209A. Investigating Adult F2P Gaming Content
Very little has been written on this topic. When I started poking around, I received public threats that made it clear I was under surveillance. Is there a bigger story here that has been hidden?
Worldwide, and especially with data leaking about the Epstein criminal ring, there has been increasing attention on organised crime in regards to the exploitation of children. As we are learning, “The Club” as I call it, had recruited top academics, scientists, lawyers, law enforcement officers, and even world leaders to make sure they were untouchable.
Relatively little attention has been given to adult gaming, despite gaming being a bigger industry than almost all other forms of legal entertainment combined. F2P games in particular are a magnet for children because they don’t need money or even a credit card to access them. That means that Mom doesn’t need to know what Bobby has been getting involved in. That in turn means no parental supervision whatsoever, or even the option for parental supervision.
The old saying that “if the service is free, you are the product” applies here. More than that, it applies 1000% when children are the product. I’ve been warning about Roblox, for instance, for a decade. But never too invasively because I just don’t have the means to defend myself from a serious legal assault. Of course, any legal attack on me could generate a tremendous amount of press coverage, as King found out when they sent their lawyers after me when I wrote The Top F2P Monetisation Tricks in 2013. That ended up being my most read article, translated by the community to over 20 languages. This was likely helped by my going public about King threatening me and Gamasutra over talking about their game monetisation.
Now it is clear that children have been the product in Roblox for decades, and extreme sadism-based criminal organisations like 764 and CVLT have set up shop there farming children for years. Both organisations are active on Discord and Telegram and then project power into Roblox. They threaten children into submission, then order them to commit and confirm acts of sadism and self harm. This might involve cutting messages onto their own bodies (branding), torturing or killing pets or siblings, providing pornographic material, or even school shootings. Many children have been coerced into suicide. The age range of victims, according to the FBI, is between age 8 and 17.
The FBI considers these groups “Tier 1” threats, the highest possible danger categories, for threat to national and economic security. When Roblox is installed on a computer or device in a home, a back door to these highest tier terrorist organisations is opened, right into their bedrooms. Oddly, when Australia banned social media use for children under the age of 16, Australia explicitly did a carve out to allow children under the age of 16 to keep using Roblox. They did this while knowing the threat posed. Roblox successfully lobbied for it to be classified as a “Gaming Platform”, not a form of social media. Of course it is both.
There is this perception by parents and governments that “games” are inherently safer than other forms of media. That’s not the case at all. I demonstrated this in forensic detail to international regulators when they summoned me to testify in 2013. I showed that one company, Gazillion Entertainment, had an adult and children’s version of the same game. The adult version (Marvel Heroes) had some of the safest and most respectful monetisation I’ve seen in a game not designed by myself. The children’s version (Marvel Superhero Squad Online) had extreme dark patterns on every screen which I detailed to regulators as I screenshotted the entire 25 screen tutorial for them.
Developers don’t go “easy” on kids. They exploit them much more intensely because they can.
Everything Online is Interactive
If a game requires you to be online to access it, that means your data is being farmed constantly while the program is open. Many games that wouldn’t seem to need connection still do, because your data is valuable. Steam does not age verify, and is loaded with adult content. Much of this content is extremely kinetic, simulates non consensual actions, and violent.
Those terrorist organisations that hang out on Roblox will attempt to embarrass children by threatening to dox them for having viewed adult content. They trick them into giving up even more compromising behavior which is then used to threaten them further. This is repeated over and over.
So I was curious, do F2P adult games have the same dark patterns as non adult F2P games? Or are they somehow even worse? This tends to be a blind spot for both senior developers and politicians because they tend to be married and don’t have a desire to purchase adult content. Further, their reputations and relationships could be harmed if that got out.
For similar reasons I’ve allowed adult content on Steam to be in my blind spot. I’ve written about malicious monetisation for 15 years, but I’ve never before written about adult content being sold to children. Two months ago in January a game called Smutstone (WARNING: clicking on the link will take you to the Steam store where you will immediately be subjected to nudity and sexual content) was recommended to me by Steam.
Smutstone is an online trading card game that features adult content. The name is an obvious play on the name Hearthstone, a popular online trading card game produced by Blizzard Entertainment. The two products have much more in common than what is immediately obvious. When I first tested Hearthstone in 2014 I immediately noticed something was wrong. As a complete newbie I was being matched against the most powerful accounts in the game, in the very first tier of the PvP ladder. These account’s clearly were not in that tier. Why was the game breaking their own rules?
I soon learned that was because there was one set of public rules for players, and a different (conflicting) set of secret rules for the developer. Blizzard was experimenting with exploiting the two way connection of online games to deploy malicious manipulation methods to force players (including children) to spend. This was the beginnings of EOMM (Engagement Optimization Match Making), which Activision Blizzard was so proud of that they patented these manipulations. The patent even brags that these manipulations are invisible to the end user.
I’ve written papers detailing the exploits of Electronic Arts’ attempts to make EOMM even more manipulative, and also a similar paper on NetEases’ EOMM research from 2024. Normally EOMM is very difficult to detect/confirm but since this is an area of expertise for me, I can. That still doesn’t make it easy, and it can be time consuming to confirm and document its use.
In the next paper I go into the process by which I confirmed the presence of EOMM in Smutstone. While EOMM has always been designed to be especially effective against children, and potentially much more harmful for them, Smutstone takes this to a level I hadn’t previously imagined. And I have a very robust imagination.
The Difference Between Children’s Monetisation and Adult Monetisation
Monetising children is very different from monetising adults. Because children are much easier to manipulate, an online connection to a children’s game makes this demographic far easier to manipulate. This should pose an immediate red flag to parents and regulators.
