Polygon reported on it here, but the gist seems to be: Dad gives his daughter access to a device connected to his credit card, and over the course of three years, she buys $300 worth of Hearthstone booster packs. He eventually wises up, and upon realizing that a) she didn’t get any good cards and b) can’t refund the purchases, decides to sue Blizzard because they didn’t properly educate his child on the shittiness of random-draw card packs.

There’s a lot of angles to this thing. I am a parent, and I know as well as anyone, being a parent is hard. Especially in this day and age. It’s a lot of work. There are so many things you have to watch out for, dangers you have to be aware of and educate your kids on… it isn’t easy to stay on top of it all. I try my best not to be too critical of other people’s parenting; we all have our own approaches, and we all make mistakes.

I can understand not realizing that you connected your credit card to an app your kid is using. I can understand not being aware a game includes lootbox-esque purchases (and I can get on board with the idea that kids should be protected from predatory microtransaction mechanics). These are mistakes parents can make.

However the moment a parent decides that those kinds of mistakes are no longer their mistakes, but the responsibility of a massive corporation that requires litigation to remedy… I don’t know. At that point I have a hard time finding the angle to that I can agree on. I mean yeah, corporations are shitty and do shitty things. But the first line of defense has to be the parents themselves, and if you’re not exercising the most basic fundamentals, it seems silly to expect Blizzard to do it for you. Especially since Blizzard definitely does have parental controls for play time and purchases, which means this parent just chose not to implement them. And yet still seems to expect the game should have done his parenting for him?

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