[HN Gopher] Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court
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Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court
Author : defenestration
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-03-09 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ruetir.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ruetir.com)
| jmyeet wrote:
| This makes me sad. I think loot boxes with RNG rewards are a
| disgusting practice. It's gambling that minors are allowed to do.
|
| One of the things I respect Epic Games for is they didn't follow
| this profitable path for Fortnite. In Fortnite, you want the
| skin, you buy the skin. You don't buy a ton of boxes and hope to
| get lucky.
|
| Gambling with an immediate result is bad. It's particularly bad
| for children. But it's also bad for adults (eg online slot
| machines).
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > I think loot boxes with RNG rewards are a disgusting
| practice.
|
| I completely agree. I think there exist many disgusting
| practices; that doesn't mean those practices should be
| prohibited.
|
| As an alternate approach, suppose that this were addressed
| through ESRB or similar: "gambling elements" could be called
| out as a theme (alongside "smoking" or "gore"), and have a
| minimum associated rating (e.g. not "E for Everyone").
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Yes. Just apply existing VLT gambling laws to this stuff. 18+
| rating and odds of winning must be made public.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Fortnite is its own evil. They only show an extremely small
| fraction of the items available each day, with no indication of
| whether they'll return, so that you feel you have to buy things
| now in case you never have the chance again.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I think this argument is a stretch for two reasons:
|
| 1. Anyone who sells anything has limited runs, sales and so
| forth. Like that's just commerce; and
|
| 2. Loot box games do all the same thing anyway so at least on
| Fortnite you know the cost of what you want.
|
| This is one of these situations where Fortnite is strictly
| better than RNG loot boxes. That's not the same as saying
| they do no wrong. But better? Objectively, yes.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| > Anyone who sells anything has limited runs, sales and so
| forth.
|
| Yes, but Fortnite pushes this to the absolute extreme. It's
| one thing to visit a store with thousands of products where
| there's a discount on some of the items and a few limited-
| time offers. It's a very different thing to visit another
| store which has thousands of products but only makes eight
| of them available for sale each day, always as a limited-
| time offer, with no information about the rest of the
| catalogue.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| I don't have any interest in fortnite but I don't follow why
| this is bad. These are just skins right? Like no
| differentiation besides personal aesthetic preference?
| Couldn't these be sold with no ambiguity, never ever coming
| back, and have literally no impact on your desire to buy?
|
| Have you ever felt a desire to buy a shirt because it won't
| be available to purchase again?
|
| Is there really a world where they say "this asset is for
| sale today and in 28 days" and you say "oh good I will want
| to be it then but not now"?
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Well, Fortnite doesn't let you customise your appearance
| _at all_ without buying skins. If you want your character
| to match your gender, you have to buy a skin. If you want
| your character to look even slightly good, you have to buy
| a skin. And then buy a new one in two weeks because you had
| no idea that they 'd give you a better option later and you
| didn't know how scarce the current week's was.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Ok but how is this different from buying clothes in irl?
| You usually can't find the same clothes n months later in
| the same store.
| [deleted]
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Fast fashion retailers are similar indeed, but they have
| vastly larger selections and slower cycle times by
| comparison. Dozens of different items in each category
| versus a total number of items I can count on my hands.
| The item selection changing daily rather than seasonally
| (monthly?).
| speeder wrote:
| Selling cosmetic things is literally the best way of
| extracting money from this. Humans are social creatures,
| and clothes, real or virtual, are part of social display,
| some people (me for example) don't care about it, but they
| are exceptions, most people care deeply about using clothes
| for social display, and "threatening" them with not having
| a potentially high social status piece is a good way to
| make these people buy everything.
|
| This is the whole point of the fashion industry too, every
| year the "collection" changes, this makes people both
| afraid of being "left behind", but also of missing
| "classics" that won't be manufactured again, also it is why
| fashion designers release things in "collections", idea is
| seduce people in buying the entire collection, not just the
| piece they liked.
|
| When you are dealing with something that has an actual
| value, for example a base-version magic the gathering or
| pokemon card, the value is exactly whatever the item is
| useful for, the more useful it is the more people pay for
| it, but when you are dealing with stuff that is useful to
| display social status, things change, and you end with
| people paying ludicrous amounts of money to buy a brick
| written "Supreme" when the "Supreme" guys themselves are
| not sure why this is happening.
