EU Accuses Epic, EA, And More Of Tricking Gamers With In-App Purchases

They missed Nexon.

Been waiting for supercell to get looked at!

well... it's the kids fault, but mostly it's their parent's fault - they know it costs real money for skins and etc. but they still do it anyway.

Welcomed, but a little late to the show.

These problems should have been stamped out before they got so deep into game culture. It seems almost every game is sold piece meal now. The latest crappy tactic of 'play the game early' when you buy the more expensive version of the game. The game is not released early, it's released when it is intended and those who don't pay extra are punished by playing late.

Frankly the whole mobile crap is fully entrenched in regular gaming now across all platforms. I might just go to the casino, seems like a way to save money.

Based.

The long-form commenters really showed up for this one lmao

The game media spoke out against this and don't give them 8's.

At least in my made up reality.

I will only say that I agree that in game/app purchases are bad. They have nothing to do with the game. Ubisoft is the worst about this. Just take a look at all their games and how much you can spend on pointless things. Stuff that some kid will see and say that looks cool I want to have that skin or such other. Also the parents should not allow their kids access to spend money but that is not a solution. Stopping all the purchases are. Mobile or otherwise. DLC is where it started but at least that is not inside the game or using the fake premium money.

It was about it on the news on tv yesterday in Sweden too.. ("last night in sweden") But my perception of it was it had nothing to do with EU and it was a collaboration between different organizations in a number of different european countries. I might be wrong.


The main thing they talked about was not loot boxes, it was how in a game you do not know how much money you spend since you spend virtual currencies, for example "robucks", instead of real currencies like euro or kronor. A person from the swedish lobby group for games of course played down the problems and thought it was important for the "game experience" to have virtual currencies instead of real money. (an argument about immersion in games, which was so ridiculous. If he was truly worried about immersion, he would be against microtransactions in the first place since they occur in very weird ways and places at times. And it was such a farfetched argument. )



EU does not have the right to make actual laws, just directives. Then the different countires makes the actual laws. If they do not make laws which are in accordance with EU directives, then there could be fines the member country needs to pay to the european union..



And the EU right to "legislate" is limited to certain areas. (Like rules for trade, because the EU has a so called "inner market" so there are sometimes rules about trading and free trade within the union, and so on. )

It is a little bit like comparing it to federal laws and state laws in united states. Federal laws in some areas and in other areas the state decides the laws (like how each state decides their own sales tax or minimum wage)

But there are differences too of course. The comparison is not perfect.

For exampel, i think there are federal crimes in united states but i think EU has nothing to do with crime laws in the different member states. and as i said, EU just makes directives. Not actual laws. but a federal U.S. law is an actual law. There are probably other differences too which are important.

Good. For years the scam of "cheapest virtual item cost 4000 in-game coin but you can only buy 3000 coin as the lowest amount" scam is a very persistent one, unnecessarily making people pay way more money than they are willing to without directly buying what they want. Ubishit is currently doing it in XDefiant. Most mobile games also doing it.

Another scam is pay to win model, making the game unnecessarily unplayable to make people buy items to make the game decent.

Another scam is adding additional paid in-game item to already non-free games. People cannot get what the game offers despite they buying the game, making people pay more and more.

Another scam is in the way "complete editions", "season pass" and "battle pass" BS. To make more money they remove the base game and instead they add "complete editions", forcing people to pay for content they don't care.

Another scam again, Ubishit unnecessarily making the game online only (The Crew series) but then they shut down the server without offering offline mode preventing people from playing it again. If the point of the game was online or if it was MMO it would be normal, however the game really designed as singleplayer game that has multiplayer mode. The point of the series is not necessarily playing it online as it's not really fundamentally designed for it. They clearly do so to make people buy the next game.

Another BS is gacha programs. They are designed to suck your money to get a random item. Such programs should be banned for they are gamble. Gamble is one of the most important thing kids shouldn't get used to. They should ban such programs from Google Play ASAP.

And lastly, the borderline scam is DLCs. The company intentionally cut content to sell it additionally for more price. SEGA known to rip Persona games and first sell the ripped version and afterwards they sell the full game, they ask full price for both versions ayy lmao. For example in Persona 4 people talk about stuff that never happened and they mention stuff that doesn't exist yet but when you play Persona 4 Golden all things people say make sense because whatever they say exist in the game lol. Also, some companies intentionally making DLCs confusing making people pay way more than necessary by also making them buy what they don't want. One of the way they do is, the user cannot access the content of DLC Z when they also don't buy DLC X and DLC Y they don't want.

As for what kind of scams online video game distribution programs like Steam, Microsoft and Sony does, Steam not offering regional prices making people pay a lot, way more than how much an american or some European country citizens has to pay. Steam enforces price on games anymore, not letting developers set the price they want below the limit of what Valve orders for if the price is below the limit Valve remove the store page of the game lol. Sony forcing people to login to their system that over 100 countries are not supported so people cannot play the game they bought before this system forced with no way to offer refund. As for Microsoft Store, their store is so confusing it's not clear if the game you bought can played on Xbox and/or PC. When people wanna buy a game for PC it turns out it's for Xbox lol. For some reason Microsoft insist to not divide Xbox Store from PC store.

If video game scams had applied to the vehicle industry, imagine you buy a car but you need to buy DLC to have the car has doors and wheels. Imagine your car requires login to the system which when you cannot login the car doesn't work. When you buy a car they ask additional price to its engine and to have an engine you bother with gacha system. Imagine they rip the car so it has one seat and 2 tires but then they release its full version that has 4 seats and wheels but both car model costs the same. Imagine when you wanna buy a car you cannot directly buy the car, you have to pay for in-store coin so you have to pay x1.8 price of the car but you can only buy 1 car for these coins and then rest of your money wasted on it and they say "damn if you had 0.2 more coin you could buy another car so wanna buy another 1.8 coins?". WTF is this BS? They destroyed video game industry and sheep still make these companies earn money lol.

Please spread like wild fire.