Mandatory disclosure: I am a programmer working for EA and the following are my personal opinions. I do not represent EA in any official capacity.
It's my strong opinion that the whole loot box phenomenon makes games as a whole worse.
For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these boxes have been handled by many games noticeably warps the design goals of the game from "make an engaging experience" to "motivate the player to buy more loot boxes".
What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game.
This has been at its worst in mobile games, but there are plenty of console and PC titles with this issue as well. It's even gotten so far that big titles with no microtransactions include a heavy focus on loot boxes which can only be gained as quest rewards or bought using in-game currency (Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind).
I really don't like it. I get no joy from wading through mountains of useless items in the hope of finding that one rare gem I actually want. This applies to ordinary loot in RPGs as well. So, seeing that the global trend has been for games to evolve in this direction has been very frustrating for me. As such, this recent pushback - both these legal actions as well as the player backlash of recent loot box controversies - have been very interesting developments which I hope will lead to market-wide improvements in overall game design.
To elaborate: I do not mind microtransactions in general. There are a few games which have plenty of ways to spend real money in-game but which do not bother me (Fortnite, Elder Scrolls Online). The key difference, here, is that those are games in which the core game loop does not heavily incentivize you to spend money and where in-game transactions will mainly get you cosmetic content or additional story campaigns.
I tried playing Quake Champions, because I remember enjoying Quake 3 as a mid-to-late teenager, and on paper, that type of game should be incredibly up my alley. I found the experience of the initial load screen dumping you directly into the daily loot box screen so offputting that I actually couldn't even enjoy playing the game proper. The very act of just opening the game was so nakedly manipulative and felt so unfun that I simply uninstalled it; I just cannot be assed to expend the energy trying to ignore the loot box mechanics to play the game on it's own merits.
This. When I launch a game I want to play the game. I don't want to crawl through screens of advertising for loot boxes and daily deals. I understand if it's a MMO or something but why does firing up a basketball game now force me to navigate through loads of ad screens before I can ever play the game?
Hope you can get past it. Quake Champions is a lot of fun. All the games have dumb loot boxes nowadays. At least Quake's are all aesthetic. More annoying is their gating of the champions behind huge amounts of "Favor", but that's f2p.
"For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these boxes have been handled by many games noticeably warps the design goals of the game from "make an engaging experience" to "motivate the player to buy more loot boxes".
What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game."
Star Wars Battlefront 2 at release was a perfect example of this. The entire experience was built for someone to either grind incessantly and/or spend real money to acquire currency to unlock items as only weapon mods were acquired via accumulated experience and not loot crates. Even the awarding of credits were loosely tied to performance. The "level" of a hero/trooper/ship was the number and rarity of star cards you had, not how much you had used them. There was no shared marketplace so the only way to get a certain emote, or pose, or star card was getting lucky and pulling one. It was often the case that you would pull items for troopers/heroes/ships that you would barely (or never) use.
As a result of all of this you ended up with things like "rubber banding" where players would use a rubber band on their joystick to prevent themselves from being booted from game modes. This had a particularly harmful effect on the Heroes vs. Villains game mode, as its small number of participants (4v4) and scoring via target system meant having one or more "rubber banders" on your team put you at a severe disadvantage and wrecked the experience.
Yes, I have been thinking this for a while as well. The issue isn't the microtransactions themselves, but the natural incentives associated with them.
If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability.
I really hate seeing this trend come to games that I presumably own.
> If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability.
I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from.
Where is the skill and gameplay involved in spinning a virtual roulette wheel until a powerful enough unit or item pops out to let you advance to the next level of gameplay? And, of course, the answer is that there is none; it's merely taking advantage of those prone to gambling addiction.
They were based on skill, but you could also note that the skill requirements varied in ways that were designed to encourage even unskilled players to feel like they could advance with "just one more".
I get your point about the addition of randomness, though. Its an interesting element and it does change things relative to the arcade scenario. Personally, I think that it is largely there to make the system not feel as much like pay-to-win as it actually is.
> I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from.
Sure, but that's a rather charitable way to describe it. What you're talking about is basically breaking or mastering the system by sheer force of will. And there is fun in that. But how much did it cost you to get to the point where you were able to play longer than a few minutes?
