EA: They're not loot boxes, they're "surprise mechanics," and they're "quite ethical"
- Thread starter Captain Marvelous_v1legacy
- Start date
The onus may ultimately be on the consumer, but that doesn?t let the developers/publishers off the hook as blameless service providers; their practices are called ?predatory? for a reason, and there?s a reason ?predatory? carries a negative connotation, or at the very least implies one party has a distinct and significant advantage far to the detriment of another. Them calling what they do ?surprise mechanics? is the wolf being caught in his sheep?s clothing and trying to convince the shepherd that the sheep he?s chewing on isn?t ?screaming,? it?s ?laughing.? If they?re allowed to continue unchecked, these practices will only get worse affecting even those of us ?smart? enough not to indulge; shit, it already HAS! We?ve already seen as they?ve proliferated more and more, getting shoehorned in where they literally have no place, games are half finished messes asking for more money now for the promise of ?the rest? later, game-changing items locked behind ?surprise mechanics,? etc. How long before MOST of a game lies not after the $60 PURCHASE, but beyond a recurring paywall after that? I agree, it?s not ?apples-to-apples? to say it?s like gambling; it?s something far, far worse; it?s like drugs, and those are rightfully regulated and illegal (when applicable) too.Leg End said:
God I hate these threads. Loot boxes are definitely not gambling, and you DEFINITELY don't want them to start treating them as such. They're shitty, but they're not gambling any more than buying a package of starburst is gambling because it might have more yellow in it than pink. A key component of "gambling" in its legal definition is that money has to have the possibility of being lost. That is, you spend money but get nothing in return. It's not "well you got the entertainment value of seeing a horse race or playing a game". It's about transactional agreement between the customer and the point of sale. If I buy a horse ticket or chips on a roulette table, for instance, I'm buying it to win more money. Therefore if I lose, I've not received the value I purchased the ticket for and have thus lost money. That's why you actually don't have to buy anything in order to enter sweepstakes in the US. You can just write to a company running a promotional sweepstakes and be automatically entered. Forcing customers to buy in order to potentially win would be gambling for the same reasons as the previous.
Loot boxes are not gambling because, unlike the sweepstakes or blackjack, the player ALWAYS win something. They always see a return for their money. "This isn't what I WANTED to win" will never be the same as "I didn't win" from a legal standpoint. If we're going to argue that loot boxes are psychologically targeting people with chance mechanics and colorful lights, then we also need to talk about how pinball, minesweeper, or really most any video game is just a psychological trap designed to steal your money, and that it should be considered as illegal gambling targeting kids. As another user pointed out, if we just see chance mechanics as gambling, then that means a LOT of things that we don't consider gambling will be gambling. Do you play DnD, where your success is dependent on the randomness of a die or dice roll? Congrats on that gambling addiction, brah. Didn't get the exact card you wanted from that pack of Magic or Pokemon cards? Well the company shouldn't be conducting such harsh gambling measures.
The thing that makes me the saddest too is how easily gamers could change this if they wanted. But this is the biggest community of emotional children I've ever seen that pretend not being able to wear a cool hat in an FPS (where they'll never see the hat during play anyways) is equivalent to heroin addiction
Loot boxes are not gambling because, unlike the sweepstakes or blackjack, the player ALWAYS win something. They always see a return for their money. "This isn't what I WANTED to win" will never be the same as "I didn't win" from a legal standpoint. If we're going to argue that loot boxes are psychologically targeting people with chance mechanics and colorful lights, then we also need to talk about how pinball, minesweeper, or really most any video game is just a psychological trap designed to steal your money, and that it should be considered as illegal gambling targeting kids. As another user pointed out, if we just see chance mechanics as gambling, then that means a LOT of things that we don't consider gambling will be gambling. Do you play DnD, where your success is dependent on the randomness of a die or dice roll? Congrats on that gambling addiction, brah. Didn't get the exact card you wanted from that pack of Magic or Pokemon cards? Well the company shouldn't be conducting such harsh gambling measures.
