ShareFacebook, Google, and Apple are facing a class-action lawsuit concerning âdangerous partnershipsâ for their social casino game services. The tech giants have been implicated in what is alleged to be an âillegal gambling conspiracyâ.
Highly Addictive and Highly Profitable
The casino services in question are, surprisingly, not played for real money. The social apps mimic real casino games while charging players real money to purchase play chips. The argument in the lawsuit is that this is just as predatory a real online casino.The lawsuit read: âLike Las Vegas slots, social casinos are extraordinarily profitable and highly addictive. Social casinos are so lucrative because they mix the addictive aspects of traditional slot machines with the power of the Platforms ⊠to leverage big data and social network pressures to identify, target and exploit consumers prone to predictive behaviors.â
Itâs incredible to think that even with so many gambling options available to players today, that people are prepared to spend their wages on virtual chips without any possibility of winning anything but even more virtual chips.
Worldwide, last year punters spent more than $6 billion on these play chips. Out of the top 12 earners on Facebook, nine of them are the social casinos in question.
Not the First Case by Far
This kind of legal action has been seen a lot during the last decade, but it mostly ends in failure. The crux of the matter is that in a legal context gambling must entail a risk to win something of value.The fact that social casino players can collect nothing that is worth anything means the plaintiff has no argument, or at least didnât used to, but now things have changed.
Nearly four years ago, the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals passed a judgement that virtual chips did have inherent value and therefore could now be adjudged to be part of gambling.
The real motivation behind this new legal pressure is that the companies offering these services operate with the same strategy to attract new players and to keep them playing, often more than what they can afford to. Fancy graphics and behavioural prompts leave many players with a compulsion that is hard to get rid of.
Victory in court will see these companies forced to stop offering these services and potentially be left with a massive bill if told to return any profits to affected players.