|
| https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/skate-brand-supreme-
| se...
|
| Or in case of game cards, people willing to pay sky high
| prices because the card has special art, sometimes even if
| the art is UGLIER than the base version, just because it is
| rare and a social status, things get even wilder when the
| social status is part of the reason the card exists in
| first place (for example cards that were manufactured to be
| given to judges or championship winners)
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Why would a fortnite skin become high status? Aren't they
| all available in unlimited quantity for a fairly standard
| price? That sounds like the opposite of scarcity. If
| something is popular then it will be the most common and
| thus the least interesting.
|
| Surely you're not saying people buy skins because they
| might turn out to be unpopular and thus cool to wear...
|
| I'm sure there's a niche culture around always buying the
| absolute latest piece, but that's not the fear of missing
| out and would exist even if everything was always
| available?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Introducing artificial scarcity on digital goods seems
| incredibly anti-consumer. Consider a different scenario
| where someone wants the skin both now and later (for
| whatever reason - value is driven by the desire of the
| purchaser), but doesn't have the financial wherewithal to
| purchase frivolous things at a whim. In that scenario the
| consumer has to make a choice between purchasing an
| artificially scarce good or making a good personal
| financial choice.
|
| From a neutral party standpoint (i.e. I neither want to
| purchase the skins, nor do I benefit financially from their
| purchase, nor do I wish to ban their sale outright), it
| seems obvious that a fungible, non-exhaustible digital good
| (with it's near-0 maintenance cost) should be restricted
| from exclusive periods of sale. There is no reason for it,
| other than to take advantage of human brain chemistry to
| drive a specific type of sale by producing artificial
| demand.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| That seems like an unlikely edge case given these are
| probably pretty cheap?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I think it is absolutely an issue if you are a kid or you
| are living paycheck to paycheck. There is a
| social/prestige aspect to skins and game rewards that
| shouldn't be underrated, and that type of business model
| is always targeting 'whales', i.e. people with a
| phenotypic disposition to getting carried away and
| spending a huge amount. I don't think it's right to let
| companies deploy manipulative business models or collect
| obscene rents - it always winds up hurting the most
| vulnerable people. Further, nothing of value is created
| by that model - it's simply another rent collection
| tactic to force people to pay up when it's best for the
| company.
|
| At least with physical goods there is an overhead to
| keeping old SKUs in the catalog. A digital skin is a
| metadata blob in a database, which can't be deleted
| anyways, since anyone who paid for access to that
| metadata needs it to exist.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| This is a textbook example of abusing FOMO (fear of missing
| out). It's real and Epic does it exactly because of this
| effect on people.
|
| If you're not completely convinced by some cosmetic item
| you might say "I don't know whether I really want this so
| I'll just wait and maybe buy it later". But if it's time-
| limited, in this case without indication whether it'll ever
| be on sale again, you cannot wait and decide later. It's
| deliberate time pressure on the decision.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| In what universe would you want an aesthetic item later
| more than you do now? Fear of missing out seems to be
| more experiential or with regards to items that may turn
| out to be have more utility in the future in my opinion.
| [deleted]
| politelemon wrote:
| Fear Of Missing Out:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
|
| Yes agreed, Epic's behavior in Fortnite is just as, if not
| more, predatory and relies on FOMO which is a huge factor in
| peer pressure among young people. Epic is not deserving of
| respect but should be called out more.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Fortnite has way more kids playing than Fifa and makes more
| money, so they're "more" evil, it does not matter if it's a
| skin on a store it's still a lot of money and kids are hooked
| to it.
|
| Lootbox issues are no the problem, games like Fortnite, Roblox,
| CoD are on the same level.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Is this somehow much worse than the football (soccer) sticker
| albums I used to buy in little foil-wrapped packets when I was a
| kid? Or Pokemon cards etc.
| drcongo wrote:
| They should make the loot boxes brown envelopes just like the
| real FIFA.
