Looking into this it seems that lootboxes aren’t banned in the sense that would benefit the industry and players as a whole and will instead incentivize game developers and platforms to create age verification systems.
Brazil had the chance to outright ban lootboxes full stop and the fact that they didn’t take it is really disappointing.
Lootboxes arent even the problem they used to be because developers have realised people will just pay $30 straight up for 1 skin anyway. On top of a subscription disguised as a battlepass, they dont need lootboxes anymore.
Even if you took the hardcore view that loot boxes are outright gambling, gambling isn’t illegal for adults. Why would loot boxes be treated more stringently than online casinos, even in your scenario?
Also, it doesn’t incentivize age verification systems, age verification systems are now mandatory. They are needed to be able to sell any games marketed at adults, including porn games, games with loot boxes and presumably any other game with an 18 and up rating by their official ratings board.
The loot box panic has mostly been another variant of the “will someone thing of the children” violence panic of the 90s. Just like then, age ratings and parental controls should have been the solution, but because gamers were too busy being angry and self righteous online they went with it to this point.
From what I tracked in one game the odds were wrong, so it goes against legal gambling laws where even if it is electronic it has to have payout odds that match the presented method.
I.e. if its 5 cards, odd should be 1:5 in flipping the reward card. But some games it could be double or quadruple that.
The comment of why would loot boxes be different than online gambling. The loot boxes I have seen in games are often chance based and the chances aren’t legal probability, so technically illegal
All loot boxes are chance based, but first of all, I don’t know which laws you’re talking about. Brazil’s? Guessing the US because when somebody has a case of the default human it’s typically an American, but who knows.
But also, I’m not a US lawyer, but I seriously doubt US gambling laws requires all games to have a flat probability, mostly because… that’s not how games of chance work anywhere, and definitely not how blind boxes work anywhere and blind box products are not gambling anyway, which is the entire point.
It’s still a non sequitur and I still have no idea what you’re trying to say.
(Im in Canada many other countries are the same) When a chance of game becomes electronic probability rules still apply. Those screen based jackpot machines in casinos have to follow actual mechanical jackpot game probability payouts.
So a six sided dice role in a game that involves a monetary system to purchase still has to have a 1:6 payout, or it is illegal because you are fooling the person.
I have played several games where they have say 3 loot boxes and you pay to open one. There is a known prize and generic stuff. The payout odds do not match over a large number of tries, meaning the back end probably has been coded to only payout 1% or something super low, or maybe not at all. In many countries this type of gambling (even for adults ) is illegal because it simulates a chance game but is fundamentally not as presented.
I was responding to the loot boxes and the gambling comment.
Sure, but this isn’t a digital version of a casino game. It’s a digital version of a blind box. And there is no rule to say that trading cards or collectible card games need to have equal possibilities of yielding a specific card. That is very much the opposite of how that works. Physical blind box offerings absolutely use different probabilities and different content rarities.
So yeah, if you make up the categorizations, the rules and the mechanics we can be talking about whatever you want, but in the real world that’s not even close to how this works in either physical or digital form, which I guess explains the confusion.
For the record, multiple games offer a readout of the possibilities of getting a particular type of thing. I, you may be surprised to know, haven’t checked the probabilities being accurate in all of them, but I’m gonna need some specific proof of someone fudging them, because that’s a problem of false advertising at that point, forget gambling rules that don’t even apply.
Also, 1% is a HUGE drop rate for rare items in loot boxes, both physical and digital. 1% is, as it turns out, 1 in 100. Lots of games, collectibles and other types of blind boxes feature way more than 100 tries at opening a loot box, even for fully unmonetized ones. If anything there’s a bit of a cognitive bias there, where people are very bad at instinctively understanding how percentages work, which makes disclosing loot box percentages a bit of a challenge.
Look, I’m not sure what games you play or your understanding of how any of this works but, respectfully, you’re misunderstanding it pretty deeply.
I think you mis understood what I mewnt. And maybe we are crosstalking. The 1% I meant it was a game where one of the loot boxes on screen was the prize, then “shuffled” with to others. So one of the three selections should yield the prize. Based on probabilities, you should get a payout on the 4th refreshed try at this since you are now pushing the odds in your favour, but it was not like that you could go 100 times.
Same with spin the wheel games to get the loot box. If every other spin section has a loot box, you should on average land on it 50% of the time. But they weren’t like that. Might be 10%.
