Loot boxes are in-game containers, that contain a randomly generated set of reward items, of varying value. They are also present in far more than just mobile games.
They use addictive techniques similar to gambling/casinos to encourage players to purchase more boxes, for a chance at a better reward, sometimes irresponsibly.
Using addictive techniques to encourage people to spend in an irresponsible manner can destroy lives, which is why gambling is highly regulated.
Loot boxes are using addictive techniques to encourage people to spend in an irresponsible manner, should be considered gambling, and should be regulated.
> Loot boxes are using addictive techniques to encourage people to spend in an irresponsible manner, should be considered gambling, and should be regulated.
Gambling should be considered gambling. If paying for variable and unpredictable levels of entertainment is gambling, then you have broadened the definition so wide that it is now meaningless.
You have now created a definition where buying a ticket to a movie that you may or may not enjoy is a form of gambling.
> You have now created a definition where buying a ticket to a movie that you may or may not enjoy is a form of gambling.
The appropriate comparison would be buying a ticket to sit down and watch a movie, you don't get to choose the movie though, you have a chance to see the movie you want but there are maybe 9 other movies that you don't want to watch. Maybe the movie you want to watch is super popular and you've seen the other 9 movies several times already.
Probably the most basic comparison minus an analogy for all the addictive flashing lights and all that associated with gambling (incl. loot boxes)
No, that would not be the appropriate comparison at all.
That is the comparison that is more similar to loot boxes, but not to the definition you have decided upon.
Loot boxes give you variable entertainment, but for that to be gambling you have now defined entertainment value as the element of prize. Gambling requires chance, prize and consideration.
At the point where entertainment value is the prize, you have now created a definition of gambling that includes both your example of a random movie, and my example of any movie.
The thing I hate about all of these lootboxes as gambling arguments is that they have no appreciation for what gambling actually is. Instead gambling is now just whatever you feel like is gambling in your gut, not an actual real legal and enforceable definition.
You want to regulate lootboxes, fine, but trying to draw an equivalency to real gambling and lootboxes is just not possible without classifying almost every transaction as gambling.
But honestly, if you want to regulate loot boxes we should probably start by regulating video game addiction because it is a much larger problem that effects a much larger audience.
All of these deeply concerned people who want to regulate loot boxes somehow don't seem to overlap with the group of people who want to regulate video game addiction though. Because the deeper truth is that people want to wield the tools of government like a cudgel to force video game developers to make the kind of games they want.
This whole thing is just a fig leaf similar to how child porn is used to censor the internet and enforce copyright.
> Loot boxes give you variable entertainment, but for that to be gambling you have now defined entertainment as the element of prize
Variable entertainment? Then a lottery scratch card is "variable entertainment", whatever that is supposed to be.
As is I can't distinguish a scratchcard from a lootbox except one has some regulation. They have a feature prize that is the reason for purchase, they have small odds of achieving the feature/promoted prize (Game loot boxes frequently don't give the actual odds), they cost real currency, they can give something of value.
Do you then claim that a scratch card is not gambling?
Let me clear it up for you. The entertainment you derive from a scratch lottery ticket is not the "prize" element of gambling. The prize is the money you win from the scratch off.
Gambling devices pay out a prize that is worth a real redeemable cash value and can be sold on an open market.
What prize does a loot box give you that is not purely for entertainment value? They do not give you a prize that is redeemable for cash.
That is not the legal definition of gambling, and all court decisions on the subject clearly indicate that gambling requires real cash value to the prizes and not just entertainment that has no actual value.
Loot boxes do not have the 3rd element of gambling, which is the recognized legal definition in virtually every jurisdiction.
"In order for the activity to be considered gambling, it must contain three separate elements. These are consideration, chance, and a prize. If one or more of these elements is not present, then gambling is not taking place."
"The final element of gambling is the prize. If the player has the chance to win something of value, then gambling is taking place. Again, the amount or value of the prize is inconsequential. As long as it has some value, it is considered gambling."
> Loot boxes do not have the 3rd element of gambling
Huh? I thought it was well established that there is value and that, in some cases, it could even be "legitimately" (even according to the rules of the game provider) traded for real-world money.
This may not apply to all constructs that could be considered "loot boxes", but I'm confident it's not the case that the vast majority lack the feature of of transferability of the "loot" that would give credence to the argument that any value is purely that of entermainment to the individual user.
> I thought it was well established that there is value and that, in some cases, it could even be "legitimately" (even according to the rules of the game provider) traded for real-world money.
I have never heard of any game provider doing that. I don't really believe you because they would have no legal protection if they did that.
All of their arguments are that the digital goods in the lootbox have no real cash value and are only meant for entertainment purposes.
Steam is the one who really rides the rails with these arguments when they let you turn digital goods into steam dollars. But you can't trade the steam dollars and you can't cash them out. They also actively pursue websites that do let you cash out the value of steam digital goods and try to shut them down and make it difficult for them to operate.
To be fair, it was a response to my accusation of legitimate exchange for real-world money, which, if any grey-market is involved, is technically not fully legitimate (according to, e.g. Steam).
There's also the argument that, because Steam makes an active effort to resist the grey-market exchnges, that gives them some kind of deniability or "legal protection". I believe that both you and I agree that it does not, at least not in any meanigful sense. I also doubt that was their motivation in the first place, rather than, for example, maximizing their own profit in selling the digital goods themselves.
> Steam isn't directly handing me a dollar for every Steam wallet dollar doesn't mean it is impossible.
I think this is actually the most important point. It's not that grey markets have to be involved to convert digital goods into real money. It's that Steam has legitimized everything but the very last step of converting their in-game currency into real currency (and take a cut along the way, from what I understand from other comments in the thread).
This is espeically true if they permit the exchange of real dollars into Steam dollars and merely prohibit the reverse exchange. There's no claiming "entertainment value only" and being taken seriously.
Mostly what mmt1 said, but also what you are describing is against the tos of steam.
They have done everything within their power to make this not legitimate.
If an operator buys a game that normally gives out tickets and uses it as an illegal gambling device is the game developer responsible for that, or is the operator?
Steam is not responsible for grey market transactions it is actively working to shut down. The grey market is the one operating the casino here.
> what you are describing is against the tos of steam.
> They have done everything within their power to make this not legitimate.
There's no evidence they've done everything in their power to eliminate grey market transactions. It's in their power, for example, to remove transferability of items (or maybe just items from loot boxes, though I'm insufficiently familiar with them to know if that could be gamed).
However, it's almost entirely irrelevant, because that's only one piece of a much larger "puzzle".
> If an operator buys a game that normally gives out tickets and uses it as an illegal gambling device is the game developer responsible for that, or is the operator?
This questions seems immaterial, since Steam is both the game developer and the operator.
> The grey market is the one operating the casino here.
Steam is operating every single part of the casino, except the very last little bit of cashing out the chips. They even have a cashier from whom one can buy chips in the first place!
You actually have it backward. It's the grey market that is not responsible for Steam's operation of a casino. It would still exist if items were still transferable, still had real world value to someone, but were no longer available through a Steam-operated lottery system.
> There's no evidence they've done everything in their power to eliminate grey market transactions. It's in their power, for example, to remove transferability of items (or maybe just items from loot boxes, though I'm insufficiently familiar with them to know if that could be gamed).
Why do they have to remove legitimate features?
> his questions seems immaterial, since Steam is both the game developer and the operator.
Steam is not the operator of the sites converting steam items into money, so it is very relevant.
> Steam is operating every single part of the casino, except the very last little bit of cashing out the chips.
So if you can transfer items in a video game between users it is now a casino? That is ridiculous and covers every MMO and a lot of other online games.
Add on top that the good movies are rare and tons of garbage movies are in the list, the probabilities are hidden and there are no laws to make it fair so they can use who knows what algorithm to determine when you win.
How are loot boxes significantly different to CCGs of the kind children have been playing and buying/having their parents buy boosters for, for years? Or sports cards? The concept is identical as far as I can tell.
This sudden push for regulation throws up every single one of the “think of the children” red flags for bad legislation in my mind.
For one, loot boxes are instant gratification. Cards and arcade machine rewards required going somewhere and physically buying something. A loot boxes is more like sitting in front of a slot machine and thinking, "oh just one more roll, I was so close this time!". Loot boxes also tend to really push you towards expensive options. 10 boxes for $9.99, 25 for $19.99, 125 for $99.99 (best value!!). Magic The Gathering cards are not cheap either but they also don't try to push you into buying a whole booster box as an impulse purchase.
It's pretty obvious that both CCGs and loot boxes are forms of gambling. The question is what effects they're having and how they need to be regulated. Loot boxes have a lot more of the features that make gambling a problem, and children are less equipped to handle it. It's reasonable to regulate the benign thing differently from the harmful thing.
Not much different. Which is why I would not buy collectible cards to my kids and why I was avoiding them myself (as they cost too much overall when played).
The difference is that CCG were rather niche thing most people dont know about and these games targetted at children are ever obvious and common. Meaning, people cared less because significantly less people knew you can buy CCG. Also, sports cards and CCG had known probabilities and were overall less sleazy then some of these games. They did not baited you with psychological trics and people were less routinelly trying to earn money by buying them solely in the hope of finding jackpot expensive item to sell.
