exploitative business decision that has no technical reason for existing whatsoever
There is a technical reason, actually. The messages from Android are SMS, whereas the messages from immediate iMessage are encrypted and sent over a different channel.
But the net result is a lot of social pressure.
DLC is essentially an addon pack, an expansion of the original game with new levels, characters, maps, weapons, equipment, new gameplay modes, etc.
It sounds like you’re explaining what you want it to be. Some DLC is certainly like that, but quite often it’s not. Sometimes you get that kind of content as a MTX. People try to draw a line here, but there really isn’t one because it’s all convention. Some DLC require a download (e.g. the D part), many do not (i.e. just a DRM check when you launch).
Yeah, in the old days, you’d buy your expansions as a separate product (e.g. Brood War for Starcraft), but these days there’s a lot less formality and variety to it.
So if we try to craft some kind of law against MTX, companies will just call them DLC. The only difference is how they’re marketed; on a technical level, there’s no clear separation between the “good” and the “bad,” it comes down to how it’s marketed and the value you get. The only clear separation I can think of is things that are time limited (i.e. you can only buy it for the next X days), but that’s a practice in pretty much every industry and a practical necessity for copyright law (e.g. music is usually licensed for a set number of years, hence why older GTAs aren’t available for purchase).
I’m guessing there’s a mechanism to buy DLC from within a game, and if there isn’t, game studios would push for that to be created.
worst possible situation from the standpoint of a child or a person susceptible to peer pressure or with basically the same personality of a gambling addict.
I agree children should be protected here because they cannot consent. However, we don’t prevent people with gambling addictions from gambling provided they’re adults, because they are responsible for their actions even if they suffer from addiction. Adults are expected to take measures to protect themselves, children are not.
So I’m absolutely in favor of banning children from F2P games where profit comes from manipulative practices (either they’re being manipulated, or they’re being used to manipulate others, both of which are wrong). Maybe that’s enough to dramatically reduce these games, maybe it’s not, but that’s not the goal; the goal is to protect those who cannot consent.
make it illegal for a game to allow you to spend more than so much on MTX or Premium currency in a certain amount of time
That sounds overly restrictive. If I want to buy an expensive item, I would need to make that MTX several times over the course of days in order to get it? Why?
A better solution, imo, is to provide a mechanism for customers to set their own limits so they can self regulate. It would be up to them to decide what that limit is, so they get to decide what they’re comfortable with. But they should also be allowed to disable that limit as well, though perhaps with a multi-day waiting period so they don’t just disable it while drunk and render the whole thing useless.
Apple designed their different protocol early on for no actual reason other than to intentionally be incompatible with the standards used by the entire rest of the industry, entirely to use as a peer pressure and marketing tactic to make less technically knowledgable users believe that it is somehow better or has more features or is more secure or somethimg.
It isnt, it doesnt, and it isnt more secure.
They easily could have used existing standards, but again, decided to develop their own exclusive standard and them basically lie and make misleading statements that would promote exclusivity and a superiority complex amongst its user base.
Your quibbling about the definition of DLC is irrelevant and pointless, and you do not seem to know what DLC is if you think DRM is DLC. Its not.
I already outlined substantive definitions of what constitutes DLC and MTX, and you are just repeating yourself saying the line between them is blurry. It is no where near as blurry as you think it is, and its now becoming clear that you do not appear to be able to comprehend what I have written.
The only difference is absolutely not how they are marketed. I think you are referring to how they presented in a UI.
I already addressed this, MTX is a system that has identifiable characteristics and properties that make it distinct from DLC, regardless of UI labelling.
Thats not marketing. Marketing is promotional material, trailers, paid game reviews, statements made by the company selling the product for the purpose of getting you to buy the product, a demo held at a convention, that sort of stuff.
As to your preference for allowing customers to self regulate:
Congrats, you have missed the entire concept that large demographics of people do not have the ability to self regulate their addiction problem, because an addiction problem literally is the lack of the ability to self regulate in regards to a certain activity or substance.
Anyway, I was not saying I would be necesarilly for or against such a measure, I was merely proving to you that it can legally be done, with examples.
