Produced by | Bullet Finance
Author | Fumiko
Edit | lightning
American Editor | Qianqian
Audit | Ode
Recently, "the boy played a game and recharged 10,000 yuan, and his father slapped himself" caused heated discussions on the whole network. On a short video platform, a father known as "Mr. Zhang" said that his 9-year-old son recharged 6,400 yuan in 10 minutes when he was playing a game called "Egg Boy Party", and the total amount deducted in recent days has exceeded 10,000 yuan.
In the video, the father thought that "the son is not the fault of the father", slapped himself 10 times, and even sent the child to the police station. Subsequently, he took his son to the headquarters of NetEase, the developer of the game, to ask for an explanation.
"9-year-old minors playing krypton gold" and "father slapped himself 10 times in a row" became the focus of public attention. Topics such as "minors addicted to online games", "large-amount game recharges", and "whether it is valid for game companies to charge minors large-amount recharges" have aroused widespread concern in the society.
Indeed, in recent years, there has been a lot of news about minors spending large amounts of money in games, and there is also a trend of increasing.
For example, in October 2023, Henan Metropolis Daily reported that a 9-year-old girl in Xinxiang City, Henan Province, played an egg boy party and swiped away more than 170,000 yuan of her family's savings. Because the girl registered the game with her grandmother's ID card, she recharged more than 120,000 yuan in a row in order to buy skins, and added a total of more than 170,000 yuan to recharge and consume more than 170,000 yuan in addition to the live broadcast rewarding anchor.
Looking ahead, in April last year, the Yangcheng Evening News reported that Mr. Zhang's 9-year-old child in Hebei Province had recharged as much as 200,000 yuan in the game.
What is puzzling is that as early as 2019, the relevant competent authorities made a clear gradient limit on the amount of recharge for minors' games, and even prohibited minors under the age of 8 from recharging games.
Why is it that after all these years, there is still a phenomenon in online games that "minors can play games at will and can recharge large amounts, and it is difficult for parents to protect their rights afterwards"?
What went wrong in the process?
1. The channel service is loophole, and the "protection of minors" is useless
After the "father slapped himself angrily" aroused social concern, on the afternoon of April 9, the relevant staff of Netease Games, the producer of "Egg Boy Party", responded to an interview with the media, saying that after verification, the user was the channel account of the mobile phone manufacturer, and after communication and coordination, a full refund had been arranged.
(Photo / The Paper)
This explanation seems reasonable, and it seems to have nothing to do with the "krypton gold" in the game of minors: the first time you log in, you have a real-name system, and after recharging, you are an adult player by default, and according to common sense, there is no problem with this fee being refunded.
However, what many people don't know is that the so-called "channel account" refers to the account of the app store in the mobile phone, and registering a mobile phone account is also a prerequisite for downloading the app. Different from the official server, when players log in to the game through the channel server, they can directly pull up the existing real-name information authorization of the mobile phone account with one click.
In other words, when a child downloads the egg boy party channel server with the parent's mobile phone, he can also log in to the game with the parent's mobile phone account with the real name of the adult, bypassing the anti-addiction system tailored for minors, and there is no way to talk about restricting the game time and recharging for minors. It should be noted that at present, almost all of the game applications downloaded from the app stores of domestic mainstream mobile phone manufacturers belong to channel services.
What's even more terrifying is that since most mobile phone manufacturers can open the "password-free payment" function, on the one hand, such a "water-free" setting has also contributed huge revenue to major domestic mobile phone manufacturers, and on the other hand, it has also laid the groundwork for large consumption by minors.
Looking back at a number of cases of children's game krypton, it can be found that in addition to game manufacturers, the names of almost all mainstream mobile phone manufacturers in China are frequently mentioned in the report. For example, the cases of recharging 120,000 and recharging 200,000 mentioned above can also be seen from the parents' statements that they are achieved through mobile phone channel services.
As the provider of online activities, whether it is a game company or a mobile phone manufacturer, it is the responsibility to solve the problems existing in the real-name link of the current channel service. From a technical point of view, the difficulty is not great, and the Guangdong Provincial Consumer Council has proposed that "it is recommended to use the method of turning off the mobile phone authorization login game function, or adding a login verification link".
When minors encounter "one-click real-name" and "password-free payment" in the game scene, the follow-up risks are immeasurable. Although the more than 10,000 yuan recharged by "Slap Dad" in the game "Egg Boy Party" has been fully refunded, it is obvious that if the channel server loophole cannot be patched in time, similar incidents will continue to occur in the future.
