What was described in the first part would not necessarily ensure that a “free” game could be profitable on its own. For players to experience the single-pay actions they perform as rewarding, various psychological tricks are needed. In fact, if we dig a little deeper, it is quite surprising how many classical psychological theories have found application within the mobile game development community.

For example, according to Social Comparison Theory, people tend to compare their own performance and worth with others, especially those in similar social situations. This is particularly beneficial in competitive games where the goal of the overall gameplay is to win. This can make people particularly susceptible to buying advantages for themselves, especially since such comparisons work trivially in both directions. Those who are ahead of us motivate us to perform better, and comparing ourselves to those who are behind gives us a sense of comfort, justifying our investment.

It has long been known that people may make radically different decisions in situations where a decision must be made suddenly than when they have sufficient time to decide. These two decision-making mechanisms have become known simply as “fast thinking” and “slow thinking”. The former is usually intuitive, and often biased, but as the name suggests, it is a very fast process. The latter is more complex, more conscious, and therefore also a slower process. The games industry often relies on it to encourage quick (and therefore ill-considered) decisions. A perfect example of this is when, in a game, after losing a difficult level, the player is immediately offered the chance to continue the game by making a purchase. In this case, quick decision-making is often fueled by emotional tension and the desire to gain an immediate advantage, and such “reckless” spending can be linked to a further phenomenon.

In behavioral economics, loss aversion refers to the phenomenon where investors find the potential loss of x amount of money much harder to bear than the possibility of gaining x amount of money. Simply put, what we once had is extremely difficult to part with. This is of course also true, for example, of an achievement in a game, because in the case described above, we feel that we have worked hard to complete the level, match, etc. Therefore, losing this progress is an extremely unpleasant experience that we want to get rid of as soon as possible. And the timely, paid solution that the game offers in response to this is an immediate relief because we can get back what was once ours.

The term “Ikea effect” was coined by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton in 2011. The phenomenon is based on the theory of cognitive dissonance developed by Leon Festinger. The idea is that in cases where people invest time and energy in assembling a product, they tend to think the result is significantly more valuable than it is. In essence, the effort invested so valorizes the result that we tend to think of it as more valuable than alternatives that would be objectively undeniably better. The name is not accidental, because Norton found that this is one of the important phenomena behind the success of the Dutch-based furniture store chain.

Closely related to this is the sunk cost. A sunk cost is an expense that cannot be recovered through additional spending or investment. In many cases, the immediate spending opportunities offered by games are designed to prevent losses that cannot be recovered later.

Making the money spent on the game seem like it is not much, or at least making players feel that they have gotten a good deal, is again a psychological trap. The concept of price anchoring is based on the idea that people tend to rely crucially on the first information they receive when making judgments or decisions. In the context of price formation, this means that consumers often use the first price they encounter as a reference point when they must judge whether the subsequent price of the same product is low or high. From there, it is only a step to the common practice of developers offering players options to buy at an unrealistically high price at first. Of course, no one will buy these, but that is not their purpose. Such offers exist solely to entice people to buy “cheaper” options later.

In addition to the fast thinking already mentioned, it is also important to develop a kind of deficit economy within the game. This is based on Robert Cialdini’s theory, developed in the last century, that people tend to place more value on something that is essentially rare than on something that is readily available. In mobile games, this trick works by offering time-limited offers or rare items, thus urging players to buy.

One of the most common methods is still to diversify the economy within the game. This, like microtransaction, also serves the purpose of making the amount spent in the game seem insignificant. The first and most common method is that in-game purchases are almost never priced in real terms, for example in dollars. There is always a virtual, intermediary currency that the game operates with, sometimes more than one, which can be converted into each other, and it may be necessary to make several in-game conversions to obtain a currency. All of this serves to move the real monetary value away from the value expressed in the game currency. Of course, the icing on the cake is that it is almost never possible to buy exactly as many of these currencies as you need.

True, even all the above is not enough to move a significant player base. In many cases, only a few percent of downloaders become active paying players, but for developers, this is not a real problem. The term “whale hunting” suggests that game developers are targeting “whales”, i.e. players who are willing to spend large amounts of money on the game. These players are usually competitive in nature and will spend a lot of money to get an advantage over others. In fact, they are the source of the vast majority of the revenue of a “Free” to Play game.

The fundamental problem is not, of course, that developers want to make money from their work. The problem lies in the deceptive and insidious ways in which the mobile games industry seeks to achieve this. Obviously, most of these games end up with children, who can be particularly susceptible to such trickery. It is not for nothing that gambling is age-restricted in most countries, but there is also all the other psychological damage that these harmful practices can cause. It is enough to think that in most “F2P” games the players who do not spend money are just living punching bags who make the paying players feel good about themselves. This can lead to a lot of pent-up frustration that a child may not be able to handle properly.

But as long as game development remains the moral hell it is, there will be no improvement. What is particularly worrying is that these trends are starting to spill over to other platforms (PC, console, etc.). The question is, is there, and if so, what is the role of the legislator in this matter?

István ÜVEGES is a researcher in Computer Linguistics at MONTANA Knowledge Management Ltd. and a researcher at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Political and Legal Text Mining and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (poltextLAB). His main interests include practical applications of Automation, Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning), Legal Language (legalese) studies and the Plain Language Movement.