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nostalgic_dragon t1_j0umzaq wrote

So the article starts out with saying that Epic are the creators of rocket league, which is wrong and off to a bad start. Reading the article I'm wondering how illegal the practices were compared to what companies do all the time. I'm not trying to what aboutism this, but the collecting data from children fine seems dumb, because children lie about their age online all the time. Then that data is collected. The article doesn't specify that the users were known to be children and still had data collected, just that they collected the data and their data deletion requests were a pain to deal with. The article also mentioned Google had the second highest fine for YouTube data collection of children.

For the other claim I can't speak to since I've played a single match of Fortnite, but non confirming purchases is annoying as hell, but also very common. It should be removed from all products, especially if purchases were able to occur even on loading screens. Now, parents could choose to not have credit cards attached to a child account and could also use parental locks on consoles the require a code to buy stuff, but that puts too much parenting onto the parent.

People love to hate on epic and Fortnite because it is popular, but they've honestly been good for the industry standards when it comes to micro transactions. There are a lot of predatory games out there, even rocket league changed its loot box garbage when epic was buying them. That's not saying they are moral or perfect, but I'd rather their practices than roblox and the tons of other free to play garbage out there.

Edit: The FTC report is much better than this article. Can be found here.

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ichewyou t1_j0v0jur wrote

Thanks for posting the FTC report. Definitely worth the read.

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Orongorongorongo t1_j0vit3x wrote

>Epic employees expressed concern about its default settings. As early as 2017, Epic employees urged the company to change the default settings to require users to opt in for voice chat, citing concern about the impact on children in particular. Despite this and reports that children had been harassed, including sexually, while playing the game, the company resisted turning off the default settings. And while it eventually added a button allowing users to turn voice chat off, Epic made it difficult for users to find, according to the complaint.

I wonder why on earth Epic resisted making voice chat opt in for children? It seems a no-brainer. I must be missing something obvious.

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Heartable t1_j0vl48g wrote

Gonna guess that voice chat helps players get hooked into the game.

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Orongorongorongo t1_j0vm5pe wrote

Hmmm yeah. More hooked = more in game purchases. Morals and ethics aside, it seems so risky from a business point of view.

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linguotgr t1_j0xohgx wrote

One of the key points of that Fishing for Whales presentation from however many years ago was that harassment is profitable, because in a freemium economy the people using default skins can be browbeaten in to making skin purchases to avoid that harassment. I have very little doubt that part of the reason they wanted voice chat on for everyone was so that everyone would be able to push each other in to more sales.

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erosram t1_j0vlqw5 wrote

Probably felt it was integral to the experience.

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Light_Error t1_j0v5fng wrote

I dunno, I have heard good things about Fortnite’s battle pass. But if it is anything like Overwatch and lootboxes, people will take what was a decent system and morph it into something terrible. I’ve heard nothing but bad about OW 2’s system. Halo: Infinite is better with no time restrictions but few desired rewards. And this is only the first go around. Hopefully I am wrong, but I have not seen it go any other way in the past decade.

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Agreeable-Display-77 t1_j0xim36 wrote

Wish all of you would stop buying the additional trash. Believe it or not. Companies used to only have map packs to make money off of. It made them step it up on making awesome game modes that people wanted to play for a long time. They needed people to buy copies, and then maps later. Sometimes they even gave map packs free to bring more people in. Madden had Squads with regular team ranked mode. Could name your squad and everything. Halo used to bring out new maps constantly. Many for free. It was awesome. Let them make their $69 or $59 and thats it. We dont want game modes that need spending money to be competitive, and we dont need skins. We need good games.

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Light_Error t1_j0xm7rp wrote

I don’t buy lootboxes or anything. My point was that something that can seem benign in one company’s hand, like Fortnite in OP’s post, can be taken to greater extremes than thought before. I saw it happen to both the app stores and games over a decade plus. There are degrees of badness that can be discussed while still agreeing they shouldn’t be there. I am with you though on the wish for games to have less ways to spend. The only stuff I ever buy is stuff that’d be equivalent to expansion packs on PC back in the day.

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