Today, BEUC and 22 member organisations* from 17 countries submitted a complaint to EU authorities on the unfair practices of leading video game companies, behind games such as Fortnite, EA Sports FC 24, Minecraft and Clash of Clans. Our analysis concludes that traders breach EU consumer protection laws. We call on authorities to ensure that traders play by the rules and provide consumers with safe gaming environments.
All of these would be fixed by banning in game purchases with real money.
That’s probably not going to work. There will be less incentive for companies to work on a game if they can’t turn it into money stream. Especially big and expensive games. I think the outline above is pretty fair and a good start. They should throw on top of it banning loot boxes since they essentially develop gambling behavior in children.
I don’t get this. Charge a reasonable price for the game, which should include all in game content. Don’t make people pay for the game and then for more stuff in the game, especially if it gives them an unfair advantage over other players just for having paid.
Then games like Fortnite or Apex Legends wouldn’t make sense because the whole idea is that in-game spending funds ongoing development. Development and servers cost money, and assuming that new game sales will continue indefinitely doesn’t make any sense.
What I think we should do is require discontinued MP games to be self-hostable, improve price transparency, and ban in-game purchases for minors. That should do a lot to correct the poor behavior of these companies without destroying the evergreen MP game model. This won’t impact games that already do things mostly ethically (e.g. Minecraft) and will require changes to the worst of the abusers.