So watching my nephew play apple arcade games on his tv has been harrowing.
The spongebob game wasnt so bad. It had like a login bonus but it didnt seem to be too bad But once we got into the lego star wars game the f2p bullshit started. And oh god. This game clearly designed for kids had all the f2p bullshit. Login bonuses. Gridnyness. Multiple in game currencies. The daily/weekly ect missions. The unlockables
But god the racing game was even worse. 100000 things to unlock and basically nothing is by default basically. Sooooooooooo absurdly grindy. And most harrowing of all... i swear to god... 5 seperate in game currencies.
I want to reach out and scream to him "games werent always like this maaaaan"
One of Fortnite's most insidious cultural influences is that other kids are just about expected to bully "defaults" for not wasting enough money on that hypermonetized piece of trash.
I chipped in with some friends to get my buddy's kid a gameboy knockoff thingy that has roms of thousands of old games from like nes to ps2 on it. We did it specifically so the kid could have screen time without f2p and mtx skinner box stuff.
You should reach out to him and introduce him to emulation and older games. The benefit is that you can obtain a lot of roms at one time and the system requirements are very low. If you get an HDMI adapter and a controller you can deprogram him out of freemium games.
I'm planning to donate my current laptop to my younger cousins as a "SteamOS-like" machine and a HDMI adapter when they're old enough and load it with a bunch of games running at 1080p under Vulkan. I could introduce them to pokemon romhacks and shit.
I think back to Charles
Entertainment Cheese's children's casino when we talk about this kinda thing. It was only better back in the day because they didn't have the infrastructure to make it worse.
Honestly at this point it's better to just buy them a PS4 and some old school kid games and remasters then have them accept this as a normal part of recreation. Like my weird paranoid theory is that all this f2p shit targeted at the young is to create a sense of acceptance towards extractive capital infesting every aspect of their daily lives, intentionally or not.
anyway yeah the fucking YouTube games as well - pure attention grabbing cancer. I remember back in the day there were YouTube malware ads where you had to swat or shoot a fly or something, and that was considered unacceptable. Those no longer exist. Instead we have built in Angry Birds.
I will say in defense of this (but only a tiny bit) that for some people collecting things and unlocking things can be fun, and these types of games have a nearly infinite amount of things to collect and unlock. So in some ways getting all the bonus this and currency that and hoarding it like a dragon can be fun for some people.
I think it's bad for kids to be exposed to it like that though. Definitely treatifying their developing brains to such a level can't be healthy
One of the earliest examples of contemporary hypermonetized hell I can think of was a Smurf phone game that expected kids to collect berries... and collecting berries instantly charged their parents' phone account. Some kids racked up thousands of dollars of debt doing that.
5 seperate in game currencies.
I think the current king of contemporary hypermonetized grift is Diablo Immoral (it's too fun to call it that so I keep deliberately writing it that way) because it has even more currencies than that. Do you people not have phones?
Star Citizen may be an even more disgusting grift but it has less reach and is more about hollowing out the bank accounts of a specific niche of reactionary boomer and boomer-adjacent gamedads.
There's monetization on Apple Arcade? I thought the whole point was that most of the games were "plus" versions of mobile games just without the microtransactions. I wouldn't be surprised if companies were double dipping though, and doubly unsurprised if Apple was fine with that.
(controversial opinion) This is why I'm a fan of things like gamepass because it offers a different option for publishers to sell their game other than f2p, even though there's still games on gamepass that have f2p microtransaction bullshit in them.
The game industry is so bad with this shit and desperately needs a big change. Hearing devs say that using things like gamepass allows them to design without f2p microtransactions made me hopeful, but I think a majority of games on the service have some kind of mtx or expansion that they're selling still