This is why its become a worldwide scrutinized thing in games because the chances are misrepresented. There are guidelines for those tginking about adding paid game mechanisms so as to not run afould of state/province gambling laws.
Gambling involves the opportunity to win something that actually exists. The fundamental issue with loot boxes is your gambling for code that can’t be sold, traded, or preserved past the lifetime of the game.
It’s a disgusting practice that preys upon people’s psychological reward centers and has been normalized by our obsessive consumption. It should absolutely be illegal.
Yeeeah, I’ve encountered this argument a few times, particularly when this issue was more salient and, I’m not gonna lie, it’s absolutely baffling.
As in, it seems to imply that gambling is better because there’s a chance of winning something of genuine monetary value.
Which, let me be clear, is the exact opposite of how this works. The possibility of recouping losses or winning money is the actual problem with gambling. The potential monetary reward is a major component of gambling and one of the meaningful reasons why loot boxes are… nowhere near as bad?
Digital loot boxes are typically not allowed to be translated into actual money by design, both as a security measure and because that’s how actual gambling works. Betting for real money is way worse than buying some digital thing that only has value inside a game. Because, you know, in that scenario you know you’re spending that money and it’s not coming back, it’s just a matter of spending it on what. You’re not getting enticed with the fiction that you’re investing money or not actually spending it because you could potentially get it back. That’s why kids aren’t typically allowed to bet in a casino but they still get to buy Magic the Gathering packs (and let’s be clear, the fact that Magic has a thriving gray market around it makes it worse than digital loot boxes as well).
I try to keep this conversation respectful but, honestly, hearing this argument is one of the surefire ways to know the person talking about this has no idea what they’re talking about.
Gambling is at least ok in my book because it’s only legal for adults and in specific, regulated locations. It’s still fucking idiotic behavior to engage in, but whatever, adults can waste their money, I don’t really care. It’s easy to avoid unless you live in Vegas.
I’m sure I’ll alienate most of the user base here, but anything that involves turning money into ‘pulls’ should be illegal for minors, and honestly probably just entirely. Magic, Pokemon cards, blind boxes, the stupid Lego minifigs I love to collect. Ban all of it, it’s bad for our psyche, it’s wasteful, it’s anti-consumer bullshit that should never be allowed. If you can’t make money selling your product directly, then you don’t deserve to run a business.
You’re right though, the gambling analogy perfect. I doubt paid loot boxes are significantly worse than letting children gamble. But still, there’s a reason we don’t let children gamble, and loot boxes certainly aren’t any better.
It’s not easy to avoid unless you live in Vegas. I live right above a gambling establishment. Nobody bats an eye and it’s fully government-sanctioned.
Not every country is the US, friend. Including, you know… Brazil.
But hey, at least you have the intellectual honesty to include all the IRL blind boxes people actually like in your assessment. You still have this pretty much backwards, but at least it’s consistently backwards.
That’s not sarcasm, I do think that’s better than the baseline of “make the game mechanic I don’t like illegal, but keep all this 100% analogous stuff I do like” vibes-based approach to demanding regulation.
I still disagree super hard that “bad for our psyche” is the bar for banning stuff. Age ratings, sure. But I would very much prefer to keep tobacco, pot, alcohol, porn and yes, Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone available for anybody mature enough to make that choice by themselves.
It’s definitely appropriate that every other item on your list is illegal for minors in almost every country on earth. If I thought we could reasonably keep ‘blind boxes’ an adult indulgence I wouldn’t be opposed. But they are so deeply tied to children’s toys, I don’t think you could ever have them available for adults in a form that isn’t just begging for children to figure out ways to buy them anyway. It’d be incredibly hard to justify banning them only for children, especially on the admittedly abstract basis of psychological harm.
Setting aside that, I believe they should be fully illegal simply on a consumer protection basis. A business should not be allowed to sell a mystery product. There’s no justification for it IMO. There is no reason we should allow businesses to sell us useless bullshit and hope we get something we actually want. You can still have MTG, you can still have mobile games. But let people buy the shit they want, or don’t. If the business model can’t work, somebody else will figure it out.
But of course, there’s no fucking chance of that happening here in the US, so I keep hoping somebody else will tackle it (though Brazil’s attempt here wildly misses the bar unfortunately).
Yeah, but I actually like multiple games built around blind boxes, and I sure don’t like you telling me what I can like.
You’re just passing your own tastes as morality and I don’t care for that any more when it’s gamers pushing their preferences than when it was pearl-clutching moms and politicians trying to score cheap points.
