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Kid Racks Up $5,900 Bill Playing Jurassic World On Dad's iPad (pcmag.com)
theodp writes: For Mohamed Shugaa, the scariest Jurassic World creature is perhaps Apple CEO Tim Cook, not the Indominus Rex. That's because Shugaa discovered his 7-year-old son had managed to rack up a $5,900 bill playing the Jurassic World game on his iPad in six days. "Why would Apple think I would be spending thousands of pounds on buying dinosaurs and upgrading a game," Shugaa told The Metro. "Why didn't they email me to check I knew these payments were being made? I got nothing from them. How much longer would it have gone on for?" Shugaa discovered his son's 65 in-app purchases when a payment he tried to make to a business supplier was declined. His son had upgraded dinosaurs using the game currency 'Dino Bucks' without realizing it was charging his Dad in real money. The good news is that Apple has decided to refund the money, so the kid doesn't have to worry about Apple making him work 8,500 hours for $5,980 to settle the debt. Btw, before you developers get too excited about the possibility of using In-App Purchase to take kids to the cleaners at $6,000-a-pop, remember that Apple call dibs on the first $1,800!
You let your brat play unchecked with a credit card-enabled tablet, you deserve every bill you get.
Especially if you're too dumb to read the fine print and adjust your settings, so that these things can be avoided.
Whenever the kids ask for a game on their tablets, as soon as it is installed, I log out of the itunes account so that they cant purchase anything more. It takes only seconds, and if this guy can't figure out how / cant be bothered to take that simple step, then he deserves to have to cough up the money. Its like they say, a fool and their money are soon parted.
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Knowing Apple, why not require that in app purchases have to actually provide you something of value beyond arbitrarily increasing counters in games?
In-App Purchases require you to enter your Apple ID password. A better question is why has this father provided his password to his son?
Talk about naive. A seven year old absolutely needs to be supervised when using a mobile or any internet connected device. The most maddening part of this is that he seems to be expecting Apple to babysit his kid.
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The smart child had memorized his father's Apple ID password
A password was required to make an in-game purchase, and even if the father entered it himself, that only works for 15 minutes. How is it Apple's fault that the kid memorized the guy's password?
My question is why would hand a child a device to 'play' with that is tied to a system authorized to make payments? I realize all kinds of people do that every day but its still stupid. You would not hand your kid a wad of cash to used building a house of cards, why would you hand them a computer with credit information embedded?
Both IOS and Android can be set so you at least have to enter your Apple / Google password to make a purchase. If your device isn't set to lock itself with a short timeout or you ever hand it to anyone you can't trust entirely (like your spouse) then you absolutely should have the password for ordering functions on! It is true that the result is this also requires the password for free stuff, but there again if you can't be arsed to manage the entertainment software on your phone for your kid, you probably should get them their own device like maybe a PSP or their own phone with no credit card info associated.
Frankly this is an expensive lesson but this day should pay up and learn it well.
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This is maybe the shittiest article I've seen posted to Slashdot in a long time, and that's saying something.
First, why does the blame fall to Tim Cook of all people instead of the developers of the game?
Second, Apple has already set up a Family Sharing system to prevent just this sort of thing. Never mind the fact that your have to give your kid your password to the account tied to a credit card for this to happen in the first place.
http://www.apple.com/icloud/fa...
To say nothing of the fact that in the article itself they said Apple refunded him the money. But yeah, they're assholes because he doesn't know not to give your kid access to your credit card.
Finally throw in a dash of globalization scare tactics and remind developers that they *only* get 70% of the IAP revenue, which they know about already, and you've got the Slashdot Shithead Trifecta.
Schnapple
Steam requires you to reenter your credit card CVC if you've been making a lot of purchases recently. Apple could do something similar.
What, like this and this ? Via Settings > General > Restrictions
I feel IMHO should be banned on any game targeting an audience below 12 years old. At the very least in-app purchases above a certain amount or accumulated amount should require external authentication, to prevent this exact scenario.
As for the 'in-app purchase are evil' subject, it is because you'll frequently get a free app and then find it goes on to nickel-and-dime the whole experience. What is the real price of a free app with in-app purchasing? Here we saw it was potentially well above $5000. At that price $60 console games look cheap.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"Settings > iTunes and App Store > Password Settings"
This sounds like the beginning of THHGTTG, where the guy's house is bulldozed because he didn't know that he should have checked in the city hall to find out that this was planned.
The default should be to protect the user against them shooting in their feet and to make them go out of their way to disable the protection. Don't expect them to oversee and remember all potential consequences of typing in their cc number.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
WHO demanded fee-to-play (they certainly aren't free) games? Nobody I know fucking did, and most I know hate it.
First they took local LAN play, so you could only play when online.
FTP is basically just a scam to hide the real cost of a game, be it free install or otherwise.
On tablets etc, games didn't *require* paying of course, unless your actually wanted to progress beyond a certain point.
Meanwhile on PC/console, we got unlockable "achievements", which was kinda cool until those became necessary to unlock items in the game.
Then off course, came the ability to "pay" for unlocks, so you had the ability to play 10,000h for a sniper scope or pay in order to compete with the fucking rich kids who bought them at $50
Back to tablet, oh now we're not charging you money, you get game "credits" (which of course your can purchase) to obfuscate the cost of things further.
Lastly, let us not forget DLC. What used to be legitimate add-ons a year or so after release became 0-day nickel-and-dime cash grabs to get a full game.
Tell me, when did we ask for this shit? Because it seems to me that as soon as the industry see dollar signs, every fucking game went there. EA was the biggest sell-out, but with them and other big names buying out any game studio that produces a decent product, your choices are pretty much limited to whose dick you want to take up your ass, and with how much lube (lube available in micropayments of $5/application).
It's mostly Whales. Obsessive compulsive types with mental issues. A large percentage of the revenue free to play makes comes from these folks. I think the point the Grandparent was getting at is that these games survive by taking advantage of people with varying degrees of sanity. As a society we like to think that we protect those kind of people. We don't.
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