How mobile games are designed to SCAM you.

Pokemon Call of Duty Diablo Immortal raid Shadow Legends these are just a few of the hundreds of

games

run by

scam

mers trying to bankrupt you. Let's expose them as they were three weeks ago. I started playing the incredibly popular

mobile

game. Pokemon unite seems simple, you are on a team of Pokemon and your goal is to go to the other side of the map and score goals against the other team of Pokemon. It's a completely free game and over 100 million people have downloaded the game, but I had already finished the tutorial when I was slapped with a full-page ad to spend ten dollars on something called a join membership.

No way did I think about it, so I closed that tab and continued playing not realizing at the time that this was all part of a larger plan to cleanse myself of everything I have. It took me only six more minutes of gameplay before I was greeted with this. Look, the game gives you a login bonus every day you come back to the game and play, but this pass eventually gives you bonuses on top of that bonus, which actually seemed pretty reasonable for the 60 EOS gems it cost me, which is roughly equivalent to a dollar in real money, so I bought it one of the first times I spent money. a free game and I felt alive, the way you feel when you manage to get one of those lightning deals from Amazon right before they sell out after the first few days, although I started to notice that while I was receiving a lot of new things and constant level ups and I They had given four different Pokémon to play with.

I started losing a lot. I started to realize that this game was less about skill on the battlefield, combat is effectively just smashing your different attacks as soon as they're ready to use it it's more about how strong you make your Pokémon before you put a hit on it. foot on the battlefield, so I decided I needed some held items. Held items are what you equip your Pokémon to give them improved stats, so I headed to the store and spent about half of the total in-game EOS Coins I had earned so far purchasing three items, one that increases my maximum health. , one that gives me health regeneration and another that increases my damage output, and I thought my Pokémon is finally equipped.

I do not do it. I have to think more about this. I can play the game, so I charged into battle with my head held high and was completely demolished. At this point it became very clear to me that it wasn't enough to just buy the held items because when you first get one they are almost completely useless, like this attack boost scope lens I bought literally gave me an extra 0.4 chance of getting a critical hit that caused more damage. Imagine adding 0.4 to your dinner one night, you would get one. extra p to be competitive in ranked matches, you actually need to level up your items up to grade 30.

At that point, they'll give you a big game-changing upgrade, like let's say 15 more damage, but the problem is leveling up your Items is a ridiculous process, you can't gain levels with skilled play, you have to buy them with something called item boosters, but these item boosters are so incredibly slow to gain through any organic means that I was practically forced to do so. my second purchase. Battle Pass, this game and almost all other

mobile

games

use battle passes as a way to unite their players to pay more money every time you complete a game, it will tell you the rewards you got and then the rewards you could have cattle.

On top of that, if you just bought the battle pass, which is just this extra stream of rewards to keep you playing and get back into the game, and in this case a lot of those rewards turned out to be what I was looking for. power-ups this cost ten dollars in real money. I bought it because the alternative option was to spend weeks of my life fighting for it, but at the time I was realizing that I had already spent more on this game than any other. mobile game that I have played before, at least now when I was playing it I could guarantee myself a constant supply of new item boosts so I could remain a competitive fighter and that is where you would expect the story to end well bad because well when I thought that I had paid my way out of my troubles was actually when things sunk the most until now because it is at this point that I realized how many of these item boosters I was going to need, see why when you are upgrading your items, all you you can see is how many item boosts it takes to get from the level you're on to the next level so when I saw that all my level one items only needed three item boosts to level up and then I saw that with this battle pass I could Get a pack of 30 item boosters every few days of play.

I thought these 10 would easily cover me, thanks, but what the game didn't tell me was that with each level you go up with your held items, the more item boosts you'll need to get to the next, so to get my three held items to level 30 It wasn't that I needed 100 or 200 of them, I actually needed no less than 7761. When I realized this, my jaw practically hits the floor to put that number into perspective in the entire base game of Pokémon, combine the maximum amount of power-ups of items you can earn without going into the whole loot box opening system is 1535.

If I fully max out my Battle Pass, which is already something I paid for. Also, I could get an extra 360, but I want to say no. Not only would this process take me approximately 150 days of play every day to earn it, but even with that I would. I still need to find a way to get the remaining 5866 item boosts I still needed and that's when you almost have no choice but to go to the store. How much do you think this was going to cost me for a simple almost required mobile game? buy the app 100 100 dollars in real money and if you want to max out all of your items, not just the three you currently have equipped 760 dollars or Pikachu for that price, but the scary thing is at this point I have the choice that I have.