2. The rights and responsibilities of both parties are unclear, and it is becoming more and more difficult to protect rights
Article 19 of the Civil Code of the People's Republic of China stipulates that minors over the age of eight are persons with limited capacity for civil conduct, and their legal representatives shall act as their legal representatives for civil juristic acts or with the consent and recognition of their legal representatives;
"Slap Dad" used extreme methods to send himself to the hot search, and finally achieved the success of this rights protection, but more people are not as "lucky" as this father.
At the enforcement level, on the one hand, it is not easy to defend the rights of minors in the above situations. According to the principle of civil procedure of "who asserts, who presents evidence", the guardian is required to provide a series of sufficient evidence to prove that the act was carried out independently by the minor.
On the other hand, because the refund of the channel server is required, it is inevitable that the game company and the channel party will be blamed back and forth. Behind this is the problem of unclear rights and responsibilities of game companies and channel parties on both sides of the channel service.
It can be understood in this way,Users download official server games,All the income goes into the pockets of game companies;And channel services are the "increment" of game manufacturers,After all, Android traffic is amazing,It is a necessary channel for manufacturers to expand the market plate。 However, in order to obtain this "increment", game manufacturers also have to pay a lot of share to the channel side.
Data shows that games have become an important source of profit for the world's well-known mobile phone manufacturers. For example, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have almost half of their revenue in this field.
(Photo / Photo Network, based on VRF protocol)
However, game companies and channel parties that have reached a clear consensus on profit sharing are ambiguous in terms of the boundaries of their responsibilities for the protection of minors.
And this "ambiguity" brings about the prevarication of the responsibility of both parties for the refund. You must know that the revenue generated through the channel service is shared proportionally between the game manufacturer and the mobile phone manufacturer or platform, and of course no one wants to take the initiative to refund the full amount when the refund is made.
As a consequence of this, parents inevitably get "kicked in the ball" when they ask for a refund from the game company. The reason is very simple, "the money is recharged by the channel party, and the channel party should be contacted". And the channel side is directly invisible in this "pull".
"Not everyone can get the results as quickly as 'slap dad', and many people are 'kicked the ball' by platforms and channel providers in the process, and in the end they can only consider themselves unlucky. After all, there is an entanglement of interests between brands and distributors. Mr. Chu added.
"If we shoot a video while our child is playing a game, how can we let our child recharge?" "If these games can be identified when they log in, it can also be an extra layer of protection. In the comments section on social media, the above comments are typical.
3. Is there a solution?
In fact, through the frequent incidents of juvenile games and their rights protection, more people have begun to reflect on how online games, as a part of the digital cultural industry, can strike a balance between pursuing industrial development and effectively strengthening the protection of minors.
In the view of Interface News Bullet Finance, we must start from at least three aspects:
First of all, from the parent side. Family education is the starting point of children's education, games can be used as a way of leisure and entertainment, but minors cannot be fully responsible for their own behavior, and their judgment of some things is not rational and mature, so they need the correct guidance of parents.
(Photo / Photo Network, based on VRF protocol)
Second, mobile phone manufacturers and other channel parties, as one of the main bodies providing online games, are also the recipients of benefits, and like game companies, they need to strengthen their awareness of protecting minors while obtaining benefits, and effectively protect the interests of minors through technology and other means.
Finally, for game manufacturers, they should not only focus on growth and income, and ignore the supervision and review of minors' top-up and tipping. At present, the real-name supervision of registration adopted by manufacturers is obviously insufficient, and the secondary real-name authentication of channel services may be the top priority.
In addition, on the basis of ensuring the convenience and privacy of adult players, game manufacturers may, through technical means, conduct surprise inspections such as facial recognition based on the user's game time, and promptly detect and identify minors using guardian information or third-party information authentication accounts, using game accounts at non-compliant times, or using one-click payment to make large purchases, so as to protect the property of minors and their guardians.
When juveniles are strong, the country is strong, and ensuring the healthy physical and mental development of minors is an important task of the state. The state attaches great importance to preventing minors from indulging in online games, and has continued to issue various notices in recent years to promote implementation.
It is very difficult to prevent addiction to games, which not only requires minors to have a correct and healthy understanding of games, but also requires all relevant parties to strengthen their sense of shared responsibility, strengthen cooperation on the basis of drawing clear boundaries of responsibility, clarify rights and responsibilities, and do not leave any supervision vacuum or "three regardless zones" of channel services.
The achievements in the protection of minors in the game industry have not come easily, and many years of efforts have been made in vain due to channel service problems.
*The title image in the article comes from: Camera.com, based on VRF protocol.