What The Tech Series #3: Let’s Talk Games as Service

 

About Your Hosts:
Micah is an avid gamer fresh into the adult world of work and independent living.
Nathan is a recovering gamer with a family and a passion for seeing people love God and use tech.

• This series is focused on empowering parents to talk about healthy gaming with their children.

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Transcription:

Purposely. Your life. God’s purpose. Listen at onpurposely.com.

Nathan Sutherland:

Welcome to the Gospel Tech Podcast, a resource for parents who feel overwhelmed and outpaced as they raise healthy youth in a tech world. As an educator, parent and tech user, I want to equip parents with the tools, resources, and confidence they need to raise kids who love God and use tech.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. My name is Nathan Sutherland and this podcast is dedicated to helping families love God and use tech. Today we are in for a What The Tech episode. Yes, sir. And Micah is here in studio again. Wow. Yes, I know this is three, this is like a tradition now. Yeah, we’re going places. So Micah, today we are keeping ever on the cusp of the preeminent topics parents are asking about. I mean, we’ve talked gamer rage we’ve talked about eSports. And now we’re talking about games of service.

Micah Roberts:

Yeah. The funny new term in the gaming world,

Nathan Sutherland:

Which I walk, what does that even mean? Give me like two sentences.

Micah Roberts:

The game that is a game is a service is Fortnite. And basically what it means is you keep paying for the game after you’ve bought it.

Nathan Sutherland:

boom. So parents, that’s, that’s really what we want to talk about today is we wanted you to know that’s a thing. Second is we want to know, help you see what that means so that when you’re talking to your kiddo and they are using words, you can know what it means. So to take a quick step back, we talk a lot about tool tech and drool tech. Tool tech helps us create, drool tech helps us consume. That’s not good and bad. They’re just designed differently because tool tech is designed to help you accomplish your goals. And drool tech is designed to help accomplish its own goal. So the example I like to use is word processors. You go and use a word processor, you have the goal of writing a story. It doesn’t have another goal for you. It doesn’t tie you in with social media.

It doesn’t tell you about how so-and-so down the street has a much better story than yours. It doesn’t give you likes or follows. It just writes a story, saves a story, you can share it, edit it, et cetera. Drool tech, on the other hand, wants to take your time, your focus and your money. And the reason that’s important is games of service. While it’s a wonderful process to make money as a company it can be a drool tech tool to increase engagement. And that engagement can go sometimes beyond the realm of even I’m doing this because I have fun, or I’m doing this because I want to. It can cross into I feel like I need to now and we start giving up stuff. We actually need to pursue stuff we want. And that’s an unhealthy combo . You don’t want to swap your needs for once. That’s kind of the base level for addiction. <laugh> is when you start giving the things you need. Sleep or relationships or future opportunities for something you want. So Micah you mentioned Fortnite. Where do we see game of service in Fortnite or games like that?

Micah Roberts:

Well, for one, it is one of the most financially successful games in history and it’s free.

Nathan Sutherland:

That is interesting, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. I saw it made five and a half billion in a year. Yeah. Is that still roughly what it’s pulling out? I think that was 2020.

Micah Roberts:

Something like that. Okay.

Nathan Sutherland:

How in the world does a free to play game make five and a half billion?

Micah Roberts:

The same way games have for a way before this and a little bit of new tech the same way most games make their money if they’re free to play is skins,

Nathan Sutherland:

Which, what does that even mean? Skins?

Micah Roberts:

You just have a generic boring character. You can pay money whether it’s in-game currency, you earn currency you can buy or both to buy a different outfit or an entirely different character to play. As in Fortnite’s case, there’s such a big conglomerate that they have anime collabs and Marvel and Star Wars characters that you could play as, you can play as Goku versus Darth from Dragon Ball Z. There we go. Versus Darth Vader versus Iron Man and Spider Man and all this crazy stuff.

Nathan Sutherland:

Do those change how the game plays for you then?

Micah Roberts:

Not at all. It’s all cosmetics. It’s just how you look.

Nathan Sutherland:

So skins are cosmetic. Why in the world would someone spend real world money to buy their video game character and outfit?

Micah Roberts:

Because it’s fun. Yeah. If you’re playing a game for a long time, you want to what you’re looking at and if you’re just some boring generic human looking guy and military olive drab, who cares when you can be neon red glowing suits with a flaming skull and stuff because that looks cooler.

