this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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There is a middle-ground though: require a credit card. You can't legally get a credit card under 18, so either your parents gave it to you (i.e. you have their permission), you stole it (they'll probably catch the charges), or you're old enough.
Don't allow this nonsense to be purchased with gift cards, require credit cards. Do the same for adult sites, gambling sites, etc. Maybe require a second factor for every new website a credit card is used at (a text/app notification should be enough) if you're worried a kid will lie and use the card at an adult website instead of their stupid F2P game.
And on top of that, anything purchase with an element of chance should be regulated as gambling, and the items should be tradable with other players if the customer doesn't want the item.
Kids aren't really the ones spending so much on games, but they are being used to help market those products. People wouldn't buy cosmetics if there wasn't someone to show off to, so thin the field a bit and hopefully we'll see less of it.
Add enough hoops like that and you'll nudge the industry to stop making so many of these games.
Assuming you're including debit cards here (as most people do when they say "credit card"): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for "Revolut <18".
I'm not sure what could be a better solution though.
I'm not including debit cards.
I'm also not a fan of going cashless. I'm just saying that, in the absence of a better way of verifying age that doesn't violate privacy, credit cards work pretty well.
Perhaps we can come up with a token-based system where you can verify your age without either the game knowing your identity or the age verification service knowing what's requesting it. I don't trust politicians to make such a system properly, so I think the credit card option is a reasonable approach.
But then also many people don't have credit cards - they're frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.
Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we'd need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.
Cool, then those people need to prove their age another way.
There should also be a law that private companies cannot store personally identifiable information (e.g. your ID details) unless specifically required to by law. So if they want to get people to play a predatory game, they need to find a way to prove age without violating privacy.