I would say 'no' on principle. No child of mine will EVER receive virtual currency as a present for Christmas. I would sooner buy them £120 worth of games than even £5 in Robux.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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I mean I can understand it. What do kids have these days? Arcades died, malls died, "why won't kids play outside?" the outside old people built
I mean.
Sold my (child's) soul to the company store....
Over half of us kids are really fucking dumb, so this tracks.
No different than buying a game if they get the same amount of playtime.
I think it's a little different. With new games comes novelty. Sticking with a single game and just buying cosmetics doesn't provide nearly as much novelty.
I don't think this is a children only issue either. Its a trap adults fall into as well.
And why does this "novelty" matter if what they spent money on got them the same amount of fun?
Not sure why novelty is in quotes, it's a quantifiable measurement based on differences. Anyway, novelty has shown to have a wide range of mental benefits. This is a pretty good overview, and if you want to dig into specific papers they're listed as well.
Even if you want to ignore any potential benefits of novelty, generally when you have a new experience for the first time, you will have more fun that you typically do. The downside is some new experiences may not be fun, but that's very low risk in the context of gaming.
Currencies often unlock completely new content and the fact that you might not like a new game could cancel out the potential to have a slightly better time. Ultimately, how you spend gaming money is up to you.
I would say the vast majority of micro transactions are cosmetic or time unlocking. Not adding much novelty.
Also the context of this post is about gifting kids on Christmas, so no, not necessarily "up to you". I guess there's an argument to just give kids whatever they want, but I don't think think that leads to the best development outcomes. You can't force kids to do anything either, but there does exist a middle ground.
I get the old man sentiment. But I remember being excited for a gift card to the arcade. Is it very different? Is it bad?
It's also no different than a RuneScape membership in the 2000s, or hell, Roblox Builder Club almost 20 years ago.
Both of those brought me an immense amount of joy and connection to others that I would never otherwise had gotten to experience living in an isolating rural area.
imo a subscription service is far more ethical than the current model. Its a very straightforward transaction. Now I have to convert real money to a fake currency (in set amounts of their choosing), purchase a pack of some kind, and gamble my way to a new pointless cosmetic item.
Company scrip is back lads
So….. when was it that all of the children in America were polled again?
With the power of math you don’t have to. I’m a data analyst by trade so I take offence to this question every time.
Yeah… the Entertainment Software Association polled kids. Doesn’t say what kids, or where. We have long since known that polling can easily give you the answers you want.
Also, I’m not going to argue about this.
Neat!
We still have no idea what kids were polled, and where they’re from. What we do know is that those that polled them has reason for a bias.
YouGov and ESA conducted a 5-minute online survey in the U.S. from September 26-30, 2025 among 1,912 respondents ages 5-65 recruited from YouGov’s proprietary online panel. Data is weighted to be representative of the overall U.S. population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, education and census region. Respondents ages 5 to 17 were asked to complete the survey under the supervision of a parent.
If you want to know proprietary information that provides competitive advantage like weights applied then you might be out of luck, however publishing garbage would destroy YouGov reputation quick and so they don’t have that much incentive to fudge numbers.
The ESA represents the profitability of gaming. I wouldn’t believe a single thing they polled, regardless of who they used to do it.
Polls are rarely unbiased, sooo….. We will have to agree to disagree
If that ain't proof microtransactions are a bane on society, then we're already too corrupt to care.
I see it as as much of a problem as cheap toys from Toys r' us. The kids love them for about 30 minutes, then they break and that's it (the toys that is). But does it really matter? Just because something is digital, does it really make it worth less to the children?
It's less about the value to children and more about exploiting that to extract money without any regard to the children's wellbeing. Crappy toys would be purged in a more ethical state of the world instead of being allowed to thrive and take over.
That's just every single thing ever sold and marketed to children. No company has ever given half a shit about children's wellbeing. With that said, what part about them buying a skin to show off to their friends hurts their wellbeing?
The part where they buy a skin to show off.
Not to mention there’s hardly any micro transactions left, a lot of these micro transactions are the prices of full games or more!
Macro transactions 😎
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If it isn't proof they target children, I don't know what is.
Microtransctions prove they should be illegal every time I read any article about them
Kids my age: Remember when you could just download a skin for Quake from a website, install it, and still have other players see it? And it was free?
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I worked hard to make my kids understand why that stuff is bad. They got their highs, crashes, and understanding, now they're not attracted to stuff like that any more 😅 but man, it should totally be illegal.
Especially for kids ffs.
The current landscape of gaming is so foreign to me. Gaming for me has always been an experience to get lost in a fantasy world — something akin to reading. Nowadays everyone seems obsessed with the online and competitive sides of it. It feels like you can't have a conversation about videogames without someone bringing up Fortnite and the new skins they unlocked by treating it as a job.
because that's what the majority of people play.
the majority of people buy 1-2 games a year and play them all year. COD, sports games, the big popular shooters or whatever is trendy at the moment.
they are casual fans. they don't give a shit about stuff like Expedition 33 and would be totally uninterested in a game like that as boring and stupid. these are the same people who only watch marvel movies or hollywood action crap.
all my friends/family who play games think I'm a gay weirdo for liking non sports, non military, non racing games.
Its partially lack of marketing. You have to have the time to be at least somewhat keyed into the gaming community to even know what exists and is good.
For example I don't have a lot of time to play, so I am ideally looking for something like 15-30 minute increments. All the mass produced things marketed on tv or whatever are that type of game. God forbid I find a game and then realize it has some punishing save system.
Well, some people just treat it like playing sports. Wanna go play ball? Wanna play CSGO? Hey, this ball/shirt/skin looks fancier! It's foreign, but understandable to me.
It also seems to be as many people as it was back shooters became a big thing. Out of the few people I know who video game, one only does FPS, one sticks to a few different games (Ultrakill, TF2, Peak to name a few), one either plays co-op with his gf or does Single player, and one mostly plays single player like me. Chatting up random people about games, that ratio seems similiar.
Most people don't treat sports like that, though. Even those who do, know to shut up about their stats when talking about their sport with someone who isn't that into it. You don't say "oh, I went golfing with some friends last week" and immediately hear "I can score an 85" because that'd be obnoxious. I know there's always been people like that but it honestly feels like "competitive" play has become the norm and it didn't use to be like that.
Damn this one stings.
Instead of wanting a video game as a present.. They want a bunch of resources for the video game they already play.
And here i was assuming that with all the gamer parents, kids where going to be guided towards actually good games.
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