I remember a media story about outraged parents getting credit card bills for thousands of dollars after their kids played a Smurfs game on ipad where you could buy in game Smurfberries for fifty US dollars. Apple eventually caved and issued refunds.
A game aimed at young children(Smurfs) with an in game item that costs fifty dollars? Yea play coy all you want developer you knew exactly what would happen.
I know a guy in real life that won’t let his toddler touch his iphone anymore after the kid downloaded a superhero themed game and made in game purchases and he got a CC bill for two hundred from it. He wasn’t even aware it was possible for this to happen, he said Apple demands your CC just to use itunes and then it can be used by any app LOL.
I have never owned a Apple device, only android tablets but even I ran into this but at least I wasn’t burned by it. Just had a screaming kid frustrated by the fact the game would not let you progress unless you kept pumping 20 USD into it for every few levels. The game was aimed at children under 10 and listed as a free download in the google store.
:smack:This is a scam, plain and simple. Why back in my day we bought viddy games and GASP we owned it and could play as far as we wanted.
The fact they put this crap in games aimed at young children, who have no way to earn money is a laugh. Talk about exploiting ignorance.
Back in my day, my parents strictly limited my “screen time” and didn’t rely on electronic gadgets to entertain us, so that’s always an option. Rather than getting outraged that corporations are trying to make money, parents could, you know, parent.
Apparently to make use of Apple devices a credit card number is demanded, once you have created the account apps can access this automatically. The kids aren’t entering the info, just clicking.
There are controls you can set, like asking for a password before making a purchase, but the majority of people don’t set it.
So your parents watched you every second while you played SNES?:dubious:
I consider myself a libertarian, but I’m going to call out unethical behavior by corps.
I’m not even against in game purchases, but fifty bucks for an in game item in a game with the amazing graphics of a SNES/N64 game, a game aimed at young kids, is laughable. We’re not talking EVE online here, and it wouldn’t bug me so much if you could purchase the game up front and be done with it, but no the game is free but oh you want to play it to the end? Well you’ll end up coughing up the cost of a damn console!
The sequence of events is apparently parent buys iphone/ipad and is asked for a CC number to use it without setting controls, then at some point kid asks to play a kid aimed game or parent sees one in the app store listed as free and downloads it.
You can play the game for a while and then at some point to progress you need to spend real money buying in game items or to progress to a next level etc. Kid clicks and the statement comes in the mail.
There are high quality video games aimed at adults using the latest in graphics technology with budgets in the MANY millions of dollars and staff of hundreds that create add on content up to the standards of the original game with many hours of game play that take almost as long to create as the original game and up to the same standards, and it costs fifty bucks or under.
So when a game aimed at kids too young to have money with the production standards of the 1990’s coded by five people wants to charge more than a blockbuster game for such paltry content yea it rubs me all wrong.
This will also work for pay to play games bought through android stores including google’s, so long as the store has the CC data (the parent already associated it with the account).
Here’s a valuable feature of some credit cards: You can create a temporary transient on-line credit card number for one-time on-line purchases. My credit card has this feature (the only reason I keep this particular card), maybe other cards have it too.
When you want to make an on-line purchase, you first go the the credit card web site and sign in. There, you can get assigned a transient new card number, linked to your real card. This number has a low credit limit that you can set (so make it just enough to buy what you want) and a very short-term expiration date that you can specify. Once you use this card to make your on-line purchase, if there is any credit limit left on it, you can only use it for subsequent purchases with the same vendor.
Whatever reason you have to give Apple your credit card number, you should use one of these.
Every time I buy an app with my iPad or iPhone i get asked for my password or thumbprint. I’m very lax when it comes to security so this would be the default behaviour. I’ve never had an issue with my kids buying stuff from the App Store and neither has their Mum, they’ve always had to enter a password, or in the case of their own iPads there is no cc associated with the account so they can’t buy anything even when they do know the password. I agree that pay to play type games are a scam and suck (including those aimed at adults), but it’s up to us be responsible parents, it’s not up to the corporations to do that for us.
It is very possible Apple has made improvements in the years since the article was written, and I was told an anecdote.
I’ll freely admit scam is maybe hyperbole, but unethical and shitty business practice?
But like I shared in another thread the time I played around with an ipod touch years in the past and it would not allow mounting as a disk to transfer media, would not play audio or video files transferred as files, and required going through itunes only to add files and garbled them somehow so they could not be transferred out, AND required rewriting the entire library just to add one .mp3 file only to be corrected that this limitation had since been removed. A bad impression sticks with you.
