Raid Shadow Legends: A Casino for Children
I would like to shed some light on the heavily advertised mobile game Raid Shadow Legends. This topic was covered more extensively by a YouTuber whom I have a great of amount of respect for Upper Echelon Gamers.
To start off I would like to say that I do not generally play mobile games, as a PC gamer I just cannot bring myself to play games on my phone, the experience is terrible and more often then not mobile games are just excuses for large studios to increase profits rather than make a game people enjoy.
With that being said, there was a time not so long ago where you could not watch a YouTube video without seeing an add for Raid Shadow Legends. Through some incredibly deep investigation by Upper Echelon Gamers and another YouTuber AxialGT it was discovered that the company who produces Raid Shadow Legends is quite literally a company that occupies the casino gaming space (more on this later).
Raid employed the incredibly effective tactic of paying/sponsoring YouTube creators to promote their product by providing them with a very specific script of the promotion they wanted. This was of course publicly denied by the company but the FCC requires this type of disclosure so it is easily provable.
Plarium Games is the producer of Raid Shadow Legends which is a company that was purchased by Aristocrat Leisure Limited in 2017 for $500 million. Aristocrat Leisure Limited is a casino gambling manufacturer, they make most notably slot machines. A statement given by Aristocrat CEO Trevor Croker in 2017 stated that the purchase of Plarium “Allows Aristocrat to expand our addressable market into logical adjacent segments of the fast growing mobile gaming market”.
I am not sure if you have every played Raid Shadow Legends, but if you have you will know that while it is free to play there is no doubt that it is designed to push the player towards sustained purchases in order to enhance the experience. I don’t have an issue with studios monetizing their products, I do however have an issue with an actual casino games manufacturer jumping into an unregulated mobile gaming market and using physiological gambling tactics to push their often underage users into making purchases that are in fact randomized and have no clear return on investment.
This issue is a growing problem not only in the mobile gaming space but it is slowly infecting all games with more and more studios adopting these gambling mechanics because they offer much higher returns for the studios. I do not want to see heavy governmental regulation within the gaming space however I believe it to be inevitable and at this point quite possibly needed.
I do not appreciate studios and companies taking advantage of often underage users by using gambling mechanics to increase their profit. This type of predatory monetization needs to stop. This is by no means an issue for just the mobile gaming communities but becoming one for all gamer’s. If we don’t stop this, governments around the world may have to step in and stop it for us, I don’t want over reaching government regulation for fear of it going too far and damaging the gaming community as whole, but it may be necessary in this case.
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