Nathan Sutherland:

And I guess that’s kind of like why we buy a lot of the clothes we purchase. It’s somewhat of what we like. So it’s expressing that it’s somewhat how we align. So I dress this way, I’m more like those people than these people. And at the end of the day, there’s this flex component to it, right? Yeah. Why would you wear a $200 pair of sneakers when a $50 pair is really nice?

Micah Roberts:

I mean if you want to talk about that, there’s literally a Balenciaga Fortnite Collab. Oh, where you get skins in game only you buy the $900 jean jacket that just says Fortnite on the back.

Nathan Sutherland:

There it is. Yeah. We’ve officially broke the meta. That’s that my friends is reality collapsing around our ears. So parents, what we need to know about this we do have this concept of the game as a service where we can have what are also called micro transactions. And they’re called that because you can either pay a monthly subscription, which is the service side, but the Microtransaction side comes in when you purchase skins or other items

Micah Roberts:

They give you the option to buy the in-game currency. And it ranges anywhere from $5 to a hundred dollars and that gives you different amounts of currency which you can buy with more things.

Nathan Sutherland:

And by the way, I just checked 2020 revenue for Fortnite, 5.8 billion. Yes. So the previous year was 5.5. So yes, that’s B billion with a B for a singular game that is free to play. So we’re talking about something that is prevalent, relevant, and setting the stage where other companies which desire to make money <laugh> are going to say, Hey, we could sell this game for 50 bucks a pop give them everything they need to play the game. Or we could sell the battle pass. So explain to us what a battle pass is.

Micah Roberts:

A battle pass. So games have seasons now. Yes. That can range anywhere from a month, multiple months. And during that time you have a Level up system. So as you play the game, you gain experience to level up. You need a certain amount of experience to go to the next level. You get that by winning, getting kills, doing side objectives, daily objectives, stuff like that. And everyone gets the free battle pass, which every fourth or fifth level you get something. Not always a skin, maybe it’s just a little XP boost, some in-game cash. But the big thing everyone wants from battle passes is skins. But there’s a paid battle pass every season there’s a new one. Every season it’s $10 and you get the free stuff from the free tier, the battle pass and the stuff from the top tier. The stuff you pay for every level gets you something. With the paid battle pass, there’s way more skins. There’s like gun skins as well. Make your guns look different, make the pick ax you use look different. And at the end, at Level a hundred, there’s always the big crossover. Last season it was Dr. Strange, this time it’s Spider Gwen from the spider verse,

<laugh>, stuff like that. So it’s basically a way to cement at least constant revenue every few months or so with the new Fortnite season.

Nathan Sutherland:

And for the player, there’s this feeling of value add because you’re getting what would’ve cost you hours and hours and hours to earn on your own. And you’re getting these and when you do invest the hours and hours, you’re assured to get some cool kickback.

Micah Roberts:

Yes. Eve. Eventually the more you play, the more cool things you get.

Nathan Sutherland:

So could you go to a previous season and earn those skins now?

Micah Roberts:

Nope. The only way to get previous skins is for them to show up in the store. And the store only has I think 10 or so things available and it refreshes like every day. So it’s not gambling, but you kind of just have to wait.

Nathan Sutherland:

Yeah, it’s not, yeah, it’s working on that variable reward. It’s a reason to show up, a reason to check.

Micah Roberts:

It’s a reason to boot up the game and at least check. And while I’m here, I might as well play a couple games.

Nathan Sutherland:

It’s not not clever.

Micah Roberts:

And I don’t know if it’s been a thing forever, but I know at least now you can also just buy levels in the battle pass.

Nathan Sutherland:

Oh, is that true?

Micah Roberts:

Yeah. So

Nathan Sutherland:

That has not been a thing forever.

Micah Roberts:

No. Yeah. So if you wanted to just like, oh, I’m one level away from this skin, but I really want it, you can just pay.

Nathan Sutherland:

There’s only a day left in the season or whatever.

Micah Roberts:

Yeah. Or if you can be one of my friends and just buy all a hundred levels and just complete the battle pass instantly and get all the cool stuff immediately.

Nathan Sutherland:

Oh, it’s the Diablo immortal all over again.

Micah Roberts:

Yes, Sir. And the main thing that’s worrying about this is a lot of the big games that our multiplayer have a battle pass. Now Call of Duty has it. Battlefield has it. Destiny two has it. Overwatch two is going to have it. Yeah. Mobile games have battle passes. Fall guys has a battle pass.