At a casual glance, the two kinds of monetisation look very different. I demonstrated this to regulators at the ICPEN summit in 2013. Adult monetisation is both subtle and (usually) respectful. It has to be, because adults will get mad when they detect mistreatment. Children, on the other hand, are well aware that they have to do what adults say and that they have little or no power. There are laws to protect children, but these are very rarely enforced except in the most dire of circumstances.
More importantly, at least in gaming, these laws don’t seem to protect children in games at all. A good example is the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It was passed to protect children from labor exploitation. Almost 100 years ago. Roblox has been violating the FLSA for over 20 years. Why is that permitted? I see people promoting Roblox on LinkedIn and by industry influencers almost daily. Because, of course they do. If children can be exploited legally, by just ignoring the FLSA, then this creates a Holy Grail economic exploit that will suck anyone with a flexible moral compass into it like a black hole.
I showed this to regulators in 2013 by contrasting the very respectful Marvel Heroes game with the unbelievably manipulative Marvel Superhero Squad Online game. Both made by the same developer (Gazillion). The only difference was that Superhero Squad was made for children, so anything and everything manipulative was automatically green lit.
While this may be a bit intuitive and can be quantified like I did in Panama, you don’t need to quantify the abuse to recognise it. It’s quite blatant because the people making games for kids don’t expect to get caught. This was the first thing that hit me when I fired up Smutstone. The manipulation was just so extreme that I thought “what adult would play this?” It soon dawned on me that this was not a game for adults. Smutstone is a game designed for children. Even the sex acts in the game are drawn up in cartoon style, non-kinetic, in a way that would appeal to children.
Adults see the “adult” tag and just assume children don’t have access to it. That’s the furthest from the truth. They also assume that when children see that tag, they will want to avoid it. That’s also the furthest from the truth. Steam only asks the user if they are 18. If they say yes, they can come right in. A 4 year old can breach this sort of security without help.
Cosmetics Reversal
Someone selling their “game economy services” on LinkedIn recently was talking about the billion dollar market for cosmetics. So of course this ended up in my feed. Adults will spend a lot to dress up their avatars. I’ve done this before, dressing up my super heroes in City of Heroes was something I really enjoyed.
In Smutstone your avatars start dressed in these elaborate costumes. The artwork really is commendable. While I would rather have cards with spaceships or tanks on them, I still was impressed by the costumes and fantasy themed backgrounds for the five elements. But the progression systems, what rewards you in the game, involves destroying those cosmetics and replacing them with skin.
What business model charges the user to destroy their cosmetics? I’m thinking that the answer is one designed for children. Once the clothes are gone, the models all look pretty much the same with minor variations of tattoos or body position (standing, bent over, etc.) or weapon.
The Threat
Soon after I started testing Smutstone, I began posting negative reviews of the product on Steam. I gave detailed warnings of the kinds of manipulations that users will encounter. [I go into more detail on these in my next paper, where I explain them at developer level.] I have also been updating that review every ~2 weeks.
The most disturbing manipulations are also the hardest to detect. Just like the ones that Activision Blizzard and EA brag about. So the more I delve into this product, the more I learn. But it didn’t take long before I received this threat, right here on my substack:
This person was trying to dox me for behavior they felt might be damaging to me. They made an account on my substack hours before, just to drop it where the public would see it and thus where it would be most damaging. They wanted me to know that they knew what was being played on my computer, since when, and on which days. My friends on Discord would have access to that information, but that’s a very small group and I’ve known most of those people for 10+ years.
If the criminal organisation 764 was going after someone, they would threaten to dox their behavior, usually some sexual behavior. In this case, the person just went straight for the dox, probably knowing that a threat would be pointless. Yes I am an ethicist and that means I have a lot of powerful groups that likely see me as a problem. But my substack is named “…Game and Dating App Economics” for a reason. I do research into human dating and sexual behavior. I design better games/apps for dating than what has so far been deployed to the public, which I believe would make a lot more money because they are a lot more useful. Of course they are designed to monetise very well, because that’s what I do. I’ve been doing research into human sexuality since 2010. I took my first collage course on human sexuality when I was 18 and even started doing clinical work in a fertility lab that same year. That was 1984. I’m not going to be shy, secretive, or apologetic about research into sexual content in games.
Conclusion
In the next paper I will explain just how awful the manipulations (Dark Patterns) are in Smutstone, in detail. In this paper I’m making the case that this game was deliberately designed for a children’s demographic. I’m also reinforcing the idea that (some/many) game developers go after children because they can, and children are an especially lucrative demographic for the F2P business model due to vulnerability. Platforms like the Apple App Store and Steam are willing to go to court to avoid refunding monies spent by children without consent on F2P games.
And then you have the platforms themselves exploiting children, like with the perpetual stream of lawsuits and criminal complaints against Valve for designing, deploying, and profiting from children’s gambling. The latest lawsuit from the New York Attorney General for illegal gambling seems likely to succeed.
Exploitation of children will continue if it can. That only ends when light is shown on the misdeeds (which I am doing here and have been doing for 15 years) and governments and consumers act to defend their children. Sadly, that can take a while. Governments and consumers have been trying to shut down Valve’s (soon to be proven illegal) gambling for children for 10 years now.
For parents, you have to realize that game developers don’t let their children use any of the products I mention here. We know better. Predators know that if you are careless enough to not protect your kids from economic exploitation, you also won’t protect your children from sexual or violent exploitation. So this is why those malicious actors hang out in places where children are being exploited economically.