Ah yes, the world isn't perfect yet so we can't look at anything but, uh, I'd say climate change because that's on top of my list but it doesn't seem to be on yours? I guess different people find different things important.
Curious how you think that climate change will kill more people than violent crime.
Perhaps you should talk to the largest corporations who are busy polluting the waters and skies? The government knows how to shut them down, where to find them, but instead they are buying stock in those companies.
What a curious coincidence that Valve is a private company.
Loot boxes have been defined as “features in video games which may be accessed through gameplay, or purchased with in-game items, virtual currencies, or directly with real-world money”. They often appear as chests, crates, or card packs.
This definition is way too broad. It would move ALL RPGs into the category of “gambling”. The definition should be narrowed to only include real money transactions that can be (directly or indirectly) traded for loot boxes in game.
We don’t regulate gambling video games as gambling. The distinction we always make is whether or not real money is involved.
It's not clear to me whether this is a "someone somewhere once defined it as such (and we'll use this working definition to not make things unnecessarily complicated and will reserve a proper definition for after we've looked at the problem broadly)", or an actual "this is how we are defining this for legislation purposes".
This goes far beyond a "working definition" in that it encompasses literally every game that unlocks content in any way. /Some/ distinction is needed to differentiate a "loot box" from every other game mechanic.
It would be like using "a metal object that can harm people" as a working definition of an assault weapon. If the definition also includes ladders, cars, and push-pins, it's far too broad to be useful in any discussion.
It's formulated as, "Carrying an article with a blade or point or an offensive weapon in a public place".
Which of course covers everything from legitimate things to non-legitimate. Which is why the law also allows for a "reasonable excuse" to be carrying such an article.
By the time any regulation is made into legislation it'll iron out the difference or define things in such a way that a reasonable person can tell the difference between an actual game mechanic and a problematic "loot box".
Even worse, the definition doesn't even say anything about an element of chance!
If when my character levels up through gameplay they unlock a new ability, that would also seem to meet this absurdly overbroad definition of a "loot box".
Even if we added the requirement of real money purchase, offering some features of a game only as part of a paid expansion also has nothing to do with "loot boxes".
I’d had said i’d never really encountered loot boxes, but yeah, i guess in an RPG, they are “loot boxes”, but they make sense in the game, they could all have been preprogrammed or random, i wouldn’t have noticed.
I’ve managed to avoid most games where they’re these little extra things that are obviously presented as, get this for a random thing, and you can also pay cash to try.
But I’ve recently been playing Gran Turismo 7 where you get these roulette awards, and while i like the rest of the game, i find those awards really irritating. They’re presented as a little spinning wheel of items and it sure looks as if you would have an even chance of winning anything on the board, but it’s weighted so you nearly always get the lowest valued one. This seems deliberately deceptive and scummy, it should at least show the chance of winning any item.
I was nodding along, but it occurs to me that most RPGs have a sanctioned money -> in game currency mechanic. As long as you can draw a line from being able to give the game money and use it for a gambling mechanic, there’s the potential for shady behavior. Developers will figure out where the line is and stay just on the other side of it.
I believe this language isn’t just thinking about games of today, but how games may change to get around this wording.
Curiously arbitrary to then not require that the definition include the ability to pay out whatever you got from the loot boxes in real money.
To phrase this in the most cautious way: The potential to win more money than you started with needs to be considered as a factor in the potential addictiveness or more importantly destructiveness of the entire process.
I used to think that, but I think that even ones you can't redeem back (such as FIFA?) can still be extremely problematic with people still spending thousands to get the item they want from the loot box.
I don't think it is - when you introduce a real money cash out you are firmly over the line into gambling territory. Something doesn't need to have _monetary_ value to be considered desirable by a wider group.
The trouble is that with many games loot boxes are purchased with an in game currency that can be both earned through game-play and purchased with real money. This blurs the line between what is and is not a real money transaction.
Games have had mechanics like this for a long time though
Diablo 2 for instance, you could use in-game gold to buy Unidentified Items, which when Identified could turn out to be a lot of things. Arguably the same as a loot box mechanic.