I mean, there is plenty of justification for it in that blind boxes allow for a random distribution of items while still controlling rarity and allowing for balance, which is why every single videogame in existence that does any sort of randomized or widespread lootable equipment does loot tables. It’s not just a very useful technique, it’s a fundamental one you engage with constantly. If you want to make a case for monetization of randomized loot being beyond some line we can have that argument, but the method is useful and it won’t be “figured out”, it predates videogames altogether.
Frankly, it’s not even the worst option out there. The sad irony of the entire moral panic is that the part that got figured out is an alternative monetization-to-engagement pathway. Several, in fact. Overbearing regulation of loot boxes is no longer a dealbreaker because everybody knows how to do seasonal cosmetics and battlepasses now, so all the features of paid loot boxes can be done without the randomized elements people latch on to.
The part you can’t quite get is the outright advantage that loot boxes will sometimes give people decent stuff without having to grind, which all the current alternatives don’t do. I’d take randomized tables over mandatory grind any day, but I certainly don’t want to ban either.
Random distribution in a game is fine, the problem is entirely being able to use cash to get them. The solution is very simple, as you’ve pointed out, hundreds of games have already figured out less predatory ways to add content and keep a game alive.
The cash for randomization is fundamentally what makes it so insidious. Everything you’ve mentioned is wildly preferable to paid mystery bullshit. Seasonal outfits, battle passes, whatever. If you know what you’re getting before you choose to buy it, that’s your choice.
The part you can’t quite get is the outright advantage that loot boxes will sometimes give people decent stuff without having to grind, which all the current alternatives don’t do. I’d take randomized tables over mandatory grind any day, but I certainly don’t want to ban either.
This is the most Stockholm Syndrome shit I’ve seen on here. You do realize that the grind only exists to push people into buying the bullshit right? Games should be fun to play, with rewards coming regularly from normal play. If you’re ‘grinding’ through a mess of bullshit to avoid paying, or if you’re paying to skip the grind, then why are you bothering to play a game you don’t actually like playing? A little grind is understandable and fun, I’m looking forward to a little boss farming in BL4 later tonight. But that’s the fun part of the game, playing it and hoping to get something good.
Looking into this it seems that lootboxes aren’t banned in the sense that would benefit the industry and players as a whole and will instead incentivize game developers and platforms to create age verification systems.
Brazil had the chance to outright ban lootboxes full stop and the fact that they didn’t take it is really disappointing.
Lootboxes arent even the problem they used to be because developers have realised people will just pay $30 straight up for 1 skin anyway. On top of a subscription disguised as a battlepass, they dont need lootboxes anymore.
Even if you took the hardcore view that loot boxes are outright gambling, gambling isn’t illegal for adults. Why would loot boxes be treated more stringently than online casinos, even in your scenario?
Also, it doesn’t incentivize age verification systems, age verification systems are now mandatory. They are needed to be able to sell any games marketed at adults, including porn games, games with loot boxes and presumably any other game with an 18 and up rating by their official ratings board.
The loot box panic has mostly been another variant of the “will someone thing of the children” violence panic of the 90s. Just like then, age ratings and parental controls should have been the solution, but because gamers were too busy being angry and self righteous online they went with it to this point.
From what I tracked in one game the odds were wrong, so it goes against legal gambling laws where even if it is electronic it has to have payout odds that match the presented method. I.e. if its 5 cards, odd should be 1:5 in flipping the reward card. But some games it could be double or quadruple that.
Did you respond to the right thing? This seems like a non sequitur, so maybe the threading got messed up?
The comment of why would loot boxes be different than online gambling. The loot boxes I have seen in games are often chance based and the chances aren’t legal probability, so technically illegal
All loot boxes are chance based, but first of all, I don’t know which laws you’re talking about. Brazil’s? Guessing the US because when somebody has a case of the default human it’s typically an American, but who knows.
But also, I’m not a US lawyer, but I seriously doubt US gambling laws requires all games to have a flat probability, mostly because… that’s not how games of chance work anywhere, and definitely not how blind boxes work anywhere and blind box products are not gambling anyway, which is the entire point.
It’s still a non sequitur and I still have no idea what you’re trying to say.
(Im in Canada many other countries are the same) When a chance of game becomes electronic probability rules still apply. Those screen based jackpot machines in casinos have to follow actual mechanical jackpot game probability payouts.
