Do Children’s Games take Advantage of People

By Brady Gibbons

      Moises Ramirez, a longtime student of Benicia High School plays a game called, Rust, a PvP game, where you collect resources and stay up till 4 AM just to lose all your progress the next day because you died. 

     Now you may wonder, why play this if you’re gonna lose it all anyway? I wondered this too, so I asked Moises personally “why play Rust?”  He said, “I make money off of it.” Turns out, Moises gambles in game items online and makes real life money off of it. 

     “I can’t stop playing it–it’s too addictive,” Ramirez explains.  

     Most games have a gambling aspect to them now, from very rare items encouraging you to spend money to get them, to developers adding “limited” items you have to pay for. Which isn’t necessarily bad if you just ignore it, but these developers are targeting children. 

     A children’s videogame, Roblox, is a platform where young developers can make games for other children to play. But now, big companies are making Roblox games, and they have a profit incentive. 

     Children are very impressionable and if you make a flashing, “Buy at half cost, Limited” a kid will not think “ oh this is a rip off” they see the item and buy it because it’s “Limited.” 

     In Roblox, there are items you can pay money to get to put on your avatar. Those items have a “Robux” value that will fluctuate over time, just like a stock market. You can then trade and sell these items to people for real life money. This encourages kids to spend money to make money.

     Many games on Roblox have a “Gatcha system,” a japanese game where you put a coin into a machine and you get a random prize. In some games, you have to wait a certain amount of time and spend your in game money to buy these rare items.

     Which doesn’t sound bad at first, but say one of these rare items comes into the shop and you don’t have the in-game money to buy it. Well, you can spend real life money to get more in game money to get the rare item. Many games like “steal a brainrot” and “grow a garden” have these types of situations. 

     Children do not know how to differentiate between a bad deal and a good one. Developers are taking advantage of young children for the goal of easy profit. Parents need to keep a better eye on what their children are playing and viewing to protect them from greedy developers.