Arcade games were specifically designed to extract as many quarters as possible from players. That was the stated goal. If a game wasn't able to extract N quarters per hour, it didn't last long.
> What you're talking about is basically breaking or mastering the system by sheer force of will. And there is fun in that. But how much did it cost you to get to the point where you were able to play longer than a few minutes?
Ah, but how is that different from, say, swimming, golf, tennis, or racing where one must rent a course or court in order to practice their skill? Yes, arcade games weren't called quarter munchers for nothing but, for the most part, they offered a reasonably fair deal.
In contrast, there's no analogy to be made between those sports and loot-box based game. One doesn't toss money into a sports equipment store until one randomly gets a drastically better golf club.
While there were arcade games gated on skill, I think there were plenty that weren't.
I'll admit that it may just be that I don't have the proficiency required, but after playing it again recently it seems that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was simply designed to quickly drain your health as soon as you got to a boss.
I was playing Nioh. The game doesn't have loot boxes, but it has hordes of items that I have to shift through tons of items just to find the maybe 1 that I care about. It is a lot of work with zero joy or benefit.
Loot boxes are the same, except now you also have to gamble.
I feel you my friend.
Also why would you work for EA? I genuinely want to know. After everything I heard / read about them I wouldn't touch that company with a 10ft pole. I even avoid anything they sell intentionally because of it.
Because EA is not as bad as they are portrayed and everything is not black or white. I really dislike the way we are viewed in the public eye and I feel much of it is exaggerated and undeserved. Seriously, EA is full of very talented and passionate people doing their best to deliver awesome games. There have been some controversies, but it's still a company which produces a lot of games I really love. To list a few EA IPs I really like:
- Mass Effect
- Dragon Age
- Mirror's Edge
- Titanfall
- Dead Space
- The Sims
Beyond that, working as a full-time programmer for EA in Sweden means
- job security
- good salary
- working on AAA games as a full-time job
- working together with other passionate gamers and nerds who share my interests in a way I wouldn't have thought possible before moving to this industry
- Getting a lot of information from contacts in the industry before it becomes public news.
- Learning incredibly much about the behind-the-scenes stuff. Both from EA in general but also from other parts of the industry
Working outside of the game industry wouldn't get me the last four points. Working at a smaller studio wouldn't get me the first three points. Also, I have a house that I love in an area which I adore and I'm raising a child for whom I wish a childhood filled with stability and security. For these and other reasons I really don't want to relocate. This also limits the short list of viable employers.
I’m the parent of a teenager who has struggled with an unhealthy obsession with features like this. A kid who is 14 or 15 is able to intellectually understand how to use these game systems, but at the same time he or she is often lacking the type of sophisticated understanding that an adult would have (e.g. that gambling can be addictive and therefore restraint and self-observation is required). They greatly overestimate their ability to participate in a safe and healthy way.
I would like to see loot boxes out of games for players under 18. Loot boxes are not a real part of the game anyway, they are a way for the publisher add the types of subconscious psychological rewards to “increase engagement” that are now rightfully criticized in platforms like Facebook.
This is another area where the arbitrariness of the 18 year majority limit is exposed: 18 year olds are not neurologically adults. That doesn’t happen until like 25-29.
These games aren't lower in price. Freemium games may have that aspect, but the games in the article are all AAA $60+ games with deluxe editions for $80 or over $100, and still have loot boxes.
Meh. Self discipline is very much a learned skill. I've seen plenty of high school age who have as much self discipline as your average middle age adult and vise versa. I think whether or not you have good personal responsibility at 18 depends a lot on whether you're given chances to build that skill from age 10-18 or so. People tend to mostly try to meet the expectations of society and society doesn't expect much from 18yos.
When playing Battlefield 5 beta last weekend, I was actually thinking about this. I'm wondering how they'll approach it in that game.
I have a bit of a double feeling about this as a Belgian - on the one hand I think it's a good direction for the industry. We didn't have that crap a decade ago and I'll be happy to see it removed. OTOH, I hope they don't just remove content for the Belgian market as it'd potentially create an unfair system.
It is EA after all, a company I don't have a lot of faith in.
EA has publicly stated that there will not be lootboxes [1] or even DLCs [2]. I'm especially content about there not being DLCs that divide the player base so much that there are only enough players available to play the base maps.
