The Toddler Arcade
Nickel and diming kids within mobile games is bullshit.
The adage is true: content is king. But it’s especially true when you’re on a 15+ hour flight with a four year old. There, content isn’t just king, it’s queen, prince, princess, hand of the king, jester, and everyone else.
All of that is to say that I recently downloaded the first videogames for my child to try to play on our trip. Nothing too fancy, some simple games on an iPad that seemed age appropriate. Think: less Call of Duty, more Peppa Pig.
Anyway, she loved them. I mean, who wouldn’t? They’re like mini movies or shows but you can interact with them by touching them. When I was four years old, we played with those weird plastic things that morphed when parents put in the oven. Oven toys! Great fun. Times change.
Anyway, it’s awesome being a kid in 2023. It’s decidedly less awesome being a parent as I quickly found out because you’re constantly being upsold on content in said games. Call me naive, but I assumed that games meant for toddlers wouldn’t try to nickel and dime their way into your hearts. I was wrong. I was very, very wrong.
Honestly, it’s disgusting. Your kid can enjoy a game for a couple levels or rounds and then to keep enjoying it, it will be $5 a pop. Or $9 a month. Or whatever. It’s total fucking bullshit.
I get it. We all get it. Everyone needs to make money. If you feel the need to charge my child $9 a month to play a game, how about this: charge me $50 upfront to play it, with all the content there from the get-go? Hell, charge me $99. Just make it honest and straightforward. Don’t make it so that my child has to come to me, begging me to unlock the levels she wishes to play to continue. It’s so tacky and gross.
And it’s dark — as in a dark pattern. If you show a child that there is more to play but put a giant lock symbol over the content that only goes away if you pay, there is no way a child isn’t going to ask a parent to help them get to that content. A game developer could at least hide said content so that only parents can find it and choose to pay for it or not, never showing it to the child unless it’s already unlocked. But no. That would be too decent.
This is nothing new, of course. But it’s new to me. I grew up on Nintendo. You paid — well, your parents paid — $50 for game and you could play it until you had to blow in your cartridge slot to get it to keep working. In the 1980s, $50 was even more money than it is now. So I only had a few games. Honestly, some of them sucked. But you know what you were paying for and what you were getting. These days, it’s the opposite. And it sucks.
I recall when Nintendo released their first game for iOS, Super Mario Run, and they went out of their way to make it so there wouldn’t be upsells (though they bungled the initial implementation). I appreciate that about 1000x more now than I did then. Of course, investors dragged them for this — leaving money on the table. Yuck.
These days, Apple has taken up the torch with Apple Arcade. And that’s fantastic. But I’m honestly not sure how long that lasts in the world where they need to keep increasing revenues. But if anyone can release games where I’m promised my child won’t come to me with longing eyes to buy some sort of upsell, I’m all in.