The thing that makes me the saddest too is how easily gamers could change this if they wanted. But this is the biggest community of emotional children I've ever seen that pretend not being able to wear a cool hat in an FPS (where they'll never see the hat during play anyways) is equivalent to heroin addiction
If you spend money on a chance at acquiring what you want, then it is gambling. It applies to physical card packs as well, but they at least have the added benefit of being tradeable afterwards. If you spend money on loot boxes it is entirely possible you will receive nothing of value.irishda said:
I 100% want loot boxes to be treated as gambling, as it has made game companies lazy and focused on "player engagement" which actually means "milking wallets" and less on producing a valuable product that is worth what is paid for it.
Sure.CaitSeith said:
They're absolute hand-wringing greedy disgusting bastards, yes.Xprimentyl said:
The problem is, the proposed solution does not fix the core issue that people are giving these greedy bastards their money every year for the same exact games or games with treasured names slapped on in order to sell more shit, and it only gets Government involved with something it neither understands, nor will actually improve.
Oh we're pretty much there already. We also have huge unskippable ads in games where you already have to shell out enough money for a semi-decent used car in order to unlock everything that used to be a single DLC payment for a line of code about a decade ago, and absolutely free about five years before that.
So it's Super Gambling. Or something.
So if you can trade-off or otherwise sell what you get, does that change things?Abomination said:
Can't we vote with our wallets instead of putting legislation in place that heavily regulates and restricts anything with a hint of chance in it? This is all sounding like suddenly every virtual TCG will automatically require ID and be outright barred in a shitload of the United States.
If you reply to a post without reading the whole post, you're gonna have a bad time. The mere presence of chance does not qualify ANYTHING as gambling. The semantics of your argument lie in "value". The problem is you're paying for virtual items that cannot exist outside of the game they inhabit, therefore, any value they have is not determined by an actual market, but by the developers. "Pay for this box that may or may not contain the ones and zeroes you want but will definitely have ones and zeroes in it" is not gambling; it's them setting the value and the customer determining that the value is worth it. By clicking on "buy this loot box", you've already accepted this trade of value. So it's a dangerous business discussing the "value" of in-game items when those items have no inherent value.Abomination said:
Again, do I not like loot boxes? Absolutely. But I've yet to see a game that demands you buy them without also offering an in-game currency that doesn't require money. Maybe I'm wrong there, however, but even on mobile platforms, games like Marvel Strike Force offer orbs for gold or cores that can easily be earned in game. To date, I haven't spent a dime on it.
This all just smacks of the most annoying aspect of gamers: unrelenting consumerism. Gamers are the singular most consumptive community I've encountered, so any time there's something problematic in the market, they insist it be changed forcefully rather than ask themselves to simply not participate or purchase something. This is a community that needed to tell themselves not to buy products before they're actually finished, and now I'm supposed to believe that this is a nefarious scheme of predation on a poor populace.
"At least 1% ethical."IceForce said:
You at least can confirm that you have received something of value in exchange. You receive a physical product. 1s and 0s might as well be flashing lights that appear on a slot machine. Maybe you want a certain combination of 1s and 0s and are willing to pay for it, then you do pay for it, and you get it. Wonderful transaction. But if you pay and get nothing that you wanted, you have spent money and received nothing in return due to chance. That is gambling.Leg End said:
Can't people with gambling addictions just not go to casinos? If they know there's a tiny chance they won't win then they can just deal with it if they lose. We shouldn't even regulate if there is a chance to win at all, it's fine if the hoop will never be able to fit on the cone, at least they think it's possible - and they should realize that before they pay for the 3 tosses.
Great, make them banned. The idea that your business makes money off people paying for 1s and 0s in a system of self-imposed artificial scarcity is straight up bonkers. Toss luck into the mix and you have a gambling racket.
Right back at'cha.irishda said:
Yes, value, when it comes to goods and services one offers currency in exchange for an item or service. If I pay someone and I do not receive what I wanted or what was advertised I can, in most civilized countries, demand my money back. Loot boxes offer no such option. Money is being exchanged for something hidden, you are GAMBLING with your money. To call it anything other than gambling is to demand the word gambling to only apply in a set of circumstances that appeals to a contrived convenience. Just like how "pizza" is somehow considered a vegetable now.