If only they'd bring back a usable server browser, or (god forbid) release the server software for community game servers.
Oh that's nice :)
The server browser was both nice and annoying. Nice to see it have a server browser which apperantly you can't take for granted anymore.
But the server browser was buggy..
Arguments like this is what I find entertaining about (pure) free-market advocates.
They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it - and when the consumers inexplicably fail to do so, the advocates get mad and blame the consumers instead of adjusting their theory.
Gaming is one of the most competitive industries I can think of. It's very easily accessible by new developers and there's an entire industry of indie games.
> They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it
Loots boxes exist because they aren't actually a problem. A consumer has a choice between games with varying degrees of loot boxes and games without them.
Obviously if people buy games with loot boxes, they don't oppose them strongly. Personally, I don't have a big problem with loot boxes because I like cheaper games. Loot boxes are a way for game makers to milk more money out of whales while leaving the rest of us better off with a cheaper game. Banning or regulating loot boxes will only take away options from consumers, increase prices, or both.
People don't need to be babied by the government whenever a small minority of people make bad decisions. It just allows people to be lazier and less skeptical than they already are.
That assumes all consumers are connoisseur gamers who are well-informed about the verious upcoming indie games and not just kids who want to play Battlefront because they like Star Wars.
In other words, this assumes, as the efficient market hypothesis requires, that consumers are perfectly rational and have perfect information about the market. And I hold that, as always, this is not actually the case in the real world.
Moreoever, loot boxes aren't just some random game design feature. They are currently the best way to make money with a game. (And I believe they are well-known to the vast majority of developers). So there are actual economic forces pushing developers to implement loot boxes unless they explicitly reject the idea and have enough resources to do so.
> Obviously if people buy games with loot boxes, they don't oppose them strongly.
This is exactly the circular reasoning I'm talking about in the parent post. If that were the case, then people wouldn't at the same time complain about them so much.
It's also pretty funny that the thing that is finally shifting the typical reddit/youtube hardcore gamer-atheist demographic away from their ancap ideology is lootcrates.
It was a free beta weekend, and it seemed like an interesting thing to try.
Now, it's not that DICE is per se a bad developer, but the deadlines pushed on by EA give rise to lots of bugs on release.(But, I've not played an EA/DICE game since BF3 so I could be wrong there, things might've changed.)
The games are usually playable some time after release.
And another thing I hate about the yearly releases of CoD and BF: The previous versions more or less die when the new ones are released.
As someone who play games on macOS, the delay before the Mac/Linux versions are released makes it so when you get to play the games, most of your friends play the next version or something else. I've stopped buying games like CoD and BF because of this.
It seems only Blizzard and Valve understand they can keep people playing the same games for decades with little investment.
Name a single Blizzard game with official support of Linux. They are also had banned accounts for playing their games through Wine, but they've stopped 5 or so years ago.
Exactly. After the crap they pulled with NBA2k18 [1], I refuse to buy another ~EA~ 2K game. Apparently they made it ever so slightly better this year, but that's not enough.
[1] Up through 2k17 (that was on the edge though) you could make your custom player good just by playing the game. It might take some time, but it could be done. With 2k18, you needed to buy the game for $60 and then spend ~$100 to have anything near a playable character.
EDIT
Whoops, my micro transaction hate got ahead of my coffee drinking :) My point still stands though. If you don't like the way a company is doing something, don't buy their product.
Video game publishers have been trying consistently to implement a "less for more" attitude when it comes to their products. The whole lootbox trend on a whole was the peak of having their cake and eating it (wanting to "chase whales" like the free to play model but charging full price for the product). The only surprising thing about this is that there hasn't been a lot more push-back a way earlier.
Video Games have been growing with such a strong trajectory that what consumers expect at a bare minimum in a new release is a large increase in risk for a game publisher.
For example Super Mario World was made by less than 20 people and sold for $69.99 at launch in 1990. That’s nearly $140 in today’s dollars.
Now take into account that a modern AAA game has at a minimum a 150 person staff, with the more content heavy games breaching 500 people; if your game is a flop your studio is dead despite having years of successes before. The margins at $60 don’t provide enough cushion so publishers are continuously scrambling for extra revenue they can get away with before consumer backlash.
