib endorsement of that manipulation does not make it rational.
And this is the shallow end. Characters, you can almost sorta kinda argue, as sloppy expansions. Skins? Fuck off. A bottomless pit of manufactured discontent. Plainly sufficient to wring billions out of people for a game that's "free." Or for a game that's forty fucking dollars and will gladly take another hundred dollars every single year. And characters in a 1v1 fighter are drastically different from MOBA bullshit, where having the wrong options can ruin an hour of four other people's lives.
People are rightly incensed by efforts to charge $80 to own one video game.
This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing.
Something's fucky.
Skins are fine. They are entirely optional. Something existing doesn't mean you must own it.
That's the part where we're not going to agree. Well, the maximalist holier-than-thou stance in general. But otherwise, you see things existing as an affront to you personally. This skin was made by someone and put in the game, and so I'm entitled to it, so it either shouldn't exist or it should be mine.
That just doesn't track. I don't feel any more entitled to some random bikini costume than I do to some random statue bundled with a collector's edition. It's faff some people may want, but I'm not being attacked because somebody is buying and selling collector's edition of Cyberpunk for 200 bucks, just like way I'm not attacked by someone buying some in-game costume.
Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? That comparison means different things depending on whether you know that and both are confusing.
This is an entire market of games where you can pay $1000 and still not have the whole thing.
Those aren't the games we're talking about. We're talking about DBFZ, an example of fixed DLC being sold at a reasonable price, which you want to dishonestly conflate with more predatory models in order to say that nothing should be sold ever.
And you know goddamn well that fighting games had incremental re-releases, decades before this abuse was possible.
Of course I know, I know how much it fucking sucked! No one wants to go back to that!
You'd rather spend $60 on Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, then spend $60 on Street Fighter II': Champion Edition, then spend $60 on Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, then spend $60 on Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers, then spend $60 on Super Street Fighter II Turbo?
That's better to you than being able to get the patches for free, with the option of buying characters at a reasonable price, all while still retaining compatibility with opponents on the latest version even if you don't spend a dime?
How is that better? How?
Or, if you want continuing revenue for an online service - make it a service. Sell subscriptions. Oh sorry, do people not like that?
No, no I don't like that! I would much rather buy a character once than have to subscribe to them forever! If I buy a character I get to keep them, if I subscribe I don't. And I'm not getting gouged, I know what the price tag is. If anything, a subscription is gouging because I have to keep paying again and again in order to keep what I should've only had to pay for once.
I'm actually baffled that you're seriously trying to suggest subscriptions as a better alternative. Like... seriously? Really?
I do not respect the dishonest conflation of 'FighterZ doesn't get to expand forever' with 'FighterZ would be banned.'
FighterZ as we know it would not exist in your world. In your world, it'd just be the 1.0 base game and that'd be it, but I know you know we're talking about what FighterZ was able to become over the course of its lifespan thanks to DLC.
You're taking this needlessly aggressive tone accusing us of misconstruing you, but I know you know damn well what we're saying here while you keep misconstruing us. Don't accuse me of being dishonest when you're playing dumb like this.
Subscriptions are honest. Like actual sales - where you get a thing you didn't have, in exchange for money. Paying money, to be allowed to use part of the game you already have, is not a sale.
SF6 fucking launched with $120 in DLC. Like yeah, you bought the game, at full price... but fuck you, pay us again. Breaking up the fuckening into individual characters, trickled out over years, is psychological manipulation to disguise that abuse.
And I’m not getting gouged, I know what the price tag is.
... the fact you can pay hundreds of dollars and still not have all of a 1v1 fighting game is not made problematic through mystery. No shit you can see the price tag. That price is obscene. Past abuses being worse is no kind of excuse.
I swear to god, Capcom could charge the price of a whole game for each new character bundle, and there'd still be people up my ass about how it must be fine because it was the same in the 90s. You know how I know? Because they do. Annual character passes are $30! Does that get you everything that comes out, that year? Does it, fuck.
I know you know we’re talking about what FighterZ was able to become
Of course you do, because it's what that paragraph was about. How am I the one "playing dumb?" You're still insisting there's no way a game could be updated - aside from the other two ways you don't like! - so that's the same as the game being banned. Because saying it's banned sounds really bad, and serious, and is totally the same thing as saying Capcom doesn't need real negotiable currency in order to change the color of a character's pants.
But hey, this is only the shallow end of a business model that's turning the games industry into a frustration-based casino. Why worry?
DLC is honest. I get a thing in exchange for money. I know what the price tag is, and I'm happy to pay what I think is a fair price. And I only pay once to keep the thing I paid for, unlike a subscription.
Let me just cut straight past all your deflecting. Do you think that the final version of DBFZ, with all of its DLC, sold at its price, should be able to exist in this form?
Hey, if latching on to the jokes helps you ignore the point be my guest, but the point stands with or without your acknowledgement.
But arcades!' Are renting someone else's hardware. Different thing. This did abuse not exist fifteen years ago.
Yes it did, and even longer. Quite a few arcade games were made with intentional difficulty spikes to suck up as many quarters as possible, not to be a fair game.
Read what you quoted.
That would also ban online gambling like poker
I'm already sold, you don't have to keep trying to sell me on it.
If you see a difference between two things, so can the law.
Great!
That's already banned in quite a lot of countries.
This is primarily why I don't bother discussing game balance in live service games. They will never balance the game to have a level field between the items and characters. They will always balance the game to keep you playing and spending money on mtx.
Most players thinking of quitting a game, generally are losing often. The game will notice this, and then give you a win. It's always been noticeable, but some games, like The Finals, are super egregious with it because it shows everyone's MMR right off the bat and you will be able to tell if you will win or lose a match right as it starts when you see that your team is 5 times higher ranked than the other 2 teams, or vice versa.
This site is fake, it doesn't have Dead By Daylight at the absolute top of dark pattern design, and says DBD Mobile (now shut down) is only -1.43?
Also, why would anyone need an account for this? Isn't this just a database? What, does it have a linked forum?
"SEO experts" skew results for pay. They are doing mobile games for now, because they are particularly egregious "dark pattern" games.