The thing that makes Loot Boxes insidious to me isn't just the RNG, or the "purchase", it's the real world money part.
Also, in the instance of Diablo 2 (and many other games), I wouldn't call the Gold earned in-game a "Digital Currency". It's a game currency sure, but I think a game currency needs some way to be expressed as in real world dollars to be considered "Digital Currency"
My example for that is Destiny 2. There is the game currency "glimmer". Then there is the digital currency you can earn through playing "bright dust". Then the premium digital currency you purchase with money "silver". Silver and Bright dust can purchase the same items, so there's more or less a conversion rate between Bright Dust and Real Money even though you can't actually convert it into real money.
So, defining digital currency this way allows Diablo 2 to skirt past the digital currency problem, but it's still "RNG rewards that are earned through playing the game"
The real money blurring line of loot boxes is terrible of course, but the real problems I have are the enforced scarcity, and the fanfare when you open them.
Game devs use all sorts of time gating tricks to make sure you can only earn so many loot boxes through gameplay in a period of time, so if you want more faster you are encouraged to buy with real money. They make sure to give a big reveal when you open a loot box to really sell the idea that opening it is exciting and fun, making you want to do it more.
It's just overall an extremely exploitative and miserable practice. I hate loot boxes.
I am completely in agreement that loot boxes are exploitative.
I think we are partially in disagreement at what constitutes a digital currency, but we might be in agreement just discussing it in different terms.
For me, I think the best analogy for in game currencies is foreign currency. To give an example, I play a FTP game that has an in game currency called Units. You can earn Units playing the game or you can get Units more immediately by purchasing Unit packs for real money. You could liken this to either going to another country and earning their currency by working, or buying their currency through a foreign exchange with your own currency. However, in game currencies can't be converted back to your local currency, so it is a synchronous transaction.
Thanks for the detailed and well expressed reply by the way.
Just wanted to add that one of the worst things about digital currencies is how they turn us into serfs, toiling away for currency that can only be used to purchase different ways to toil away in the same hamster wheel.
I liked the loot boxes in Rocket League. I would very occasionally plop in 5 or 10 dollars and see what I got. I was putting a lot of time in to the game, and it was a fun way to get new items.
People complained. Now they have an entirely new system with “blueprints” and a store and I haven’t spent a single cent. To me, the randomness was part of the fun. I’m not going to spend $12 on a virtual pair of wheels.
I’m not sure how much society should be on the hook for people’s bad habits/addictions. If it’s about protecting children, it’s probably better they learn how gambling is a losing game when there isn’t much money on the line rather than when they’re older. For adults with gambling issues it’s hard for me to empathize. How can you not tell how much money you’re losing?
> If it’s about protecting children, it’s probably better they learn how gambling is a losing game when there isn’t much money on the line rather than when they’re older.
The same logic could be applied to alcohol consumption, but we still bar kids from buying alcohol. I think treating loot boxes as gambling strikes the right balance where they are not banned in general but also not actively being pushed on 12 year olds. The industry likes to claim that the primary driver of their loot box revenue is wealthy, adult "whales" so I don't see why they would be opposed to being classified as 18+ games - unless they're lying that is.
So you're actually conflating two topics with that first sentence - since this is a topic from the UK government, we don't forbid alcohol consumption amongst children here (over the age of 5), only bar them from buying the alcohol.
Given the topic at hand, it might be a bit more challenging to prevent children from buying loot boxes, whilst still allowing them to open them - but there is prior examples of a distinction in legality between the two.
I've heard that binge drinking among teens and young adults is pretty limited to the United States with our high drinking age vs. Europe, so it seems the logic might hold.
Perhaps there could be more limited laws where people below 18 can only spend so much per month, and those above could also potentially have a limit.
It's a total scam to let people pay for tons of boxes to get the item they want. Plenty of people thinking they might hit the jackpot, spending more than they wanted with the chance of not even getting said item..
It's normal to have a listing of items which you can buy directly. Everything else is just a scam to make you spend more money. Don't fall for it, please.
