> I suspect you are embellishing your story a bit to rile people up.

You do? What made you suspect that?

Have a read:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-17/kids-racking-up-huge-b...

> You can easily complain to Apple, Facebook, or any platform that has these games, if your child spends a huge amount of money on the game. It's called a "chargeback", and is very easy to do. The game developers have to return the funds by contract, and the user is typically banned as a result.

Yes, and these rules are of course clearly advertised when you start a game like that.

I watched a kid aged 8 playing with a smartphone rack up 10 euros in charges in about 5 minutes while on the train on Saturday, nobody around had any idea what was going on.

Parents will typically be honorable to the extent that if their kid did this that they will not charge back if they perceive their kid is at fault by buying these scam products. What they don't realize is the cunning and the guile that go into designing these and I'm fairly sure that if they did that it would be a completely different picture.

> My understanding is (from personal work on social games) that the highest-monetizing users, across the board, are the older users.

Ah ok, so that makes it ok to take money from the kids as collateral damage, after all they're not the big spenders.

The basic idea in a transaction is that you do what you can as the seller to give the other party something of value in return. The idea is not to see for how much you can 'take' a party in an a-symmetrical set-up where you have all the data and they have none. That's very much like taking candy from a baby.

These are not 'social games' they're anti-social games.

> Even if the game looks like a cutesy kid's game, it's normally the case that it wasn't really designed for children.

Oh that must be my impression then. And that explains all the pre-teens that I see hooked on such games. It wasn't designed for them. And they shouldn't be playing with those smartphones to begin with.

> For the most part, children that unwittingly spend a bunch of money make up a very tiny fraction of revenue for these companies.

Feel free to support that with evidence, I suspect that the large majority of the customers are technically adults (because an adult has signed for the contract) but the consumers are kids and their parents are too honorable or not informed enough to make use of the charge-back options provided. And I'm sure you'll blame them for that. Typically those options are not listed up-front and the practice with charge-backs is that even on outright scams the percentages are low enough that they persist. Most people don't even know about the possibility to do charge backs on their credit card ('card not present') charges when not using 3D.

> Any of them that spend a huge sum normally end up receiving a refund a month later when their parents find out.

Yes, a huge sum would set off alarm bells. But $50 would likely be absorbed even if it came out of the family telco budget, or if it causes a kid to get into trouble otherwise.

I'm quite surprised that you would defend these practices, but given that you work on 'social games' I guess that you're just trying to rationalize your complicity.