D&D is gambling, but there is no exchange of currency, so there is no need to regulate it. Nobody cares how long it takes to unlock a lootbox via in-game XP gains and the government will never regulate that, because it's not an exchange of real world currency.
Paid for lootboxes are gambling.
I go back to a previous example. Say instead of me going out and buying physical booster packs, I instead decide to boot up Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links and buy some 1s and 0s booster packs because I like not actually owning things. Already, with your description, this has evolved into straight-up virtual gambling and should be extensively regulated, despite the process of buying boosters and getting whatever is inside with an element of chance not being different from the act of driving over to a Walmart and picking up bits of colorful cardboard inside a little wrapper.Abomination said:
If I were to decide I wanted to get say... this card:
And chose to try and get them within booster packs, this in your criteria constitutes gambling, correct? On-par with me gambling in games of skill or chance with actual currency on the line to flow into or out of my wallet? With that in mind, should physical booster packs be regulated in such a manner as actual gambling for money? If not, why? Is it because you have a physical product to sell or trade? If there were proper means to sell or trade these 1s and 0s with others, should they be treated as we treat physical items whose contents vary in every pack? How far do we go in regulating things as Gambling?
They still do.
I should probably make it clear that I believe if the odds are clear and there is no underhanded business going on to rig things, people can do whatever.
No, because as a physical item with barter and monetary value you can go to a specialist store and look through their collection of cards for Black Luster Soldier and make a direct purchase or trade a card of your own of equal value to another person for it.Leg End said:I go back to a previous example. Say instead of me going out and buying physical booster packs, I instead decide to boot up Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links and buy some 1s and 0s booster packs because I like not actually owning things. Already, with your description, this has evolved into straight-up virtual gambling and should be extensively regulated, despite the process of buying boosters and getting whatever is inside with an element of chance not being different from the act of driving over to a Walmart and picking up bits of colorful cardboard inside a little wrapper.Abomination said:
If I were to decide I wanted to get say... this card:
And chose to try and get them within booster packs, this in your criteria constitutes gambling, correct? On-par with me gambling in games of skill or chance with actual currency on the line to flow into or out of my wallet? With that in mind, should physical booster packs be regulated in such a manner as actual gambling for money? If not, why? Is it because you have a physical product to sell or trade? If there were proper means to sell or trade these 1s and 0s with others, should they be treated as we treat physical items whose contents vary in every pack? How far do we go in regulating things as Gambling?
They still do.I should probably make it clear that I believe if the odds are clear and there is no underhanded business going on to rig things, people can do whatever.
As physical objects the cards have a real world value - however small it may be - that you can take advantage of to recoup your costs. And yes, if what we got in blind loot boxes or electronic booster packs could be traded or sold (for in game currency) ala the WoW auction house or Pok?mon Global Trading Service, I feel some of the pressure would be taken off companies who implement them because it enables a secondary market outside their own control.
This is absolutely right. Me and a bunch of friends rolling dice against a wall to pass time is not gambling. If we put money on what numbers will come up or who will get the higher score, that's gambling. So far, this is all pretty clear cut. Where it gets murky is when you start discussing putting money in to potentially receive goods. CCGs were heavily contested in the late-80's and early-90's, because there was a strong argument to make that Magic: the Gathering was actually gambling due to the randomized nature of the booster packs. What eventually put M:tG on the side of not gambling was not the guaranteed rarity distribution, the lack of clear financial gain or the argument that it was just game supplements and that Black Lotus had no "real life value". No, what put it down as not gambling was the fact that there was a secondary market for used cards, which also opened up for M:tG customers to purchase the specific cards they wanted or to recoup costs by selling off unwanted cards.irishda said:
If we go by that legal precedent, then loot boxes in most games are in fact a form of gambling. They are so because you are required to spend money for a chance to receive what you want and have no way to get the specific item without resorting to the whimsy of randomization. So games like PUBG (which has a marketplace for users to sell/buy cosmetics) and the Division 2 (where all cosmetics can be bought separately without engaging with the loot boxes) would not be considered gambling, whereas Overwatch or Fifa would be. I'd personally argue that gambling laws from the 50's probably needs to be updated to face the changed landscape of gambling and gambling adjacent mechanics in modern entertainment, but as of right now there's precedent for considering loot boxes gambling, the specifics just hasn't been tried in court yet.