I put a lot of time and love into my account, but I didn't feel like it was an option to just stop playing. Either I paid a hundred dollars or I accept that I will be disproportionately disadvantaged in every future game I want to play. play I decided to do it, which I know is probably the most useless purchase I've ever made in my entire life and I've made a lot of useless purchases over the years, but I wanted to give you guys a real experience. knowing and being able to show you what would happen next and sure enough, it somehow managed to get even worse because then at this point with only a hundred dollars worth of the supposedly free mobile game I found out how Pokémon Unite makes so much money.

We have established at this point that EOS Gems are the premium currency that you can use to buy almost anything in the game, but it is not the only currency because you also have EOS Coins that combine most of the things that Gems offer, but you need Next, we have tickets that come in three flavors. EOS tickets, fashion tickets and Holo tickets. Fashion and Holo Tickets unlock new skins for your Trainer and the Pokémon of your choice, or Tickets allow you to purchase those item boosts as well as Boost Cards that increase the number of experience points you earn, Tickets like coins, they can be earned in events and challenges, when they run out you have to buy them with gems, are you up to date because you also have AOS energy which is necessary if you want to play? a match and get the right set of rewards, but it gradually runs out every time you do it and even now we have the limited-time Cake Coin for the ongoing Anniversary Cake Challenge on top of that, if you haven't guessed already after two.

After weeks of playing this game, my head was spinning. The game is so incredibly confusing to the point of being stressful and I was about to find out that it's intentionally

designed

that way, not to mention finding out if I really wanted to continue playing. playing the game competitively with full access to all the characters I wanted to use with a good selection of outfits for them and enough energy to continue getting rewards for doing so, this game was going to cost me at least another twelve hundred dollars. for the next six months so I quit the game and grabbed my laptop and started researching and this is where I understood how much I was being manipulated and was about to be manipulated and how widespread these developers who are effectively

scam

mers have become.

It all starts with the first expense and this is not a term that I made up, this is a term that is actually used by developers. This is Taurus Jernstrom, CEO of mobile gaming company Tribe Flame, giving a talk on monetization strategies for mobile games. the first spin breaks their eyes and then they consider themselves spenders in the game. It's okay for me to spend on the game. What it's teaching these other developers is that 98% of players, when they start playing a free-to-play mobile game, will go into This under the premise that they won't make any in-app purchases.

I was one of them, chances are you are one of them too, but by the time these games can make you drop your first dollar, they have effectively broken it. Your barrier, I mean your willingness to make more payments, will go through the roof, so you first need to break the wall in retrospect. This must be why Pokémon Unite gave me that super cheap login bonus just six minutes after I started playing, they don't give a dime, they just wanted to crack me from a free player to a spender and just I realized this after seeing this developer talk about it, but the way the game manipulated me into buying it was through the pinning technique by first presenting me with an expensive in-app purchase and they actually knew that I I wouldn't buy that Unite membership, they set my expectations that ten dollars is the value of a prize pool in this game, which meant that when they then went for it with that dollar I deal to get the login bonus pass.

I would have felt foolish for turning it down because of the comparative value I got, but I realized that the reason I cared so much about this purchase and the reason why so many people invest so much cash. In these games it is based on another simple human facet that is being exploited, we like to be better than our peers, it is integrated into our DNA that our survival depends on having a competitive advantage against the people around us, so we face Rich players each other in something allows each of them to be able to pay for that competitive advantage and the only party that really wins is the game developer who charges them.

You can see this technique in all the most popular games, like recently Diablo Immortal, where you will get a divided by the players who have spent a lot of money and who in the industry are called whales, keep in mind that we are talking about the gaming industry, he says something about this, if you are trying to be a free player in the Diablo model, you are effectively a secondary character to these whales and your best chance of winning is to simply stay by their side and support them and this is by design, it gives the two for percent of the player base that is willing to spend thousands of dollars that Power Trip feeling that keeps them coming back to spend even more and unfortunately, even if you never defeat one of these whale players, you are still unknowingly feeding the system, by being able to destroy you with ease, generates the emotion that the whales continue to pay and this.

This is where I really start to hate this if it was as simple as paying a lot of money and then winning from now on, that would be too kind and would mean the developers would lose more money to the whales. So they found a way around it too. What these games do now is that when you pay to get much stronger, they will allow you to get your first satisfying wins with noticeably weaker players to stimulate that reward mechanism and so that you can associate that purchase with It's a positive feeling, but once Before this ends, we will soon stop pitting you against other players who have also spent large sums of money on the game, thus always creating this feeling that no matter how much you paid, you are always a purchase.