Nathan Sutherland:

Yeah. So let’s talk about that concern because at the end of the day this, it makes sense from an outside perspective, you’re using this service regularly, you pay for this service. What is the concern with ongoing payments for a game service? What should a parent be aware of or what should we as gamers be thinking about as the market clearly is going to shift this direction? There’s just too much money in it to not have this be the method that people are going to use for a while.

Micah Roberts:

Well, for one it can get expensive quick.

Nathan Sutherland:

Yeah. You said 10 bucks a month.

Micah Roberts:

Yeah, 10 or 10 bucks a season. It’s multiple months.

Nathan Sutherland:

So multiple months. But let’s say it’s every other month that a season last. Yeah. So it’s an eight week season. Yeah. You’re buying 60 of these things. So that’s 60 bucks you paid this year for that game. Yes. Assuming you didn’t purchase anything else. Yeah.

Micah Roberts:

Assuming you only purchased the Battle Pass and didn’t buy any old skins or skins that aren’t in the battle pass that only show up in the shop or any of these other things that you can buy. Cause there’s so many ways to spend money in these types of games. It’s the same scam that mobile games have been running for years. Just a little less predatory,

Nathan Sutherland:

Which would be what? So a Clash of Clans, I assume is one year.

Micah Roberts:

Yeah, clash. Yeah. Clash of Clans is the first time I remember a game charging me money to play it after I’ve already paid for it. Clash of Clans is a free game. It’s a game where you build up an army and bases, you build walls, build buildings, build defenses, and you can invade other people’s places and all this. But you have an energy meter and you have builders. So the energy meter, you can only do so much rating at a time before you have to stop and let the thing recharge and you get one or two energy points every 15 minutes. So you could play for 30 minutes and then realistically wait five hours before you have can play again. Or you can use gems, which you get by rating, but a very small amount. And you can also just buy them out. And then builders, you have two builders in your city, so you can only work on building two things at once. And building things takes real time to upgrade your main building. The thing that if it gets destroyed, you lose. Once you get to level five, it takes days, several days of just waiting.

Nathan Sutherland:

So then you can pay real world money to

Micah Roberts:

Expedite that and just get it done instantly. So

Nathan Sutherland:

If my kid can only play games, let’s say like me growing up, I can only play video game after my homework was done on a weekend. So I have Friday, Saturday because Sunday’s a school night. So I have two games or two nights during the week when I can play video games. So if I’m Saturday and I’ve run out of time to play this game because of my meters expired or I only have two builders and they’re both spoken for, I could just pay a little bit of cash and effectively get another week’s worth of play in

Micah Roberts:

Exactly.

Nathan Sutherland:

Because it’s going to be till next Friday till I can play again Anyway. So what’s five bucks to me now? And

Micah Roberts:

Exactly. I

Nathan Sutherland:

Went from paying 60 bucks a year to 65 and if I did that every weekend, <laugh>, right? Yeah. It escalates quickly.

Micah Roberts:

And that is a thing that is still pretty much exclusively a mobile game thing, but the concept of paying to expedite a process is still a thing in a lot of games today like Fortnite thing because it does take a long time to level up and if you wanted the skin at the end of the battle pass, that’s going to take a lot of hours of playing the game. And that’s assuming you’re good at it and can get a lot of XP and get a lot of wins.

Nathan Sutherland:

So then I, I’ll take an aside here on this. So we understand how game of service means it’s an ongoing payment to a game. It can be either literally for the service of I’m using your game and instead of paying for it upfront, I’m going to pay you a monthly rent and to use this game,

Micah Roberts:

Which MMOs do, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 and stuff.

Nathan Sutherland:

And so parents, I will say off the front, I have firsthand experience on one of the downsides of that is the stress of knowing you’ve already paid for this game and the next payment is coming up

Forces you to, it’s not that you forces you to play it, but it forces you to explain why you’re not playing it. If I own a game that I’ve already paid for and it’s just sitting in a box versus I have a game that I know is going to cost me another 15 bucks next month, I do feel this need to argue with myself on why I’m going to do the one instead of the other. And so just know that there is this real world weight of knowing this game isn’t yours. There are added benefits. I mean updates come out and they’re released and often they’re free with the battle pass. So they’re included with the Battle pass. I’ll say they’re not free with the Battle pass but they’re not forcing you to purchase a $60 game and then pay a monthly fee. But sometimes you do.