The current model is very fragile and not entirely sustainable. It exploits the passions of recent graduates by giving them salaries 30-40% below market only because they’re working on games, with the work being not at all different than working on spreadsheet software except for having serious crunch-heavy deadlines. The attrition rate over 5 years is over 70%, which also leads to those who merely didn’t leave instead of the most qualified being in leadership positions which makes any changes to processes very difficult.
Something that's not brought up often with this argument - the sales scope for modern games. Super Mario World was doing well if it broke 10,000 or 100,000 sales. In contrast a major game these days will break 100,000,000 sales.
$60 is also a bit of a red herring, since $60 is the base price for a game - when you start throwing in all of the special features, the price of a game climbs to over twice that amount. And that doesn't even cover the microtransactions not included in the gambling category - 4-5 expansion packs each the price of an indie game, skins, poses, voice lines, etc.
Let's not forget that EA have openly stated to their shareholders that not having loot boxes in their games doesn't affect their revenue. Either they're lying to their shareholders, or to us. I wonder which one it is.
These companies are raking in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. That's not the sign of a fragile market.
> Something that's not brought up often with this argument - the sales scope for modern games. Super Mario World was doing well if it broke 10,000 or 100,000 sales. In contrast a major game these days will break 100,000,000 sales.
Your numbers are way off. Super Mario World sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Every full Super Mario release has sold millions of copies.
Conversely, even the most popular franchises sell in the tens of millions range. GTA V is one of the few approaching the 100 million mark.
Back in the day games were in fact more expensive, but a lot of the cost was in the cartridge. Games were certainly much less expensive in development costs. Modern console game prices have been locked at around $60 for well over a decade. These games are hideously expensive to develop so publishers have resorted to gaining revenue via DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.
Naturally, publishers have become greedy in this environment and are using these deceptive revenue streams to pad their profits. And really, these practices probably would've arisen even if the price of games kept pace with inflation.
You're right, I should have worded it differently. Companies went from a market of a few million of potential customers to hundreds of millions (more if you count mobile gamers who are subjected to even more microtransactions) of potential customers.
> Video game publishers have been trying consistently to implement a "less for more" attitude when it comes to their products.
Isn't maximizing profits just a natural consequence of having a for-profit business? It's not just evil video game publishers, everybody wants to sell less for more.
The problem is that in their pursuit of profit they are creating slot machines with the actual game on the side. Then they are crippling the game so that you have to use the slot machine to have any sense of fun while playing the game.
Therefore there are two choices:
Either they get regulated as other slot machine makers around the world, including being taxed as both a slot machine maker and as a slot machine operator.
Or alternatively just make a video game and sell that and not have to deal with all the regulation.
Yeah, I'm absolutely aware what is happening here.
Of course if they are creating slot machines they should follow the related regulations. However there is nothing that forces them to make actual games. If they can make business by selling virtual slot machines let them do so as long as it's legal. After all they are not the only game publisher out there and if there is an actual need for quality games it will be fulfilled by other publishers.
There is not much of a difference. The question is, did your $60 buy you a game, or a program that is designed to just make you buy as many loot boxes as possible?
If the games are no more than glorified casinos, they should be regulated as such.
A slot machine is clearly a slot machine, and is additionally labelled as such, with mandated warnings. A video game is not - a video game which is actually a slot machine looks very similar to an actual video game.
Not OP,
not everyone wants to make gambling illegal just regulate it so some categories of people don't get abused.
If the game is gambling then the existing rules for gambling need to apply, if you don't like the existing rules then you need to try to change them.
Which games are you talking about that require you to open loot boxes in order to have fun in the game? The most popular games that I can think of with loot boxes, Hearthstone, Dota 2, Overwatch, CS:GO, PUBG, all either have strictly cosmetic items in the loot boxes, or have ways of getting the loot boxes free through gameplay. Saying that major developers are creating games that require you to buy loot boxes in order to have any fun in the game sounds like unnecessary hyperbole.
I feel like Hearthstone is the outlier in your list
Card games are gambling. True, you can get gambling credits by grinding a lot in Hearthstone, but I feel this is despicable especially for a card game catering to mostly underage or very young people.