I never "fell for it." I never had an specific item in mind, and the amount of money I spent was incredibly limited. To me, the random item I received was a fun way to customize my car.
So you can’t empathize with gambling addicts because you can’t understand how they don’t value the money being lost, yet your entire comment is about how the fun of gambling has nothing to do with value or money?
It seems weird to me that people can’t wrap their around the fact that gambling addiction has pretty much nothing to do with money.. yet justify their own “harmless” gambling actions by saying it isn’t about the money. You aren’t that different from the problem gambler, just be glad you don’t fall into the 1% of people who destroy their lives over gambling.
I suppose with all addictions it's a matter of degrees, no?
I like to have sex. I like to play videogames. I'm not addicted to either, because that's simply not what I want to do all day.
I don't play the lottery or do pulltabs. I've watched people spend literally $500 on pulltabs and maybe get $10 or $20 back. Loot boxes were different to me because I was always getting something and I wasn't looking for something specific. It was a "fun" way to spend $5 a month or whatever on the main videogame I was playing at the time. If it was $5 and 90% of the time I'd get literally nothing, I wouldn't have done it.
Twitch has recently added channel points and gambling to most (all?) channels. The allure of betting as a way to juice engagement is just too hard to resist in gaming it seems, even when it comes to young children.
Yeah, they are totally fine with gambling for sure. I was actually a bit surprised to see https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Slots near the top of "most watched games" when I was bored the other month and wanted to see what the popular games to watch were.
It's literally a bunch of whales flushing money down the drain on gambling while viewers watch it (vicarious thrills? not sure tbh as I'm not a gambler).
Yes, they're almost all getting kickbacks, which I think is even worse. These people are effectively getting paid to advertise gambling to children.
In some cases the odds for streamers have been rigged by the site owners so that it makes it look like winning big amounts is more likely than the reality.
Just an anecdote, but I absolutely love the Twitch betting and it has massively increased my enjoyment of weekly Quake Pro League tournaments. Like most people I have zero interest in real money gambling, it's just imaginary internet points.
Alcohol is by far the most harmful drug in the world, and yet plenty legal. Twitch betting is hardly hard drugs to be denied everyone because some people have trouble controlling themselves.
If Twitch were routinely encouraging alcohol drinking to it's largely underage audience it'll be taken to the coals over it. Excessive alcohol consumption on stream is also against twitch TOS.
One of the most popular streamers on Twitch was streaming slot machines and blackjack today with tens of thousands of kids watching. I remember another popular streamer saying some anecdote about a 11 year old who watches that first streamer I mentioned saying all his friends have accounts on this gambling website too. But the stream title has "18+" in it so it's fine.
They get paid obscene money as well, millions or tens of millions a year to advertise gambling to teenagers.
Reddit rolled out something similar a year later, with "Predictions Tournaments". "Tokens" reset to an initial amount at the beginning of each tournament and are used to bet on a series of mod-posted multiple choice questions. No reward other than being declared a tournament winner.
This stuff is so insidious. I remember the outrage when Bethesda came out with the golden horse dlc, and now we are at a stage where people willingly accept paying money just for the small chance of getting a golden horse. Games are a big business now, and significant developer resources are spent on this type of monetization now, for a lot of games (like mobile gacha games), the core game elements almost feel like they only exist to enable the lootbox gambling loop.
At least usually the golden horse armour lootboxes are slapped onto otherwise free games, so you're not paying $60 in order to buy a bunch of lootbox keys.
The profits being made from loot boxes targetting children are staggering and there are powerful well funded lobbyists working to keep it that way. For some context, FIFA the football governing made $766 million in 2021, EA FIFA Ultimate team (an egrerious example of loot box monetization) brought in $1.6b in 2021. Child gambling is very lucrative.
You've made a bit of a jump here by implying that all of that revenue is from children. It's definitely not scientific but a strawpoll [0] of FIFA's playerbase a few years ago shows its primary demographic is 16-25. It's reasonable to assume they're the majority of spenders in the game too.
I don't know the breakdown inside that category, but yes I am aware. It also likely includes far more adults than children. My point is that it's not a bunch of under 14 year olds playing the game, it's really much closer to 20 year olds than 15 year olds.
