This came up a while ago in the PC community and the consensus I saw was that it's a fake. It uses too much language that is deliberately evil in tone like "bait and switching" etc.<p>That said, Activision (or maybe EA?) recently received a patent for matchmaking technology that "encourages" you to buy items by first allowing you to be demolished by them, and then if you purchase you're allowed to demolish others so that you feel vindicated.
It looks fake, if not because of the sci-fi tech then because slide decks don't go into this much detail. But it has that ring of <i>Black Mirror</i> plausibility that means people will pay attention to it.<p>A "hashlib of engine noises" for determining user social class, ha! Fitbit spent millions of dollars just trying to accurately convert wrist movement into steps taken.
If you’ve ever interacted with drug dealers and/or pimps, you know people are frequently this sleazy on a daily basis. People devise schemes to sell heroin to miserable people, and hook prostitutes on it so that they’ll turn tricks in exchange for doses, operating brothels out of hotels.<p>What. Video poker and slot machines are the limits of this kind of business model?<p>Maybe what’s really going in the comments here, is forum sliding and engineered flak.
This is why you shouldn't play free-to-play games, or perhaps we should say "99.99% of android and ios games".<p>I mean, it's not quite this bad ... mostly ... yet. But it's very clear that this is where it's going.
Provided that it's true, this could be stopped by just not giving the game access to the microphone (seriously, why would you?!) and removing the game from memory when you finish playing.
Who is going to play such games then? It might be good indeed, emulators will be popular for real gaming experience and people might spend more time in nature doing stuff in real-life.