These people thinking they can push gambling as "ethical and fun" are fucking retarded and deserve to be pointed out as such. I'm glad this shit is reaching the mainstream finally. A game like 2k20 shouldn't be marketed to children if you can spend money in it and it has bright lights and slot machines in it.
Government doesn't give a shit about gambling.
They just want their cut.
Mods are too busy to be bothered with moderation...but still post nonsense in threads.
Please do not contact me about moderation - Reach out to another member.
That's my take on this. The politicians have been trying to find excuses to get their hands on and "regulate" the gaming industry forever and not for the best of reasons, while treating games as the boogie man for everything going wrong in society (forget about gamergate and all that, this started way before it and funnily enough from the other end of the political spectrum). This mess with lootboxes though, unfortunately, gives them a very valid reason to get involved and also to do so under the pretence of good morals.
Runescape 3 actually got brought up as an example recently. No surprise, when some guy became infamous for maxing every skill in the game and having hundreds of millions of leftover gold in a week by maxing out his credit card on microtransaction events. (which, as of right now, they have just released the same event again, but with a chance of DOUBLE rewards on the xp lamps. Naturally.)
Completely agree, and it's really underhanded for her to try and piggyback on the largely innocent pleasure that a Kinder Egg (or other equivalents) offers to children. If I was a parent, those comments would just infuriate me and end up in a hard pass on any of their games for my children. How stupid does she think parents are...
EAs latest response is "they strongly disagree about the gotv findings and will continue fighting this"
Kinder Eggs are analogous to aesthetic-only loot-boxes but a better comparison would be trading-card games as there are often rewards that ,affect in-game performance.
Really though the problem is more to do with the way microtransactions (not just loot-boxes) can be marketed in games and the ease with which large sums can be spent. Unfortunately financial control and advertising standards are a lot less sexy than gambling for people who are spreading moral outrage about video games corrupting children.
I personally dont care much about lootboxes, i dont buy them. However i have problem with ESRB and PEGI being bought party. There is no logical reason a game to be rated E for everyone, then tell parents to be careful about this game, turn parental control on it! So its not for everyone? It would be like Lego box saying age 6 months up, then lego discaliming, you must build it for your children and glue it to not have a choking hazard. You know what they do, lego are 8 years + on the box instead.
I mean porn, gambling, alcohol, weed, all adictive legal stuff thats regulated for adults only. Lootboxes should be the same period.
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Regulation is bad argument is something only a child would say or somebody is so young they never worked in their entire life or someone that regulation stop from their unethical profit. Regulation is why we dont have smog all over the place anymore. Regulation is why building catch fire less often. Regulation is why less people die in working accident. If theres no regulation on things, people with no ethic can make maximum profit, cut every corner imaginable. Good call. Look at fifa, its the example of cutting corner in every other industry, its a game that became so barebone it probably doesent even cost more then 10 million to "make" every year, but rakes in nearly a billion in cash. Even Disney cant put up such low effort for profit.
Last edited by minteK917; 2019-09-15 at 06:34 PM.
That's kind of where I fall on this particular issue.
Sure, loot boxes are "gambling". So are TCG packs, not to mention other trading cards. So are a lot of carnival games. So are those vending machines that sell toys in bubble packs. You know you're getting "something", but you can't pick what you want, directly. And to date, these things haven't been flagged as some kind of risk factor to kids.
When I was growing up, if I wanted to blow my allowance on Magic: The Gathering cards, I could (and did) do that. Was that dumb? Probably. Did I get a metric fuckton of garbage that's worth nothing? For sure. Still did it. Don't consider myself to have been a victim of anything shady.
If the issue is kids stealing their parents' credit card information and spending hundreds or thousands of dollars, that's on the parents' not keeping their card secure and their kid who thinks stealing is okay. They'd steal to fund whatever hobby they had.
And I can separate my position on legality from my position on "good game design". There's a lot of shitty lootbox mechanics out there; if you're getting anything but cosmetics, it's a P2W kind of thing, and I don't like that. So I don't play those games. That's where user agency comes in. "Reward" companies with shitty game mechanics by not playing their games and not buying their shitty lootboxes. If plenty of other people do so, you're just not the target market, apparently. And that's fine.
This whole stuff about "OMG it's GAMBLING" just seems right in line with the Satanic Panic of the '80s, targeting Dungeons and Dragons, to me. Same kind of pearl-clutching over fundamentally nothing.