World of Warcraft does you pay the full game price and the monthly opportunity to play it. So just know that that’s one side and know that with these come micro transactions, they already have your credit card info. You’re already there. It’s so easy and accessible and know that this isn’t an accident. This is behavioral training. And for my example, I will look to the book called Hooked. It’s by Nir Eyal, and Nir does an awesome job of explaining at the time he was trying to explain how to help people create habit forming products. He wouldn’t use the term addictive because no one wants addictive and also that word can be hotly contested. But the premise was he wants to help people with a good product, get people to use it without even thinking of it. How do you become a product that’s just the go-to?

And he breaks it down very simply says there’s going to be a trigger. It’s either internal or external. That can mean it’s either a reminder, like a notification gets sent or it’s your bored. So there’s some motivation occurring. That’s your trigger. When that trigger happens, you want to steer them to an action, you want them to do something. So in our case of Fortnite, since we’ve already used it the child is bored or the child has free time or the child has a friend say, Hey, let’s play a game. We want them to play Fortnite. So how do we do that? Well, we have the shop set up, so they come in and check it regularly. We have a monthly fee that reminds them that this is an ongoing thing. It can’t be forgotten. It’s showing up on a bank statement every month. We have ongoing daily challenges, weekly challenges, seasons that expire and that include your ranking with specialized skins that go on out there.

And don’t forget, by the way, there is still a game to be played that there’s still something to show up for that is fun in and of itself. So that’s the action. We’re going to go do this thing and we’re going to get what’s called a variable reward. All they mean by that is that there’s a reward and we’re not exactly sure what we’re going to get. So yes, we know we’re going to get the skin, but how many points am I going to get? How many wins am I going to get? Am I going to get actual solo dub and the am I going to join this? And when it all by myself for bragging rights there? We’re not exactly sure what the variable reward will be. It’s not always even positive. Sometimes a loss is your variable reward from the game standpoint because if you lose, it drives you back to play again because you want to get better, you want to win next time.

And all of that builds investment. And this is where I want parents for us to be aware. Building investment happens when we give them money and we give them our time and we give them our focus that’s building our investment. As adults. We know what we’ve built investment with as kids because we feel nostalgic about it. So we built investment with shows like T G I F, right? And then we had the nostalgia of that specific time slot and those specific shows that may or may not have been that good, but we feel nostalgic for it. We have games that we remember fondly, even if we go back and play them now and they’re not exciting, or movies we watched and we go back and me were some of those movies, I’m like, oh, I can’t actually finish this. This is physically painful to me.

But we invested in that and that’s what Nir Eyal is saying because the next time that trigger happens, boredom, a friend asks, a notification comes, we are more likely to take that action because we’ve now invested our time, our focus and our money in this thing. And it can get to the point where if you have a serious gamer in your life or someone, you could ask ’em if they’ve ever played a game even though it wasn’t fun anymore. And a serious gamer will have had this experience where we’ve played games past the point of enjoyment and you go, why? And you’re like, I don’t. I was already so far in, I might as well just keep playing it. And have you ever had this experience, Micah? Yeah, yeah, I definitely know I have. And so keep that in mind. Investment is what we’re looking at. That is an engagement strategy that games of services looking to capitalize on games like Clash of Clans still very successful. And last year, 2021, they made $500 million off of free to play game. And this is a game that’s been around for quite near a decade.

Micah Roberts:

I was in fifth grade when I first played it. Oh, what that made you like? And I’m almost 21 now,

Nathan Sutherland:

So right around a decade. So somewhere in that we could find that stat, but right around a decade it’s been going at a solid clip of 500 million a <laugh> year. So games of service. The reason we want to note that is your kid can be spending real world money in doing so. It might be a perfectly good value add if you let your kid buy nice sneakers because it’ll impress their friends. Maybe buying a skin in game makes sense. Just know that you’ve talked it out. I, I’m encouraging who parents to have that conversation of where is our limit? How do we know what’s worth purchasing? These games are not looking out to help your child be a discerning consumer. They’re just looking to help your child consume and that’s consume the game, consume the items, consume the culture of the game. And I would argue that many times that is not going with the spirit that Christ is asking for us to have one of contentment and one of joy and one of satisfaction it instead is driving us into the death spiral of just

Micah Roberts:

Consumerism,

Nathan Sutherland:

Just wanting more and of never enjoying the game because it’s the game but enjoying the game because this is how I’m going to get that next thing. And at the end of the day, that breaks the point of game in general for as far back as humans have been playing them, which is quite a while. The idea is it’s competitive. It has a goal and it has a basic set of rules. So the rules are you can do this, you can’t do that. And that’s true in baseball or in Cobe which is that n Norse block tossing game <laugh> or Bocci or pickleball or right in any sport or competition there, chess, there’s rules, there’s a competition. It’s usually us against another person or team of people in computer world. We can go against trained computers and programs and there’s some kind of a goal.