| kregasaurusrex wrote:
| As a kid I used to play the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game a lot, and
| the odds for getting cards of certain rarities were published on
| the packaging so you knew how many packs on average it would take
| to hit a super rare/ultra rare card. There were 8 commons and one
| rare slot per pack which had a 1:5 chance of being a super rare,
| 1:12 for an ultra rare, and 1:23 for a secret rare.[0]
|
| Additionally the cards had actual utility where the rarest cards
| often had better effects than commons and decks would be built
| around these rarer cards to be used in a duel. For games like
| Fortnite where the items in the lootboxes are purely cosmetic,
| the kids who are playing know that they aren't getting any
| competitive advantages with different skins in playing. However
| this becomes a bit murkier in games like FIFA and Star Wars
| Battlefront 2, where the rarest items from lootboxes contained
| items that were better than those obtained through leveling up
| alone. The article says that "92 percent of the FIFA boxes are
| not bought with real money, but unlocked via football matches and
| are therefore simply part of the game of skill." which implies
| players can expect to get a reasonable number of good players to
| build a team with and a team constructed of said players on
| aggregate would not provide a significant competitive advantage.
|
| My opinion is that players should spend time in games because
| they consider it to be fun rather than to be the best for the
| sake of being the best, and the in-game whales who spend the most
| $ on a game shouldn't be overpowered to the point where free to
| play players should feel they need to spend money to win.
|
| [0] https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Booster_Pack
| firekvz wrote:
| > My opinion is that players should spend time in games because
| they consider it to be fun rather than to be the best for the
| sake of being the best, and the in-game whales who spend the
| most $ on a game shouldn't be overpowered to the point where
| free to play players should feel they need to spend money to
| win.
|
| this is very debateable
|
| all games have (egaming and regular sports) have a competitive
| level, you always start playing for the fun, then you either
| become bored or you realize that you are good and want to start
| playing vs people with your same or more level of
| skill/ability, and thats where monetization comes.
|
| You talk about whales being able to pay for the best
| cards/items/etc in a game, but those usually get quickly
| demoralized as having overpowered stats/items/etc doesn't mean
| you can enter competitive skill inmediatly, it's easy for
| people in those games ti quickly identificate players who
| bought their way to the pro scene of the game, usually called
| pay to win players and defeat them
|
| I see it as something that needs to happen, in the past I've
| been the one in the other side of the trade, mostly in MMORPGS,
| where I was able to farm/craft/bot for really rare/unique items
| and sell to those willing to pay thousands of USD for them and
| yet, beat them in regular matches/pvp/etc, so it somehow
| encouraged the economy inside the game, and kept actual pro
| gamers happy, kept devs happy, kept the general population
| happy, the only ones really unhappy were the ones that paid for
| the items and got sad when it really didnt help
|
| of course, I understand that it should be regulated and not to
| make it fully stupid, but well, at the end, all of this things
| keep people invested and interested in games, otherwise, they
| would generally just die.
| slg wrote:
| >The article says that "92 percent of the FIFA boxes are not
| bought with real money, but unlocked via football matches and
| are therefore simply part of the game of skill." which implies
| players can expect to get a reasonable number of good players
| to build a team with and a team constructed of said players on
| aggregate would not provide a significant competitive
| advantage.
|
| It has been years since I played FIFA so maybe things have
| changed, but this quote is misleading which means the
| implication you got from it is incorrect. The FIFA lootboxes
| aren't uniform. There is a wide variety of different packs and
| they all have different odds and come with different costs. It
| is very easy to earn the cheapest versions with the worst odds.
| No one spends real money on those. The real money
| proportionally will go to the more expensive packs with the
| best odds and therefore can lead to an imbalance in play
| because those 8% of packs account for much more than 8% of the
| rewarded value.
| willis936 wrote:
| State endorsed gambling laundering.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I'd have upvoted if you just omitted the last word. I'm not
| sure where the money laundering obviously comes in (I'm sure
| it's possible, I just don't see how it's particularly
| applicable here).
| amock wrote:
| I read it as laundering gambling, not money. Gambling is
| illegal for children in most places and this is a way to make
| it legal.
