My thoughts on the subject are becoming increasingly complicated. This is very similar to the situation with an 11 year old running up a thousand pound XBL bill.
I'll be honest, as much as I advocate responsible parenting, I don't see many problems with letting an 8 year old play a video game on their own. Heck I did it when I was around that age (Atari 2600 and the like). A lot of the stuff advertising these games is deceptive, when you look at app, or browser based games in a lot of cases they say "free" and you don't find out about the real money charges until you enter the game. If the information is on a website or whatever it's oftentimes pretty well hidden, and even if it's there findint the exact method of buying things and how it works is difficult without having played the game at length.
Now, a parent looking at a game like this is probably going to see "free" and notice that it's a Smurfs game with a rating acceptable for an 8 year old. Not wanting their brain to melt, most adults are going to have little to do with actually playing a game like that. What's more, that game (from the screenshot) looks like absolute garbage, it looks like some freeware thing someone would generate for fun, or would be thrown on the system for promotional purposes (hey you get a free game for the kids!). The point is that it's not something that falls under a "too good to be true" catagory.
I agree with the goverment that I think some of these systems ARE set up to be deceptive and to prey on children, and adults who aren't entirely tech savvy. While Capcom did refund the money in this case, to be entirely honest I think increased safeguards that help prevent this kind of thing are more likely to get rid of a lot of games and programs like this, rather than simply to cause them to operate with those safeguards... I say this because no parent is going to pay a hundred bucks for smurfberries in a game like that. The game is garbage and kids are fickle, I can sort of see it when adults buy items in MMOs that they are already playing for months on end and are pretty high quality games, but not here. The whole thing seems like it's set up specificlly as a trap. In most cases I figure they are expecting to get lesser charges, and be able to bully the parents since it isn't worth the expense of disputing it in a small claims court, but fighting a $1,400 charge is more inspiring and risks bringing exactly the kind of attention they wound up getting.
To be entirely honest, as time goes on I am beginning to think it might be a good idea for the goverment, at least in the US, to ban virtual currency and cash shop transactions. Two incidents recently, and a bunch of them in the pastover the last few years. I'm increasingly being reminded of how we had foreign companies setting up concealed pay lines that charged like $500 a minute, then they would tell someone they won a prize (or leave a message claiming they needed contact urgently) and give their number, the person would call and then get a huge phone bill... but ooops, it's regulated by another country's laws. You know about 1-900 but not the designation (which might not even be similar) that they were using. This isn't identical, but it does remind me of it. The way they wound up stopping that from my reading was to outright ban a lot of those numbers from operating in the US, because if they banned specific ones they would just create new ones to do the same garbage.
I'm actually surprised this took so long to get to the point that I (Mr. Capitolist) am getting queasy thinking about it now that I really think about it. I remember all the discussions about the potential dangers in the "virtual currency" system Second Life implemented with it's real money exchange. It seems like a lot of the fears people expressed at the time are coming to pass through these cash-shop run games.
I know many people will disagree, but I like to think that despite not being the sharpest knife in the drawer (especially now), I'm not a complete moron either. There is such a thing as being careless or stupid, with the XBL incident mentioned on this site, I can see why the parent was being dumb. In this case however I could see myself winding up in the same situation, because chances are I wouldn't have put much more thought into it than the parent did. I also doubt the lack of safeguards are an oversight. There are only so many occasions where you can look at this and blame the users, when you see the same stuff going on with Facebook games and the like. I think companies are abusing the system, and fishing for these kinds of mistakes. Any crummy game like this one that even has the possibility of a $100 charge built into it is definatly fishing, you could buy the collector's edition of a AAA title for that much money.
Perhaps it's an overreaction, but really I'm beginning to think that instead of chasing these people around it might just be time to ban all cash shops or whatever. Doing it piecemeal is just going to result in the industry adapting to find other ways to scam, just like they did with the phone problems, until someone just puts their foot down and axes the entire thing.
