An Artificial Intelligence would detect the players most likely to spend in a free to play. This technology exists but they are afraid to implement it.
As part of Melbourne International Games Week, the recent Game Connect Asia-Pacific conference was an opportunity for Australian developers to share their knowledge and findings. This includes the information that one player of the mobile game Transformers: Earth Wars spent over US$150 on microtransactions, and how free-to-play developers are now training AI bots to attack “whales” – a term for free-to-play players who spend large amounts and pay for other players.
An AI that is very scary
The development team of Transformers: Earth Wars Yodo1 is Australian and as is customary in the country for that sector, it works predominantly in the mobile and free markets; He commented that he is working on an AI to locate players willing to spend a lot of money. Yodo1 created a machine learning neural network that could analyze its audience behavior and session times, along with other monetization data. Thus they predict which players had the potential to spend the most money.
This AI can already spot these “whales” with up to 87 percent accuracy. When asked about it, Yodo1 CEO Henry Fong said they hoped to get up to 95 percent accuracy. But he believes it’s even possible to train the AI model to target different players with a wider range of monetization packages to get them to spend money, albeit less.
Fong is fully aware that using such an AI model in free-to-play games would actually be disastrous, as players wouldn't accept it, resulting in a net loss for the studio. The problem would be that it would create an ecosystem where different people pay different prices for the same products. Furthermore, with the potential for developers to implement such AI models, Fong expects more regulation of the industry regarding the use of microtransactions because, " as video games become a mainstream industry impacting billions of people, regulation is inevitable and part of our industry's growth and success ."
These cases of people spending thousands of dollars are not uncommon. In Transformers: Earth Wars itself, one player spent $150,000 on microtransactions. And Fate/Grand Order has thousands of players who spend more than $1,600 annually on it.
Source: PC GamesN