Its clear your reading comprehension is not that good and you have at no point acknowledged that basically I have disproved everything you think you understand about how anything we have talked about works, functions, is actually defined, etc.
I will likely not be responding to you on this matter further as it is evident you basically have no idea what you are talking about.
integration with macOS - you can message people on macOS/iOS without going through your phone
features like read receipts and reactions
aforementioned encryption (and yes, it is encrypted, and you want that), which has the practical benefit that telcos (read: police, hackers, etc) can’t see the content of your messages
There are practical benefits, and you would want to know if a message is encrypted or not. The issue isn’t that they’re using a nonstandard protocol, it’s that they didn’t open it up to others. I’m sure Android would’ve loved to integrate with it, but instead Apple kept it proprietary and even took steps to shut down a competitor that found a way to be compatible, all to drive purchases for iPhones.
The problem isn’t making an alternative to SMS, it’s actively preventing competitors from making a compatible app. This wouldn’t be an issue at all if Android users could install a compatible app.
Your quibbling about the definition of DLC is irrelevant and pointless, and you do not seem to know what DLC is if you think DRM is DLC
I’m explaining how game companies will react to a ban on MTX.
And yes, DRM can be a part of DLC. Instead of downloading content, many games just check if you have a license for the content and flip a switch internally to enable it. That’s how DLC gets to be available for clients if the host has the DLC, it just enables that switch if the host has it. There’s no actual download process, it’s literally already included in the game, just disabled.
That’s literally the same way MTX work, but instead of the DRM check happening with the launcher, it happens with the game server.
its now becoming clear that you do not appear to be able to comprehend what I have written.
No. You’re writing what you think DLC is, I’m providing examples where the line actually is blurry.
Yes, there are plenty of cases where DLC requires a download and is local only, but there are also plenty where it doesn’t and is shared with others who play with you. MTX is like the latter.
If we ban MTX, we run the very real risk of banning other, “good” forms of DLC that work in exactly the same way. So the distinction becomes very subjective. Sure, maybe you and I could agree that a given method is “good” or “bad,” but that’s not something that can easily (read: feasibly) be written into law, and the gaming industry will find workarounds.
And that’s not even getting into the discussion about whether it’s moral to restrict individual choice of adults in the first place. So my focus will be on protecting children, not trying to ban MTX entirely because I honestly don’t think that’ll work.
Congrats, you have missed the entire concept that large demographics of people do not have the ability to self regulate their addiction problem, because an addiction problem literally is the lack of the ability to self regulate in regards to a certain activity or substance.
No, addiction is not the inability to self-regulate, it’s a physical or psychological dependence.
Someone with an alcohol addiction probably needs to avoid alcohol entirely. That’s a form of self-regulation. If you’re addicted to MTX, your form of self-regulation is either to entirely avoid games with MTX, or put a lock on your account to prevent purchases (if there’s a PIN, have an SO set it so they can help you control it). If you only make stupid decisions while drunk and you look to drink while playing, putting a daily purchase cap could be enough.
We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, we can instead provide tools to help those with addiction problems self-regulate. That would be the direction of legislation, not banning things that impacts a small subset of the population.
Yep, you continue to be wrong in ways that I have already explained which you obviously do not understand, and in more baffling ways that would require even further in depth explanations from me which at this point you quite clearly would also misunderstand.
You often do not even understand how to make relevant criticisms and simply assert something false or irrelevant about one point I make and use it to argue against some other point in a way that I have already shown to be false or failing to even grasp the concept being discussed.
You are in this latest post just outright contradicting yourself within the span of two adjacent sentences as opposed to separate posts.
Obviously you are someone who plays games and has opinions about them and has no actual programming or tech industry or video game creation experience, as opposed to myself who does have actual experience making games and has worked in the tech industry for a decade.
Again, you have no idea what you are talking about and have basically been wrong about literally everything you have mentioned.
DRM still is not DLC. Yes. They interact. That does not mean they are the same thing or necessarily must coexist. DRM is not /content/ it is /content management/.
Their interplay or relationship is irrelevant to a discussion about MTX, which you still fundamentally fail to grasp is a system with definable attributes, which I again have already defined more than sufficiently, which you again are either forgetting or ignoring.