This applies to non-virtual card games too (e.g. Magic, Pokemon, Yugiho). Pack-opening is kid's gambling. They are made to encourage people to open more packs/make a deck/etc. At least in real-life card games you can trade cards (EDIT: hearthstone has dust - which acts the same).
This is false. Hearthstone is a huge money pit and the items that drop in Hearthstone are not cosmetic, they are cards you use in the core game, just like Magic the Gathering but with no real money market.
> ...have ways of getting the loot boxes free through gameplay...
That's actually rather reprehensible as well since the free loot boxes involve spending extensive time in the game grinding. These children are essentially Judas goats; living enticements to other children to join their friend in the game and possibly spend money.
"Middle-earth: Shadow of War" comes to mind. To beat the endgame you either had to grind really hard, or just buy loot boxes (to get best Orcs, Equipment and Buffs). They said that the lootboxes didn't have an influence on the game "difficulty", but after they removed the lootboxes the endgame was also patched to adjust for normal play.
They also had a PvP element where you could attack other peoples strongholds, but with the lootboxes it was also pay to win.
Just look at the games listed in this article: FIFA. The output from these loot boxes directly impacts your ability to play the game. It's not just cosmetic.
The classic one is Star Wars Battlefront 2 where they altered the progression system so that you either grind for an incredibly long time (much longer than reviewers had to) to get the better characters. There was an uproar about it - and the most negatively voted reddit comment in history - and then they changed the game and removed the loot boxes.
In Australia I'm not sure how much a poker machine (slot machine) maker is taxed over and above the regular company tax, but I know operators of such machines are taxed more (and I think that's a state based tax).
Somehow though if EA, Activision, etc were taxed like slot machine operators then they would not be as inclined to include this stuff in their games.
>Isn't maximizing profits just a natural consequence of having a for-profit business? It's not just evil video game publishers, everybody wants to sell less for more.
I think less for more naturally would come with inflation across the board but the less for more approach isn't the only way to increase profits or even the most popular one. The computer industry for example is known for scaling by giving more for less. Beverage companies add more drinks for the same price. Less for more requires a monopoly or something close to it, otherwise competitors rush in.
That is a good point. Since every IP is a state sponsored monopoly, this leads to the state of the game industry. You don't add loot boxes to a new franchise, but to existing ones that people are emotionally invested in. For example, you might have competition in the genre of action RPG set in space, but Star Wars is a monopoly, and another company cannot legally make an alternative, so the people who want a Star Wars game are a more captive audience that can be maximally exploited.
However, I think the entertainment industry is particularly fond of this.
My guess is because its products are both luxury items (so moral arguments against the same practices in housing or pharma don't necessarily apply) and items that consumers potentially have enormous emotional investment in. So once you've managed to build a fanbase, you can get away with a lot before the fans will seriously consider quitting.
I'm so happy with this, it will create a precedent.
I know people that have spent a lot of money in counter-strike boxes, it works like slots machines, designed to keep you exited while you get a reward. The worst thing is now is the rule in every game (pubg, heartstone and so on..).
It's still gambling... even more so if you can exchange the cosmetics back for real money. Which means it's still exploiting some people's gambling addition tendencies, which is the justification for gambling regulations in the first place. They don't regulate video poker because the gambling is making that arcade machine less fun.
The thing I actually care about is computer games. Good ones, well made, and designed around being fun. I enjoy opening my dota2 chests - but they have (basically) no negative impact on the game.
I actually agree - it's "pure" gambling in that sense. You're spinning a wheel and getting a random payoff. I just don't think that's an inherently bad thing
Hearthstone is pretty reasonable imo. You get a fairly consistent amount of dust per pack and even like a ‘lucky’ pack isn’t that great. Just saves you from having to dust a few extra cards to get the one you want. I wish the prices were lower given how many cards they release a year now, but it’s not very much like gambling.
For me Hearthstone is a big offender of the practice - the way they gate the new cards behind an expansion pass which you have to pay for is very predatory, not to mention a portion of newest cards always form the metagame as they suffer from power-creep.
They were also heavily criticized for adopting this game mechanic in star wars battlefront and eventually decided to drop it. I don't even understand the appeal of wanting to play games that have this sort of predatory feature.