| Conlectus wrote:
| I believe they meant that it was the gambling that was being
| laundered (disguised) not the money.
| CommanderData wrote:
| I'm not sure why this is down voted. This is exactly what I
| feel this is.
| vanviegen wrote:
| It's not state endorsed, just not illegal. It's hardly
| gambling, as there are no monetary rewards. And what has
| laundering got to do with anything?
| vkou wrote:
| It's not gambling laundering, it's just gambling.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm not sure "endorsed" is quite correct, as I read this it's a
| court saying it's "not-yet-forbidden" gambling laundering.
| supergirl wrote:
| that's funny considering that gambling is so restricted in the
| Netherlands: only state owned casinos are allowed and online
| gambling is not allowed
| defenestration wrote:
| The linked article is an English translation from this article in
| the Dutch newspaper NRC:
| https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/03/09/gedurfde-uitspraak-loot...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| (For anyone going just by the title: this is the _purchase_ of
| loot boxes.)
|
| I'm personally against this for moral reasons having to do a lot
| with corporate greed and and then some to do with gambling in
| general, but I do want to point out this isn't remotely new and
| isn't something that the digital gaming/entertainment industry
| came up. When we were kids, we all used to gamble by buying
| _Pokemon_ booster packs for $4 or $5 hoping they would contain a
| Charzard or a holographic Magikarp only to discover just another
| Koffing. That was specifically marketed towards and aimed at kids
| - probably even younger than those playing FIFA.
|
| Although - I realize now that I may be speaking out of ignorance
| as I have no clue if the Netherlands allowed the sale of Pokemon
| cards to minors in the first place?
|
| (I learned a few years ago that the smarter guys used to go in
| with a scale and weigh the packs to see which one was heavier due
| to the presence of a holographic card until Hasbro/TPCI wisened
| up and began adding blanks to make up for the weight difference.
| jafoi wrote:
| Good. The government does not have a right to restrict trade
| between citizens and companies. On the other hand, it's the
| parents' job to decide what their children can and can't do.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > The government does not have a right to restrict trade
| between citizens and companies.
|
| Of course it does, as a matter of category.
|
| The government makes it illegal for you to buy grenades, for
| instance.
| [deleted]
| icu wrote:
| I was really hoping that the pushback on videogame gambling by
| minors would gain more regulatory momentum, not less.
|
| I think it's going to take longer to see regulation stick due to
| a lack of first hand knowledge of lootboxes by politicians and
| judges, who to be fair, are of a generation that just do not
| understand the subject matter.
| zht wrote:
| im sure they understand the lootboxes of cash they get here and
| there on a nudge nudge wink wink basis
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I don't think legislators are entirely ignorant of the problem.
| They probably don't want to even try regulating artists; and
| the companies selling these lootboxes have insisted that any
| regulation would impinge upon freedom-of-speech. The
| regulations we have on gambling applies because the games
| involve wagering money; things like loot boxes[0] get around
| this primarily by not offering anything of value.
|
| Of course, the counterargument (which I agree with) is that
| these have the spirit of gambling - i.e. being designed to
| maximally fuck with the heads of people who are even slightly
| vulnerable to dopamine. You will probably get politicians to
| agree with you on that, but they won't want to waste political
| capital on an antipartisan[1] issue. Sure, it might have
| popular support, but it harms the country's interests to be
| regulating things that make money.
|
| [0] And their historical antecedents such as TCG booster packs,
| figurine blind bags, coin-op arcade games, and so on
|
| [1] Political issues can be broadly categorized into
| "partisan", "bipartisan", and "antipartisan":
|
| - Partisan issues are ones that typically find their way into a
| political party's "agenda". They are issues that one or more
| parties support and one or more parties oppose. Examples
| include basically any wedge issue in American politics.
|
| - Bipartisan issues are ones that are obvious to a
| supermajority of politicians. These are issues that "everybody
| supports" and pass Congress with wide margins. Examples include
| things like copyright law.
|
| - Antipartisan issues are ones that are obviously _bad_ to a
| supermajority of politicians, regardless of whatever popular
| support they might have. Examples include things like right-to-
| repair.