All this arguing over semantics, let?s just call it what it IS and not worry about what it is or isn?t LIKE. Lootboxes are a predatory practice designed specifically and only to milk consumers; they add no fundamental value to games; they add ZERO value in terms of consumer?s enjoyment of a full-retail ?purchase,? and with the potential of a steady stream of microtransactions, developers and publisher have gotten LAZY; games aren?t worth the $60 upfront let alone additional dozens of $1.99 ?rolls of the dice? to sift blindly through their troves of mediocrity for the chance to maybe be pleasantly ?surprise mechanic?d.?
We need someone to hold them to the decent standard that predatory business is BAD business, and if you?re going to sell your wares, amassing billions of hard-working public?s dollars, you can?t do it like that. Do it like you managed to do it in the decades before you started copying the shit-show practice of mobile games (which are mostly FREE aside from their microtransactions,) and use your vast resources to actually make games that are worth the money want to earn, y?know, like a GOOD business.
I understand being wary of governmental involvement, but we?re not the NRA; they?re not coming to taking our games. You don?t need to be a gamer or understand games to call a snake oil salesman on his shit; I?m not a parent, but if I saw someone punching their kid in the stomach, it?d be a hard sell for that parent to convince me that the look on the child?s face was ?delightful surprise.?Leg End said:
We need someone to hold them to the decent standard that predatory business is BAD business, and if you?re going to sell your wares, amassing billions of hard-working public?s dollars, you can?t do it like that. Do it like you managed to do it in the decades before you started copying the shit-show practice of mobile games (which are mostly FREE aside from their microtransactions,) and use your vast resources to actually make games that are worth the money want to earn, y?know, like a GOOD business.
You?re assuming the worst: ?putting legislation in place that heavily regulates and restricts anything with a hint of chance in it.? Is it at all possible that they could simply regulate blatantly shitty business practices? But fine, if not the ?guh?ment,? then maybe the Better Business Bureau or some like authoritative, influential organization; we absolutely cannot trust pubs/devs to police themselves. I wish it was as simple as voting with our wallets; that?s exactly what I?ve done, but the kind of concerted effort that would take for the industry to notice and change is impossible. You have to account for the growing population of gamers for whom this IS the norm (children/teenagers) and their parents who think they?re just buying games. Older gamers like myself who laughed at horse armor while gratefully paying $30 for Shivering Isles to ADD to an already full and complete $60 experience, those of us who see the criminal turn this industry has taken, are on our way out.
That's what we did, and we got lootboxes as result. The problem is that normal person's vote has 1/1000 the weight of a single whale's vote. So even if only 1% of the audience are whales, they have 10x more say than the 99% rest of the players together. Because of that, publishers have focused their games in luring and hunting whales, with lootboxes being the most effective bait trap.Leg End said:
You realize games are a commercial product? They are specifically designed to milk consumer. EA/activision and such aren't charity, they make game because people buy them. Games "are a predatory practice designed specifically and only to milk consumers". Any law that will regulate lootbox has an high chance of severely curtaining what can and cannot be done in game even outside lootbox because the two are indistinguishable from one another. They're bits of 1 and 0 designed so that it tickle our brain in just the right way that we spend money on more bits of 1 and 0. When you buy them, you don't know if the bits 1 and 0 will be arranged in the right way to make you enjoy the content, you hope they are but you can't guarantee it.Xprimentyl said:
I don't care one bit for facebook/twitch integration in games and neither do most player. But does that means it should be restricted just because most people don't want it? If something is only enjoyed by a minority, is it okay to take it away from them? I don't think so. If you don't like it, don't play it.