It's been around for a while and I've honestly never even been remotely attracted to games like that.
I definitely feel like this has exponentially increased since iOS games called 'freemium'. Generally, the game will be free but then things can take 30minutes to be accomplished unless you buy diamonds that cost 1$ and you get instant gratification.
But you can choose to play games that don't have the feature. When Android was first starting, I wanted to get into gaming on my phone - but these days I don't bother, even if I hear good things about a game, because the odds are too great that it's ruined with freemium crap if it's on mobile.
I'm a FIFA player and this is a complex situation. "Packs" in FIFA are not solely used for cosmetic items but for actual virtual players with distinct play characteristics.
EA are trying to turn FIFA into a eSports game (see the recent FIFA eWorld Cup) and the majority of play takes place in the "Ultimate Team" mode. To get the high calibre players you'd use to build up your experience and reputation in UT you either need to make a ton of coins to buy them or buy "FIFA points" with real money and open the packs.
It's pretty standard practice for the higher end players to throw money at these packs to build up teams early on, so I suspect this move will put Belgian players at a disadvantage (it's not a total nightmare as you can buy most players in 'standard' varieties for a lot less, just not the in-form ones you'd use in competition play).
Of course, at the end of the day, it's still just a game.. :-D
I don't see how they can have it both ways. Either the game is an eSport where the most skillful person wins, or they can have lootboxes where the person that spends the most wins.
So in the first case there is no super significant difference between the players on the field, which means there is no point to buy loot boxes to get better players.
Or in the second case it isn't really an eSport because the person that spends the most money (and is luckiest with the players that they get) will more likely win.
What you are essentially describing is "pay to compete". Many sports have a barrier to entry to compete at the top levels. For example, take a look at Magic the Gathering. A top tier deck can cost thousands of dollars, but it only puts you on an even playing field with other top players. Past that point your success as a Magic player is based upon your skill and consistency.
Yes, but you can buy those cards and decks directly without having to pay thousands of dollars more in boosters in order to find those cards.
It's the difference between going to the shop and buying the thing you want versus going to a casino and pulling a slot machine handle until you get lucky and win the prize that you want.
Yes, it's easy to drop money on packs and either get a pack of duds or (less often) an amazing player. I tend to get quite lucky spending a few hundred pounds in total, but there are videos of YouTubers dropping £1000+ in a day and barely getting anything interesting.
A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins" instead of packs in affected territories.. but then you'd have the opposite effect of players there getting a major advantage :-D
> A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins"
Preventing this kind of workaround is already part of many gambling laws. They usually define the payment/stake/wager as a very generic term like "anything of value". For example, in NV (as a stereotypical representation of a locale allows gambling), the law defines[1]:
>> “Representative of value” means any instrumentality used by a patron in a game whether or not the instrumentality may be redeemed for cash.
>> “Wager” means a sum of money or representative of value that is risked on an occurrence for which the outcome is uncertain.
Any type of in-game "coin" still represents value to the people playing the game, so trading them for lootboxes with uncertain contents is still a "wager".
The gaming industry could solve a lot of this mess if they simply *sold people the game (or game pieces) directly as a defined product. Of course, that wouldn't exploit the human weakness to operant conditioning[2]... ~sigh~
Preventing this kind of workaround is already part of many gambling laws. They usually define the payment/stake/wager as a very generic term like "anything of value".
Ah, maybe I'm misunderstanding the concepts involved, but coins in FIFA are more directly convertible into the end result, more like buying a currency. With "coins" you can buy players directly in the game for a known value on a marketplace (you can also buy packs, but this could be disabled).
With the current system (where you buy "FIFA points") you can only use the FIFA points to open packs of "random" players, which is where the gambling element comes in.
>"I said there's something amazing inside. Something life changing inside. Well, this is what this video is about. After 25 BILLION cubelets have been destroyed, over 150 days, after 4 million people have downloaded it onto their various devices, and after hosting tens of thousands of simultaneous concurrent users, we have reached the end, and one lucky person has reached the rewards of their hard efforts. How can anything be worth all that effort?"
Well what was in the cube? A broken promise.