You insist on relying on astoundingly vague and unspecified concepts of ‘good’ DLC vs ‘bad’ DLC which is obviously not possible to legislate or regulate because it is not well defined.
We absolutely do not run the risk of banning any kind of DLC if MTX is regulated against.
Again, as I already stated, in a world where say games were not allowed to, within the actual game itself, offer access to the player to additional content that applies specifically to that character’s avatar as either a cosmetic or a functional in game item, where the actual digital code for said items is already present to all players without additional download, this would 1) lessen impulsive purchases 2) reasonably result in many games moving there stores for MTX to a program or website not actually in the game itself.
Then, if you combine that with my other theoretical restriction of being able to purchase additional DLC for a specified game only every so often, or put a cap on max spending on DLC in a time period, what this results in initially MTX individual items to be sold as bundles, and at the very least highly incentivizes game companies that rely on MTX to make reasonably priced bundles, while also not seriously affecting non MTX games that semi-regularily release DLC that contains more substantial things than just items for the individual player.
While this would not entirely destroy the ability of MTX games to sell more content, it would seriously dampen the exploitative power of their predatory business model to harm those susceptible to it.
In the world of preventing addictions and similar things, there is never a full proof solution, but there often are very effective harm reduction techniques.
Not that you have any understanding of such policies as you apparently still cannot grasp that addiction literally is a self regulation problem, but also simultaneously that it is and MTX is somehow unique and special and different than other addiction problems and should be addressed by methods which are very, very well known to be very ineffective for all other addiction problems.
I cannot believe that I have actually wasted my time repeating myself due to your inability to string together consistent concepts from my differing posts.
You are just arguing for the sake of wanting to be right and have absolutely no ability to realize you are incorrect, uniformed, and also just at this point unable to make a coherent argument.
You are in this latest post just outright contradicting yourself within the span of two adjacent sentences as opposed to separate posts.
Then please point that out so I can either explain how it’s not a contradiction, or learn where I was mistaken.
DRM still is not DLC. Yes. They interact. That does not mean they are the same thing or necessarily must coexist. DRM is not /content/ it is /content management/.
I never said they were. I said that in many cases, DLC is already “part of the game,” just hidden behind some DRM. That seemed to be the contention you had with MTX, that content was in the game, but not available unless the player purchases it. I’m sure there are plenty of games in your library with content locked behind a DLC paywall, but still in the binary you downloaded.
DLC used to simply be a replacement for those expansion disks you can buy at the store, and now they’re just unlocked in the same binary everyone downloads. MTX is extremely similar in that you get to see content you can’t access directly, provided someone you’re playing with has paid for that content.
Again, as I already stated, in a world where say games were not allowed to, within the actual game itself, offer access to the player to additional content that applies specifically to that character’s avatar as either a cosmetic or a functional in game item, where the actual digital code for said items is already present to all players without additional download, this would 1) lessen impulsive purchases 2) reasonably result in many games moving there stores for MTX to a program or website not actually in the game itself.
Games would just provide a link to a browser (or embed a browser directly, depending on the wording of the law) in the game itself, and then you’d see the effects immediately in the game when buying cosmetics. Yeah, maybe it would be a slight hurdle to jump, but it would basically only be one more click.
And that’s if your bill even passes. The market is just too lucrative for these companies to just roll over, they will find a way to capitalize on players’ vanity and desire to have “everything.”
theoretical restriction of being able to purchase additional DLC for a specified game only every so often, or put a cap on max spending on DLC in a time period
How would that be enforced? Unless that number is quite high, it’s going to annoy a lot of players (i.e. let’s say I come back to a game like Magic Arena or Hearthstone and want to get caught up with the latest cards), and if it’s too high, it’s probably not going to help much. Maybe a requirement for games to block users for unusually high spending would help in some cases, but would that really apply to people who are addicted (i.e. that have consistently high spending)?
It just seems incredibly hard to craft a law that effectively solves the problem, doesn’t restrict players’ freedom too much, and that large gaming companies would not fight too hard against. And I’m sure large gaming companies would find a way around whatever law is crafted (i.e. maybe gifts don’t count, so players gift each other stuff instead).
addiction literally is a self regulation problem
No, addiction is a dependency problem.