I see E3 disappointed you this year; because that's the only logical explanation for such hyperbole. Either that or you just see capitalism in general as a predatory practice designed specifically and only to milk consumers.Meiam said:
I?m not an idiot; no shit games are a product. I never once took issue with BUYING games; I took issue with buying half-baked games that serve only to leech MORE from me despite the LESS they are.Meiam said:
Games have not always been ?specifically designed to milk consumer;? there was a time when one paid $60 and got a fulfilling experience that didn?t require going to one?s wallet over and above that $60 purchase on a recurring basis. Games were designed to be enjoyed out of the box as-is; single player games had a beginning, middle and end with progress gated off by meticulously designed challenges. Multiplayer titles required an internet connection (or at least another person for local play) and a skill set capable of competing with actual intelligence. We bought and played games on their merit, the same merit that netted good developers their prestige and bad developers their infamy; the onus lay on them to put in the time and effort to honestly compete and EARN our money.
Now? Ha! Every other damned gamed is a copy-paste of whatever?s trending where more effort was put into monetizing the labor of avarice than creating a worthy $60 experience. If you think that?s just the way it works, ask yourself how gaming managed its meteoric rise in popularity over the past 20 years and why it?s potentially waning now over this predatory nonsense, why there?s talk of the next big ?gaming crash.? ?If you don't like it, don't play it? doesn?t work when ?it? is in every damn game, when the best developers lower themselves to these petty nickel and dime practices only to under-deliver a mediocre, same-y product.
TL;DR?
Aka: Stockholm syndrome. It's attitudes like Meiam's that're going to ensure the industry stays this course.CaitSeith said:
You're thinking of this all wrong, its easy to define it from a customer point of view ("I don't like it ergo predatory practice") but a law will be crafted by politician (not gamer/customer) and interpreted by judge (not gamer/customer). You really expect them to understand the nuance between a lootbox (a product you buy that only give you a digital reward in a game you already purchased) and DLC (a product you buy that only give you a digital reward in a game you already purchased)?
You say the difference is whether or not it's design to make money, but that would mean every game published by a for profit company would be categorized as a lootbox. You say it has to be enjoyable on its own, but how do you prove that people who buy the lootbox don't enjoy it? You say it require skill, but plenty of game don't require any skill and people enjoy those. And plenty of non lootbox game also have low to non existing skill ceiling, like nintendo game that let you skip section if you struggle with them. How do you differentiate that?
So let say you buy a DLC, in the DLC there's a boss, killing that boss give you reward, those reward are random. Isn't that gambling too? You might say it require you to kill a boss, but what if they made the lootbox a boss that's really easy to kill? Or if the area is low level so that anyone high enough level can easily clear it?
Again these things might sound obvious to you, people who have been playing video game for a long time and love them. But the person who are going to write and interpret the law are most likely people who have never played a game in there life. If they ask there constituent what they think of lootbox they'll mostly get answer along the line of "evil video game corrupting our youth and teaching them Satanism". You really think they'll be able to craft a coherent law that won't drastically reduce what game can do? When the american court system was asked to define pornography it wasn't even able to do that, good luck with differentiating video game from lootbox.
You say the difference is whether or not it's design to make money, but that would mean every game published by a for profit company would be categorized as a lootbox. You say it has to be enjoyable on its own, but how do you prove that people who buy the lootbox don't enjoy it? You say it require skill, but plenty of game don't require any skill and people enjoy those. And plenty of non lootbox game also have low to non existing skill ceiling, like nintendo game that let you skip section if you struggle with them. How do you differentiate that?
So let say you buy a DLC, in the DLC there's a boss, killing that boss give you reward, those reward are random. Isn't that gambling too? You might say it require you to kill a boss, but what if they made the lootbox a boss that's really easy to kill? Or if the area is low level so that anyone high enough level can easily clear it?
