The Office of Fair Trading has launched an investigation into "free" internet and app-based games amid fears children are being ripped off
There's a big furore being kicked up by a small group of parents who have been stupid enough to let their kids run up huge bills downloading paid for extras on free games. I have literally no sympathy with these people.
One family, interviewed by the BBC, said they gave their seven-year-old son the password to spend more money, and get this â€" he spent loads of money! Seventeen hundred quid, to be exact. If they gave him a seventeen hundred quid and left him in a toy shop, there's a strong chance they'd come back and find he'd bought a massive radio-controlled car or something. There wasn't even a problem, as Apple had refunded the family the money. Sounds like exemplary customer service to me.
Equally, another aggrieved mum told the woeful tale of how her nine-year-old daughter had memorised her password, and used it to buy a £70 unicorn for a virtual zoo. I'm sorry, but if your child has the nous to memorise a password, she also should have the intelligence to know right from wrong. Another of her complaints was that "a unicorn shouldn't cost £70". Obviously this woman hasn't been shopping for toys recently; at Christmas this year, I dropped over £100 on an ugly plastic Monster High-branded dolls house.
Frankly, I'd much rather have bought my niece and nephew virtual unicorns to ride. But of course, in mummy's eyes, little Jessica wasn't just a grasping, cunning little unicorn thief, she was a poor darling who had been abused by evil big corporations. These parents have now successfully lobbied the Office of Fair trading, who are launching a consultation.<
The OFT don't have the power to ban games, all they can do is ask for a voluntary code of conduct. What will happen, as always with this sort of thing, is people who play by the rules will be penalised, and the unscrupulous people who are trying to rip off children won't sign up.
I recently spoke to Paul Wedgewood, founder of a British company called Splash Damage, that makes free-to-play games. Their best selling title, Rad Soldiers, has gone to number one in 96 countries, without a penny being sent on marketing. It's a fun cartoony game, and I certainly enjoy it.
I asked Paul about the development of free-to-play games, and the concerns people have around them. While he acknowledged people's fears were real, he put a different spin on the whole market of free gaming for me:
I grew up on a council estate â€" when I was a kid, I couldn't afford games, and if I could afford one, it had to be really good. We try to be as ethical as possible with our games. We wanted something that was great, that could be played well by putting in time and little money; something that's completely free from the start.
A lot of free to play games are over-monetised; that's partly because lots of them are developed in the far east, where people have a different view of how you should succeed at gaming. In the West, we tend to see that the person with the most skill should win, not the person with the most money.
That made me think about the future of gaming; the free-to-play gamer is a different person from the thirty something queuing up to buy a triple-A title like StarCraft 2 or Bioshock: Infinite. No-one is surprised to pay a fortune for a triple-A game â€" after all, you are playing it on a machine costing several hundred pounds. Back in the 80s, games were cheap, and accessible to most people. As prices have ramped up, more and more people have been frozen out.
The free to play gamer doesn't have a lot of cash â€" they're often playing on a cheap smartphone or a borrowed tablet. That doesn't always mean kids â€" it often means living in the developing world. Part of the reason we are seeing such a huge gaming boom on smartphones is because that gaming culture â€" where everyone plays on their smartphone â€" is coming over from Asia.
It struck me that great British gaming firms like Splash Damage are already bending over backwards to get into this market ethically. And the more regulatory hoops they have to jump through, the more of the market will be left to predatory foreign developers.
So, free to play isn't something sinister â€" it's a gaming model that's unfamiliar, but one that works, and makes gaming more accessible. Parents who take the time to understand their child's hobbies, rather than just parking the kid on the sofa with a game to keep them quiet, will see it pay dividends. People who scream for the state to parent for them shouldn't be listened to.
The answer, as ever, is good parenting, not government regulation.
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