Curiosity Winner Has Received Nothing - 2 Years Later:
>"This week on Feature Creep I discuss the recent controversy about 22Cans head Peter Molyneux, the failure of the GODUS God of Gods plan and how Bryan Henderson, the winner of the Curiosity competition has been ignored."
I've been boycotting EA since the dawn of modern DLC with Battlefield: Bad Company, which was 10 years ago.
Every single gamer who has not stood on this side of the line since then is a part of the problem.
If you have purchased a single EA game directly from the publisher in the last decade, instead of aftermarket, then you have absolutely no right to complain about loot boxes because we live in a time where all of the information about EA's destruction of the gaming industry has been freely available for anyone to find.
You chose to feed the beast for your own selfish desires and now you act like it's someone else's fault that the beast has gotten so big.
Cartamundi in Belgium must have printed billions of cards for collectible card games by now (Magic the Gathering etc.). It would be interesting to see an analysis of why that doesn’t run afoul of the law.
To the extent that these card games rest on "winning" a good card by luck in the blind purchase packs they're clearly in the same ball park.
The psychological quirk these games exploit is that some humans get a disproportionate internal reward for taking chances that come off. This quirk gets you polar explorers, and a man on the moon, but it also gets you financial crashes and people losing their life savings on the turn of a card. So, you know, maybe not something we want under the control of a for-profit company.
Traditional gambling laws assume the rewards must be financial, but this psych quirk doesn't care what the reward is, shiny Pokémon cards, virtual currency, anything you perceive as desirable. What's important is that you took a risk and it paid off, if you have this quirk your body rewards you for this entirely luck-based success, of course you want it again.
Note that although Magic itself is going nowhere, this game design trope has been somewhat displaced by designs where players buy fixed decks with fixed boosters - no blind buy. Android Netrunner is an example of that. You know going in that to be competitive you're buying so-and-so many packs to have the best cards, a few extreme choices might mean buying one extra copy of something, but there are no truly "rare" cards.
I hope EA loses and appeals all the way to the European Court. Once it’s settled there EA loses a market of more than 450 million people for its unregulated casinos.
Lootboxes and the general virtual in-game currencies are what pushed me away from NBA2K. I really enjoy the game, but I don't want to be constantly told to pay more and more for the game that I've just paid $70 for. I stopped playing after a few weeks and I don't think I'll be buying this year's edition.
With MTG you can skip the whole booster buying and just get the cards you want from people who have them. The rarest most desirable cards in standard are $10-$50 at most. If you want a rare overwatch skin you have no option but keep buying boxes until you get it.
This is more nuanced. You get in-game currency for skins/cards you already have in both Hearthstone and Overwatch, which is equivalent to being able to sell your cards
With hearthstone, can't you also "sell" any card you have for in-game currency, in addition to getting currency when you obtain a duplicate? In overwatch, you just get currency for duplicates (or randomly from a box).
I believe in Hearthstone, the only option you have is to turn the card to Dust, and then it takes so much Dust to craft other cards, based on their power and rarity.
Which is unfortunately one of the ways that the companies try to avoid being labelled as gambling, because they do not allow you to sell or trade the items that you get. There is no secondary market for these games nor a way to cash out.
If I want to quit playing M:TG, I can sell my cards (I've done this twice, and it's been profitable both times). If I stop playing FIFA, there's no way to recoup any of the money I've put into it. My rewards from FIFA loot boxes are tied solely to FIFA.
Funny things is, MTG cards are produced in Belgium; and now there is MTG: Arena, where you can either earn boosters; or pay for them with real money.
Feels a lot like loot boxes/gambling to me, in either instance. Okay, at least IRL you have a (largely unregulated) secondary market to sell/buy/trade cards.
Not being familiar with their system myself, I have to ask - does this imply that there's 2nd order gambling? I mean, the same gambling "kick" then arises from seeing what they would get after paying for the following big, right?
I suppose they could also make the boxes transparent all the way down, but that would just shift the gamble to the account creation phase.
Oh, or is it just the exact same boxes for everyone? I suppose that solves the problem.
The problem is that it just pushes out the "unknown" factor to the next box. The content of the current box never changes for an individual, but the content of the next box might have that rare or legendary object that I really want.
Practically speaking, it's a brilliant move because it works around laws without removing the addictive gambling feeling.
