Anthemis - Is Gaming the New Gambling? 5.11.2018

Is Gaming The New Gambling? - Anthemis Insights - Medium

• Micro-transactions system that is raising in the gaming industry. This micro-transactional system is a sort of weaponised behavioural psychology, perfectly pitched to exploit all the cognitive weaknesses that make people so susceptible to addiction and compulsion. They pull all the standardised strings of problem gambling:
  1. The desire for one more go
  2. The misplaced belief that an unlucky streak must come to and end.
  3. The hope that continuing to bet will reverse the losses already incurred."
• Three trends:
  1. Free-to-play games implementing micro-transactional elements to their game design to extract maximum monetary value from each player.
  2. Game publishers start implementing gambling industry techniques such as ‘Random reward schedule’ — which gives the player the illusion of skill.
  3. Free-to-play games are now targeting a particular player group called ‘whales’ who pour huge amounts of money into the games via these micro-transaction techniques.
• Many rules and regulations that protect children from participating in gambling activities. But very few rules exist in the gaming industry. Skins betting and lootboxes have to be considered as gambling practices and therefore must be regulated.