| sofixa wrote:
| The article is about the Netherlands, so basically none of
| your arguments are applicable.
| akersten wrote:
| Thank goodness. I was genuinely worried they'd make Pokemon card
| booster packs illegal next.
|
| Let kids live a little and learn the perils of gambling play
| money early. They can safely learn the disappointment of throwing
| 20 bucks into a box with no reward during a time when it's
| relatively consequence free, instead of throwing 20 grand into
| stock options and being shocked when it goes to 0.
|
| Loot boxes are not really gambling anyway, because there's not
| even monetary payout. It's the most tame form of "money pit"
| there is, and I'm glad we're not continuing this trip down "make
| things I don't like illegal" lane.
| [deleted]
| jnsie wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen so many ads in an article. To the
| point I stopped reading. Wow
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| This is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that
| serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is
| very real. I've witnessed first-hand a grown in sort of a
| "gambling" culture amongst kids, as early as elementary school.
| While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and
| whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more
| overt monetary component.
|
| Part of me, though, wonders if this is just me getting older and
| becoming one of those "grumps." It's painfully obvious that as a
| whole society is moving to becoming more and more accepting of
| things like this (for instance, the huge push towards gambling in
| organized sports in the US), that it has the feel of
| inevitability. My sense is this will be a net social negative,
| but perhaps experience will prove it to be not so bad.
| icu wrote:
| I don't think you're way off the mark, or being a "grumps" on
| the subject. Young minds can be heavily influenced which is why
| many societies regulate experiences that may cause harm.
|
| I'm sure there are children who aren't impacted by EA
| lootboxes, as I'm sure there are children who are. It's the
| ones that are I'm concerned about, and the families that will
| end up dealing with the fallout.
|
| I don't see why it's not possible to gate it behind a proof of
| age... however it's obvious that there is no incentive for EA
| to do so.
| barbazoo wrote:
| This is all really sad and I wonder how I'll ever protect my
| child from what these cooperations will come up with 10 years
| from now. I know probably every generation has lamented about
| this but I wonder if childhood these days is as fun as it
| used to be. Yesterday we overheard two kids, maybe 9 years
| old, discuss the local real estate market and how one house
| across the street went for a million bucks to which the other
| kid responded that it was probably because of their finished
| basement. WTH.
| moltke wrote:
| Just have a rule against closed software in the house. It
| works _very_ well.
| icu wrote:
| I hear what you're saying but my conclusion was that I'm
| never going to be able to protect my son and all I can do
| was prepare him in stages as best as possible.
|
| Change is inevitable... and in the past I used nostalgia as
| a mental point of origin to judge situations today. However
| I've come to see that change creates both negative and
| positive opportunity but it's just a matter of perspective.
|
| I'm sure there are positive aspects to those 9 year olds
| discussing real estate, like an opportunity to discuss
| sustainable development or homelessness and charities like
| Habitat for Humanity. Who knows where those seeds will lead
| a 9 year old?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Could be a sign of good parenting if they are aware of
| their future costs and that they should start investing
| their allowance in index funds to afford a house, as
| opposed to wasting it by gambling on lootboxes or yu gi oh
| cards.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards
| and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much
| more overt monetary component.
|
| The more I think about it, the more I realize loot boxes to
| kids now are what trading card packs were to kids back in the
| day. When I was in elementary school, I was deep into Yu-Gi-Oh!
| cards. Card packs ran ~$4 and carried the chance that you got a
| super powerful card. I spent probably close to $100 on cards
| over the years which, for a 8 year old kid, would be akeen to
| me dropping $3k on the new Mac Studio.
|
| But there were natural controls in place back then. I had to
| save up every week to get a new pack, and I only had one chance
| per week to buy a pack. Now with microtransaction, the biggest
| problem (in the context of kids), is how easily accessible it
| is. If I came home and opened my pack to find that it didn't
| have any good cards, I would have to wait another week to get
| another pack. Now a kid can just go and get another lootbox
| instantly.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| But they still have to pay for it right? How is this
| different than say if you bought your game cards, opened them
| up outside the store and after you realized you didn't get
| the card you wanted, you went back inside and bought another
| one? I'm confused how this is different
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| I agree; is the premise here that audiovisual spectacle of
| opening the box in the video game somehow compounds the
| problem? Or that there's some manipulation of scarcity or
| something? The "core mechanic" seems exactly the same.
