Post by Lone Wanderer on Feb 21, 2019 23:07:01 GMT
a Reddit user who goes by the name Kensgold posted an open letter to publisher EA and other developers in the video game industry. “I am 19 and addicted to gambling,” he wrote. Kensgold wasn’t talking about roulette tables or online poker. He was talking about spending over $10,000 on in-game purchases over the last several years.
Kensgold, who asked that we not use his real name, shared with Kotaku his bank statements and receipts proving that he had indeed spent $13,500.25 in games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Smite, and The Hobbit: Kindoms of Middle-earth over the past three years. His post was a plea to the people who design and sell games to take note of the effect microtransactions in games can have on the small population of people who are especially susceptible to them. He includes himself in this group, and while he’s legally an adult now, he says the lure of spending money for rewards in his favorite games started when he was only 13. The first was a browser city-building game Kensgold remembers being similar to Clash of Clans. “I think I spent around $30 on it but I was also very young and had actually no income whatsoever,” he said during a phone interview.
At the time, Kensgold was a sophomore in high school with no car and a part-time job at Panera. Of the $300-400 paycheck he received every two weeks, he reckons he spent about 90% of it on in-app purchases. His grandparents started to worry and his mom tried to shut off their internet to stop him from playing, but with a smartphone and a 3G connection, circumventing those obstacles was easy. He even got a second job to fuel his addiction.
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