This is why I only pay cash, even online and overseas.
In fact it could have happened with any product ever and has absolutely nothing to do with microsoft or Xbox. Dad gave his son a credit card, son spent over eight thousand dollars, what he spent it on is not in any way shape or form the point of that story.
Your idea of “heart-wrenching” is having to give your credit card to get some stupid apps? If only the rest of us could be so fortunate. :rolleyes:
Does each individual transaction show up as a line item on your credit card bill, or are they batched up so he got charged $8K in one shot? If there are 100 individual charges on their credit card then it’s hard to make the argument that the kid didn’t know what he was doing.
I disagree. Online purchases are deceptively antiseptic, especially when the product is intangible. In the “naive stupid kid” scenario he might not have realized what was going on. But if you walk into a MicroCenter and walk out with an $8K server-class gaming machine you damn well know you bought something.
Q:
I’m playing a game on some console.
I get to a point where I can “pick” something.
The something has a real money cost.
The game pops up a “You are about to spend $99.99” screen.
My Q’s:
Does the game already remember my CC number/code/date, or do I need to enter it each time?
If it remembers the info and is simply prompting for permission to send the charge to the CC company:
How do I get the “That annoying screen, yet again!” to go away?
Do I need to move the cursor and click a box, or do I just need to depress the Enter button?
If just hitting Enter makes the chosen product appear and return me to my game, I think maybe there should be another look at that dialog.
I know plenty of adults whose computers are full of malware and toolbars and whatnot because whenever they install a new program they just keep clicking “yes, next, agree” on everything that comes up. They just want to install the lousy program and can’t be bothered reading all the text that means nothing to them. So they unintentionally end up with all those “ad-ons” downloading from the internet can give you.
My point is, as I think someone mentioned earlier, it’s quite possible that the kid has agreed to the purchases without realising it. He might very well have just been thinking, “yes, whatever, stop showing me all these pointless menu screens and let me play the game”. I’m sympathetic to that.
Of course, he could just be lying and knows full well what he did. I don’t know.
Too late to edit:
It only just occurred to me that I don’t know how purchases work in FIFA. Do you have to go to a specific “shop” part of the game, or are additions you have to purchase just scattered round the regular game? I assumed the latter, but if it’s the former disregard my previous post.
You can’t even blame EA for that; it’s a common thing in the gaming world nowadays.
And at least when I’ve done it, it’s been little individual charges- like $2.56 or $3.07 type things.
In the Playstation Store, you have the option of having the system remember your card information, or entering it manually each time.
There is no “Enter” button. These are game consoles. The PS Store will tell you you are about to be charged X dollars and will default to “cancel.” You have to move the highlight over to the “accept” option in order to spend money.
But here’s the thing: you are not spending actual money every time you buy something in a game. You essentially buy store credit using the credit card, and then the individual transactions use up that credit until you refill it. Even then, of course, it prompts to to accept any transaction that drains the credit. So there are two layers of protection built in, unless he initially bought $8K worth of XBox Marketplace credits in one transaction.
I would be very surprised if the XBox Marketplace doesn’t work exactly the same way. Either way, the authorized $8 grand in purchases. There’s no way he made a mistake (other than not paying attention to how much he was spending).
You very deliberately buy things from a store. Here’s an image.
There is some truth in this. Every company has realized they can get more money and fund “freemium” games by offering additional content. The problem is that they do it to varying degrees. Some games are deliberately engineered to be unplayable past a certain point unless the player is willing to start investing more and more money. EA is notoriously predatory. If you buy EA, you can pretty much count on getting an extremely minimal game that asks for more and more money, above and beyond the $60 you already spent.
AFAICT, EA has been the leader in the in-game purchase model (first for smartphone games and now for consoles). As I said before, if the game is free (like, say, the Android “version” of Madden, which is really a card trading game) then I have no problem with it. But they can go fuck themselves if they’re charging $70 for the game and then charging more for insubstantial content like player packs. Regular DLC, like added levels and things, sure.
