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General: FTC Investigating F2P?
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In The Free Zone this week, Richard Aihoshi takes a look at a recent announcement that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was taking a look at iTunes free to play games. At issue is the in-app purchases made by children, one to the tune of $1,400.00 by an eight year old. Check out what Richard has to say about the investigation and any implications he sees for the MMO market. Be sure toadd your thoughts.
What I don't understand is how this got blown up into an impending investigation of the entire US F2P space. The first sentence in last Tuesday's Post piece states that "The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday it will review the marketing and delivery of mobile applications that charge users for products and services, such as through Apple's iTunes store."
Read more of Richard Aihoshi's Free Zone: FTC Investigating F2P?.
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Comments
There is a reason why F2P game are so popular (for devs and publishers anyway). Spend a dollar here, some cents there, the funny thing is tho a lot of players spent more money in total in month on their F2P game than on a standard $14 P2P game.
Personally I still think you get more bang per buck in P2P games.
I think it is a total scam how devs conjure up ways to milk your wallet just so that you have a nice virtual house you can show off to your friends. On the other hand, nobody forced these people to buy this stuff. Apparently parents don't educate their kids enough and adults who spend fortunes on this stuff are just stupid in my opinion.
When it comes to mobile games that target kids there should probably be some regulation in that space. You can argue both directions here parents fault for getting kids a smart phone. But lets face it it's just as cheap to get a smart phone as it is to get a standard one. Some sort of verification email or something to the primary account holder of the phone contract should be sent in order to complete any of these kinds of transactions where its a game for kids. If you are the primary contract holder and spend $1400 on your smurf house thats your business, but when it is a kid that probably doesn't understand exactly what they are doing when purchacing that purple polkadot wallpaper there should be some safeguards in place.
The key is informed consent - while you are playing a game, is a "buy now" button an in-game or a real-world action? How far can you blur that distinction? As long as F2P keeps token-buying on a seperate website safely away from game-playing so that it is clear what is inside and outside the game then it is clear there is no attempt to confuse the consumer and I don't imagine there being much of a legal concern.
With regards to the FTP MMO market i think it's just a damn scam and always have done, as a previous poster has already said most people pay more than £10 a month for items in order to remain competative or enjoy the game, now thats fair enough and it's their money they spend, doesn't change the truth though, FTP games maybe a smart idea from a business standpoint but they are still.. well, just wrong.
With regards to phones and apps etc, contract phones require the signature of someone over 18, in good credit standing and able to afford the monthly costs, no one under 18 is legally able to sign a contract, therefore for contract phones there should be limitations put in place, the contract should require the details of who is going to be using said contract phone (if a parent is getting for a child etc) and if it's for someone under the legal contract age then limitations should be placed on the phone itself (not the sim as thats easy to get around these days) where any transactions have to be authorised by the contract sign holder (the parent) and things such as porn or other things that are age limited are completely bypassed and not permitted what so ever, such breaches would void the contract and the phone would be useless. a lot of Pay and Go phones require sim registration these days so similar blocks and such can be done through this means.
And when will they stop using kids to advertise everything, because when you say you love XYZ products with a big smile at the age of 6, you sure are doing it knowingly.
Double-standard crap like this is not even funny anymore *shrug*
This issue can go both ways. yeah, Apple's kinda at fault for the whole "leaving credit card data cached for 15 minutes" thing. and yeah, the people who wmarket the smurfs game are kinda skeezy for marketing it to kids, however, people are forgetting the one person that could have, at several steps, stopped this from happening.
The Parent. Oh yes, I'm going there
Firstly: when I was 8 years old, would I have been trusted to handle something as expensive as an iPad? HELL no, second I touched it, my parents would have taken it out of my hands and put it out of reach. This could have stopped the 1500 dollar charge
Secondly, when I was 8, the video games of the day were Atari. do you think I was ever unsupervised when playing? If the parents would have just been -watching- what the kid was doing, you know, like a parent's supposed to do, this wouldn't have happened.
Thirdly, part of the issue here is that the iTunes system stores credit card info in memory for like 15 minutes or so after a music purchase. This leaves me to think it was a case of "Mommy just bought some music, here's my iPad, play Smurfs while I do something more important than caring for you". Steps one and two could have stopped this, as well as some simple system security. Knowing this about iTunes, the parent could have, say, disabled the caching feature, or held onto the iPad until the data left cache.
TL:DR version: yeah, the companies are at fault, but Mommy and Daddy here are borderline neglectful.
LOL. The subscription-only folks are going to print out, bronze and frame this news item...
My daughter has an ipod touch that she and her little brother play on. There are parental controls that allow for disabling of, among other things, any purchases. This is not rocket science, the parents who either do not disable this or associate their CC with their KID'S iTunes account are morons.
How dare you present him with logic! Don't you understand? He fights epic fights, in epic games, with epic toons....eats epic food and takes epic dumps! He has more e..pic..icity...ness in his little finger than you have in your whole unepic body! - ChicagoCub
Sure am!
<link>http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8204/8245379178_45a58cec29.jpg</link>;
I agree to most fo this exceptt hat iTunes has the option to permanently store the CC info until removed by the cutomer. Meaning if a parent puts in their CC info and doesn't remove the billing option, the child can rack up a large bill in the span of a just a day.
There's a difference in the investigation of the apple devices in-app purchase and F2p MMOs cash shop. In F2P MMOs the customer has to purchase points and in almost every case the payment method is not stored. While for iTunes the CC info is stored creating a situation of automatic payment without any effort beyond clicking 'Yes' for 'Are you sure?'