There is also element of fake think of children where gamers who hate everything new and not for them use this to demonise games they don't like.
Physical CCGs have always been on the nice side of a gray area, digital CCGs are worse, and most loot boxes are much worse. Some important differences (experience drawn from Magic: the Gathering CCG, Rocket League, Team Fortress 2, Hearthstone, Pokémon CCG, Hustle Castle, Merge Dragons, Call of Duty WW2, and a bunch more I don't remember off the top of my head; I play a lot of games):
Games with loot boxes will constantly push them: Throw a loot box in your face while you play or at the end of the match, urging you to pay to open them. What's inside? Maybe something cool? Don't you want to find out? They will also typically show that you have "(3) Unopened Boxes" in your account when you are in the menus. With a CCG, I can browse my collection, play games with friends, or even tournaments, without having to turn down constant sales pitches.
Games with loot boxes often remind you, while you play, that this and that player in your game or your friend X just opened a loot box now and got something cool.
Anything you want in a CCG can be traded or bought fairly from other players. Few loot box implementations allow this.
Any duplicates you get in a CCG can be re-sold, or given away. Few loot box implementations allow this.
Any cards you get from a CCG have a physical presence, so you can store them in a box in the basement and dig them out again years later to either play or sell. Most loot box games will be dead in 5 years.
Opening a loot box is instant gratification. One click and fireworks you have spent the money and it's opening. CCGs require either mail order or physically going to a store. The time delay between feeling the urge and getting the crackle kaboom whoosh (loot boxes opening is very showy) of opening the thing is days or hours versus split seconds.
I don't see how this is related to whether or not CCGs or loot boxes are gambling.
- "heavily advertised" is not necessarily a feature of gambling
- Being able to easily resell reminds me of poker chips.
- The longevity of the prize is not a requirement for gambling.
- CCG could be instant gratification too. Time delay is not a feature of gambling.
Think of it as a "boiling the frog" situation. The fact that this is close to CCGs, and CCGs haven't been banned, doesn't necessarily mean that it's just fine - it's a slow, gradual increase in "water temperature for the frog" that's has over time become unacceptable. So it's going to be equated to gambling and regulated - obviously, there needs to be a line somewhere through that fuzzy, gradual, unclear border, but IMHO it remains to be seen whether that line will be above or below current CCGs.
There's not a bright line between CCGs, scratchcards and loot boxes.
CCGs have merely been overlooked by regulators because they've traditionally been a niche interest and none of the makers were dumb enough to decorate the card packs with one-armed bandits.
1) This is very prevalent in high budget desktop/console games as well, not just mobile games.
2) These games typically do little to nothing to abide by laws that prohibit gambling by minors. There are definitely concerns of whether this is ethical or legal.
The question was "why should I care whether it's gambling". Answers that point out the (legal/moral) consequences of it being gambling are entirely appropriate, even if they don't give any consideration to the possibility that it might not in fact be gambling.
The article is talking about competitive multiplayer games, rather than mobile games. DOTA 2 and CS:GO are the examples used. Theres a few elements that, together, make it extremely problematic in my opinion. Using CS:GO as the example:
1. Items are dropped randomly, or you can buy randomised "crates". By design, plain looking drops are common, while visually impressive drops are rare.
2. When you buy crates and unlock them, there is a "wheel of fortune" style visual system that indicates what item you will receive. There are audio and visual cues indicating how rare or common the item is.
4. There is an in-game trading system that allows users to buy and sell items at an agreed price. Rare items are naturally more expensive on this market. The majority of CS:GO's revenue comes from cuts of these trades.
5. Kids play CS:GO. It is very common to run into young teenagers (13-15) in matchmaking servers.
6. Kids who are exposed to gambling are much more likely to become addicted than adults, are much less likely to have the means to repay debt, and therefore are not held responsible for gambling losses in the eyes of the law. Gambling under the age of 16 is illegal in most countries, and in many cases under 18.
It should be noted that most items in CS:GO cannot be obtained as a normal drop, only from a crate, so it's not so much that good-looking drops are rare, it's that good-looking items can usually only be obtained by paying money to open a box (AWP Dragon Lore being one of the few exceptions).
A loot box is specifically an item that can be purchased in-game that offers a random reward, typically from a loot table and with set odds known only to the game maker. They come in many forms; one of the most obvious is found in Overwatch right now, typically awarded to the player after they level up in game. Overwatch's loot box animation is very pretty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdB17umeKB0
If this sounds kind of familiar, it's because a similar concept exists in many Arcades already, in the form of capsule machines. Japanese Gashapon are the oft-cited inspiration, but countless variations on this idea exist. Here in South Texas, they're a common sight in grocery stores and restaurants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon
On their own, random rewards in a video game sound tame, but where this gets questionably ethical are games which (a) accept real money for in-game purchases, and (b) offer loot-boxes as an in-game purchase. This enables game players to pay real money to receive a random reward, and it's not hard to draw comparisons to real life slot machines. Unlike real-life gambling though, loot boxes have been popping up in games that are often targeted towards minors, making the issue even more complicated. I won't weigh in on the issue here, I just wanted to try to clarify what they are.
I think Overwatch is a bad example because you can't turn the loot into real money. Valve's games are a better example because you can sell the loot directly through Steam -- in some cases for hundreds of dollars.
Overwatch is also a bad (good) example because the developers have a policy where only cosmetic items are available through the loot boxes, while all gameplay features are free for everyone.
Many other loot box games offer items that increase player power or change gameplay in loot boxes. For example, the prerelease version of Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017) had a backlash because of items such as "Deal 30% more damage with ship blasters." Other games may have items such as "Deal 20% more damage, but reduce health by 30%" which open up additional strategic options.
Right, Overwatch is a relatively tame example where it starts to feel potentially manipulative. I forgot about the Battlefront scandal, that's a bit more obviously bad. Again here, the presence of random boosts isn't inherently a bad thing, but making them purchasable is already questionable ("pay to win") and putting them in real-money loot boxes is certainly sketchy ("pay to win but only sometimes")
Doesn't feel manipulative to me, just annoying. I wish there was a big 'open all boxes and skip animations' button that I could click every few months. Right now my boxes tend to accumulate because I just can't be bothered to watch the stupid animation, even when I'm waiting for competitive matchmaking, which can literally take minutes.
I found myself spending so much cash in Dota 2 loot boxes...
It's very addictive. Yet I wasn't opening those boxes to grab something valuable in order to make money out of it, and that's probably where the use of the word "gambling" is confusing people.
I was just looking for those ultra-rare unique cosmetics in order to feel good and unique as well. There is a social dimension to this problem, if Dota 2 was a solo game, I wouldn't have spent a dime on cosmetics.
Gambling is gambling, loot box is loot box, I think we should not spending time on arguing the definition, but instead limit loot box as what we do with gambling.
New stuff come with new rules, may sound more resealable.
I agree - Gambling is rolling the dice to make back more money than you put in. Loot box is rolling the dice to get digital items you want with no expectation to profit. There is a difference.
I often wish, there was a diffrent sort of gambling- taking the customers money and refunding it - in secrecy to the familys whos reward-circuitry-hacked members bleed them dry.
That- and only that, is the acceptable gambling that i could accept existing.
The British government owns lots of banks, one of them, the National Savings and Investment Bank has a product that is almost this (but not secret), named 'Premium Bonds'.
You buy bonds, and like a lottery ticket they might randomly win a prize in a draw. But because it's a bank not a lottery the bonds themselves never go away if you don't win, it's basically a savings account except instead of boring percentage interest you randomly win prizes.
Here's the definition of a "lottery" under the uk gambling act "(2)An arrangement is a simple lottery if—
(a)persons are required to pay in order to participate in the arrangement,
(b)in the course of the arrangement one or more prizes are allocated to one or more members of a class, and
(c)the prizes are allocated by a process which relies wholly on chance."
There is also a complex lottery where the process begins with chance. This covers things like scratchcards where you choose which things to scratch off but which card you are given, and what is printed on the card is governed by chance.
Lotteries are one of 3 forms of gambling covered by this regulation, so in the uk at least it seems pretty obvious that lootboxes are gambling from a legal point of view. Lotteries are permitted for people older than 16 in the UK but it's an offence to allow a "child" (someone younger than 16 in this law) to participate (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/19/section/56)
It's also an offence if your company to manufacture, supply, install or adapt gambling software without a license. So they could be liable from that point of view also, in the UK at least.
The law calls that a complex lottery. But it's still a lottery, and the UK law on lotteries is very simple: No for-profit lotteries.
You can (and at least two big companies do) make money from operating a lottery on behalf of a charity, but you can't run a lottery where the profits themselves go somewhere other than a "good cause" such as a charity. And the UK has tighter regulation than the US of charities so it's harder to have a "charity" that basically just puts money into your own pockets.
Wagers on things which are part-skill and part-chance are covered by the definition of "gaming", which is one of the other forms of gambling in this law and seems like it was originally designed for games like roulette, poker etc. If the loot-box is designated gaming then the restrictions are no less severe and certain exemptions around lotteries wouldn't apply (so probably more severe).
