*Undertale*-style maze crawling? It’s really time to regulate auto-renewal this time.

The most glaring design flaw is not the charge itself, but deliberately turning the cancellation path into a “reverse puzzle.” It’s obviously just about turning off a subscription, yet it feels like navigating a hintless pixel maze, clicking through layer after layer, only to be hit with a popup trying to talk you out of it at the end. On April 17, People’s Daily published an article directly criticizing the long-standing chaos of automatic renewals on internet platforms, and this time it finally put into words the frustration many users have been bottling up for a long time.

The issues mentioned in the report are actually all too familiar to the gaming community. When you sign up, they offer you a low first-month price or a better deal for continuous subscriptions, with buttons flashing like coins in Vampire Survivors; but when it comes time to renew, the amount charged may be several times the introductory price. Even worse are some “ghost charges”: some people thought they were grabbing a red envelope, only to end up paying instead; others just tapped a popup to download something, and the system quietly enabled charging mode in the background. It really is appalling.

The data is striking as well. Complaints related to automatic renewals have grown explosively in recent years. In 2025 alone, the number of complaints was close to 70,000, bringing the cumulative total past 220,000. At this scale, it is no longer a minor issue on a few individual platforms, but more like a repeatedly validated profit model. Put plainly, merchants, platforms, and third-party payment institutions seem to be playing on the same team: the profits are clearly divided, but when something goes wrong, they kick responsibility back and forth. Unfortunately, the ones footing the bill have always been ordinary consumers.

Speaking of this, the rules have actually just patched a key loophole. The Rules on Pricing Conduct of Internet Platforms, which took effect on April 10, clearly state that for any automatic renewal or automatic deduction, consumers must be reminded in a prominent manner before every charge, and users must be able to cancel at any time. This requirement may sound basic, but it is crucial, because what many platforms used to do best was hide reminders like secret blocks in Fez—and by the time you noticed, your monthly pass had already turned into an annual one.

I very much agree with People’s Daily’s judgment this time: business should keep people through service, not trap them through process. The indie game scene actually offers a pretty good counterexample: many small teams use a buy-to-own model, and it does not matter if content updates come a bit slower, because the pricing, versions, and DLC are all laid out clearly, and players are actually more willing to support them. If platforms keep trying to use tricks to boost renewal rates, the short-term numbers may look good, but in the long run they will only drain away user trust.

If you are still holding a pile of video, music, and cloud storage memberships right now, my advice is simple: take some time this week to check all your billing items in one go, turn off the ones you do not use often, and see whether the platforms provide clear reminders. The core of the gaming community’s complaints about automatic renewals over the years has never been “you can’t charge people,” but rather “don’t charge people behind their backs.” Now that the rules are in place, the next thing to see is whether the platforms will truly clean up their act, or keep treating users like slimes that automatically drop coins.