Apple makes it easier to spend your money than a F2P MMO. Both can cause a person to spend enormous amounts, but Apple makes it happen with less effort / customer interaction.
"If you're going to act like a noob, I'll treat you like one." -Caskio
Adventurers wear fancy pants!!!
Again I agree here. Parents should be proactive in this sort of situation. However, I can see some parents either don't have the knowledge that parental controls exist or they are just being lazy and trusting thier kids won't do it.
"If you're going to act like a noob, I'll treat you like one." -Caskio
Adventurers wear fancy pants!!!
ive seen some ignorant ppl spend 200 + bucks in one week in a f2p mmo and claim they would never pay a 15 buck monthly for an mmo subscription because not worth the money..... LOL
when i used to play f2p games only (never tried p2p at that time) i used to say i would never pay for a p2p game if i had so many f2p mmos around..... untill i felt the need to spend money in order to improve my toon (pay to win) so i stoped right there (sadly had spend like 150 bucks already in a little less than a month) a couple years ago...... so now i always suggest anyone to check good p2p games before spending on any f2p cash sinking mmos
Except...it doesn't really have anything to do with free to play and everything to do with mobile applications targetted at consumers who may not have any idea that they are spending real world money while in a game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Alright on the tapzoo one if this is same family I saw a yahoo! news about it was really stupid... parents bought the app using THEIR ACCOUNT since they had "parental controls"(come on don't parents realize yet if it's "child proof" it's only adult proof when I was growing up my folks joked well long standing tradition... you want to open a child proof cap ask a child) set and didn't realize the "key" for the parental controls was active which means she could buy more on her touch for 5-15 minutes in which time she bought the $100 buckets of stars. You serious just buy an app for your kid and don't sit with them 15 minutes to make sure it works just turning them loose with an ipod touch with no supervision? The kid said "I didn't know it was real money". I'm sorry when I was that young my parents sat with me to watch for a bit and decided I was smart enough when I became a teen.
Well now that the feds are involved its going to be bad for all of us. Free to play is going to be done and over with now for sure, it might take a few months, but whenever you get those guys doing an investigation nothing good ever comes of it.
Free to play has always been a gimick, and this kind of thing proves it. However I have to ask about the iphone as I don't have one and never will. Are there parental controls? and how does one go about setting those.
It's stupid to blame games because some kids spent a crazy amount of money on them. Why don't we put a blame on candy-making companies - kids can go out and buy a bag of candies for 1400$, can't they? No, they can't, because adults aren't letting them to get hold on such sums of money. Now, why they're letting children to get hold of the same sums in non-physical forms? It seems it's totally unbelievable hard to create an iPad account for their kids to play with, without a credit card attached to it...
Online Games in Girl's Eyes
http://chickgeekgames.blogspot.com
What bothers me about this issue (though my wallet would prefer I remain silent) is that we have issues like gambling and drug addiction putting families out of job and home but we are worrying about issues like this. That is to say that when people start showing up on the Oprah Winfrey show by the boat load to complain about getting divorced,fired and evicted because they spent too much on the Smurf's app then I can rally behind an investigation like this.
One day the gov't will realize that we have more pressing issues than the kind of cream baseball players rub on their buttocks or who's skirt the president is running his hands under and stop spending billions upon billions of dollars on things that have no bearing on our lives or safety.
Aint that the truth lol
One thing i haven't seen anyone post is the reality of things (for want of a better way to describe it). Kids and teenagers these days are unresponsible but can be very smart, My fiance used to give her 2 year old her phone while it was playing music cause he'd dance to it, phone was always locked, one day he'd managed to unlock it and did so every time he managed to get it thereafter. If a 2 year old can accidently unlock a phone and remember how then it goes without saying that kids in general can and will find ways to get past security and parental features. Anyone who says they have a golden child who doesn't do anything behind their back or when they step out of the room is a blatent liar.
Intelligent parenting! Huzzah! You, sir or madame, deserve a medal. My hat is off to you. *doffs hat*
Seriously, if more parents had common sense like you, we wouldn't be seeing these kinds of ludicrous shenanigans.
the problem with itune is that you need to have a valid Credit card to register an account. without that, you can't download anything, not even free one.
yeah, the FTC should advise apple to remove that CC validation craps.
Which FF Character Are You?
Agreeing with lizardbones. Everyone saw "F2P" and we get the whole "F2P vs P2P MMO" crew in here. This was all mobile application stuff, which have different ways of buying items and such IN THE GAME, rather than having to go elsewhere to get currency. Simmer down, kids. No one saying they're going after F2P MMOs (whether you think they should or not).
I reiterate the points made before - parents need to RAISE THEIR KIDS. 'Nuff said.
First off pal i'm probably older than you are at 31 so enough with the kid abuse. secondly instead of trying to slam someones poor choice of wording it would have been much easier for you to simply mention that it was a poor choice of word to use. Scam is a bit harsh a word to use but it's the word i chose to use to describe what i was saying.
As for the throwing around slander i'd suggest you know the law as i do before writing slander yourself..
1. Law Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person's reputation.
2. A false and malicious statement or report about someone.
This is the kind of fuzzy logic that is itself a form of bad parenting, imo. Where parents themselves are so brainwashed to the idea that these companies have unimpeachable rights and the public should be forced to conform to what is best for the corporate bottom line.
I agree that it isn't rocket science. There should be absolutely no need for a parent to disable purchases from inside any F2P or P2P game. This should be configured off by defaul from the companies offering these products. The consumer can then turn them on when they want to use them. Teach your children by example and demand that companies not exploit children or any consumers.