I much prefer how Epic Games have done this with Fortnite. And by all accounts their method is raking in a LOT of cash.
All cosmetic items only, but you purchase the exact item you want directly. The items are a little more expensive than you might expect (I think on average $4-10 each) and it includes skins, different "axes" to break objects, different dances and different "gliders" that you fly into the game on.
It's quite fun, but also totally unnecessary and you only spend money on exactly what you want - no random chance.
On top of the fact that it's a free to play game in the first place, and you can also get quite a wide range of skins, axes and dances (10s of them) by playing to complete the battle pass which is only about $10 or so per season. Plus there are a few freebies even if you pay nothing, and some you can get from linking to Twitch Prime, etc.
I think this is winning partly because it is fun (the skins are quite comedic) but also just because you know what you're getting. By comparison I spent about $10 on keys for PUBG and stopped because I just got useless crap that isn't really exciting - they're just basic clothing items. Even the rarer items aren't as exciting which doesn't help but the chance of getting one is quite low.
The thing Epic/Fortnite have done to make them sell more (compared to the random chance) is that there is <10 items for sale per day for 24 hours, after 24 hours the set changes and you may not be able to buy that item again (though in practice many returns a few days or weeks later, you can't be certain). So instead of random chance gambling they're capitalising on missing out / time limited offers. Plus there's a constant influx of new items so instead of wasting time gambling for that ultra rare item - instead you can keep up with whats newer and cooler.
Fwiw, PUBG loot boxes are not game play impacting; they are cosmetic only. If you don't want that "chance", you could just buy the specific item you'd like on the Steam store from other players. You may even sell unopened boxes (which require a key) there.
So what you're saying is that there's a variable real world amount of monetary value that you could win determined solely on the random outcome of a loot box. Sounds exactly like gambling. If someone spent $5 on a chance to win either a marmot, a squirrel, a fancy coat, or a golden banjo and the rarity of winning those depended upon their real world value, it would still be gambling. The only difference with loot boxes is that their real world value is determined by their rarity.
Loot boxes work by having a list of items with weighted probabilities adding up to 1, and what you buy is getting one or more of those items at random.
The way the weighted probabilities list is constructed changes from implementation to implementation.
The prevalent one so far is "box gacha", the spiritual successor to "complete gacha". The latter is now banned in Japan and the rest are somehow regulated.
The motivations are many. First, it distributes large payments over smaller payments making people lose control over their spending. Then, it complicates people's perception of how expensive an item is.
In a sense, lottery games are the same in spirit. For example, what's the probability of getting an arbitrary unique combination of 6 numbers out of 49 (lottery)? Very, very low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_mathematics
In mobile, they're usually coupled with "events" that have a leaderboard. Events are actually auctions were people "play" (bid) for a better place in the leaderboard. The rewards are usually not worth it, because through successive updates they're made worthless (e.g.: stats inflation).
Maybe nit-picky, but this is one place (the title here I'm talking about) a properly choosen dash would've saved me a couple seconds or so. When I was reading this, I thought first to myself, what is a crap-loot box, only to understand later that the endash there stood for a semicolon. But endash is for word pairs (i.e. black--white, on--of); here, an emdash would be more appropriate.
There's nothing wrong per se with using the dash, at least if you get the spacing right. If you use a dash as a punctuation you should either use spaces or - as you said - the correct glyph.
I'd say otherwise. It's not like it's really important here, but in a book, that would be a very bright sign of amateurishness to me. Just like with sans serif dotless `i', `n' and `m' the only difference is not the number of the loops, the same with the hyphen, endash and emdash, they mean different things. Hyphen compounds words or breaks them across the line break, endash connects them in logical relations, and an emdash can stand for a colon or a pair of parantheses, indicating a subordinate clause that serves as an aside, generally. When these are mixed up, parsing the text becomes harder. It's not much of a trouble here in an internet title, but when this kinds of misuse appear in a long, difficult period in some rather complex text, it can end up consuming too much time.
Most games contain calculated random rewards or else the game would be boring and predictable. However to call this gambling it's quite a stretch as you can't cash out. Whoever decided to make those "boxes" look like slot machines spinning brought it upon themselves.
This is not random loot you find in the world, you pay real money to buy a box and hope you win some cool helmet or gun, you can't buy that item directly and have to buy many boxes until you win it or in some games as mentioned in the article this items can be traded on some gray markets.
There are games that just sell you the item, no randomness involved.
In many games you can cash out, either above board (steam marketplace) or in the grey/black market. But even then, does it necessarily matter? Things of value still have value, and digital goods still have value. People pay cash money for software constantly and we don't question that, we believe that software can have tangible real-world value, sometimes considerably. If someone gifted you a copy of Photoshop or AutoCAD etc. you wouldn't think of that as valueless. The same is true in entertainment products too, and just as with professional software it's a matter of enforced artificial scarcity.
Even if you can't trade the items (and you often can), they have a perceived value, and often a hard cash market value. A value that is frequently over-promoted by the game to encourage purchase of more premium currency by the naive to buy more boxes.
I can't distinguish a loot box from a scratch card -- except a scratch card must reveal odds.
I'm old-school in terms of paying for games: £xx for a complete game, £x for a month's access as they provide a known value exchange. Doubly so when it's the underage being sold to. My kids learnt never to ask - my answer was always no. Lootboxes and other variable rewards, time unlocks and so forth are just a piss-take driven by sheer greed of the GameCo that's ruined many games.
> I can't distinguish a loot box from a scratch card -- except a scratch card must reveal odds.
A lot of problem gamblers get in a bad way because they think that the only way to recoup their losses is by continuing to play until they win.
If you can't sell loot for cash, then it can't lead to this same kind of problem gambling because it's literally impossible to recoup your losses instead of merely unlikely. Therefore lootboxes should be regulated differently from actual gambling if at all.
> A lot of problem gamblers get in a bad way ... by continuing to play until they win
The why does not matter. By removing that part of your text the behaviour applies equally to both.
Whether it is about recouping losses, or desiring the "ownership" of some pixels the same addictive behaviours are at work, and the same problems and financial losses can accrue.
Game companies employ psychologists and economists to try and ensure addictiveness - giving you a meaningless "almost a winner" tickets with 2 of 3 required tokens etc
> If you can't sell loot for cash
In a good proportion of games you can sell the loot for cash. Via Steam Marketplace and so on.
They deserve the same regulation and age limits as fixed odds betting terminals and fruit machines as that is essentially what they are.
I guess buying physical cards is not so addictive that anyone would pay attention. In mobile games, everything is set up for you to make repetitive purchases in the hope of winning bigger: your credit card is on file, the design of the boxes echoes casinos, etc.
But that's a lot less than what Blizzard is making on lootboxes (4 billion, just on lootboxes). And MtG is the biggest of its type, whereas the lootbox industry is much bigger. So I think the difference of scale is important before a legislation is considered.
This point comes up a lot when discussing loot boxes.
Essentially, it's a matter of practicality and extent of impact on the public. Industry regulation with regards to some widespread practice is usually the final step of an extended period of failure to self-regulate [the practice that is producing some undesired side-effect].
Mostly because you can directly buy the cards you want in MtG on the secondary market.
Consequently, this limits the "whale effect"--even the most expensive decks of cards in "Standard" tops out at about $1200 ($20 times 60 cards), and generally MUCH less than that gets you championship level decks.
If the ONLY way to get an MtG card that was required to compete was to open $200 boxes over and over and over, I suspect that people WOULD start complaining.
Most of the "skinner box" games explicitly prevent you from being able to buy specific cards precisely to keep you on the hamster wheel.
But card packs are random at least. The very rarest card will be equally rare for every buyer, any time. Loot boxes can be much worse than gambling on a random number generator: game servers know the inventory of a player and can tailor box contents to always keep the inventory close to one of the many thresholds that are usually designed into game rules. Maybe some operators are voluntarily staying away from these dark patterns, maybe using them could theoretically get you into legal trouble, but it would be very difficult to prove anything.
Basically my point is this: it can be perfectly reasonable to allow one form of gambling-like transactions where it is easy to ensure that the house is playing fair while outlawing a superficially similar one were making sure that the house is not cheating would require enormous regulations and oversight efforts.
Couldn't you prove operators were doing it by running a large number of accounts, checking the distribution of inventory and figuring out what the likelihood of distributions?
How many non-free transactions would you be willing to pay for?
Ps: Also, a manipulative pretend-random drop function could easily be made to adhere to defined overall droprates without sacrificing any individual manipulation. Detecting "bad luck" that only strikes when the system detects willingness to keep rolling the dice until some local goal is achieved would not be easy even with a complete dataset.
I agree the non-free transactions thing is a problem, however some organizations might be willing to do it as part of an investigation?
However for the second point, given what I know about programming as a discipline, I'm not sure that the probable bad actors have gone through a lot of effort to hide their gaming of the system, or that if they have made the effort to make said function that it actually works as envisioned and does not leave its own telltale traces.
I have vague memories of reading about this kind of dark pattern when I first heard about loot boxes, but I failed to google any references now so maybe my memories are diluted with imagination.
