Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill

Re:Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill by kevin_b_er on Friday July 03, 2020 @10:16PM (#23729474)

> But he says he's amazed that in a game designed to be played by children it would even be possible to spend thousands of pounds across a thousand transactions over the course of just a few weeks.

These games are designed around this. The dark patterns are intentional.

> "We encourage parents to review their payment settings on third-party services, such as Google Play, as they typically have an option to require a password for each purchase made and/or to prevent any information from being saved in browser settings that could allow them to be reused."

Then you blame the parents for being scammed.

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Re:Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill by balladeer on Saturday July 04, 2020 @11:28AM (#23732903)

A friend, who worked at a famous mobile/Fb gaming company, once told me his company would, sometimes, assign an engineer for an individual user or just few users. High spending users.

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Re:Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill by lapsed_pacifist on Saturday July 04, 2020 @01:23PM (#23733626)

"whales" is the free-to-p(l)ay/ freemium games industry term for this sort of power user, who will spend vastly more than the average user and carries the lions share of the profit for the developer.

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Re:Dad horrified at £4,642 gaming app bill by Sarah_Giggs on Saturday July 04, 2020 @05:52PM (#23735173)

It's the app's fault they were scammed, I think this is more a case of pointing out that there are ways of mitigating this through the app store. Whether that's enough though is another question entirely.

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