Gamers, Avoid Being Fleeced for Your Health

As many of you know, Rach and I do installments of Gamer's Health on the Tavern Chat Podcast on Friday Nights. It's an honest view of the health challenges Rach and I face and how we are attempting to change our habits to improve our health - physical, mental, and emotional.

We make no bones about the fact that our experiences may not reflect yours, and hope to be as much an inspiration for positive change as we are examples of such change. Everyone's path to improved health is individual to that person,

You also probably know I'm fairly well known for exposing "Wayward Kickstarters" and fraudsters within our corner of the hobby.

I'm suspecting we are seeing an intersection of these two aspects of my passions.

How much is your health worth? When someone offers to help you with a program to a healthier life that's geared around your hobby, it probably seems too good to be true. Of course, it really isn't geared towards the RPG hobby, but the video gaming hobby, and there is much overlap between the two hobbies, and the health challenges experienced by a large segment of these communities are well known.

Remember when Kickstarters promised the world and often had nothing to show? Well, I've found that to be true in the gamers' health niche.

A program that promised amazing results (and I was likely targeted due to the weekly Gamer's Health Podcast episodes) was introduced to me by someone that friended me on Facebook. I have a fairly high profile in our corner of the hobby and accept most friend requests that aren't obviously porn spam. 

The sales pitch started as a soft pitch, and initially, I thought I was going to be given some generic advice. But once the "marketer" thought I was hooked, the presentation began and the script was obvious, and the "you can't put a price on improved health" told me that the price was likely high.

$3,200 bucks high. For a program that had very little to show for itself upfront, and was reluctant to actually link their website.

Key take away? You can use the Nintendo Switch to turn exercise into a game. So, for 300 bucks and the cost of a game or two, I can replicate much of the program for 10% of the cost.

Sure, you need to motivate yourself. My motivation would be saving 90% and improving my health. I don't need to pay others to motivate me.

As gamers, there is a segment of society at large that thinks we are easy marks with disposable income waiting to be fleeced. I prefer to save that money for gaming ;)