Ask anyone who has made it through AA or any similar program and you’ll learn that the (physical or psychological) dependency is still there, but they’ve learned how to self-regulate to avoid triggering it. What seems to work is placing obstacles in their way to force themselves to make a conscious decision instead of giving in to that need.
So if there’s any regulation here, it should be around giving people the tools to self-regulate (and perhaps requiring games to advertise them), not on preventing the behavior directly (that limits individual choice). If people know they have an addiction problem, they can set a cap (or ideally just not play predatory games).
You are just arguing for the sake of wanting to be right
No, I’m arguing because I have a different opinion, and I think you’re misunderstanding it. If you simply disagreed, you’d presumably stop replying, or try to convince me of yours. But if you attack my arguments, I’ll clarify and explain.
There is a technical reason, actually. The messages from Android are SMS, whereas the messages from immediate iMessage are encrypted and sent over a different channel.
But the net result is a lot of social pressure.
It sounds like you’re explaining what you want it to be. Some DLC is certainly like that, but quite often it’s not. Sometimes you get that kind of content as a MTX. People try to draw a line here, but there really isn’t one because it’s all convention. Some DLC require a download (e.g. the D part), many do not (i.e. just a DRM check when you launch).
Yeah, in the old days, you’d buy your expansions as a separate product (e.g. Brood War for Starcraft), but these days there’s a lot less formality and variety to it.
So if we try to craft some kind of law against MTX, companies will just call them DLC. The only difference is how they’re marketed; on a technical level, there’s no clear separation between the “good” and the “bad,” it comes down to how it’s marketed and the value you get. The only clear separation I can think of is things that are time limited (i.e. you can only buy it for the next X days), but that’s a practice in pretty much every industry and a practical necessity for copyright law (e.g. music is usually licensed for a set number of years, hence why older GTAs aren’t available for purchase).
I’m guessing there’s a mechanism to buy DLC from within a game, and if there isn’t, game studios would push for that to be created.
I agree children should be protected here because they cannot consent. However, we don’t prevent people with gambling addictions from gambling provided they’re adults, because they are responsible for their actions even if they suffer from addiction. Adults are expected to take measures to protect themselves, children are not.
So I’m absolutely in favor of banning children from F2P games where profit comes from manipulative practices (either they’re being manipulated, or they’re being used to manipulate others, both of which are wrong). Maybe that’s enough to dramatically reduce these games, maybe it’s not, but that’s not the goal; the goal is to protect those who cannot consent.
That sounds overly restrictive. If I want to buy an expensive item, I would need to make that MTX several times over the course of days in order to get it? Why?
A better solution, imo, is to provide a mechanism for customers to set their own limits so they can self regulate. It would be up to them to decide what that limit is, so they get to decide what they’re comfortable with. But they should also be allowed to disable that limit as well, though perhaps with a multi-day waiting period so they don’t just disable it while drunk and render the whole thing useless.
No, there’s no technical reason.
Apple designed their different protocol early on for no actual reason other than to intentionally be incompatible with the standards used by the entire rest of the industry, entirely to use as a peer pressure and marketing tactic to make less technically knowledgable users believe that it is somehow better or has more features or is more secure or somethimg.
It isnt, it doesnt, and it isnt more secure.
They easily could have used existing standards, but again, decided to develop their own exclusive standard and them basically lie and make misleading statements that would promote exclusivity and a superiority complex amongst its user base.
Your quibbling about the definition of DLC is irrelevant and pointless, and you do not seem to know what DLC is if you think DRM is DLC. Its not.
I already outlined substantive definitions of what constitutes DLC and MTX, and you are just repeating yourself saying the line between them is blurry. It is no where near as blurry as you think it is, and its now becoming clear that you do not appear to be able to comprehend what I have written.
The only difference is absolutely not how they are marketed. I think you are referring to how they presented in a UI.
I already addressed this, MTX is a system that has identifiable characteristics and properties that make it distinct from DLC, regardless of UI labelling.
