Tuesday, January 16th 2018
Leaked AI-powered Game Revenue Model Paper Foretells a Dystopian Nightmare
An artificial intelligence (AI) will deliberately tamper with your online gameplay as you scramble for more in-game items to win. The same AI will manipulate your state of mind at every step of your game to guide you towards more micro-transactions. Nothing in-game is truly fixed-rate. The game maps out your home, and cross-references it with your online footprint, to have a socio-economic picture of you, so the best possible revenue model, and anti buyer's remorse strategy can be implemented on you. These, and more, are part of the dystopian nightmare that takes flight if a new AI-powered online game revenue model is implemented in MMO games of the near future.
The paper's slide-deck and signed papers (with corrections) were leaked to the web by an unknown source, with bits of information (names, brands) redacted. It has too much information to be dismissed off hand for being a prank. It proposes leveraging AI to gather and build a socio-economic profile of a player to implement the best revenue-generation strategy. It also proposes using an AI to consistently "alter" the player's gameplay, such that the player's actions don't have the desired result leading toward beating the game, but towards an "unfair" consequence that motivates more in-game spending. The presentation spans a little over 50 slides, and is rich in text that requires little further explanation.
The rest of the presentation follows.
The paper's slide-deck and signed papers (with corrections) were leaked to the web by an unknown source, with bits of information (names, brands) redacted. It has too much information to be dismissed off hand for being a prank. It proposes leveraging AI to gather and build a socio-economic profile of a player to implement the best revenue-generation strategy. It also proposes using an AI to consistently "alter" the player's gameplay, such that the player's actions don't have the desired result leading toward beating the game, but towards an "unfair" consequence that motivates more in-game spending. The presentation spans a little over 50 slides, and is rich in text that requires little further explanation.
71 Comments on Leaked AI-powered Game Revenue Model Paper Foretells a Dystopian Nightmare
www.kotaku.com.au/2017/10/activision-patents-matchmaking-that-encourages-players-to-buy-microtransactions/
One of the first slides describes how it constantly leads you on into thinking you're gonna win by buying something, but all it actually does is use bait and switch to frustrate the player into spending more. Fucking shysters. Gamers are nothing more than cows to be milked at every opportunity. There's nothing at all about providing any kind of user satisfaction there at all. Dystopian it is.
I would say we are only about 5 years from Indie devs having easy access to the AAA graphics we have now. Once the tools exist for a hobbyist to make the equivalent of a full Assassin's Creed game by themselves in a basement, they will make it so consumers can ignore the transaction-filled AAA games.
Sure the graphics won't be as good, the voice acting will be average most of the time, and there will be more bugs than usual... But the games will be much more creative, inexpensive, and built with the mindset of "gameplay comes first."
At the same time, I'm having a hard time understanding where's the rip-off when the player knowingly chooses to play a microtransactions enabled game. MTXs are there to sell, that's the whole point.
Are you ok with this, don't you find anything wrong with it?
In short, I see no reason to take out the pitchforks just yet. Just to cautiously move forward.
That's why these things need to be exposed so everybody can see...utmost respect for the person that risked to get this out!!!
But this is all about making the game progressively harder in order to make you buy something that makes it easier again. The very definition of pay2win.