Far from being content with being better than your peers but never getting there because there will always be people willing to spend even more than you. That's why I felt like no matter how much I spent on Pokémon Unite, I kept losing and I mean Diablo's emote haul is even worse, you know, it's a big deal to pay ten bucks for an in-game purchase. You know, I was absolutely horrified that you had to spend a thousand on Pokémon Unite, well, in this game, it can cost. you 100,000 to max out your character a hundred thousand dollars to escape this feeling of constantly needing a little more power and that's just until they release an update thatI increased that limit, so I made my first purchase. feel the social pressure of wanting to be better than other people, that's just the first step of the hook habit hobby model that is starting to become the playbook for a top-grossing game, because to make real money at the cost from me, they also have to make sure their game becomes that and according to this guy the best way to do that is to give me fast progression to start with to make sure the first levels are incredibly fast, the first unlocks are incredibly cheap and the first two incredibly easy enemies, this stimulates the reward centers in the players' brains, the same reward centers that give you a rush every time you pass a test at school or every time you get a raise at work. work and it does it in such a way that your brain will start to want to play these games as a regular part of your day because the progression you are getting gives you more instant gratification than probably any other part of your life and that is why now you barely You can find a game that doesn't have a battle pass built in, it's less than the ten dollars it might cost you per season, it's more. about trying to form a habit within you at the point where you have paid real money to get extra rewards every day, who won't log in and claim them and at the point where they do, why not just play a couple of games?

Also, it now makes sense why Pokémon Unite was so interested in me purchasing the battle pass because as soon as I did, the most efficient way to play from now on is to log in a minimum of once a day in some games like Diablo goes even further by offering login bonuses that start small but get bigger and bigger over time, as long as you log in every day to the point where you'll be afraid of missing a day because you'll lose a lot of progress. on this bonus scale, but it's the hook habit part of the hobby that's the most dangerous because once that habit is formed and you've already spent massive amounts of time and money progressing your character, this is kind of where I'm at with Pokémon Unite.

Now these companies know you're not going anywhere, they have your full attention and that's when they start changing the way they continue to make money away from traditional boosters because you've already spent hundreds or thousands to strengthen your character. and more about convenience, this seems so horrible to me but effective in slowing down your natural progression for the sole purpose of trying to sell you ways to speed it up again, as if the experience is multiplied, making you not have to pay to get that. The same feeling of high stimulation and rapid progression that I used to have when I started playing for free, is not a different strategy than that of drug dealers.

I must point out those who effectively build their businesses by handing out freebies to turn customers into addicts in the hope that they then become dependent and are willing to pay to maintain that level, it sounds stupid but at this point in the player's journey most will pay real money to earn even, say, a 10 experience point bonus and it's all driven by something called the Ikea effect. You should go deeper, look, it is a fairly well-seen fact that Ikea furniture is not of the best quality but since it comes in pieces and you have to assemble it yourself, that effort you have put in makes the values ​​much more and exactly the same.

The developers know that even If you realize that your game is not the most balanced and consumer-friendly fair service out there, once you've spent weeks developing your character and putting in the effort to make it right for you, your attachment is so high that you'll be willing to do everything. possible to keep the fun alive, but then we have the value question that we've established at this point, why someone might want to make an in-game purchase, but what moves that needle that you're pushing? That they want to spend exorbitant amounts of money is largely because they don't realize how much they are spending thanks to a tactic known as Material Distortion, the idea of ​​creating a layer between the in-game money they spend and the real value of what they spend. that's costing you and I realized, oh my god, this is as real as when I wanted to update my articles in Pokémon.

First I had to buy item boosts to do that, but then it's not like I could just pay. dollars to buy those item boosters, I had to use EOS Tickets and then when I wanted to buy EOS Tickets, I had to use EOS Gems or to put it another way, I had to convert my currency three times to be able to do what I wanted. with this it's almost criminal because not only have you started to feel like you're not spending real money, but you also have no idea how much each purchase is worth, not to mention the fact that you can almost never buy the exact amount of gems you need. necessity means that A you spend more than necessary and B you will always have leftover gems in your wallet that cannot be exchanged for cash, which will encourage you to make your next purchase by reloading a little more and the cherry on top of this whole alternative reality of effective is that if you look closer you realize that this game does not have a single mention of the word purchase, they never use the word loot boxes, they are prize boxes that they never use. the word buy is always get they don't even use the word buy it's an Emporium here it really reminds me of those killer clowns you used to see on the internet they have the most attractive innocent facade for a child but right under that thin veil you are pure evil, imagine if If there was a High Street shop that tried to do the trick that made you exchange or charge for tokens on entry that could only be spent in that shop, they wouldn't get away with it and nor should they. guys, oh yeah, and if we say that material distortion makes you pay two or three times more than you would otherwise pay for in-game items, then the reward randomization that all these major games now use was going to take that up to 10 times this is Call of Duty mobile, it's actually one of my favorite mobile games from a gameplay perspective, but check this out, many of the rarest and most desirable items in the game are locked behind loot boxes like e.g. , I really want this gun. they have it in the middle, it's

designed

so that when I kill people it turns them into a shadow which will earn me a lot of social validation and it costs 30 premium coins to spin, it's worth about 50 cents so I head to En The store bought me 420 coins which should be enough to have 14 runs of this.