So a six sided dice role in a game that involves a monetary system to purchase still has to have a 1:6 payout, or it is illegal because you are fooling the person.
I have played several games where they have say 3 loot boxes and you pay to open one. There is a known prize and generic stuff. The payout odds do not match over a large number of tries, meaning the back end probably has been coded to only payout 1% or something super low, or maybe not at all. In many countries this type of gambling (even for adults ) is illegal because it simulates a chance game but is fundamentally not as presented.
I was responding to the loot boxes and the gambling comment.
Sure, but this isn’t a digital version of a casino game. It’s a digital version of a blind box. And there is no rule to say that trading cards or collectible card games need to have equal possibilities of yielding a specific card. That is very much the opposite of how that works. Physical blind box offerings absolutely use different probabilities and different content rarities.
So yeah, if you make up the categorizations, the rules and the mechanics we can be talking about whatever you want, but in the real world that’s not even close to how this works in either physical or digital form, which I guess explains the confusion.
For the record, multiple games offer a readout of the possibilities of getting a particular type of thing. I, you may be surprised to know, haven’t checked the probabilities being accurate in all of them, but I’m gonna need some specific proof of someone fudging them, because that’s a problem of false advertising at that point, forget gambling rules that don’t even apply.
Also, 1% is a HUGE drop rate for rare items in loot boxes, both physical and digital. 1% is, as it turns out, 1 in 100. Lots of games, collectibles and other types of blind boxes feature way more than 100 tries at opening a loot box, even for fully unmonetized ones. If anything there’s a bit of a cognitive bias there, where people are very bad at instinctively understanding how percentages work, which makes disclosing loot box percentages a bit of a challenge.
Look, I’m not sure what games you play or your understanding of how any of this works but, respectfully, you’re misunderstanding it pretty deeply.
I think you mis understood what I mewnt. And maybe we are crosstalking. The 1% I meant it was a game where one of the loot boxes on screen was the prize, then “shuffled” with to others. So one of the three selections should yield the prize. Based on probabilities, you should get a payout on the 4th refreshed try at this since you are now pushing the odds in your favour, but it was not like that you could go 100 times.
Same with spin the wheel games to get the loot box. If every other spin section has a loot box, you should on average land on it 50% of the time. But they weren’t like that. Might be 10%.
This is why its become a worldwide scrutinized thing in games because the chances are misrepresented. There are guidelines for those tginking about adding paid game mechanisms so as to not run afould of state/province gambling laws.
Here’s what’s been happening about it in some places https://liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/glr2.2024.0006
Gambling involves the opportunity to win something that actually exists. The fundamental issue with loot boxes is your gambling for code that can’t be sold, traded, or preserved past the lifetime of the game.
It’s a disgusting practice that preys upon people’s psychological reward centers and has been normalized by our obsessive consumption. It should absolutely be illegal.
Yeeeah, I’ve encountered this argument a few times, particularly when this issue was more salient and, I’m not gonna lie, it’s absolutely baffling.
As in, it seems to imply that gambling is better because there’s a chance of winning something of genuine monetary value.
Which, let me be clear, is the exact opposite of how this works. The possibility of recouping losses or winning money is the actual problem with gambling. The potential monetary reward is a major component of gambling and one of the meaningful reasons why loot boxes are… nowhere near as bad?
Digital loot boxes are typically not allowed to be translated into actual money by design, both as a security measure and because that’s how actual gambling works. Betting for real money is way worse than buying some digital thing that only has value inside a game. Because, you know, in that scenario you know you’re spending that money and it’s not coming back, it’s just a matter of spending it on what. You’re not getting enticed with the fiction that you’re investing money or not actually spending it because you could potentially get it back. That’s why kids aren’t typically allowed to bet in a casino but they still get to buy Magic the Gathering packs (and let’s be clear, the fact that Magic has a thriving gray market around it makes it worse than digital loot boxes as well).
I try to keep this conversation respectful but, honestly, hearing this argument is one of the surefire ways to know the person talking about this has no idea what they’re talking about.
Gambling is at least ok in my book because it’s only legal for adults and in specific, regulated locations. It’s still fucking idiotic behavior to engage in, but whatever, adults can waste their money, I don’t really care. It’s easy to avoid unless you live in Vegas.