The box system is exactly the same as before, only that you can see the contents of the next box. It's very easy to implement and, as you pointed out, changes pretty much nothing. The gamble is still there, but not in the box you pay for.
Actually I think that's a common salesman trick ? Put the product in the hand of the customer, so that they feel they already have it, then they have to pay.
Its that too, but that aspect of it isnt gambling. It's the part where buying the existing loot box gives you access to a second, yet unknown, gambling outcome.
I can see how this can work in the US, but courts in Belgium (and Europe in general) do not stop at technicalities and they can absolutely consider it gambling without having to define the exact boundaries of gambling.
Beliefs don't have to be black and white. You're allowed to be mostly for deregulation, while still finding that some key bits of regulation make sense.
Should all gambling be illegal then? I fail to see the problem with it. If somebody feels that's where she wants to put her money - great. If you arguing that's poor use of somebody's money then you may also want to ban whole lot of foods and gadgets. Those can be addictive too.
Gambling is tightly controlled and age-restricted in most countries, usually only available to those aged 18+.
Publishers have been using the argument that loot boxes aren't gambling in order to justify making them available to minors. As far as I'm aware, Belgiums' decision to ban them is more a recognition that they are, in fact, gambling, and therefore should not be available to minors.
I think it’s the targeting. I’m no prude by any stretch and am in favor of both legalized gambling and prostitution. But I wouldn’t want either to be marketed or directly available to minors.
That extends to gaming platforms and the trend toward randomized loot boxes. It’s not “like gambling”. It is gambling. Arguably worse though as there’s no regulatory oversight.
Good laws recognise that where preferences/tendencies are likely to become addictions for some people, they cease to be merely conscious "wants" or "choices", and thus some level of control is required to limit the damage both to the individual and to society.
Gambling, both online and at casinos is perfectly legal in Belgium (and most EU countries) so this is not in any way about making gambling illegal. This is just about making companies that sell gambling 'products' adhere to the regulations that exist for gambling.
Pretty sure Valve haven't actually removed lootboxes, they just show which common reward you will get if you are in Belgium, Rares are still random.
When you consider that the above is enough that Valve haven't been touched yet, it just feels like EA are digging their heels for the sake of it.
On the other hand, these are the same people who gave us BF2 and have been releasing a near identical game every year since the 90's so they may have just gotten lazy and not even noticed the law. Far too used to no effort money making that lot.
> it just feels like EA are digging their heels for the sake of it.
That's exactly it. They are challenging this in court because they don't want to lose their loot boxes by this enforcement spreading to other countries.
They could pursue it all the way up to EU supreme court. That would set a binding legal precedent for the EU, hopefully not in favor of EA.
So, once again a government tries to dictate what people can and cannot spend their money on.
I don't like games with lootboxes. I don't buy lootboxes. I don't buy games that have them. As a game developer, I don't work on games with lootboxes.
But this is my personal preference, and I am an adult who is capable of making such a decision. I respect other people who decide to buy lootboxes, even if I wouldn't do it myself. Why is it so hard to just live and let live?
It's my strong opinion that the whole loot box phenomenon makes games as a whole worse.
For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these boxes have been handled by many games noticeably warps the design goals of the game from "make an engaging experience" to "motivate the player to buy more loot boxes".
What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game.
This has been at its worst in mobile games, but there are plenty of console and PC titles with this issue as well. It's even gotten so far that big titles with no microtransactions include a heavy focus on loot boxes which can only be gained as quest rewards or bought using in-game currency (Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind).
I really don't like it. I get no joy from wading through mountains of useless items in the hope of finding that one rare gem I actually want. This applies to ordinary loot in RPGs as well. So, seeing that the global trend has been for games to evolve in this direction has been very frustrating for me. As such, this recent pushback - both these legal actions as well as the player backlash of recent loot box controversies - have been very interesting developments which I hope will lead to market-wide improvements in overall game design.
To elaborate: I do not mind microtransactions in general. There are a few games which have plenty of ways to spend real money in-game but which do not bother me (Fortnite, Elder Scrolls Online). The key difference, here, is that those are games in which the core game loop does not heavily incentivize you to spend money and where in-game transactions will mainly get you cosmetic content or additional story campaigns.