Analysis of Billing Inducement Methods in Smartphone Games

Abstract

With the growth of the smartphone game market, many cases have been reported in which children have purchased charged items in games without restraint and have been charged large sums of money. In addition, there are users called "heavy payers" or "wasteful payers," who pay much more than the normal amount of money, and there are also reports of cases in which these users are disturbed in their daily lives. In this study, we actually play several representative smartphone games and analyze how developers induce users to pay for their games. As a result of extracting and tabulating the billing elements for each game, we found that many games employ a rich gacha system that makes consumers dependent on the game, similar to gambling, and that they also employ a number of game management strategies to make the amount charged look profitable and to stimulate user motivation to pay.