But why wouldn't it happen? How would the public find out? Tipping the scales just a little bit, at the right times, for the right victims, could be very effective at "increasing engagement". The whole thing would even be a/b-testable, so any internal arguments against would be futile. (You'd want to keep the "a" implementation around anyways, in case you need to present source to someone who should not see how the sausage is made)
At least for jurisdictions like Nevada, heavy regulation and verification.
I'd expect that's part of the point of regulating something that appears to be gambling as gambling, to ensure that it is, at least, fair (for some definition of that word).
With digital goods, the distributor can stack the odds against you to make you spend more money. They know what you want and they can make sure you don't get it.
And then you possibly don't realize how much you've spent, because unlike real cards, digital ones don't pile up.
The lootbox mechanic can be easily disguised without making it seem like gambling:
1.Buy lots in-game currency with cash or grind X hours for it.
2.Buy "A ticket to dungeon Y" with in-game currency.
3.The dungeon has a boss that is essentially a easy to kill walking lootbox.
Tada, all gambling regulations bypassed.
If you want to play loot-centric games this is your choice.
All MMOs that revolve around items and loot will bypass the "lootbox" ban with a system as described above or better.
(for the record, this system is actually in widespread use in Asia-based MMOs)
There's one level of indirection between letting you buy an exclusive pass to fight a monster that has some special random drop vs. letting you buy a special random drop. That's basically the 'skill-testing question' hack that's used to run every sweepstakes in Canada. You'd have a revolt on your hands if you outlawed "Roll Up the Rim to Win".
Oh no, We wouldn't dream of having gambling in our game! That's why we don't have single-use dungeon tickets (which is just gambling with one extra step between).
You can do our dungeons as many times as you want, they aren't single use. Of course doing a dungeon run costs five purple crystals, which costs five bucks. After an epic story focused (cut-scenes that you can skip) showdown with a boss (that you can take down in one attack) you get random loot from a loot table, just like in good old games like Diablo (functionally the same as a lootbox).
Of course, the fact that it works out to 5 bucks for a random item is not gambling, since we now have two steps instead of just one.
In both WoW and Diablo2 doing instas required nothing but the game itself (for WoW it was the monthly subscription, for Diablo2 it was a one time purchase).
Of course, if there's a freemium model, it's very hard to argue that it's not gambling, if people buy in-game-something to speed up grinding.
But in that regard simply wasting time for a low-probability-drop item is also gambling.
The problem is that in the direct microtransaction lootbox model there's just an insane feedback loop, to get that nice knife/gun/armor/breastplate.
It should be treated like addiction - which it is. People like to play hazard games, so gambling will be with us forever, and some people will not be able to handle the accompanying mental draw to that dopaminergic feedback loop.
I think the easy-to-kill-walking-lootbox-boss isn't as as much gambling as the current lootbox system. An important element is that the game shows you all these possible rewards much like a slot machine. I'd be surprised if they'd include that as a gameplay element.
dedicated people use their past wins against bosses to populate drop table of the potential chance of getting a certain drop. It's very much a system that shows your all possible rewards like a slot machine.
> Regulations that tightly restrict or absolutely prohibit loot boxes will definitely hurt the gaming industry and will hurt, perhaps even fatally, games I love.
Maybe actually charge for the game that companies used to?
I hate free 2 play games because I am a whale and I know it. When I get hooked I can easily pay hundres of dollars of digital shit. Much more than I would ever have if I had just purchased the game.
Fuck loot boxes and fuck companies trying to defend the practice.
I agree with this. I wish more consumers would pressure game companies into practices like CD Project RED displays. Those fellas keep some integrity in the industry.
I think there's a pattern here: 'Highly talented company makes highly praised product but eventually realizes there is much more money in exploitative products instead'. Valve made the amazing Half-Life series, then later seems to have come to the conclusion that their return on investment is just much higher if they focus on multiplayer games with loot boxes (plus selling other people's games and taking a cut). Blizzard went through a similar transformation from e.g. Warcraft 3 to World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone (these days WoW is probably even the less exploitative of the bunch). Facebook went from being 'the place to hear about what my friends are up to', to just trying to show me as targeted ads as possible. I don't blame them, per se - these companies are just following the economic reality, but I just wish being exploitative wasn't so damn profitable.
I would easily argue Blizzard has the most generous/least exploitative loot box models. Cosmetic only with a fairly regular/healthy rate of freebies, not to mention the currency you get that lets you acquire the ones you actually want without relentlessly "rolling". Heroes of the Storm steps it up even further with a reroll mechanic you can use for disappointing boxes. Compared to the others in the industry, Blizzard is downright pleasant.
HotS and Overwatch really aren't exploitative sure, but Hearthstone is incredibly exploitative. Unless you are so good you can go "infinite" in arena (always make your gold entry fee back and then some, on average), you have to buy packs for every expansion that comes out. Or you have to play with lower-tier cards, which some people do successfully, but to get the most out of the game or be "competitive" they will need the best cards eventually.
Out of the 3 games, I probably played Overwatch the most, followed closely by Hearthstone, but the amount of money I invested in Hearthstone is easily 3-4x the initial price I paid for OW. I got fed up of the "pay or fall behind" nature of Hearthstone and stopped playing a long time ago though.
That is very much the nature of a CGC though. Hearthstone seems less exploitative than Magic the Gathering, Pokemon TCG or Yu-Gi-Oh because you can trade in unwanted card and those have been around for a long time.
Also in MTG there's a lot of people who will happily play unrestricted games for fun. Unless you're after playing at tournaments you can ignore editions and new releases. (Or just pick what's interesting to you in them)
I've played digital card games that sold digital card packs for real money like ten plus years ago. Decipher did the Star Trek CCG online the same way.
I always thought a much more modern scenario would've been if they put like a code or something on physical packs so you could buy them once and have the same cards in both digital and physical form.
The initial investment in MTG is higher, since you start with zero cards, but there is an independent market where you can purchase almost any card directly. I personally prefer this over the gambling and crafting mechanic in HS.
Yeah, I think of Hearthstone as a game with a $150 per year subscription and evaluate if I want to keep playing it based on that - which currently I do, but I can definitely see how many people wouldn't (and if I hadn't been playing since the beginning, it would cost more to stay competitive now)
Yeah I reached the point where I decided it wasn't worth it. Towards the end of my degree, I was just playing far less because of bigger workload and the times I played were mostly on my phone while waiting on my own for something. I continue to have less free time now that my degree is finished, and now I kill time with free phone games. Maybe one day I'll get back into it, if I haven't fallen too far behind.
You can be perfectly competitive without playing arena or buying packs. I haven't paid a cent for the past 2 years and can play all the competitive decks I want in every meta. Blizzard has been very good with bumping up the rewards you get from playing normally.
I stopped playing 2 years ago so that's likely it, for the first 2 years of hearthstone from closed beta to when I stopped the rewards were lacking. When I had time to play a lot in early student years, I could play some expansions without paying a thing but getting busier in later student years I fell behind too quickly.
For Blizzard, you forgot about Diablo 3, which was designed to push people toward the (real-money) auction house (a good write-up here:http://www.sullla.com/D3/unsatisfying.html).
But I agree that, right now, they are not the worst offender, at least with Overwatch (I haven't played Hearstone and I haven't played enough of HotS to reach the lootboxes).
> There will definitely be economic harm, and games companies will have to figure something out to fill the monetary gap.
Regulation painted as 'economic harm' is hard to defend in an industry that's been around a long time without these kinds of practices being so widespread, and so user-hostile, that regulators are actually starting to care.
Games companies long ago figured out how to fill the monetary gap -- sell a game for money. The transaction is straightforward, transparent, and aligned with the expectations most people have for most goods and services exchanges.
What that kind of traditional transaction does not lend itself to is changing the contractual arrangement after the exchange (to the purchaser's disadvantage), or to orchestrate a situation where the vendor can continually identify, manipulate, and abuse the weaknesses of the purchaser.
I think the difference with games now is that the expectations are much higher - games cost far more to produce than they used to, and are much more complex and have better graphics, so it is harder to recoupe development costs by selling a game at an upfront cost, especially when the expectation is that a game should cost $60 or less. Maybe we need to change our expectations of how much a good game should be worth.
Seems to me like we are in a race to to the bottom in all parts of the software and entertainment industry.
When behavioural economics and data mining became all encompassing we lost all that was positive and good in this field.
This modeling of the human psyche has existed in PR and the commercial industry for a century, but the incredible multiplier that lies in the constant connection and the advancement of fast and agressive interfaces has now made us all like rats pushing levers in a Skinner box.
Hordes of psychologists, data analysts and digital designers has become like a mercenary army that whores itself out to the global-internet-consciousness that itself has become like a cancer that eats up peoples last moments of clarity.
We now stand completely naked and exposed as the irrational, animal, mamalian ape that we are in front of the extreme exponential technological whirlwind that has made everything so complex, fast changing and exploitative that we have no option but to completely drop out or ride the tiger.
> We now stand completely naked and exposed as the irrational, animal, mamalian ape that we are in front of the extreme exponential technological whirlwind that has made everything so complex, fast changing and exploitative that we have no option but to completely drop out or ride the tiger.
