In-app purchases -- bad parents?!

[robinator]

Exactly. Most games come from "small" studios; considering there are hundreds of them compared to the few big name developers.

 

[Feronia]

Ack, no! I love small studios and indie developers! Some of my favourite games are made by one person or by small groups of people. (Dungeons of Dredmor, Legend of Grimrock, La Mulana, Spelunky, Cave Story, Gurk 2, Dark Spire to name a few.) I support small game developers whenever I can. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding and we are talking about different games here. These games do not have any form of microtransactions, in app purchases -- there's the difference. But they're all made by very talented small developers. Personally, I'd rather buy a creative game made by a small, dedicated team than a game made by EA any day, so absolutely no offense to your husband!

The "crap" games I am talking about are the extremely basic ones that essentially require you to spend money to progress. And that's it. (This article does a good job of explaining the ones: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-13-saturday-soapbox-the-high-cost-of-free-to-play). I know that these ones are made with minimal thought and structured only around the getting the player to cough up money. When these sort of games are targeted at toddlers, I have a problem with them. There's a difference between a small studio of creative people with a vision and limited resources, and a small studio of people using psychological manipulation to make a semblance of a game for the sole reason of making money.

 

[Foogirl]

Anyone who trusts a company not to be underhand is probably at risk from them in so many more ways than just with Apps.

We have i-phones and and I-pad which our daughter plays with all the time. She is generally supervised but sometimes not. If she is unsupervised I stick it on airplane mode. Not because I fear she will buy stuff, more in case my boss phones and she answers it

It is so easy to restrict in app purchases, to password protect and just as you would with your pin number, never let your LO know it or see it. To buy anything on my phone, I have to physically go in to the settings and change them and go back to the app. Sure it is a pain in the ass but it's better than the alternative. I do hold parents responsible if their children run up a bill as it is so easy to avoid.

What does annoy me though, is how easy it is to spend the credits you do buy - one reason I don't tend to do it. Most online things - even microsoft - asks you "are you sure" and app games generally tend not to. When frantically trying to finish a level, I've often pressed the "pay xxx coins for extra time" by accident and when I challenged the app company they basically said "tough" To me it seems like a deliberate ploy to get people to buy more and that should be investigated.