We’re trying to be the first one to eliminate the other team or the first one to score this many points or take an objective. This game of service almost adds a layer to that where the player becomes part of the game and the company, instead of the point being, have fun with your friends. The point is, how long can we keep you here even if you don’t want to stay? And so games of service is concerning for that reason parents, because it can be an unfair fight. A 10 year old, 12 year old, 15 year old brain is not set up to delineate what a billion or sometimes trillion dollar company has as its ulterior motive, which is why has Blizzard act activate and happened yet by the way?

Micah Roberts:

Not yet. It’s

Nathan Sutherland:

Still going through. It’s still looking. But that’s why that’s such a huge conversation. You have a massive video game creating studio being purchased by a trillion dollar company who’s looking to make a game as service process. So they are looking to do online, oh my goodness, how do I explain that? The online version of a stadia where the games are hosted online. You don’t own the system. Yeah, you actually, you lease basically.

Micah Roberts:

Yeah, it’s basically renting an Xbox, digitally <laugh> kind of.

Nathan Sutherland:

Yeah. So you log in. So instead of owning the Xbox, you’d log into their online server and instead of buying the game in you person, you

Micah Roberts:

Stream them,

Nathan Sutherland:

You stream them. Yes. And the quality’s not there yet. We talked about this previously. It’s not competitive at all with an actual hardware static system. But

Micah Roberts:

It’s going to get there eventually

Nathan Sutherland:

It will. And they’re dumping billions and billions of dollars into this happening. So this is what we’re seeing is the future of gaming. For better or worse, I think there’s still going to be a niche for people that like to own a game, to have the game.

Micah Roberts:

But there is less and less people who care about even just owning a physical copy of a game because it’s inconvenient to take out one disc and put in another.

Nathan Sutherland:

Yeah, I mean you download it to a hard drive. Currently that’s what a lot of people do is you purchase the game. You never actually own a CD or anything. It just downloads to your device automatically downloads, updates and firmware and whatever else needs to happen. DLCs that may come out. So parents to review we’re talking about games of service, which means the game is no longer a one-time purchase. There’s ongoing purchases, which might be a battle pass, like a monthly subscription or a bimonthly subscription. But a season of time that is used also as part of the behavioral training because when it resets, so do your levels, your ranks. If you’re playing a game with ranked play like a League of Legend would be an example of that. So that there’s the battle pass side. There’s also micro transactions, which we discussed really two kinds.

We talked about you can buy things like skins, which are purely cosmetic. They change the way you look, but not the way you play. Or you can go into the pay to win model where the game is actually leveraging your desire to be a part of the game against your ability to be a part of the game. So Clash of Clans being one of the preeminent examples they’re going to limit how many turns you get and make you wait real world time. Or you could pay a little bit of real world money and progress in the game that way. And I mentioned offhand Diablo Immortal, which has become the meme of all of this.

Micah Roberts:

Someone did the thing and if you paid for all the micro transactions that they want you to pay for to level up and cosmetics and stuff, it’d be like a hundred thousand dollars. And that is an extreme example. I will say it is

Nathan Sutherland:

Extreme.

Micah Roberts:

And it’s not even Fortnite game who’s started this whole trend towards micro transactions. Is that bad.

Nathan Sutherland:

Yeah, no,

Micah Roberts:

It’s not that bad. Good Lord.

Nathan Sutherland:

It was made, I mean it’s right. It’s become a meme. It was made with specific what you’d call a whale player in mind, that there’s this very small niche group of players who love that genre of game and that studio and they basically just buy it on site. And so that game made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes. Even though most people and you can’t earn, that’s a big piece. You can’t earn the credits to get there. Some of those things are purely locked behind paywalls. So

Micah Roberts:

Yeah, that is a purely toxic example of it. Most games are not anywhere near that. No,

Nathan Sutherland:

I went to that extreme because companies don’t have a reason not to do that sometimes.

Micah Roberts:

I mean it got so much backlash and so much hate online and yet still made a lot of money.