Love the imagery in your writing... I think we do have an option for now (turn off your phone when you get home/go on vacation etc.) and that the animal were riding is not a tiger but a rabid monkey in heat stung by a scorpion, which is how some yogis describe the unquestioned mind.
The observation of my own patterns and relationship with media/attention grabbing tech it has become clear to me that if I am to be productive and healthy, I need to change my relationship with my mind.
I can't help but feel like this will divide society. Like fast food and eating healthy. Everybody knows eating healthy is better for you, but a lot just can't be bothered. Consuming media on the most addictive feeds will be the same. Only this time we won't have an obesity epidemic, but an epidemic of retardation and uselessness.
Where did Greg Egan write about that? I'd be interested to read it. I've only read one of his novels, plus some supplementary writing on his site. I plan to read more.
Egan mentions "health" in Distress, primarily surrounding those that define the word and set the bar what "healthy" is. Alongside that idea, lies the ultrarich who have rearranged their DNA to a point they are invulnerable to every known disease, most chemical toxins, and more. They're also physically a different species, as they are incapable of making young with other humans.
Or as with most new things it gets a bit out of hand and it takes a generation or two to find a balance. But don't let me deny you the pleasure of your apocalyptic rantings :)
And yet, there was a time when Behaviourism was all but snuffed out by Chomsky's criticism of Skinner's Verbal Behaviour, and the subsequent rise of cognitive science.
What happened? My guess is we got trapped by the short-term rewards of systems that seem to work for a while- until they don't; and create an ocean of social and other problems in the meanwhile (e.g. the use of "AI" systems to predict recidivism that overfit on race, etc).
This is all a lesson humans desperately needs to learn, and we are slowly learning it. Todays technology in the hands on these multi billion companies becomes a lethal weapon towards the minds of entire generations.
Everything the ad market touches becomes shit. They live in shit, and they feed off each other's shit, and it's overflowing everywhere into society like a pollution that has no cure, because it's built into capitalism.
I still haven't heard anyone take on physical vs digital card games as part of this. Typically cards are sold in random 'packs' (see Hearthstone, Gwent and Valves 'up and coming' card game) which should fall under this definition. But blind card packs (Magic the Gathering, Pokemon) physically are not banned by any government, nor, have I ever heard them talked about in the same umbrella as gambling?
Randomized physical card packs can be gambling, but they also have non-gambling uses; in MtG, there are ways of playing (drafts) where the randomized packs are logistically important to how the game is played, and those ways of playing are legitimately fun.
Apparently I didn't get the point across. MtG drafts remain fun and the randomization of the card packs remains necessary even if you remove the ownership element entirely, by agreeing to destroy the cards afterwards.
For skins or other purely cosmetic items with no effect on gameplay, to me it's equivalent to a gumball machine where you might not get your favorite color.
From what I understand, Magic and other card games are not gambling because the cards are considered to all be of equal value despite rarity. If the company that sells Magic (Wizards or the Coast / Hasbro) were to acknowledge that the cards DO have a secondary market value, it would qualify as gambling. Especially so, if they acknowledged they knew the relative values of the cards during the design / planning phases (which they absolutely do). Though I love magic, I have no doubt, if all the facts were to come to light in court, the law would stipulate drastic changes to their model, which is part of the reason why Wizards of the Coast is run like a cult.
Last time this topic was discussed I saw a very similar question so I had a theory: What if physical card packs is such a small market that government have simply not noticed enough to care to regulate it. I then went and look up the numbers and checked. If I recall right:
Magic the Gathering and Pokemon sat around $500k in realy global market sales. Sport cards a few millions. Game with lootboxes is estimated around a half a billion. Regular gambling estimated around $400 billions.
This make in my view a rather simple answer why Magic the Gathering might not be a big concern for government but why regular gambling really is and why loot boxes currently sit in the middle. To simplify: 1x, 1000x, 1000000x.
I think the big reason that Magic never ramped up so much is because of the fact that it's a physical pack. You can only buy however much is in stock (at most) and even when you order a booster box or fat pack online, it still has a delay before it arrives. With the online model it's really easy to just keep pulling the lever over and over again and getting an instant response.
There were some legal rumblings many years ago about Magic being gambling, and assertions that the government should step in and stop Wizards from selling gambling to kids. I don't remember how it blew over exactly.
Is monopoly gambling? Where buying property is betting on the uncertain outcome of someone landing there later, and the stakes are playmoney or the honors of winning?
To argue that monopoly for playmoney is "gambling" is sophism. When one talks about gambling the bet is for real money (or other tokens with real monetary value). Playing roulette "for honors" would not be gambling either, it would be just playing. The argument you make is sophistic because you are focusing on the word gambling instead of seeing the real issue - that gambling for real money can cause addiction and worse. A random number generator is taking chances all the time, but it is not gambling for money until you connect the outcomes to real money.
What stakes are you playing monopoly for? When the game is packed up back in its box, is the winner walking away from the table with value extracted from the other players?
Semantics schemantics. Most things that fall into the category of "provoking compulsive reward-seeking behavior" (that is, are addictive) are—and should be—regulated. Gambling, alcohol, drugs...
Everything is addictive in the right circumstances. There are people who became addicted to sudoku puzzles. Things like sports, which are usually considered beneficial can be addictive too. Reward seeking is a normal human thing, and it is essential for the survival of the specie.
The general idea, I think is that addictive things shouldn't be regulated unless it is a significant threat to society. Gambling is, because it is known to put people into bankruptcy. Obviously, drugs, which alcohol and tobacco are, also pose serious problems. But lootboxes? I've never heard about families being destroyed by lootboxes. Yeah, people can spend more than intended, but for it to be a problem warranting heavy regulation, it has to be more than just scraping disposable income.
>> The loot box mechanism is straightforward: you buy a box for a fixed price, and you receive a random reward. Some rewards are commonplace and low value; others are rare and high value. So far, so gambling: these essential features are found in roulette, slot machines, betting on horses, raffles, and lotteries.
Er. And Magic: the Gathering booster packs.
Does that mean I have a gambling problem then? Because I had hoped that despite my M:tG habit [1], I was not really-really a gambler.
____________
[1] And let's not discuss my DnD etc RPG habit. I flip cards and roll dice way too much for someone who sincerely thinks she's not into games of chance.
> Does that mean I have a gambling problem then? Because I had hoped that despite my M:tG habit [1], I was not really-really a gambler.
Just because someone gambles doesn't automatically mean they have a "gambling problem". But I certainly don't see why M:tG booster packs wouldn't be considered gambling, as well.
> And let's not discuss my DnD etc RPG habit. I flip cards and roll dice way too much for someone who sincerely thinks she's not into games of chance.
But do you have to pay a fixed price each time you roll the dice or flip the card?
For M:tG cards, yes, I think so. I have to pay something to get the cards in the first place, and I guess you could see the cost spread over each use of a card (uses which, btw, are limited in time- there's only a limited number of times I'll get to include a rare card in a deck, draw it and play with it, until I get bored or it rotates out of the most popular formats I'm engaged with).
The psych people I've talked to explain it as a rule of thumb "If it's not a problem, it's not a problem".
Say you feel you need to wear a hat made of marshmallow. Is that a problem? Well, is it? For example if you lost your job because of the hat, that's a problem. If you spend so much on marshmallow hats that you can't afford your rent, that's a problem. If you killed somebody's dog because it tried to eat your hat, that's a problem, and so on.
If you spend money on MTG and enjoy it even if it's $5000 per week that could be fine, psychologically at least, if it didn't cause you or others to suffer. But if you find you're ruining your life, or other people's to buy cards, even if it's just $50 of cards per month then that's a gambling problem.
I think the idea is that in an ego-dystonic illness _you_ know this is a problem, and in other mental illnesses other people have spotted it's a problem but you can't/ won't.
For example starving yourself to death is definitely a problem, but body-image mental health illness that causes it usually leave the sufferer unable to recognise this consequence of their actions.
This sort of thing is going to keep happening, and not just because game publishers are greedy bastards.
These days, it's very, very difficult to make a profit on a AAA game at only $60 a pop, but if anyone tries to raise that price the fans will cry bloody murder. So publishers are desperately trying to find ways to make up the difference. Cosmetic sales, DLC packs, loot boxes, anything. Making loot boxes illegal doesn't fix the problem; it just pushes it somewhere else.
There are different classes of gambling, and in the UK at least they are regulated differently:
1. Proper full-on skill-based gambling; Poker, Blackjack, type games, plus arguably Horse Racing and other sports where you learn the starts and make judgement calls.
2. 'Luck' based games; Pay money, get 'prize' - this is where loot boxes fall into, and in also in the real world, CTGs and LEGO Minifig bags (for example). You always get a prize no matter how small.
3. Raffles; Buy a ticket for a fixed sum, win a prize. The prizes on offer are known up front. Viewed slightly different (for some reason) - most non-business places can run one of these without a licence. However the nationwide Lottery does require a licence, even though it's basically just a raffle.
Types 1 and 2 require different licences if you want to operate them, type one definitely has to have all the GambleAware[1] stuff prominently shown.