Again these things might sound obvious to you, people who have been playing video game for a long time and love them. But the person who are going to write and interpret the law are most likely people who have never played a game in there life. If they ask there constituent what they think of lootbox they'll mostly get answer along the line of "evil video game corrupting our youth and teaching them Satanism". You really think they'll be able to craft a coherent law that won't drastically reduce what game can do? When the american court system was asked to define pornography it wasn't even able to do that, good luck with differentiating video game from lootbox.
It's "predatory practice ergo I don't like it". No wonder you're thinking of this all wrong. We KNOW how out off touch government officials are from gaming mechanics and similar; THAT's why we have been warning and telling the publishers and developers (you know, another group of people who is intimately understand how games work) to at least tone down the predatory practices for YEARS! And politicians finally smelling the blood trail and approaching for a bite, just like we predicted, doesn't suddenly make lootboxes acceptable.Meiam said:
Get it right, go back to the drawing board and try again.
Uh? Yes? They?re lawmakers, not complete idiots. That?s debatable, I know, but for the sake of countering the suggestion that they?d be unable to differentiate lootboxes from legit DLC, I?ll give them the benefit of the doubt.Meiam said:
Wrong. As someone pointed out (hint, hint: it was you,) games are a product purchased in exchange for a set amount of the currency of the realm; how anyone might confuse this with a mechanic within a product that exist only to entice consumers to spend money over and above the purchasing price (and on a recurring basis) for randomized, digital goods that can?t be sold or traded (and as such are effectively unowned) is a mental leap I simply cannot take, even as a hypothetical.
Seeing as lootboxes have landed publishers and developers around the globe in varying levels of hot water ranging from consumer outrage to legal proceedings, I think it?s a safe bet to say if there?s anyone who enjoys paying money for random rewards they can?t exchange or sell is by far and away in the minority, and those same people likely fall into the category of clinical addicts and probably shouldn?t have lootboxes either. There are people who enjoy crack cocaine, that doesn?t mean it?s ok.
?Skill? was in reference to multiplayer games which survived, nay, THRIVED, well before the implementation of lootboxes and other pay-to-win mechanics. And if Nintendo isn?t charging extra, real-world money for only a chance to skip difficult sections, I think any reasonable person can differentiate that from a lootbox.
Wow, you?re either really reaching or really misunderstanding, but I?ll reply to what you?ve suggested. Yes, let?s say I bought DLC, in the DLC there?s a boss and killing the boss give [me] reward, those rewards are random; no, that?s not gambling. The only exchange of money was for the DLC; I now OWN it and can replay it as many times as I like giving me literally a 100% chance of eventually getting every random reward it offers, all for the upfront cost of the DLC which I purchased for a single, one-time price. And I?m not even sure what you?re trying to say about the difficulty there?
I?d argue that you?re thinking about this all wrong; you?ve literally dumbed down the complexities of the legislative process to an addle-brained kangaroo court. The existence of games is nothing new; violence, sex, drugs, pretty much any variety of debauchery you can imagine is in a game somewhere and thanks to the ESRB, every game receives an appropriate rating and the ?likely people who have never played a game in there life? haven?t taken an significant issue with them or their content in decades. That?s not even what?s on trial here; what?s on trial are the predatory business practices, practices of those outside the games putting mechanics inside the games, entirely irrespective of their subjective content, which are designed and exists purely to knowingly unethically manipulate consumers to repeatedly spend money beyond the purchase of the game without the promise of a fitting return on that investment.
Look, if you just don?t like the idea of government getting involved, I understand, but at the same time, I understand that what the industry has become is criminal and they?re shamelessly taking something I?ve cherished for +30 years with them by default; they need SOMEONE to check them, and we can?t trust them to check themselves. Ultimately, I?d like to see we gamers take the stand and refuse to pay for this stuff and them feel the hit to their coffers in a meaningful enough way to willingly change themselves, but evidence points to the fact that it?s not the 99% of outraged gamers who don?t want to spend $1 for random shit the pubs/devs are listening to; it?s the 1% of gamers willing to spend $1,000, the ?whales,? that make these overtly greedy and criminal practices viable and worth the hit to the corporate image.