Loot boxes, season passes, micro transactions: I'm sure there are some great modern games but as someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s these concepts are so depressing.
I remember custom skins and new maps meant downloading them for free, made by some enthusiasts.
I remember trying to make my own maps in unreal ed. Servers were free to play on. Or you hosted your own.
Most the games I play are from that era, I own them on gog.com now. Or on an everdrive, or emulated. Though to be fair I barely have ten minutes a day to myself usually!
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadPerhaps you should talk to the largest corporations who are busy polluting the waters and skies? The government knows how to shut them down, where to find them, but instead they are buying stock in those companies.
What a curious coincidence that Valve is a private company.
This definition is way too broad. It would move ALL RPGs into the category of “gambling”. The definition should be narrowed to only include real money transactions that can be (directly or indirectly) traded for loot boxes in game.
We don’t regulate gambling video games as gambling. The distinction we always make is whether or not real money is involved.
It would be like using "a metal object that can harm people" as a working definition of an assault weapon. If the definition also includes ladders, cars, and push-pins, it's far too broad to be useful in any discussion.
Secondly, that's kind of how UK law works, read up on the knife crime regulation:
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/offensive-weapons-kniv...
It's formulated as, "Carrying an article with a blade or point or an offensive weapon in a public place".
Which of course covers everything from legitimate things to non-legitimate. Which is why the law also allows for a "reasonable excuse" to be carrying such an article.
By the time any regulation is made into legislation it'll iron out the difference or define things in such a way that a reasonable person can tell the difference between an actual game mechanic and a problematic "loot box".
If when my character levels up through gameplay they unlock a new ability, that would also seem to meet this absurdly overbroad definition of a "loot box".
Even if we added the requirement of real money purchase, offering some features of a game only as part of a paid expansion also has nothing to do with "loot boxes".
I’ve managed to avoid most games where they’re these little extra things that are obviously presented as, get this for a random thing, and you can also pay cash to try.
But I’ve recently been playing Gran Turismo 7 where you get these roulette awards, and while i like the rest of the game, i find those awards really irritating. They’re presented as a little spinning wheel of items and it sure looks as if you would have an even chance of winning anything on the board, but it’s weighted so you nearly always get the lowest valued one. This seems deliberately deceptive and scummy, it should at least show the chance of winning any item.
I believe this language isn’t just thinking about games of today, but how games may change to get around this wording.
To phrase this in the most cautious way: The potential to win more money than you started with needs to be considered as a factor in the potential addictiveness or more importantly destructiveness of the entire process.
Diablo 2 for instance, you could use in-game gold to buy Unidentified Items, which when Identified could turn out to be a lot of things. Arguably the same as a loot box mechanic.
The thing that makes Loot Boxes insidious to me isn't just the RNG, or the "purchase", it's the real world money part.
Also, in the instance of Diablo 2 (and many other games), I wouldn't call the Gold earned in-game a "Digital Currency". It's a game currency sure, but I think a game currency needs some way to be expressed as in real world dollars to be considered "Digital Currency"
My example for that is Destiny 2. There is the game currency "glimmer". Then there is the digital currency you can earn through playing "bright dust". Then the premium digital currency you purchase with money "silver". Silver and Bright dust can purchase the same items, so there's more or less a conversion rate between Bright Dust and Real Money even though you can't actually convert it into real money.
So, defining digital currency this way allows Diablo 2 to skirt past the digital currency problem, but it's still "RNG rewards that are earned through playing the game"
The real money blurring line of loot boxes is terrible of course, but the real problems I have are the enforced scarcity, and the fanfare when you open them.
Game devs use all sorts of time gating tricks to make sure you can only earn so many loot boxes through gameplay in a period of time, so if you want more faster you are encouraged to buy with real money. They make sure to give a big reveal when you open a loot box to really sell the idea that opening it is exciting and fun, making you want to do it more.
It's just overall an extremely exploitative and miserable practice. I hate loot boxes.
I think we are partially in disagreement at what constitutes a digital currency, but we might be in agreement just discussing it in different terms.