You'll see on many daytime and light entertainment programs on TV that they run 'competitions' for the viewers where the question is stupidly simple. They do this to step around the 'gambling' licence issue. By asking a question (no matter how simple) it legally occludes the fact that the text-in/phone-in competition is basically a Lottery.
Back to the point of Games... All games publishers have to do is get a gambling licence (for the region they want to sell the game in) and be up front that their game contains 'some gambling'.
Of course though, if they do that, then they can't sell their game to minors...
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadThey use addictive techniques similar to gambling/casinos to encourage players to purchase more boxes, for a chance at a better reward, sometimes irresponsibly.
Using addictive techniques to encourage people to spend in an irresponsible manner can destroy lives, which is why gambling is highly regulated.
Loot boxes are using addictive techniques to encourage people to spend in an irresponsible manner, should be considered gambling, and should be regulated.
Gambling should be considered gambling. If paying for variable and unpredictable levels of entertainment is gambling, then you have broadened the definition so wide that it is now meaningless.
You have now created a definition where buying a ticket to a movie that you may or may not enjoy is a form of gambling.
The appropriate comparison would be buying a ticket to sit down and watch a movie, you don't get to choose the movie though, you have a chance to see the movie you want but there are maybe 9 other movies that you don't want to watch. Maybe the movie you want to watch is super popular and you've seen the other 9 movies several times already.
Probably the most basic comparison minus an analogy for all the addictive flashing lights and all that associated with gambling (incl. loot boxes)
That is the comparison that is more similar to loot boxes, but not to the definition you have decided upon.
Loot boxes give you variable entertainment, but for that to be gambling you have now defined entertainment value as the element of prize. Gambling requires chance, prize and consideration.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e7b39fc2-501e...
At the point where entertainment value is the prize, you have now created a definition of gambling that includes both your example of a random movie, and my example of any movie.
The thing I hate about all of these lootboxes as gambling arguments is that they have no appreciation for what gambling actually is. Instead gambling is now just whatever you feel like is gambling in your gut, not an actual real legal and enforceable definition.
You want to regulate lootboxes, fine, but trying to draw an equivalency to real gambling and lootboxes is just not possible without classifying almost every transaction as gambling.
But honestly, if you want to regulate loot boxes we should probably start by regulating video game addiction because it is a much larger problem that effects a much larger audience.
All of these deeply concerned people who want to regulate loot boxes somehow don't seem to overlap with the group of people who want to regulate video game addiction though. Because the deeper truth is that people want to wield the tools of government like a cudgel to force video game developers to make the kind of games they want.
This whole thing is just a fig leaf similar to how child porn is used to censor the internet and enforce copyright.
Variable entertainment? Then a lottery scratch card is "variable entertainment", whatever that is supposed to be.
As is I can't distinguish a scratchcard from a lootbox except one has some regulation. They have a feature prize that is the reason for purchase, they have small odds of achieving the feature/promoted prize (Game loot boxes frequently don't give the actual odds), they cost real currency, they can give something of value.
Do you then claim that a scratch card is not gambling?
Gambling devices pay out a prize that is worth a real redeemable cash value and can be sold on an open market.
What prize does a loot box give you that is not purely for entertainment value? They do not give you a prize that is redeemable for cash.
> the activity or practice of playing at a game of chance for money or other stakes
That is not the legal definition of gambling, and all court decisions on the subject clearly indicate that gambling requires real cash value to the prizes and not just entertainment that has no actual value.
Loot boxes do not have the 3rd element of gambling, which is the recognized legal definition in virtually every jurisdiction.
https://www.truthfinder.com/glossary/gambling-definition/
"In order for the activity to be considered gambling, it must contain three separate elements. These are consideration, chance, and a prize. If one or more of these elements is not present, then gambling is not taking place."
"The final element of gambling is the prize. If the player has the chance to win something of value, then gambling is taking place. Again, the amount or value of the prize is inconsequential. As long as it has some value, it is considered gambling."
Huh? I thought it was well established that there is value and that, in some cases, it could even be "legitimately" (even according to the rules of the game provider) traded for real-world money.
This may not apply to all constructs that could be considered "loot boxes", but I'm confident it's not the case that the vast majority lack the feature of of transferability of the "loot" that would give credence to the argument that any value is purely that of entermainment to the individual user.
I have never heard of any game provider doing that. I don't really believe you because they would have no legal protection if they did that.
All of their arguments are that the digital goods in the lootbox have no real cash value and are only meant for entertainment purposes.
Steam is the one who really rides the rails with these arguments when they let you turn digital goods into steam dollars. But you can't trade the steam dollars and you can't cash them out. They also actively pursue websites that do let you cash out the value of steam digital goods and try to shut them down and make it difficult for them to operate.
Ever heard of a third party? How about paypal? Is a gray market a concept foreign to you entirely?
I can exchange them to a bot, recieve Amazon gift card funds, and then turn that into USD.
I can trade them straight up for any cryptocurrency.
I can have a bank deposit made tomorrow.
I can exchange them for points on a website which get cashed out for USD/EUR/GBP.
The list goes on.
Just because you are ignorant and Steam isn't directly handing me a dollar for every Steam wallet dollar doesn't mean it is impossible.
Please educate yourself or stop feigning.
There's also the argument that, because Steam makes an active effort to resist the grey-market exchnges, that gives them some kind of deniability or "legal protection". I believe that both you and I agree that it does not, at least not in any meanigful sense. I also doubt that was their motivation in the first place, rather than, for example, maximizing their own profit in selling the digital goods themselves.
> Steam isn't directly handing me a dollar for every Steam wallet dollar doesn't mean it is impossible.
I think this is actually the most important point. It's not that grey markets have to be involved to convert digital goods into real money. It's that Steam has legitimized everything but the very last step of converting their in-game currency into real currency (and take a cut along the way, from what I understand from other comments in the thread).
This is espeically true if they permit the exchange of real dollars into Steam dollars and merely prohibit the reverse exchange. There's no claiming "entertainment value only" and being taken seriously.
They have done everything within their power to make this not legitimate.
If an operator buys a game that normally gives out tickets and uses it as an illegal gambling device is the game developer responsible for that, or is the operator?
Steam is not responsible for grey market transactions it is actively working to shut down. The grey market is the one operating the casino here.
There's no evidence they've done everything in their power to eliminate grey market transactions. It's in their power, for example, to remove transferability of items (or maybe just items from loot boxes, though I'm insufficiently familiar with them to know if that could be gamed).
However, it's almost entirely irrelevant, because that's only one piece of a much larger "puzzle".
> If an operator buys a game that normally gives out tickets and uses it as an illegal gambling device is the game developer responsible for that, or is the operator?
This questions seems immaterial, since Steam is both the game developer and the operator.
> The grey market is the one operating the casino here.
Steam is operating every single part of the casino, except the very last little bit of cashing out the chips. They even have a cashier from whom one can buy chips in the first place!
You actually have it backward. It's the grey market that is not responsible for Steam's operation of a casino. It would still exist if items were still transferable, still had real world value to someone, but were no longer available through a Steam-operated lottery system.
Why do they have to remove legitimate features?
> his questions seems immaterial, since Steam is both the game developer and the operator.
Steam is not the operator of the sites converting steam items into money, so it is very relevant.
> Steam is operating every single part of the casino, except the very last little bit of cashing out the chips.
So if you can transfer items in a video game between users it is now a casino? That is ridiculous and covers every MMO and a lot of other online games.
This sudden push for regulation throws up every single one of the “think of the children” red flags for bad legislation in my mind.
The difference is that CCG were rather niche thing most people dont know about and these games targetted at children are ever obvious and common. Meaning, people cared less because significantly less people knew you can buy CCG. Also, sports cards and CCG had known probabilities and were overall less sleazy then some of these games. They did not baited you with psychological trics and people were less routinelly trying to earn money by buying them solely in the hope of finding jackpot expensive item to sell.
There is also element of fake think of children where gamers who hate everything new and not for them use this to demonise games they don't like.
Games with loot boxes will constantly push them: Throw a loot box in your face while you play or at the end of the match, urging you to pay to open them. What's inside? Maybe something cool? Don't you want to find out? They will also typically show that you have "(3) Unopened Boxes" in your account when you are in the menus. With a CCG, I can browse my collection, play games with friends, or even tournaments, without having to turn down constant sales pitches.
Games with loot boxes often remind you, while you play, that this and that player in your game or your friend X just opened a loot box now and got something cool.
Anything you want in a CCG can be traded or bought fairly from other players. Few loot box implementations allow this.
Any duplicates you get in a CCG can be re-sold, or given away. Few loot box implementations allow this.
Any cards you get from a CCG have a physical presence, so you can store them in a box in the basement and dig them out again years later to either play or sell. Most loot box games will be dead in 5 years.
Opening a loot box is instant gratification. One click and fireworks you have spent the money and it's opening. CCGs require either mail order or physically going to a store. The time delay between feeling the urge and getting the crackle kaboom whoosh (loot boxes opening is very showy) of opening the thing is days or hours versus split seconds.
