This is simply a delivery system for micro transactions. 99% of the time these limits on gameplay can be bypassed for a few pennies or dollars.
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It isn’t market socialism though, in it’s traditional sense.
Capitalism with Chinese characteristics would be a more accurate description
Absolutely it isn’t. Which is why I called it Chinese market communism, specifically. Maybe I needed a hyphen or two.
Chinese Commu-capitalism?
As a game industry veteran, I can provide some reassurance there. This is not what will will happen. We code in special systems and exceptions for lots of different markets. A good example is swastikas in WW2 games- it’s illegal to display them in Germany, so builds for that market swap out the textures with iron crosses. Very common technique. We already localize the text for hundreds of different markets, and our pipelines are set up to handle this. We do it because it ensures best chance of success in each market. American players want to see those swastikas, and are disappointed if they aren’t there, so the small effort to customize for Germany is worth it.
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The ones who are not okay with it tend to leave. I have two recent Chinese immigrants on my team at work, and they both cite stuff like this for why they didn’t want to raise their families in China. Both recently had babies here in America, and very excited about it.
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So, I work in the free-to-play mobile industry, and I need to correct some misconceptions on what you wrote. Puzzle & Dragons, for starters, is a huge game worldwide. More importantly, though, those timers and cool downs are not some sort of public health benefit. They are a standard freemium gameplay mechanic to psychologically manipulate you into spending money. Little tricks like that are worth billions of dollars at scale, and it’s how this business operates. It’s a bit dirty and cynical, but the sad fact is that people won’t pay for content. These games cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make (yes, even those little phone games) and nobody will pay even a dollar for them.
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All the more data to eventually be leaked/hacked.
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