| crayboff wrote:
| I think the issue is the lower barrier of access. Every
| small step added to the process discourages the use: get
| driven to the store, walking to the counter, talking to
| the employee, physically pulling money out of your
| pocket, physically seeing how much money you have left.
|
| All of those contribute to making it more difficult to
| buy cards.
|
| Loot boxes, on the other hand, is much easier. Once you
| store your credit card info, all you have to do is press
| a button or two.
|
| This is the general idea Nudge Theory (https://en.m.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#:~:text=Nudge%2....) when
| shaping behavior.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I assume because an 8 year old kid needs a ride, and more
| money to buy another pack.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| You quite certainly did not sit in front of the
| supermarket's cash register with your mom's credit card
| shoving packs of cards over the counter for hours on end.
| The overall physicality of the process back in the day
| prevented the feedback loops to manifest. The lack of speed
| decoupled spending from gratification thus ensuring your
| behavior wouldn't devolve into a bonafide gambling
| addiction.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I think the effect is similar to what Peter Norvig
| described in his "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data"
| lecture (which if you haven't seen, you should really check
| it out -- its awesome).
|
| In essence, yeah, the core mechanic is the same, but the
| digitization of it fundamentally transforms its ubiquity,
| how often it can be iterated, optimized for more and more
| segmented group of kids, etc. I think there is an argument
| to be made that enough of that can effectively change the
| character of the activity itself, even if it is at first
| glance "sorta the same thing."
| slg wrote:
| Many of these games have different types of in game
| currency which can be used to purchase lootboxes. With
| FIFA, one of those currencies can be bought with money. The
| other one can't be purchased directly and is earned through
| playing the game or selling what is received in the
| lootboxes. This means that a person doesn't need to use
| real money to participate in the gambling aspect. They can
| instead gamble their time which might not be as damaging as
| gambling money, but is still just as addicting.
|
| Also even the real money gambling in a game like FIFA is
| more dangerous than physical trading cards. With physical
| cards, you had to go to a store and pay at point of sale.
| You couldn't easily do that with your parent's credit card
| and there was always a person on the other end of the
| transaction to stop you or even just exist as a social
| obstacle to discourage obscene spending. Those obstacles
| don't exist with lootboxes. A parent's credit card can
| easily be added to an account and you don't have to look
| another human in the eyes to make a purchase.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > With physical cards, you had to go to a store and pay
| at point of sale.
|
| No, you didn't; mail-order and then online retail in the
| hobby games industry has existed as long trading card
| games have.
| slg wrote:
| Fair enough, but I believe that is a fraction of the
| business compared to in person sales. Most kids were
| buying baseball cards or Pokemon cards from local stores.
| Plus those methods of purchase introduce their own
| obstacles such as latency. It is much more difficult to
| form an addiction when there is a two-week turnaround in
| each transaction compared to the instantaneous clicking
| of a button.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I think the point stands: there is an aspect of delayed
| gratification in the waiting a week for money then
| getting away to go the store, and possibly waiting until
| you got home to open them. Mail order was worse, as
| postage added more waiting time and cost.
|
| Having it instantly accessible from your phone makes it
| so much easier to lose impulse control.
| autoexec wrote:
| Packs of cards don't have psychologically manipulative
| lights and sounds which probably does make a difference,
| but a pack of cards also can't send you constant
| notifications, and isn't accessible 27/7. Opening a pack
| outside the store and going right back inside isn't the
| same unless the kid never leaves the store's property and
| the store never closes.
|
| Packs of cards also released specific sets with set odds.
| Games can add or change the contents of lootboxes on the
| fly, as well as adjust the odds to keep you hooked. They
| can strategically give you a rare or very useful (for you)
| item when you've had a long streak of junk to keep you
| interested, or evaluate your play-style and chats to
| determine exactly when you're most vulnerable (tired,
| manic, just got your birthday money, etc).
|
| Loot boxes and gacha mechanics have their place, and can be
| fun but they are gambling and can also be exploitative.