Thats not marketing. Marketing is promotional material, trailers, paid game reviews, statements made by the company selling the product for the purpose of getting you to buy the product, a demo held at a convention, that sort of stuff.
As to your preference for allowing customers to self regulate:
Congrats, you have missed the entire concept that large demographics of people do not have the ability to self regulate their addiction problem, because an addiction problem literally is the lack of the ability to self regulate in regards to a certain activity or substance.
Anyway, I was not saying I would be necesarilly for or against such a measure, I was merely proving to you that it can legally be done, with examples.
Its clear your reading comprehension is not that good and you have at no point acknowledged that basically I have disproved everything you think you understand about how anything we have talked about works, functions, is actually defined, etc.
I will likely not be responding to you on this matter further as it is evident you basically have no idea what you are talking about.
There are technical reasons, such as:
There are practical benefits, and you would want to know if a message is encrypted or not. The issue isn’t that they’re using a nonstandard protocol, it’s that they didn’t open it up to others. I’m sure Android would’ve loved to integrate with it, but instead Apple kept it proprietary and even took steps to shut down a competitor that found a way to be compatible, all to drive purchases for iPhones.
The problem isn’t making an alternative to SMS, it’s actively preventing competitors from making a compatible app. This wouldn’t be an issue at all if Android users could install a compatible app.
I’m explaining how game companies will react to a ban on MTX.
And yes, DRM can be a part of DLC. Instead of downloading content, many games just check if you have a license for the content and flip a switch internally to enable it. That’s how DLC gets to be available for clients if the host has the DLC, it just enables that switch if the host has it. There’s no actual download process, it’s literally already included in the game, just disabled.
That’s literally the same way MTX work, but instead of the DRM check happening with the launcher, it happens with the game server.
No. You’re writing what you think DLC is, I’m providing examples where the line actually is blurry.
Yes, there are plenty of cases where DLC requires a download and is local only, but there are also plenty where it doesn’t and is shared with others who play with you. MTX is like the latter.
If we ban MTX, we run the very real risk of banning other, “good” forms of DLC that work in exactly the same way. So the distinction becomes very subjective. Sure, maybe you and I could agree that a given method is “good” or “bad,” but that’s not something that can easily (read: feasibly) be written into law, and the gaming industry will find workarounds.
And that’s not even getting into the discussion about whether it’s moral to restrict individual choice of adults in the first place. So my focus will be on protecting children, not trying to ban MTX entirely because I honestly don’t think that’ll work.
No, addiction is not the inability to self-regulate, it’s a physical or psychological dependence.
Someone with an alcohol addiction probably needs to avoid alcohol entirely. That’s a form of self-regulation. If you’re addicted to MTX, your form of self-regulation is either to entirely avoid games with MTX, or put a lock on your account to prevent purchases (if there’s a PIN, have an SO set it so they can help you control it). If you only make stupid decisions while drunk and you look to drink while playing, putting a daily purchase cap could be enough.
We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, we can instead provide tools to help those with addiction problems self-regulate. That would be the direction of legislation, not banning things that impacts a small subset of the population.
Yep, you continue to be wrong in ways that I have already explained which you obviously do not understand, and in more baffling ways that would require even further in depth explanations from me which at this point you quite clearly would also misunderstand.
You often do not even understand how to make relevant criticisms and simply assert something false or irrelevant about one point I make and use it to argue against some other point in a way that I have already shown to be false or failing to even grasp the concept being discussed.
You are in this latest post just outright contradicting yourself within the span of two adjacent sentences as opposed to separate posts.
Obviously you are someone who plays games and has opinions about them and has no actual programming or tech industry or video game creation experience, as opposed to myself who does have actual experience making games and has worked in the tech industry for a decade.
Again, you have no idea what you are talking about and have basically been wrong about literally everything you have mentioned.
DRM still is not DLC. Yes. They interact. That does not mean they are the same thing or necessarily must coexist. DRM is not /content/ it is /content management/.
Their interplay or relationship is irrelevant to a discussion about MTX, which you still fundamentally fail to grasp is a system with definable attributes, which I again have already defined more than sufficiently, which you again are either forgetting or ignoring.