- "heavily advertised" is not necessarily a feature of gambling - Being able to easily resell reminds me of poker chips. - The longevity of the prize is not a requirement for gambling. - CCG could be instant gratification too. Time delay is not a feature of gambling.
CCGs have merely been overlooked by regulators because they've traditionally been a niche interest and none of the makers were dumb enough to decorate the card packs with one-armed bandits.
1) This is very prevalent in high budget desktop/console games as well, not just mobile games.
2) These games typically do little to nothing to abide by laws that prohibit gambling by minors. There are definitely concerns of whether this is ethical or legal.
1. Items are dropped randomly, or you can buy randomised "crates". By design, plain looking drops are common, while visually impressive drops are rare.
2. When you buy crates and unlock them, there is a "wheel of fortune" style visual system that indicates what item you will receive. There are audio and visual cues indicating how rare or common the item is.
4. There is an in-game trading system that allows users to buy and sell items at an agreed price. Rare items are naturally more expensive on this market. The majority of CS:GO's revenue comes from cuts of these trades.
5. Kids play CS:GO. It is very common to run into young teenagers (13-15) in matchmaking servers.
6. Kids who are exposed to gambling are much more likely to become addicted than adults, are much less likely to have the means to repay debt, and therefore are not held responsible for gambling losses in the eyes of the law. Gambling under the age of 16 is illegal in most countries, and in many cases under 18.
If this sounds kind of familiar, it's because a similar concept exists in many Arcades already, in the form of capsule machines. Japanese Gashapon are the oft-cited inspiration, but countless variations on this idea exist. Here in South Texas, they're a common sight in grocery stores and restaurants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon
On their own, random rewards in a video game sound tame, but where this gets questionably ethical are games which (a) accept real money for in-game purchases, and (b) offer loot-boxes as an in-game purchase. This enables game players to pay real money to receive a random reward, and it's not hard to draw comparisons to real life slot machines. Unlike real-life gambling though, loot boxes have been popping up in games that are often targeted towards minors, making the issue even more complicated. I won't weigh in on the issue here, I just wanted to try to clarify what they are.
Many other loot box games offer items that increase player power or change gameplay in loot boxes. For example, the prerelease version of Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017) had a backlash because of items such as "Deal 30% more damage with ship blasters." Other games may have items such as "Deal 20% more damage, but reduce health by 30%" which open up additional strategic options.
I was just looking for those ultra-rare unique cosmetics in order to feel good and unique as well. There is a social dimension to this problem, if Dota 2 was a solo game, I wouldn't have spent a dime on cosmetics.
New stuff come with new rules, may sound more resealable.
Also the rare skin itself can be the profit because you get a higher status and prestige within your peers.
That- and only that, is the acceptable gambling that i could accept existing.
You buy bonds, and like a lottery ticket they might randomly win a prize in a draw. But because it's a bank not a lottery the bonds themselves never go away if you don't win, it's basically a savings account except instead of boring percentage interest you randomly win prizes.
There is also a complex lottery where the process begins with chance. This covers things like scratchcards where you choose which things to scratch off but which card you are given, and what is printed on the card is governed by chance.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/19/section/14
Lotteries are one of 3 forms of gambling covered by this regulation, so in the uk at least it seems pretty obvious that lootboxes are gambling from a legal point of view. Lotteries are permitted for people older than 16 in the UK but it's an offence to allow a "child" (someone younger than 16 in this law) to participate (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/19/section/56)
It's also an offence if your company to manufacture, supply, install or adapt gambling software without a license. So they could be liable from that point of view also, in the UK at least.
edit: clarify one bit of wording
This part sounds leaky to me. Game producers might assign prizes which are based e.g. 99% on chance and 1% on skill.
You can (and at least two big companies do) make money from operating a lottery on behalf of a charity, but you can't run a lottery where the profits themselves go somewhere other than a "good cause" such as a charity. And the UK has tighter regulation than the US of charities so it's harder to have a "charity" that basically just puts money into your own pockets.
All cosmetic items only, but you purchase the exact item you want directly. The items are a little more expensive than you might expect (I think on average $4-10 each) and it includes skins, different "axes" to break objects, different dances and different "gliders" that you fly into the game on.
It's quite fun, but also totally unnecessary and you only spend money on exactly what you want - no random chance.
On top of the fact that it's a free to play game in the first place, and you can also get quite a wide range of skins, axes and dances (10s of them) by playing to complete the battle pass which is only about $10 or so per season. Plus there are a few freebies even if you pay nothing, and some you can get from linking to Twitch Prime, etc.
I think this is winning partly because it is fun (the skins are quite comedic) but also just because you know what you're getting. By comparison I spent about $10 on keys for PUBG and stopped because I just got useless crap that isn't really exciting - they're just basic clothing items. Even the rarer items aren't as exciting which doesn't help but the chance of getting one is quite low.
The thing Epic/Fortnite have done to make them sell more (compared to the random chance) is that there is <10 items for sale per day for 24 hours, after 24 hours the set changes and you may not be able to buy that item again (though in practice many returns a few days or weeks later, you can't be certain). So instead of random chance gambling they're capitalising on missing out / time limited offers. Plus there's a constant influx of new items so instead of wasting time gambling for that ultra rare item - instead you can keep up with whats newer and cooler.
Sauce: https://www.finder.com.au/playerunknowns-battlegrounds-will-...
The way the weighted probabilities list is constructed changes from implementation to implementation.
The prevalent one so far is "box gacha", the spiritual successor to "complete gacha". The latter is now banned in Japan and the rest are somehow regulated.
The motivations are many. First, it distributes large payments over smaller payments making people lose control over their spending. Then, it complicates people's perception of how expensive an item is.
In a sense, lottery games are the same in spirit. For example, what's the probability of getting an arbitrary unique combination of 6 numbers out of 49 (lottery)? Very, very low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_mathematics
In mobile, they're usually coupled with "events" that have a leaderboard. Events are actually auctions were people "play" (bid) for a better place in the leaderboard. The rewards are usually not worth it, because through successive updates they're made worthless (e.g.: stats inflation).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16929119
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/2/15517962/china-new-law-dot...
In some games you can. See: CS:GO.
As long as items can be traded, someone will make a 3rd party site to buy/sell the items.
There are games that just sell you the item, no randomness involved.
I can't distinguish a loot box from a scratch card -- except a scratch card must reveal odds.
I'm old-school in terms of paying for games: £xx for a complete game, £x for a month's access as they provide a known value exchange. Doubly so when it's the underage being sold to. My kids learnt never to ask - my answer was always no. Lootboxes and other variable rewards, time unlocks and so forth are just a piss-take driven by sheer greed of the GameCo that's ruined many games.
A lot of problem gamblers get in a bad way because they think that the only way to recoup their losses is by continuing to play until they win.
If you can't sell loot for cash, then it can't lead to this same kind of problem gambling because it's literally impossible to recoup your losses instead of merely unlikely. Therefore lootboxes should be regulated differently from actual gambling if at all.
The why does not matter. By removing that part of your text the behaviour applies equally to both.
Whether it is about recouping losses, or desiring the "ownership" of some pixels the same addictive behaviours are at work, and the same problems and financial losses can accrue.
Game companies employ psychologists and economists to try and ensure addictiveness - giving you a meaningless "almost a winner" tickets with 2 of 3 required tokens etc
> If you can't sell loot for cash
In a good proportion of games you can sell the loot for cash. Via Steam Marketplace and so on.
They deserve the same regulation and age limits as fixed odds betting terminals and fruit machines as that is essentially what they are.
Ummmm, they call Magic the Gathering "cardboard crack" for a reason ...
Some mobile game companies do billions per year. That kind of sales attract regulatory attention.
https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-detai...
as long as you aren't hiding game changing content in loot boxes (ie. all skins or something) I think they are perfectly fine.
Essentially, it's a matter of practicality and extent of impact on the public. Industry regulation with regards to some widespread practice is usually the final step of an extended period of failure to self-regulate [the practice that is producing some undesired side-effect].
My parents minded very much.
Consequently, this limits the "whale effect"--even the most expensive decks of cards in "Standard" tops out at about $1200 ($20 times 60 cards), and generally MUCH less than that gets you championship level decks.
If the ONLY way to get an MtG card that was required to compete was to open $200 boxes over and over and over, I suspect that people WOULD start complaining.
Most of the "skinner box" games explicitly prevent you from being able to buy specific cards precisely to keep you on the hamster wheel.
Basically my point is this: it can be perfectly reasonable to allow one form of gambling-like transactions where it is easy to ensure that the house is playing fair while outlawing a superficially similar one were making sure that the house is not cheating would require enormous regulations and oversight efforts.
Ps: Also, a manipulative pretend-random drop function could easily be made to adhere to defined overall droprates without sacrificing any individual manipulation. Detecting "bad luck" that only strikes when the system detects willingness to keep rolling the dice until some local goal is achieved would not be easy even with a complete dataset.
However for the second point, given what I know about programming as a discipline, I'm not sure that the probable bad actors have gone through a lot of effort to hide their gaming of the system, or that if they have made the effort to make said function that it actually works as envisioned and does not leave its own telltale traces.
I have vague memories of reading about this kind of dark pattern when I first heard about loot boxes, but I failed to google any references now so maybe my memories are diluted with imagination.