Safer, in most circumstances; the store has you typically hand your card to a clerk to swipe it, and the clerk could easily have one of those card-readers that steals the data right next to the real one. Most customers would never notice. In a restaurant, the wait staff often takes your card off to the register while you wait at the table, too, allowing them to very easily copy your card’s information.
Hell, all they have to do is have a good memory and simply look at your card, then write down the number and your address (which they can memorize off of your driver’s license when you show it as ID) a minute later after you’ve left. Then they punch it in on Amazon.com or whatever.
At least online, there’s no other human that ever handles your information directly, so you’re actually much less likely to have your card info stolen.
This is what I was thinking, only I didn’t know how to phrase it. Plus I watch my credit card constantly - don’t other people? I mean I check it at least once a week to make sure there’s nothing crazy.
But then, I don’t have an 8000 credit limit, so you couldn’t even charge that much on my card. I don’t need that high of a limit, to be honest - I try to pay for most things up front.
Like others here, I have nothing authorized to take my credit card instantly, except Amazon, and even with Amazon, it goes through a screen to tell me what I am buying, how much it is, and what card it goes on. Every tablet, phone, or console I own, asks me to input the password each time. That way I cant even buy by accident.
As others have mentioned, EA is particularly devious about this. While paid add-ons have been around forever and aren’t necessarily pernicious (I mean, we used to buy “Expansion Packs,” now they just chop that stuff up and call it paid DLC), EA have been pioneers at the trading card approach. I believe it started with their sports franchises, but even games like Mass Effect and Plants vs Zombies have “booster packs.” You can earn packs through gameplay, but it’s a whole lot faster to just plunk down a little cash up front.
It’s sketchy to me because the “collectible” nature combined with the very slow earning rate make this stuff a bit addictive, especially for folks who are invested in the multiplayer communities of the games.
DLC purchases each show as a separate line item for me. Then again, I’ve never tried buying $8k in one billing cycle. Let me get back to you on that.
To play devil’s advocate here and lend a small amount of support to the son: I’ve played dozens of video games over the past few decades that involve in-game purchases with in-game currency, none of which actually resulted in any kind of real charge.
Here’s a store screen from Final Fantasy III. Here’s one from Super Off Road.
Note that the FIFA screen someone posted doesn’t show amounts in actual dollars.
These days, I agree that he should know better (and I think that he very likely did), but I could see someone thinking “Of course it’s not actually charging me $10 for this. I already bought the game.”
Game makers purposefully obfuscate purchases behind fake currencies to make it easier for people to spend absurd amounts of money.
But, do realize, that’s not the actual purchase confirmation screen. On Xbox One, once you select that, a very different-looking Xbox system dialog pops up, showing you the exact purchase amount, the payment method you will be using, and requiring you to select confirmation.
Is it possible they genuinely didn’t understand / process how much they were spending? Absolutely. But, barring a genuine mental disability, I don’t believe there’s any way a teenager could possibly do this, repeatedly, without realizing they were charging real money to the credit card.
Even in games that have you buy/spend “points” of some type (which is indeed shady, especially when they’re difficult to translate into dollars on the fly) you still have to buy “10,000 Game Coins for $29.99” or whatever.
At some point he was obviously and clearly spending real money on the game.
Not quite: it’s to force people to waste small amounts of money. For example, Nintendo sells Wii Points in chunks of 1000 ($10). However, the size of those chunks bears no rational relationship to the price of Wii content; the games available for download on the original Wii were mostly priced at 600 to 800. So I’ve got 300 Wii Points sitting around on my old system that I’ll never use, and which can’t be refunded. When you consider that 90% of Wii owners probably have between 100 and 400 points sitting around uselessly, and they sold millions of Wiis, that money adds up. In fact, a lot of people may have thousands of unused points.
And no, you couldn’t specify exactly how many points you wanted to buy.