They give out daily free items to draw you into the cash shop and then have small purchase offers to break the first purchase barrier. They sell in game currency to obfuscate the money you're spending and sell it in random amounts so you need to overbuy or make multiple purchases. They set dubious cost savings measures of 500-800% value on items to make them more artificially tantalizing.

They got me for $7 with the small cheap purchases. Then I hit level 60 and found myself thinking “well $100 is something I can easily afford, why not spend it?”.

I then uninstalled the game. My wife was glad and said I’d been a grumpy zombie all weekend, ignoring her and my kids.

Have you played it? I have. It's constantly throwing bundles with "+x00% value" in your face and does everything it can to try to get you to pay for stuff. And it gets far far worse when you hit the level cap. And no, it's not a valid excuse that it's a free game, so "I shouldn't complain". I'll gladly pay 60-120 Euros for a complete game as long as it treats me fairly as a customer.

I don't think it matters _when_ it becomes predatory. Whether or not gambling should be legal aside, if gambling for minors is illegal in a jurisdiction then i'd expect any game that becomes predatory at any point to be managed as gambling.

All of this is subject to the definition of gambling, predatory, etc - of which i'm not trying to argue. Just saying that befriending children with the goal of handing them drugs after a "long" period doesn't change that i'm still handing them drugs. Same goes for this, i would think - if it falls within those definitions, of course.

Diablo Immortal is wild too because Diablo 2 primed me 15 years ago to be a gambling addict. It took them awhile but the finally turned the casino of my teens into a real casino. I hate it, I wish I could get my teen hours back that I played Diablo 2.

Agreed. I've often thought of this, with respect to MMOs, and RPGs/etc with drop rates.

Inherently games are all just dopamine drivers. Some are of course based on physical skills (coordination/timing/etc), others on knowledge as a skill (exploiting game mechanics/etc). Where it gets fuzzy fast for me is very basic MMOs, RPGs, etc - RNG based mechanics. The fact that i completed the dungeon with a skill (knowledge/etc to play the dungeon correctly and win) doesn't seem, to me, to change the RNG roll at the end.

I'm in no way arguing that any RNG equates to gambling.. in the classical sense.. but it kinda does, if you squint. So when does it become bad? Is it when we make gambling addicts? Because old fashioned games with RNG rewards (loot/etc) likely form addicts (if we stretch the word for discussion).. myself included. Or is it just when we involve money?

Money seems an easy line to draw.. but is it fair to children if we make them gambling addicts and only charge them once they hit 18? Spend their youth training for the casinos, only to take part when their old enough to lose it all?

I don't have any answers.. but it feels like we're playing fast and loose with weaponized dopamine here. As with most of our society, i suppose.

I fully agree that we're training future addicts. And it's not like people don't know. There will be a deliberate sequence of hook, time sink, random reward because that's most addictive.

But I find balancing this very difficult. We want fun games and fun things are addictive. But we don't want addict-creating games. So how do you measure which amount of addiction is the correct amount?

I suspect we're unable to do anything until we understand the brain better, what defines addiction (at a very measurable, concrete way), etc.

The one thing that does scare me about addiction + money is that, like Diablo, the companies incentive seems aligned with getting players to spend vast quantities of hours and money. Regardless of what it is right now or what value it offers for free, that seems to be their incentive.

Simple buy models without MTX seem an easier model to keep company incentives aligned with player incentives.

I played a bunch of D2 as well, and D3. The thing with those games is that you can still enjoy the end game content after finishing the main game. Repeat on higher difficulty and then you have the option of respecing without having to start from scratch.

If you are having to pay to enjoy end game now, that's pretty sad.

Diablo Immoral!

People aren’t really addicted to progress, that’s window dressing for the mechanic that gives you the gambler’s high.

I think a lot of folks who are effectively immune to gambling’s allure dismiss the danger to others when they don’t see anything slowing or blocking progression because that’s what would motivate them to even entertain the thought of engaging the gambling mechanic. I think what you’re really evaluating is whether or not it’s pay to win which while terrible, isn’t insidiously predatory.

Being predatory isn't about gating later advancement, that's actually less of a problem in my eyes, that's just a different form of DLC. What makes some games predatory is when when combine payments with randomness as to what benefit you get. That's why people are calling it gbling, because it uses the same mechanisms and is using all the lessons learned from casinos as to how to effectively maximize engagement and income.

The difference? Gambling is often regulated so there's specific payout percentages. Because there's not a direct monetary payout but instead a decoupled game benefit, it's not regulated the same way, so they're free to do whatever they want with the payouts (including valuing all the items however they want if they are called on to), as well as market to children who may not recognize the system for what it is.