Unarguably, the popularity of video games has soared in recent years.  43 million people watched the League of Legends world championship in 2016, which is almost twice as many people as watched the Monaco Grand Prix; insane!  This basically means that video games are part of the mainstream now and we should get used to them, and trust me, I enjoy video games plenty.  There are however a few darker trends at work in the industry that come as the result of video games suddenly becoming accessible to everyone via the incredible small computers we all now carry around in our pockets.

I waited a long time to get a smart phone; I mean up until 2013 I was still using a black brick of a phone worth maybe 50 kuai. When I got my first one I downloaded a couple of mobile games to see what the little machine was capable of, and to be honest I was quite impressed.  The top-five games looked way better than the ones I had seen on my xbox only a few years earlier.  Tech had clearly come a long way quickly, and the touch screen is an intuitive and fun method of playing games, since they usually employ simple control schemes that are easy to learn but hard to master.   I had a great time with games like Infinity Blade or Cut the Rope and these types of game cost a fraction of what you would pay for a title on a console.

Here’s where we talk about how the other side of this business works.  The means of playing, the purchase and delivery method are all in the same place; these games are everywhere in the app stores, don’t take long to download in a coffee shop and usually cost very little or, sometimes a worse sign, nothing at all at first.  Then you get started into a game like Candy Crush Saga and you see what it’s all about. These tedious games are engineered to take your money, it’s really no better than a slot machine.  It starts off ludicrously easy, just match 3 the same; it’s addicting in its simplicity.  You play for a while and then you inevitably fail a challenge, and the game asks if you’d like to pay to have a power up next time, of course you only have a few lives and they regenerate at one per half hour.  You can buy more if you like.  The model is simple and relies on hooking you with easy returns and then getting you to pay to keep playing.  Candy Crush Saga alone had around 93 million players at its peak and reported almost half a billion dollars in revenue in just a 3-month period.  The most-effective offenders these days are shallow but involved games with a strong multiplayer component.  They’ll get you into simple progression mechanics (building a city, collecting higher-level cards or characters) and even let you join a team or clan, and then gradually you’ll learn that to stay a contributing member of that team you’ll need to invest actual funds to stay competitive.  It’s subtle and plays on a simple thing called the ‘sunk-cost fallacy’. We form an emotional attachment to things from time, energy or resources we’ve put into them that make them hard to abandon, even to our detriment; in short, we are more afraid of a small loss than excited by a potentially large gain.  This simple effect skews our perception of the value of things and leads to financial addictions similar to gambling. 

You felt for the parents; I’ve read stories of a kid spending twenty thousand kuai on accessories for his avatar and one guy who paid 16,000 dollars for a sword in a game that hadn’t even released yet. Throwing cash like that around might well be more palatable if it was at least at the cutting edge of gaming technology; an investment in the future, so to speak.  In this case, we’re talking about laughably bad 2D games on a tiny screen, for the love of god, why?  I spent around 200 kuai in total on mobile games before removing all but one from my phone.  The wife likes Heads Up.  The fact is the market is so populated with toxic garbage and all the advertising is for games that are asking you to pay to win.  There are examples of in-game transactions being implemented in a “optional and not essential” way, but even popular titles like World of Tanks or Hearthstone veer a little too close to this model for my liking, especially considering that in-game items frequently cost more than full-price games.

If you’re going to be a gamer, and even if you let that become an addiction, let it just consume your time, and not also your money.  People complaining about pay-to-win often talk of rich kids beating them easily by laying down large sums, but similar to issues like drugs, the problem is not the people who can afford it, but rather those that can’t.  Don’t feel forced to give money in order to keep up with a game you may not even like; it may be something you only play to kill time after work.  Seek out good games to play, something that engages your mind and gives at least a little challenge.  The highest level of this industry is hitting a peak; the best games around now are some of the best games ever, works of art, luscious worlds that you can get lost in for sometimes hundreds of hours and enticing mechanics that can challenge how you think about problem-solving as well as your itchy trigger fingers. You can explore and enjoy the vast majority of them without ever paying more than once.  If you only game on a mobile device, be very aware of games that ask for your money beyond the purchase price.  The companies know what they’re doing and turn huge profits by essentially duping people into spending money that would bring them far more enjoyment spent somewhere else.

I love that gaming is in the mainstream now; it means there is more patronage for games to be made, which means quality is improving quickly and fresh ideas are being expressed.  However, the trends discussed are found throughout the gaming industry and have significantly altered the company cultures of some of the biggest publishers around.  Luckily, fighting these worrying changes is easy; support the producers of well-made games that put customer enjoyment first and not their bottom-line. 

读到这里，如果已经要读吐血的，

请拨打紧急热线 15763927087 

进行抢救治疗

或者

按照下图来预约James老师试听哦

寒假课程预约中...

不一样的工作室英语学习体验

直接扫码咨询即可