You insist on relying on astoundingly vague and unspecified concepts of ‘good’ DLC vs ‘bad’ DLC which is obviously not possible to legislate or regulate because it is not well defined.
We absolutely do not run the risk of banning any kind of DLC if MTX is regulated against.
Again, as I already stated, in a world where say games were not allowed to, within the actual game itself, offer access to the player to additional content that applies specifically to that character’s avatar as either a cosmetic or a functional in game item, where the actual digital code for said items is already present to all players without additional download, this would 1) lessen impulsive purchases 2) reasonably result in many games moving there stores for MTX to a program or website not actually in the game itself.
Then, if you combine that with my other theoretical restriction of being able to purchase additional DLC for a specified game only every so often, or put a cap on max spending on DLC in a time period, what this results in initially MTX individual items to be sold as bundles, and at the very least highly incentivizes game companies that rely on MTX to make reasonably priced bundles, while also not seriously affecting non MTX games that semi-regularily release DLC that contains more substantial things than just items for the individual player.
While this would not entirely destroy the ability of MTX games to sell more content, it would seriously dampen the exploitative power of their predatory business model to harm those susceptible to it.
In the world of preventing addictions and similar things, there is never a full proof solution, but there often are very effective harm reduction techniques.
Not that you have any understanding of such policies as you apparently still cannot grasp that addiction literally is a self regulation problem, but also simultaneously that it is and MTX is somehow unique and special and different than other addiction problems and should be addressed by methods which are very, very well known to be very ineffective for all other addiction problems.
I cannot believe that I have actually wasted my time repeating myself due to your inability to string together consistent concepts from my differing posts.
You are just arguing for the sake of wanting to be right and have absolutely no ability to realize you are incorrect, uniformed, and also just at this point unable to make a coherent argument.
Ciao for now.
Then please point that out so I can either explain how it’s not a contradiction, or learn where I was mistaken.
I never said they were. I said that in many cases, DLC is already “part of the game,” just hidden behind some DRM. That seemed to be the contention you had with MTX, that content was in the game, but not available unless the player purchases it. I’m sure there are plenty of games in your library with content locked behind a DLC paywall, but still in the binary you downloaded.
DLC used to simply be a replacement for those expansion disks you can buy at the store, and now they’re just unlocked in the same binary everyone downloads. MTX is extremely similar in that you get to see content you can’t access directly, provided someone you’re playing with has paid for that content.
Games would just provide a link to a browser (or embed a browser directly, depending on the wording of the law) in the game itself, and then you’d see the effects immediately in the game when buying cosmetics. Yeah, maybe it would be a slight hurdle to jump, but it would basically only be one more click.
And that’s if your bill even passes. The market is just too lucrative for these companies to just roll over, they will find a way to capitalize on players’ vanity and desire to have “everything.”
How would that be enforced? Unless that number is quite high, it’s going to annoy a lot of players (i.e. let’s say I come back to a game like Magic Arena or Hearthstone and want to get caught up with the latest cards), and if it’s too high, it’s probably not going to help much. Maybe a requirement for games to block users for unusually high spending would help in some cases, but would that really apply to people who are addicted (i.e. that have consistently high spending)?
It just seems incredibly hard to craft a law that effectively solves the problem, doesn’t restrict players’ freedom too much, and that large gaming companies would not fight too hard against. And I’m sure large gaming companies would find a way around whatever law is crafted (i.e. maybe gifts don’t count, so players gift each other stuff instead).
No, addiction is a dependency problem.
Ask anyone who has made it through AA or any similar program and you’ll learn that the (physical or psychological) dependency is still there, but they’ve learned how to self-regulate to avoid triggering it. What seems to work is placing obstacles in their way to force themselves to make a conscious decision instead of giving in to that need.
So if there’s any regulation here, it should be around giving people the tools to self-regulate (and perhaps requiring games to advertise them), not on preventing the behavior directly (that limits individual choice). If people know they have an addiction problem, they can set a cap (or ideally just not play predatory games).
No, I’m arguing because I have a different opinion, and I think you’re misunderstanding it. If you simply disagreed, you’d presumably stop replying, or try to convince me of yours. But if you attack my arguments, I’ll clarify and explain.