Related: https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/
Unity games on mobile send your location to Unity servers every couple seconds through the Unity ad network.
Things you can do:
- GDPR Request to Unity
- use a DNS that blocks trackers, like mullvad
Haven’t seen a game that uses ads like this, but very good that it’s strictly prohibited now. That shit should never have taken off on mobile, but alas. At least we can prevent it on PC.
common Valve W
That’s nice and all,
but when will they tackle loot boxes?That shit has pushed plenty of minors into gambling addictions, but they don’t crack down on it, since they get a sweet cut of it all.
Valve in general isn’t the worst company,
but they’re far from innocent as well.They won’t, because loot boxes are their main source of income.
And this is exactly why “good companies” like Valve cannot save us. Good companies will never be a substitute for good regulations.
I agree with the overall sentiment, however:
Lootboxes are at least a conscious action you must take. They definitely have the same problems as gambling (because that’s what they are), but you can also choose not to engage with them. Ads however, are forced upon you, and do things that you cannot see (track you) and cannot turn off.
I get the hate for lootboxes, but as a casual who hasn’t played PC games in forever…what makes the lootbox mechanic any worse than CCGs?
Couldn’t it be said that MtG and other CCGs have been guilty of the exact same thing since their inception?
There two big differences to me are scale and value. A ccg has rare cards, but they aren’t actually that rare compared to loot boxes. Loot boxes tend to have both lower drop rates and pollute their drops with lots of garbage, even for rare drops. Secondly, physical cards have value, you can sell or trade them, you can buy singles of cards you want. You can use them for things other than the game as well.
CCGs hasn’t had a massive, massive Epic Games-paid astroturfing campaign against valve/steam like ‘lootboxes’ has. That’s the difference.
From my POV, there isn’t a difference, other than a CCG gives you physical objects so wotc can’t just up and decide that they don’t want to run magic anymore and make all of that loot disappear.
But from the gambling perspective, it’s exactly the same. Oh, actually one other difference, electronic gambling can fuck with the odds in real time while physical cards need to be determined when the pack is assembled. But it’s still based on false scarcity.
when will they tackle loot boxes?
Once loot boxes stop buying yachts.
Valve are the ones that popularized loot boxes. They’re never going to tackle them.
I read that games with ads were already banned from Steam a long time ago. That explains why we don’t have more junk in the Steam store. Judging by how many never completed early access asset flip games there are, it would be a complete cesspool with ad-supported games. Good decision by Valve.
Let me guess: Valve was not getting their cut from the ad money?
They are not, but they could have made it so. Instead they chose the win for everyone.
Two things can be true at once:
- valve so far took tremendous care of the people using their product. They have outclassed afaik every other billion dollar company in the world in terms of listening to their customers and not exploiting them to hell (as others do).
- billionaire companies are cancer. If gabe ever gives up valve (through death or whatever), we are at the mercy of a monopolist that can extract as much as they want.
My conclusion: force companies to behave like valve does now, but forever. Let them make money without exploiting people. And in case if valve: break any monopoly.
Down with shareholder value.
There’s a very good bill for achieving this result by a senator from my state, which requires companies to elect their board members through employees.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/08/15/warren-co-determination-capitalism-act
She’s my senator as well, and I love what she’s doing - but THAT bill is ~7 years old and dead in the water given the current administration. :-/
There’s an alternative, to make it popular with the American people. Republicans look bad to their constituents each time they vote against policies that would relieve the American people as a whole, such as net neutrality and healthcare for all.
Make some noise about it! Make it known that Democrats fight for everyone, and that a certain sect is very vocally rejecting that fight.
That would be a great solution. Another would be to put quotas of employees, customers, owners and the community (people living around a plant for example) in there. Just an idea though.
If the “win for everyone” includes shipping a game as microtransaction-based instead of ad-based, I doubt it’s really a win. Microtransactions usually come with dark patterns and rely on techniques from the gambling industry.
something like this would also harm their business in general. Garbage like that has no place anywhere.
Garbage like that has no place anywhere.
If app developers can’t get money from paid apps, then it makes sense to run ads. Especially if they do offer a paid (ad-free) version.
But if it’s a paid app already, like in Steam, it should definitely be ad-free.
Common valve W
Valve applying a bit of regulation (the right way) and still making piles of money, weird how that works.
I’ve been saying for years that if we want healthy economies, compare to human health. When the factors keeping growth at a controlled rate are disrupted, you end up with cancer.
Rant is related although covering hardware manufacturing rather than software:
Commodore manufactured in the USA and Europe some of the best-selling personal computers ever under lack of regulation. When the market became dominated by IBM-compatibles and Macintoshes, Commodore folded and left Superfund sites all over. (Superfund is basically EPA disaster declaration allowing for taxpayer funds release for large-scale cleanup operations.) Privatize the profits and socialize the losses. (lack of regulation led to the wrong way)
to anyone reading this comment:
I strongly recommend going to this government website and checking out the superfund sites located in your area. If you live anywhere east of the Mississippi, your chances of living near or not far from an illegal dumping site are really high.
https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live
I almost wish I hadn’t looked; knew my area had paper mills and wood processing, they’ve been dredging the waterways for PCBs (chlorinated organics) for decades.
I work with electronics and have heard from multiple older gentleman that when they were young, they saw old high-voltage transformers from power poles being replaced which would be leaking off the backs of the trucks until empty or even purposely tipped into the storm drains. Why is healthcare so expensive? 🤔
No apologies for being politics-adjacent in the Gaming community, billionaires aren’t keeping their hands out of anything either. Keep rewarding Valve and the good companies and shitting on the bad ones!
Some options you could consider include […] making your game free to play with optional upgrades sold via Microtransactions or Downloadable Content (DLC).
I am not sure this is better. I hate microtransactions usually more than ads.
Ads don’t cost you money, just time, and sometimes some screen space. They are annyoing and that sucks. But leveraging dark patterns as stuff like FOMO and other psychological tricks to nudge people towards microtransactions can cost you a lot. A business model, which relies on techniques from the gambling industry – also by catching some whales – is imo way worse than ads.
Such games aren’t made for all players, just for some who don’t have control over their expenses (or can really afford it).I can live with DLCs as long as there aren’t so many that it becomes increasingly indistinguishable to microtransactions. But in the end I don’t want to buy a fucking lego set, where I have to constantly buy new stuff.
That’s why I prefer single purchase games. I am also ok with paying more for them if that means the devs get the proftis to keep the development of games I like going. Buy once – have it all. Keeping games at a comparably equal price over decades is imo not meaningful anyways due to factors like inflation. But the gaming community can be really unforgiving in this regard. That’s why ad-based or microtransaction-based games are taking off. A majority of gamers are uncritical enough that this works. And then they are surprised when it bites them in the ass…
I think what matters more, or perhaps at least in Valve’s perspective, is that microtransactions are inherently binding between the game’s developer/publisher and the player, so the game’s developer/publisher is the sole party held accountable here (by Valve), while ads inherently involve and invite a 3rd party advertiser, muddying the situation for everybody. While on the other hand, microtransactions can only be done for content already a part of the game, while ads serve content outside the scope of the game.
So this is much much more enforceable for Valve, while DLC and microtransactions marketing is already subject to the established rules on Steam.
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