But why wouldn't it happen? How would the public find out? Tipping the scales just a little bit, at the right times, for the right victims, could be very effective at "increasing engagement". The whole thing would even be a/b-testable, so any internal arguments against would be futile. (You'd want to keep the "a" implementation around anyways, in case you need to present source to someone who should not see how the sausage is made)
I'd expect that's part of the point of regulating something that appears to be gambling as gambling, to ensure that it is, at least, fair (for some definition of that word).
And then you possibly don't realize how much you've spent, because unlike real cards, digital ones don't pile up.
It's definitely different.
Oh no, We wouldn't dream of having gambling in our game! That's why we don't have single-use dungeon tickets (which is just gambling with one extra step between).
You can do our dungeons as many times as you want, they aren't single use. Of course doing a dungeon run costs five purple crystals, which costs five bucks. After an epic story focused (cut-scenes that you can skip) showdown with a boss (that you can take down in one attack) you get random loot from a loot table, just like in good old games like Diablo (functionally the same as a lootbox).
Of course, the fact that it works out to 5 bucks for a random item is not gambling, since we now have two steps instead of just one.
Of course, if there's a freemium model, it's very hard to argue that it's not gambling, if people buy in-game-something to speed up grinding.
But in that regard simply wasting time for a low-probability-drop item is also gambling.
The problem is that in the direct microtransaction lootbox model there's just an insane feedback loop, to get that nice knife/gun/armor/breastplate.
It should be treated like addiction - which it is. People like to play hazard games, so gambling will be with us forever, and some people will not be able to handle the accompanying mental draw to that dopaminergic feedback loop.
Maybe actually charge for the game that companies used to?
I hate free 2 play games because I am a whale and I know it. When I get hooked I can easily pay hundres of dollars of digital shit. Much more than I would ever have if I had just purchased the game.
Fuck loot boxes and fuck companies trying to defend the practice.
Out of the 3 games, I probably played Overwatch the most, followed closely by Hearthstone, but the amount of money I invested in Hearthstone is easily 3-4x the initial price I paid for OW. I got fed up of the "pay or fall behind" nature of Hearthstone and stopped playing a long time ago though.
Hearthstone should be compared with other computer games, not with MTG & co.
I always thought a much more modern scenario would've been if they put like a code or something on physical packs so you could buy them once and have the same cards in both digital and physical form.
You can be perfectly competitive without playing arena or buying packs. I haven't paid a cent for the past 2 years and can play all the competitive decks I want in every meta. Blizzard has been very good with bumping up the rewards you get from playing normally.
But I agree that, right now, they are not the worst offender, at least with Overwatch (I haven't played Hearstone and I haven't played enough of HotS to reach the lootboxes).
" In March 2013, former Diablo III game director Jay Wilson stated that he felt the existence of the auction houses "really hurt" the game. "
Regulation painted as 'economic harm' is hard to defend in an industry that's been around a long time without these kinds of practices being so widespread, and so user-hostile, that regulators are actually starting to care.
Games companies long ago figured out how to fill the monetary gap -- sell a game for money. The transaction is straightforward, transparent, and aligned with the expectations most people have for most goods and services exchanges.
What that kind of traditional transaction does not lend itself to is changing the contractual arrangement after the exchange (to the purchaser's disadvantage), or to orchestrate a situation where the vendor can continually identify, manipulate, and abuse the weaknesses of the purchaser.
When behavioural economics and data mining became all encompassing we lost all that was positive and good in this field.
This modeling of the human psyche has existed in PR and the commercial industry for a century, but the incredible multiplier that lies in the constant connection and the advancement of fast and agressive interfaces has now made us all like rats pushing levers in a Skinner box.
Hordes of psychologists, data analysts and digital designers has become like a mercenary army that whores itself out to the global-internet-consciousness that itself has become like a cancer that eats up peoples last moments of clarity.
We now stand completely naked and exposed as the irrational, animal, mamalian ape that we are in front of the extreme exponential technological whirlwind that has made everything so complex, fast changing and exploitative that we have no option but to completely drop out or ride the tiger.
Love the imagery in your writing... I think we do have an option for now (turn off your phone when you get home/go on vacation etc.) and that the animal were riding is not a tiger but a rabid monkey in heat stung by a scorpion, which is how some yogis describe the unquestioned mind.
The observation of my own patterns and relationship with media/attention grabbing tech it has become clear to me that if I am to be productive and healthy, I need to change my relationship with my mind.
It’s a challenge, but a worthy one.
Cat was out of the bag the day some shopkeeper figured out printing advertisements.
What happened? My guess is we got trapped by the short-term rewards of systems that seem to work for a while- until they don't; and create an ocean of social and other problems in the meanwhile (e.g. the use of "AI" systems to predict recidivism that overfit on race, etc).
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[1] https://chomsky.info/1967____/
Everything the ad market touches becomes shit. They live in shit, and they feed off each other's shit, and it's overflowing everywhere into society like a pollution that has no cure, because it's built into capitalism.
Magic the Gathering and Pokemon sat around $500k in realy global market sales. Sport cards a few millions. Game with lootboxes is estimated around a half a billion. Regular gambling estimated around $400 billions.
This make in my view a rather simple answer why Magic the Gathering might not be a big concern for government but why regular gambling really is and why loot boxes currently sit in the middle. To simplify: 1x, 1000x, 1000000x.
Also, gambling is usually restricted, either by location or by age. Are games with lootboxes 18+?
Just because A has some properties of B doesn't mean that A is B.
I think both gambling and loot-boxes could be categorized as subsets of the set of things that are "compulsive reward-seeking behavior".
Playing poker for matchsticks is just as much gambling as playing poker for a $50k pot. The only thing changing is the stakes of the gamble.
The general idea, I think is that addictive things shouldn't be regulated unless it is a significant threat to society. Gambling is, because it is known to put people into bankruptcy. Obviously, drugs, which alcohol and tobacco are, also pose serious problems. But lootboxes? I've never heard about families being destroyed by lootboxes. Yeah, people can spend more than intended, but for it to be a problem warranting heavy regulation, it has to be more than just scraping disposable income.
I guess the line between games and gambling wasnt so clear cut after all.
Disgusting. This needs to be rooted out completely from the gaming industry.
Er. And Magic: the Gathering booster packs.
Does that mean I have a gambling problem then? Because I had hoped that despite my M:tG habit [1], I was not really-really a gambler.
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[1] And let's not discuss my DnD etc RPG habit. I flip cards and roll dice way too much for someone who sincerely thinks she's not into games of chance.
Just because someone gambles doesn't automatically mean they have a "gambling problem". But I certainly don't see why M:tG booster packs wouldn't be considered gambling, as well.
> And let's not discuss my DnD etc RPG habit. I flip cards and roll dice way too much for someone who sincerely thinks she's not into games of chance.
But do you have to pay a fixed price each time you roll the dice or flip the card?
Say you feel you need to wear a hat made of marshmallow. Is that a problem? Well, is it? For example if you lost your job because of the hat, that's a problem. If you spend so much on marshmallow hats that you can't afford your rent, that's a problem. If you killed somebody's dog because it tried to eat your hat, that's a problem, and so on.
If you spend money on MTG and enjoy it even if it's $5000 per week that could be fine, psychologically at least, if it didn't cause you or others to suffer. But if you find you're ruining your life, or other people's to buy cards, even if it's just $50 of cards per month then that's a gambling problem.
For example starving yourself to death is definitely a problem, but body-image mental health illness that causes it usually leave the sufferer unable to recognise this consequence of their actions.
These days, it's very, very difficult to make a profit on a AAA game at only $60 a pop, but if anyone tries to raise that price the fans will cry bloody murder. So publishers are desperately trying to find ways to make up the difference. Cosmetic sales, DLC packs, loot boxes, anything. Making loot boxes illegal doesn't fix the problem; it just pushes it somewhere else.
Source, among others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhWGQCzAtl8
1. Proper full-on skill-based gambling; Poker, Blackjack, type games, plus arguably Horse Racing and other sports where you learn the starts and make judgement calls.
2. 'Luck' based games; Pay money, get 'prize' - this is where loot boxes fall into, and in also in the real world, CTGs and LEGO Minifig bags (for example). You always get a prize no matter how small.
3. Raffles; Buy a ticket for a fixed sum, win a prize. The prizes on offer are known up front. Viewed slightly different (for some reason) - most non-business places can run one of these without a licence. However the nationwide Lottery does require a licence, even though it's basically just a raffle.
Types 1 and 2 require different licences if you want to operate them, type one definitely has to have all the GambleAware[1] stuff prominently shown.
You'll see on many daytime and light entertainment programs on TV that they run 'competitions' for the viewers where the question is stupidly simple. They do this to step around the 'gambling' licence issue. By asking a question (no matter how simple) it legally occludes the fact that the text-in/phone-in competition is basically a Lottery.
Back to the point of Games... All games publishers have to do is get a gambling licence (for the region they want to sell the game in) and be up front that their game contains 'some gambling'.
Of course though, if they do that, then they can't sell their game to minors...
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[1] http://www.whenthefunstops.co.uk/