Roskachestvo warned about casinos masquerading as online games

Lately, more and more often, real casinos are hiding under the guise of harmless online games, which skillfully manipulate the desire to win and force you to spend real money. On June 13, the Center for Digital Expertise of Roskachestvo told Izvestia about how to recognize them.

It is noted that modern developers deliberately create games, including for children and teenagers, in which the player's progress slows down and obstacles appear at every step in order to use gambling mechanics based on random chances of winning.

For example, a player is invited to make a microtransaction — to remove restrictions, increase the chances of winning, speed up the set of levels, and so on. The low price removes the psychological barrier, and a person, without noticing it, begins to pay regularly, Roskachestvo reported.

They listed several types of tricks: loot boxes and gacha (mechanisms that offer random in-game items or characters), energy limits and "battle passes" (a mechanism that limits the number of actions a player can perform in one session) and FOMO events (events that use fear of lost profits to motivate people to participate or purchases).

"The industry should be regulated directly by developers. The main goal is to create transparent and honest conditions where the developer company will openly and directly describe all the mechanics of its games, including negative and manipulative ones. This way, players will be able to make informed decisions and understand what they are doing when they download the game," said Sergey Kuzmenko, head of the Roskachestvo Digital Expertise Center.

According to him, if a user has a predisposition to gambling addiction, manipulative mechanisms can significantly strengthen it, and getting out of such a game becomes almost impossible, especially for children and adolescents. Kuzmenko called on the computer and mobile games industry to self—organize, and for parents not to lose their vigilance.

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In April, Roskomnadzor called for finalizing the draft law on the regulation of computer games. According to the head of the department, Andrey Lipov, labeling games will not be enough, for example, in the case of their mobile versions.