A few months ago, here in Thailand, there was a case of a mother that found herself in 7000 (or thereabouts) dollars in debt after her son followed “hacking instructions” on Youtube to get free stuff on a game… I wonder if the trick was to press the “Buy Now” button as fast as possible. :smack:
The thing is the charges came on next month’s bill, there was no credit card transaction or anything, charges went directly into the bill after “buying” things on the game.
If I remember correctly this was a Line application, and they must be raking it in with that borderline predatory business model.
It’s not just a click. It requires an AppleID number. If you’ve provided your child with that, it’s on you, not Apple. Also, it’s not that you can’t play the game without purchasing add ons, that’s not true. It’s that you can advance faster with purchases. Not the same thing at all.
You seem to have gone out of your way to misrepresent this in its entirety. I have friends who learned the same lesson. They also tried to blame the computer game designers.
Who gives a small child a computer game without sufficient knowledge of the game to know it encourages paying to enhance play? Or not understanding what is required to make those purchases? Or, whether or not they may buy them?
Parents who can’t be bothered to find out these basic things before plopping their kid down to play with the damn thing are being very naive. Blaming the designers, is just disingenuous, in my opinion.
Which, of course, doesn’t mean you don’t hear people complain about it all the time!
Just to fair though, way back in the day your counsel wasn’t connected to the internet and video games were still very, what’s the word, crude? basic? had a lot of growing up to do? I mean, if we had broadband in the early 90’s and you could plug your Nintendo into it maybe Nintendo would have taken $5 to let you skip a level you’ve been stuck on for 2 days.
The other thing to keep in mind when calling this a scam is that our ‘viddy’ games were, what forty or fifty dollars. These games are free. I’ve got Simpsons Tapped Out and Family Guy The Quest For Stuff (both the subject of a recent South Park episode on exactly what you’re talking about). I paid nothing for the games, but I can buy stuff to make it easier to advance through the game.
Anyways, if what was said upthread is true, that you need the iTunes password to make the purchases, then the developers, IMO, are in the clear. It’s on the parents. Just one question though, I assume your iTunes password can be different than your iPad password, right? I only ask this because my daughter has a Kindle fire and with how it’s setup a device password is required. We set one up and she has to use it to navigate from some places to other places, but she still doesn’t have my Amazon password, I believe she would still need that to make a purchase of any kind (though I should probably test that as she’s getting older).
One last thing in both the games I mentioned above, I didn’t spend any money, you don’t have to, no one is forcing you to, you don’t even have to play them. That’s what I never really understood about this whole scenario. If the game tricked you into giving up your CC info or iTunes password or charged you more then it said it was going to, that’s different but what people are whining about is that all these little one and two dollar purchase are adding up really fast. I can’t feel bad for that. If your kid did it without you realizing it, I feel a little bad for that, but take the game away now that you know how your tablet works. You could get the kid an Android tablet and some Android gift cards (I think iTunes requires a CC no matter what, Android doesn’t). Then the kid can play all he wants and when the gift cards run out he’s got to find free stuff to do.
Also I just saw this on the wiki article about fremium games, it was specifically about the Smurfs game, but seems to be in reference to iTunes in general.
I don’t have an issue with paying to buy a game. It’s the supposed free ones that pop up later requiring you to buy boosters or whatever in game that are more sleazy.
The issue with Apple was once you bought an app using your Apple ID you could make additional purchases for some small amount of time without re-entering in your ID (a few minutes). Makes sense, but there were unintended consequences. Mom buys Jr an app, and for a few minutes more, Jr can buy a bunch of stuff without using any ID, to cc linked to the Apple store. They’ve closed this loophole since then.
Ever since the app store came out with iOS2, Apple has always required a password to purchase anything or download free apps. In one of their later OS updates, they made a change so that purchases that happened within 10 minutes of previously entering your password didn’t require entering it again.
Kids either knew their parents password for some reason or they asked their parents to enter in the password for a relatively innocuous reason and then used the 10 minute grace window to complete more purchases.
iOS devices allow you to set restrictions that ban in app purchases either outright or for certain apps but the setting is fairly hidden. What Apple really needs to do, especially now that every new device they sell has TouchID is to introduce accounts. If someone opens a device with Finger X, it’s associated with credit card X they can do anything they want but if they open it with Finger Y, it’s not associated with any credit card and purchases are impossible.