For me, I think the best analogy for in game currencies is foreign currency. To give an example, I play a FTP game that has an in game currency called Units. You can earn Units playing the game or you can get Units more immediately by purchasing Unit packs for real money. You could liken this to either going to another country and earning their currency by working, or buying their currency through a foreign exchange with your own currency. However, in game currencies can't be converted back to your local currency, so it is a synchronous transaction.
Thanks for the detailed and well expressed reply by the way.
Well, that’s every game ever. The author needs to learn to write and to think critically
People complained. Now they have an entirely new system with “blueprints” and a store and I haven’t spent a single cent. To me, the randomness was part of the fun. I’m not going to spend $12 on a virtual pair of wheels.
I’m not sure how much society should be on the hook for people’s bad habits/addictions. If it’s about protecting children, it’s probably better they learn how gambling is a losing game when there isn’t much money on the line rather than when they’re older. For adults with gambling issues it’s hard for me to empathize. How can you not tell how much money you’re losing?
The same logic could be applied to alcohol consumption, but we still bar kids from buying alcohol. I think treating loot boxes as gambling strikes the right balance where they are not banned in general but also not actively being pushed on 12 year olds. The industry likes to claim that the primary driver of their loot box revenue is wealthy, adult "whales" so I don't see why they would be opposed to being classified as 18+ games - unless they're lying that is.
Given the topic at hand, it might be a bit more challenging to prevent children from buying loot boxes, whilst still allowing them to open them - but there is prior examples of a distinction in legality between the two.
Perhaps there could be more limited laws where people below 18 can only spend so much per month, and those above could also potentially have a limit.
It's normal to have a listing of items which you can buy directly. Everything else is just a scam to make you spend more money. Don't fall for it, please.
It seems weird to me that people can’t wrap their around the fact that gambling addiction has pretty much nothing to do with money.. yet justify their own “harmless” gambling actions by saying it isn’t about the money. You aren’t that different from the problem gambler, just be glad you don’t fall into the 1% of people who destroy their lives over gambling.
I like to have sex. I like to play videogames. I'm not addicted to either, because that's simply not what I want to do all day.
I don't play the lottery or do pulltabs. I've watched people spend literally $500 on pulltabs and maybe get $10 or $20 back. Loot boxes were different to me because I was always getting something and I wasn't looking for something specific. It was a "fun" way to spend $5 a month or whatever on the main videogame I was playing at the time. If it was $5 and 90% of the time I'd get literally nothing, I wouldn't have done it.
It's literally a bunch of whales flushing money down the drain on gambling while viewers watch it (vicarious thrills? not sure tbh as I'm not a gambler).
In some cases the odds for streamers have been rigged by the site owners so that it makes it look like winning big amounts is more likely than the reality.
Their slots/gambling categories are far worse, and there are far worse examples of their biggest stars encouraging real gambling.
You earn channel points every x minutes you're watching the stream. However, paid subscribers earn more channel points at every interval.
Interestingly, gambling with channel points is impossible with an Netherland IP address, but collecting them is fine.
Alcohol is by far the most harmful drug in the world, and yet plenty legal. Twitch betting is hardly hard drugs to be denied everyone because some people have trouble controlling themselves.
They get paid obscene money as well, millions or tens of millions a year to advertise gambling to teenagers.
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/a-new-way-to-interact-on-redd...
https://reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4407383251860
> Do I need to buy anything to participate?
> Nope, no purchase necessary. However, Reddit Premium members may get special advantages or benefits in the future, so stay tuned!
(Twitch's announcement: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2020/12/12/channel-points-predicti...)
Unless you buy FIFA.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/FIFA/comments/2y5k8l/strawpoll_how_...
I remember custom skins and new maps meant downloading them for free, made by some enthusiasts.
I remember trying to make my own maps in unreal ed. Servers were free to play on. Or you hosted your own.
Most the games I play are from that era, I own them on gog.com now. Or on an everdrive, or emulated. Though to be fair I barely have ten minutes a day to myself usually!
Gambling is when you receive money back. What they are describing is a black hole--you put money in and it's gone.