Nathan Sutherland:

And it’s for most of these companies. While we love to believe that there are still game design studios that have souls and therefore the process of game, they’re still making game at the end of the day. There are,

Micah Roberts:

It’s just becoming photographs. It is becoming less and less prevalent in big studios. The like desire to create creative experiences that you experience and not creative games that you experience as a way to pay more money.

Nathan Sutherland:

It’s not just all about the hook and getting you to replay this piece. So I think in conclusion on this one parents, what we want you to be able to do is go to your child and talk to them about their games. Now I say, go to your child, talked about their games. This is assuming your kid is playing a video game. And that assumes a lot. So let’s take a quick step, and I’ll just address this as well. If your child is playing video games I’m assuming that you have talked to them about their video games and you’ve looked at if this game safe for them, meaning does it have access to the internet? Do they play with strangers? What are they getting into content wise? You’ve made that conversation and said, yes, we agree this system is a good choice for our family in this season.

It meets your family expectations. So when your child is bringing the system into your house, this new technology is a fit for what you want to see your family do be whatever those expectations are, however you gauge it . I always encourage Philippians four, eight because it’s a wonderful list of just how we can gauge the things we consume and set our hearts and minds on. Then we’re also making sure it lines up with our child’s potential and their goals. So something can be really fun, it can be perfectly safe, but it can be not the right season or a bad fit for the other things we want to accomplish in life. There’s lots of things I’d love to do. I just can’t justify putting my resources and my time into it even though they’re not morally wrong. So I’m assuming you’ve had that piece and then you’ve looked at the game itself.

So if you looked at Fortnite, you’ve actually talked through what Fortnite is with your kid, what it looks like. You’ve Googled it so you have some idea. Go to, if you haven’t by the way, go to esrb.org, the Entertainment Software Review Board, the group that Micah has spoken ill against for the letter on the box, they at least do a very nice job. If you go there, look up the game, you just type in the title and enter in that paragraph. They’ll tell you exactly what’s in the game. They’ll tell you the swear words, they’ll tell you the types of violence. They’ll tell you a general plot. And it at least lets you look beyond the sticker on the outside and allows you then to converse with your child about your expectations and standards, which is what I’m trying to empower you to do. So I hope you can feel that.

So that’s the assumption here is you’ve done that Now with games of service, make sure you talk to your kiddo as they’re going. If they start expressing anxiety or stress about man, mom, mom and dad, I’m not getting enough time on this game. Dig into that because it’s probably not about time per se. It’s either the levels are too intense that I’m not getting far enough. I can’t play with my friends as much as I’d want. I feel this anxiety, this game is constantly slipping away from me or getting ahead of me and I’m not actually enjoying it as a game anymore. Kind of driving me. Or it might just be that, yeah, there’s some fun stuff to do and they would like to do it more often. I think we all have fun things we like that we’d like to do more. So do talk to your child about the games as service. What is available in that game? Oh, we didn’t talk about the super toxic FIFA example where the gambling aspect actually comes in. Oh yeah, we should do that.

Micah Roberts:

Probably should.

Nathan Sutherland:

Parents there are things called loot boxes. They’ve only been banned in one country as that I’m aware of. Belgium. Is that the

Micah Roberts:

Only I think a couple more European countries. But yeah, they are gambling. There’s no way around it. Some games have other ways around it, but they are essentially, instead of buying these skins outright, you just pay for a box for a chance to get these skins and you can get repeats. It’s almost no different than slots.

Nathan Sutherland:

It slots, yes.

Micah Roberts:

Yeah. It’s becoming less and less prevalent because of the heat that they generated during their height of them being basically literally just gambling. Gambling. So they’re becoming less and less popular and moving more towards the battle pass and that kind of way of buying the skins outright. That’s kind. The battle pass is a response to the US government threatening to get involved with regulating monetization of games like that. So it is becoming less and less of a thing, but CS Go still does it. FIFA still do still do it. It is a thing that you can run into games still.

Nathan Sutherland:

And so just to be perfectly clear what that is, there’s an item you want. So in FIFA, my favorite example would be there’s some tier one player who’s amazing and you want to go play his team. So you go by the game, you’re playing the game, but that player’s not on your team. He doesn’t get on your team until you purchase this opportunity to open up new players. So you might pay $5 for the silver level game or characters and it’ll give you three cards and it’ll give you X percent to get that player that you want. But as Micah mentioned, there can be repeats. So you can do this three times and pay $15 and get the same player twice as an option.

