Hi everyone, I’m here today to tell you more about the paper
‘Prevalence and Salience of Problematic Microtransactions
in Top-Grossing Mobile and PC Games: a Content Analysis of User Reviews’.
I’m Elena Petrovskaya, the first author of the paper, and this work was carried out with
my colleagues and supervisors, Sebastian Deterding and David Zendle.
At the time of the work being carried out we were all affiliated with the University of York,
and the Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence Doctoral Training Centre.
So, before I tell you more about the work, I should give an overview of
what are microtransactions. So chances are, you’ve heard the word used a lot in
media. Microtransactions can encompass anything from in-game currency to loot boxes to wait timers
in mobile games. Broadly, they are uncapped, repeated in-game purchases which are often seen in
what is known as a freemium model, where the game is available for free upfront
but the revenue is then generated from player purchases within the game.
Chances also are, if you’ve heard the word ‘microtransactions’, you heard it in
quite a negative way. The broad reason for this is as the revenue generation shifts from upfront
payment to in-game payment, companies have more incentive to sort of tap into user needs and
increase things like player time on device and player spending, moving from free play to paid
play, and there are some concerns that this might be done in potentially unethical ways,
including manipulation, deception, coercion of players. And there is also concern that this is
all contributing to a broad gamblification of games, and given that gambling already has some
known associated harms, there is a chance that games might also come with such harms, which
is why microtransactions are being heavily investigated and in some cases, regulated.
However, current research into microtransactions firstly largely consists of researcher-centric
work, so things like patent analysis and taxonomisation based on researcher-generated
frameworks and ethical discussions of microtransactions, as well as some focus on player
harm, but this directly comes from largely loot boxes. And in fact, regulatory attention has also
prioritised studying loot boxes because of their already established links to problem gambling.
Obviously, this is all very important research, but um, we also need to understand
more about other potentially problematic microtransactions, of which there are many.
And one of the steps in doing so is to understand how prevalent they are, as this can aid sort
of seeing the extent of potential problems. And also, to look at the player perspective,
so which of these problematic microtransactions are the most negatively salient to players.
In our work we took the fifty highest mobile games from the Google Play store,
and fifty highest desktop games from Steam. We
scraped the most recent fifty negative player reviews for these games,
and after cleaning the data we ended up with 692 mobile games and 141 desktop game reviews.
We proceeded to analyse these using content analysis based on our previous work, which was a
taxonomy of predatory monetisation techniques, generated based on player perspectives.
For each microtransaction, or problematic technique, we assigned a prevalence score,
which was the number of games within a platform, mobile or desktop, which contained this technique,
and salience, which was the relative share of negative reviews per technique, calculated in a
slightly more complicated way which I won’t go into here but you can read about in the paper.
So, the core findings were - forty four out of fifty mobile games, and fourteen out of fifty
desktop games contained at least one problematic microtransaction. And the average number of
techniques per game was two for desktop games and three for mobile games. So we’re already seeing
that mobile games contain, or are perceived to contain, more problematic microtransactions.
To go into more depth, mobile games are also seen as more so having been designed to drive spending.
So that technique refers to what players perceive the game has been, the whole game environment has
sort of been designed to get them to spend money rather than for their enjoyment of the game
and over half of mobile games were seen as such. And the most salient, the most
noticeable to players was when products were persisted-presented in an unrealistic way,
so whether that’s through deceit, or tactical highlighting of certain features.
And to name and shame the most problematic game was Marvel Strike Force, with nine techniques.
Desktop games, the situation is a bit milder. So the most prevalent and most salient are the same,
and essentially that refers to core parts of the game which players believe are integral to the
game experience being locked behind a paywall. And the most problematic game only contains four
techniques. So we’re seeing far fewer problematic techniques in desktop than mobile games.
However, the situation might not be that simple. So, mobile games might just be more so perceived
as being manipulated to drive player spend than desktop games, but this could also be because
of existing biases and norms around mobile games. There is sort of a documented discrepancy between
people who play desktop games and their opinions on mobile games, which sort of taps into genders
as well. So, men have traditionally gravitated towards desktop games, and perhaps when they
voice their opinions they perceive mobile games more negatively and that’s not necessarily
representative of what people who might play mobile games but not actually voice their opinions
feel. It’s also interesting that the most salient techniques don’t feature gamblification-related
issues, but rather focus on things like fairness and honesty as being important to players
as elements of game design. It’s also important to think about why do the highest grossing games
feature so many problematic microtransactions, is it because players are being trapped into
spending money, is the spend largely coming from a small proportion of players who can afford it, and
it’s impossible to tell this without contextual data, but it’s a really important question to ask.
To acknowledge some limitations of our work, as I’ve already mentioned,
negative reviews might be biased, they might only represent certain communities which would feel
comfortable enough to leave their reviews. And we also did not consider the full ecosystem, so
perhaps if we’d looked at indie game development platforms it might have been a different picture,
as indie games sort of aspire to sometimes different morals of game development.
I’d like you, I’d like to leave you with what are emerging to be sort of core values
for monetisation design in video games based on our work with players, and this is transparency,
equality for game experience for players, payment or no payment, and value for money,
so if a player spends money they expect to have a product in return that is worth that money.
And a question to think about: what is the relationship between play and revenue generation?
Why do the highest grossing games contain problematic microtransactions?
Is play now just becoming convergent with payment? Should we re-evaluate what our
definitions of play are? Is it silly to consider that we still might have a magic
circle that’s completely shielded from economic concerns in light of technological development?
Thank you very much for listening and let me know if you have any questions,
I can be contacted through those links.