I will definitely buy that gun, but then I lose the first one and realize that the price just went up and will continue to go up every time. I tried 30-40 to 120-300 and beyond makes me feel like I'm so close to getting it every time as if the pointer literally sits on top of it and then just slides past the gun. I really want him to reach for one too. For one, place a received marker over everything I've unlocked so far, reminding me how far I've come and encouraging me to finish it and get everything the loot box could contain.

Only when I checked the hidden statistics did I realize this. It's not a roulette, as it seems like each item doesn't have the same chance of appearing, but in reality the actual chance of getting this weapon literally starts at 0.08 percent and increases only 0.01 each time until you've received all of them. . another item in the box 0.08 percent, that is, it is disgusting. You will almost certainly pay at least 100 for this weapon, which is several times more than almost any player would have considered if he had the price of a normal product in a store. So all of this explains how these games can make frankly exorbitant spending amounts seem reasonable.

The only thing left is how they create the sense of urgency for those purchases and the way they do that is simply by overloading the player. Do you remember how Pokémon? unite has no less than seven different currencies and how I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed by all the interconnecting systems that arose as a result of them, none of them needed to exist. You could have had the exact same game where everything was bought and sold with just For simple EOS coins, the only reason we had to have seven coins is to create multiple separate in-game economies where you don't just have to be rich In reality, you can't beat it because the more resources you spend on one currency, the more you discover that another becomes your bottleneck.

Most games do it through energy. Pokémon Unite has it, and to be honest, the Shadow Legend game's raid system is even more atrocious. where every time you choose to play you are spending not only your time but also this virtual energy currency that you can wait stupid amounts of time to recharge on its own or pay to recharge your tank, so to be very clear you not only have to pay to buy your items, level up your character and get your costumes, but also to play the game that is supposed to be free while at the same time feeling like you have to spend in all directions at once.

Also given the feeling that you have to do it quickly, no joke, ninety percent of the purchases that you will show in these games, somehow, they are all about to expire. You see timers everywhere, always counting down, there is no reason why this Pokémon costume should be needed. Expiring isn't like the Pokémon company is going to run out of virtual materials to make them, it's literally just to instill in you a sense of fear that if you look away if you just leave the game for too long, you might just miss the item of your dreams. dreams forever and what I've realized is that the worst part of how this game purposely stresses you out is the way it handles Pokémon.

You unlock access to cool new Pokémon just by playing, which is great, you even get rare. and fancy suits for them, but they are temporary unless you pay to keep them, the game takes away the things it has given you and this takes advantage of the fundamental loss of version that all humans have, we are biologically coded to value something disproportionately. that we own in such a way that the thought of losing it would cause us more pain than the happiness we would get from getting it if we didn't have it and these game companies are now using this to replace simply having a store that you can casually browse. in your own free time for allowing you to feel that the thing is yours first and then charging you so that you don't take it away in the long and short term, which I realized after three weeks of playing one of these games and delving into The The reason these companies are doing what they are doing is that the more addicted you become to the game, the more profitable the company will be.

Success in this industry is no longer defined by review scores or player satisfaction, it is defined by how effectively a developer is able to convert an innocent gamer who just wants to enjoy what they think is a game. free in someone who possesses all the traits of a severe gambling addiction. I wish I could be the bearer of good news, but the truth is this Shady. The practices are becoming more and more sophisticated as time goes on, they are starting to spread from mobile gaming to console gaming and we have even started to see the effects it is having on the next generation of gamers, generating all kinds of of impulse control disorders, so be aware of games that try to squeeze your money and feel free to subscribe to the channel and share this video if you found it helpful, but if you find yourself in one of these games and feel like you're on about to throw your phone at a wall in frustration I have the perfect product for you this is the new Rhino Shield grip which once attached to the back of your phone case prevents it from slipping out of your hands they weren't kidding when they did it They called it a grip but Actually, that's not my favorite part about this visual grip.

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