Micah Roberts:

These are more called like gotcha mechanics. They’re no different than the capsule toy machines. You see where you put in two quarters and you get a random plastic ball with a rubber ninja in it or something and you really want the red one. Yes. But you got the purple one so it’s like, oh, I’ll put in two more quarters. It’s the exact same concept just for in the FIFA players, you really want Messi or something. Yes, you’re going to have to get a few packs before you get him. Or a lot of packs because it’s gambling, it’s just odds.

Nathan Sutherland:

Yeah. And it is playing with a mechanic that is popular in games. Drop loot drops are real thing in a lot of games. Destiny two does this very well where you’ll beat a boss and you’ll get a percent chance of some rare item dropping and you’ll just have to spam that boss till you get it. And I’ve seen things where someone beat a boss. I mean they played him 30, 40 times and we’re talking three to six hours depending on the boss and the level that goes with them. Cause you can’t just start at a boss, you have to beat the whole level again. And so you do that 30 plus times for a single weapon drop. That could be very disheartening, but you didn’t pay real world money for it. You still were leveling up. You were still with your friends, you were still playing the game. This is just cutting out the middleman of the actual play and getting right to the loot drop opportunity and you’re just paying money to pull the lever. So I’m glad we remembered that.

Micah Roberts:

Yes.

Nathan Sutherland:

Parents, I hope what you take away from this is games should remain games. When you look at the games your child’s play, they should be fun. They should be challenging, they should have a goal and they should have a clear ending. Games of service can be convoluted. It is very lucrative for studios. We like it when people who make good games make money. That’s excellent. This can be a little manipulative. So do keep an eye on that drool tech, taking more of your child’s heart and attention than you want. Have these open conversations with your kiddo and then know that there are practices set in place to circumnavigate your good decision making and help your child feel the pressure to spend those monies. And I would add, what would I add? Hold on. There was one more thought and it, it’s gone. But just know that microtransactions aren’t.

Micah Roberts:

They’re not inherently bad.

Nathan Sutherland:

That’s where I was headed.

Micah Roberts:

And buy, buying skins for a game isn’t like horrible. No, it’s fun. You want, if you play a certain character in a game and they have a cool skin, if you really like that character, you want them to look cool. Yeah, that’s not bad, but something, it’s recurring. There’s always more to get. There’s always more skins, other stuff. That’s when it starts to get predatory and weird.

Nathan Sutherland:

And having that conversation with your child of, Hey, why do you want this? How much do you think is reasonable to spend on this game each month? How much are you willing to put of your money into this? Yeah. Right. Are you willing to accept this as a gift that we can give? You can, by the way, purchase gift cards for video games, Roadblocks, does it

Micah Roberts:

Fortnight, Fortnite does it.

Nathan Sutherland:

So that’s an option if you want to do that. Or do you want your child to say, Hey, this game needs to be fun. Whatever games we play, they’re fun and they can be put away because we don’t want that added pressure of investment. And now I feel bad walking away from this game, just like any other player who has a thousand hours on a game is going to have a hard time deleting that game. Yes. Because you’re just so far in at that point it feels like it’s part of you. And by the way, parents, I would argue it is a little bit of them. You can’t ever get those thousand hours back. That’s now invested. That’s part of who you’ve become. And we want to be intentional, I guess walking into that with our eyes open, knowing we’re investing our time here. That means this thing now has some value and we will feel tied to it whether we think that’s fair or not. So closing thoughts, Micah on this?

Micah Roberts:

Yeah, I mean just the game above all else should be enjoyable. If that means putting money into it, that isn’t immediately a bad thing. But it can become a slippery slope very quickly, especially now because it’s just such a new concept that it’s still changing what we said could be different two or three years from now. Yeah,

Nathan Sutherland:

This could be a one that doesn’t age well. But for this conversation and this season, do go in eyes open parents if your kids are playing games because you’ve had those conversations, you should be in those games with them. You should ask them to show you about the game to teach you how to play that game and then to play it together. Even if it makes you motion sick because your child is going there. Their presence means that that thing now has value to you. So you don’t have to do it all the time, but you do need to be present with them in the process. And I hope this conversation helped you think through that intentionally. You can join us next time as we have another what the tech mm-hmm. Talking about. Who knows what will come up with. And you can continue to listen to the Gospel Tech podcast coming out on Tuesdays as we continue this conversation about how we can love God and use tech.