I’m sure I’ll alienate most of the user base here, but anything that involves turning money into ‘pulls’ should be illegal for minors, and honestly probably just entirely. Magic, Pokemon cards, blind boxes, the stupid Lego minifigs I love to collect. Ban all of it, it’s bad for our psyche, it’s wasteful, it’s anti-consumer bullshit that should never be allowed. If you can’t make money selling your product directly, then you don’t deserve to run a business.
You’re right though, the gambling analogy perfect. I doubt paid loot boxes are significantly worse than letting children gamble. But still, there’s a reason we don’t let children gamble, and loot boxes certainly aren’t any better.
It’s not easy to avoid unless you live in Vegas. I live right above a gambling establishment. Nobody bats an eye and it’s fully government-sanctioned.
Not every country is the US, friend. Including, you know… Brazil.
But hey, at least you have the intellectual honesty to include all the IRL blind boxes people actually like in your assessment. You still have this pretty much backwards, but at least it’s consistently backwards.
That’s not sarcasm, I do think that’s better than the baseline of “make the game mechanic I don’t like illegal, but keep all this 100% analogous stuff I do like” vibes-based approach to demanding regulation.
I still disagree super hard that “bad for our psyche” is the bar for banning stuff. Age ratings, sure. But I would very much prefer to keep tobacco, pot, alcohol, porn and yes, Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone available for anybody mature enough to make that choice by themselves.
It’s definitely appropriate that every other item on your list is illegal for minors in almost every country on earth. If I thought we could reasonably keep ‘blind boxes’ an adult indulgence I wouldn’t be opposed. But they are so deeply tied to children’s toys, I don’t think you could ever have them available for adults in a form that isn’t just begging for children to figure out ways to buy them anyway. It’d be incredibly hard to justify banning them only for children, especially on the admittedly abstract basis of psychological harm.
Setting aside that, I believe they should be fully illegal simply on a consumer protection basis. A business should not be allowed to sell a mystery product. There’s no justification for it IMO. There is no reason we should allow businesses to sell us useless bullshit and hope we get something we actually want. You can still have MTG, you can still have mobile games. But let people buy the shit they want, or don’t. If the business model can’t work, somebody else will figure it out.
But of course, there’s no fucking chance of that happening here in the US, so I keep hoping somebody else will tackle it (though Brazil’s attempt here wildly misses the bar unfortunately).
Yeah, but I actually like multiple games built around blind boxes, and I sure don’t like you telling me what I can like.
You’re just passing your own tastes as morality and I don’t care for that any more when it’s gamers pushing their preferences than when it was pearl-clutching moms and politicians trying to score cheap points.
I mean, there is plenty of justification for it in that blind boxes allow for a random distribution of items while still controlling rarity and allowing for balance, which is why every single videogame in existence that does any sort of randomized or widespread lootable equipment does loot tables. It’s not just a very useful technique, it’s a fundamental one you engage with constantly. If you want to make a case for monetization of randomized loot being beyond some line we can have that argument, but the method is useful and it won’t be “figured out”, it predates videogames altogether.
Frankly, it’s not even the worst option out there. The sad irony of the entire moral panic is that the part that got figured out is an alternative monetization-to-engagement pathway. Several, in fact. Overbearing regulation of loot boxes is no longer a dealbreaker because everybody knows how to do seasonal cosmetics and battlepasses now, so all the features of paid loot boxes can be done without the randomized elements people latch on to.
The part you can’t quite get is the outright advantage that loot boxes will sometimes give people decent stuff without having to grind, which all the current alternatives don’t do. I’d take randomized tables over mandatory grind any day, but I certainly don’t want to ban either.
Random distribution in a game is fine, the problem is entirely being able to use cash to get them. The solution is very simple, as you’ve pointed out, hundreds of games have already figured out less predatory ways to add content and keep a game alive.
The cash for randomization is fundamentally what makes it so insidious. Everything you’ve mentioned is wildly preferable to paid mystery bullshit. Seasonal outfits, battle passes, whatever. If you know what you’re getting before you choose to buy it, that’s your choice.
This is the most Stockholm Syndrome shit I’ve seen on here. You do realize that the grind only exists to push people into buying the bullshit right? Games should be fun to play, with rewards coming regularly from normal play. If you’re ‘grinding’ through a mess of bullshit to avoid paying, or if you’re paying to skip the grind, then why are you bothering to play a game you don’t actually like playing? A little grind is understandable and fun, I’m looking forward to a little boss farming in BL4 later tonight. But that’s the fun part of the game, playing it and hoping to get something good.