Opinion: OFT consultation on gaming a 'good start'

First we had ‘compu gacha’ and now the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has consulted on video games aimed at children and monetised using the now well-known ‘freemium’ model. The issues that have upset the OFT are 1) transparency; 2) misleading consumers; 3) exploitation of children; 4) direct exhortations to children to buy and 5) deduction of payments without the account holder’s knowledge, express authorisation or informed consent.

No-one is criticising the ‘freemium’ model of monetisation-over-time as a method of charging for entertainment per se. It has the advantage of allowing access to gameplay that might otherwise have been subject to an expensive up-front charge, and to that extent it benefits players and programmers alike. Games programmers have mortgages to pay and the shopping to fetch.

The OFT is more concerned at what could be characterised as poor practice in relation to children, particular where the ‘freemium’ model offers lots of incremental paid-for enhancements meaning that the ‘basic’ gameplay can’t be said to be ‘free’ in any meaningful sense. The OFT wants consumers to be given clear notice as to what is free, what they will subsequently have to pay for, and what is optional.

Another issue is where players may be led to believe that payments are required for something when in fact the necessary points, credits or virtual chips could be amassed by waiting or by winning them without payment. Also in relation to children, the OFT does not want to see psychological pressure put onto children by making them feel bad about not making a purchase.

There are other comments and requirements in the consultation too, but mostly they boil down to transparency, customer care, good communication and a general fairness towards players. Some commentators have called for stricter rules but the writer’s view is that the consultation seems to be a good start in terms of the balance between the programmers’ right to make a profit and the players’ rights to be treated transparently.

In many ways the OFT consultation is a call for the gaming industry to develop some ‘best practice’ in an area that gives parents cause for concern. It is helpful in that it kicks off a debate which needs to occur not just in relation to ‘freemium’ entertainment-style video games but also in relation to ‘social’ gambling-style games, where the game is gambling in all but the fact that virtual currency is used.

The promotion of gambling-style games, or games using arrangements derived from gambling, such as spinning reels, and using overtly child-friendly brands based, for example, popular animations, is something that is causing official notice to be taken in the UK already. As always and at the risk of a truism, the best way to ensure sensible self-regulation and avoid the heavy-handed imposition of official regulation is for the industry to develop some standards of its own and the recently-formed Social Gaming Association has set this ambition as its raison d’etre.

As readers will know, there is a lively ongoing debate at present about virtual currency and virtual worlds and their equivalence or interchangeability with reality. Concerns have been expressed by as august a personage as Mark Liparelli during his tenure at the Nevada Board and here in the UK the Commission is watching the sector.

Those of us who work with gambling law realise that the first step to official aggrandisement is where the industry gives the authorities a problem which they think they have to be seen to be dealing with, and when they fear that they will risk political or press criticism if they do not.

Despite the enabling and liberalising tendency of the UK’s 2005 Act, voices hostile to gambling are still strong, the mainstream press’ reporting of electronic gambling issues is disproportionately influenced by discontents and over-sensationalised accounts of, for example, problem gambling. So there has to be a concern that if good practice is not adopted by the social gaming industry, especially regarding children, it will unnecessarily pressurise the Gambling Commission (or other authority) to seek to regulate products which they can currently disown due to them falling outside the Act.

So in a way, entertainment-style ‘video’ games, ‘social’ (non-) gambling games and gambling proper all live in different rooms of the same house and bear comparison with one another which becomes more pressing the more similar they are. Poor practice in the non-gambling sectors may therefore invite the extension of regulation from the gambling sector as the ‘answer’.