Nintendo Sued For 'Immoral' Mario Kart Loot Boxes - Slashdot

Nintendo Sued For 'Immoral' Mario Kart Loot Boxes

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  He's the one who linked his credit card to a "Nintendo account" then sat his brat in front of the machine unsupervised.

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    I remember back in the day when Android and Apple got hit for this shit. Basically, they make linking the credit card as easy as they can, make putting a card in temporarily or removing permission to charge a card as hard as possible, etc...

    So you could put your card in to buy your kid Matlab or such, and next thing you know they've charged a couple hundred for some gaming credits.

    Also, kid. Might not realize the difference between real world currency and game currency yet.

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      I agree that it's despicable but I don't see how it's illegal or how anybody is still surprised by it in 2023.

      What's needed is a law to force banks to send an SMS every time something is charged to a card. Some banks already do but it should be obligatory.

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        I'd probably be drowned in notifications in that case.

        It might not be illegal, but to keep companies under control, I think it should be, especially for minors. I'm also not surprised by it at all.

        Which is why I think the lawsuit over it is the news, not the practice itself.

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        If they depended on the kid's confusion over the difference between real money and virtual in-game money, then it's fraud. Hard to prove, but again - it's not like they go out of their way to make it hard to link a credit card to an account (or make it easy to require a parent's consent to use the card on file).

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      I'm fairly certain Nintendo has some parental control options available to prevent a kid from running up their parents' credit card. As much as I personally feel IAPs are a scummy practice and have ruined every game they've infected, the fault here lies with the parent for not properly configuring their kid's Nintendo Switch.

      • Re:

        Mario Kart Tour is a phone game, not a Switch game. It's on iOS and Android.

        Some levels from Mario Kart Tour were later re-used as DLC for Mario Kart 8 on the Switch.

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      It doesn't help that a lot of this stuff gets charged in game currency or company scrip. You generally buy a season pass, in-game items and keys for loot boxes with V-Bucks, Crom Coins, Apex coins and what have you. If you don't have sufficient coins, you might get a pop up offering a number of coins for RL cash, kid clicks OK, and dad gets a charge on the linked credit card.

• Okay, I remember back when Android and Apple got busted for this sort of thing.

  1. Air Jordans - this requires dad to pull out the card. To be similar to what happened, the dad took the kid in to get some sensible school shoes, and the kid went back to the store later, they pulled up dad's credit card and THEN sold the kid a half dozen pairs of Air Jordans.
  2. The kid is a minor. We don't know how young, but he could be young enough that the concept of "money" is still shaky, much less taking without permission, and all that. There's a reason why we generally protect minors more in contracts and such. It's just that game and other companies these days are preying upon them under the idea that most parents will just pay the bill. Do you really want to introduce little Timmy to the US justice system as a preteen? I don't.
  3. Who says that he didn't face him? He might have sat "little Timmy" down and given him an education on that stuff. Doesn't mean that Nintendo didn't deliberately target Timmy in what amounts to a scam operation to get Timmy to do it. I mean, if some adult convinces your kid to sell illegal drugs in school, do you just punish your kid, or do you make sure that adult is never seen again as well?

  Nintendo, in this case, was very much an active participant, deliberately engineering their game to encourage this sort of behavior.

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  Did the kid go grab the credit card and key in the number? Or did dad buy a single game for $3.99 a year ago and Nintendo "helpfully" stored the card on file automatically? Because I think they can share the blame for that behavior. Modern systems are designed around tricks like this. And then games have "virtual" currencies that you earn in-game. Kids are not always aware that real money is involved in any of it because it's a game.

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  Kids are idiots. Nobody is born with an adult sense of morality, they have to learn it. And its entirely possible theyfather has been lacking in that respect.

  That does not abborgate the fact that Nintendo have been lazer targetting gambling advertising at children. I've seen how pernicious these loot boxes are with kids. They go absolutely mental if you wont buy it for them, and theres a huge amount of peer pressure amongst peers to have the latest shiny things. (Fortnight is insidious for this, but with th

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• Re:

  So if a toddler approaches you and wants to buy a cookie with a $1000 bill, you'd happily sell - fair transaction according to your logic. Then declare the toddler to be a thief of their mommie's money. What a criminal. That's a pretty narrow view of morality you have there.

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    Since there is no such thing as a $1000 dollar bill, you would be the one being conned.

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      There are several $1000 bills in existence, some of which are no longer being printed and in some cases are worth more than their face value due to being rare:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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  Well if a kid walks into a store with a credit card, you'd expect the store to refuse the purchase because they can see it's a kid who shouldn't have a credit card. Online it's not so easy for the company to do that, and they had no reason to know it wasn't the father directly using his card.

  But you're right, the kid stole from his father and the father is responsible and should be dealing with it. Blaming nintendo is stupid.