| It's worth keeping a close eye on how they're being used
| and limiting the impact they'll have on kids.
| mFixman wrote:
| I'm sure my parents would disagree that Pokemon trading cards
| weren't a giant money sink designed to take their money.
|
| I can see a lot of problems with giving children access to
| credit cards, but I honestly fail to see how loot boxes are
| different from trading cards marketed to children. My high
| school enacted and enforced a ban on all card and board games
| because some parents were worried about child gambling; I'm
| still mad that they took the fun away from school recess
| because of a dumb moral panic.
| yakak wrote:
| I'm not sure how to feel about collectibles, I bought a lot
| of baseball card packs and didn't open them as an
| "investment" as a kid. Probably they beat inflation, but the
| market would be lower if people like me could ever be
| bothered to sell.
|
| In the case of digital "assets" though, I don't find it so
| legitimate. AFAIK, they can change their ToS whenever they
| like or cancel this version of the game, etc.
|
| Perhaps a shrewd system would pretend to be indifferent yet
| force them to escrow money for obligations related to hosting
| these assets and eventually make them wonder why they didn't
| just print cards and be done with it as complicated civil
| cases begin to emerge.
|
| (But should we really let the human endeavour degrade to the
| point where bartering pointless collectibles is where the
| smart people get allocated? I kind of agree with the IRS that
| we should add disincentives.)
| SkyBelow wrote:
| I feel they are very similar, but do have a few key
| differences. If these differences matter enough to make a
| moral difference is something we can discuss.
|
| A few of the key differences, in no particular order:
|
| 1. Trading card games come with base sets that have
| guaranteed cards and are useful for playing the game. This
| makes it TCGs better.
|
| 2. CCGs can be traded to others or sold. This one I'm unsure
| about.
|
| 3. Loot boxes are wrapped into games and are often designed
| to appeal to players in a much more intrusive way than TCGs .
| This makes loot boxes worse.
|
| 4-1. Some loot boxes have no impact on gameplay. These make
| loot boxes better.
|
| 4-2. Some loot boxes have an impact on gameplay larger than
| the impact of buying TCG boosters. These make loot boxes
| worse.
|
| 5. Loot boxes are often purchased through currency systems
| made to separate the buyers understanding of how much they
| are paying. This is why games often make you buy some
| currency and then use that currency to buy loot boxes, with
| some games have layers of currency in between. Compare this
| to TCG boosters which are sold in stores for specific dollar
| amounts. This make loot boxes worse.
|
| 6. You can buy specific cards you need directly from other
| players, while most loot box systems require buying more loot
| boxes until you get the specific item desired. This one is
| related to 2 and I am also unsure about.
|
| 7. Loot boxes are often built into games on ones phone and
| use tactics to encourage worse spending habits. This make
| loot boxes worse.
|
| Overall my personal opinion would be that loot boxes as a
| whole are worse than TCGs, but the better done loot boxes are
| comparable or slightly better (less predatory) than TCGs
| while the worse loot boxes are much much worse (more
| predatory).
|
| Edit: One way to look at it is that the more predatory loot
| boxes are an extension of TCGs that doubled down on the worse
| parts, which might be enough for it to cross a person's
| personal moral threshold.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| True, but those trading cards are worth big bucks nowadays.
| Lootbox rewards are basically worthless since you don't
| really "own" them and cant resell them
| Bombthecat wrote:
| And every year, they become useless. I still don't get why
| people spent so much money... Every year..
| kojeovo wrote:
| It's really only some first gen holo mint cards that are
| worth decent money. That's gotta be a tiny, tiny
| percentage.
| Nowado wrote:
| You mean, the issue with child gambling these days is that
| there's no promise of a big pay out?
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| The gambling part is no good in either case. But there is
| a difference between buying a toy/collectible and
| actually owning it vs. this digital skinner box stuff
| where all you really get is a hit of dopamine, the latter
| seems more insidious to me
| [deleted]
| Kiro wrote:
| So you're basically arguing for NFTs?
| BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote:
| This definitely isn't a universal experience and there are
| definitely a lot of trading card horror stories, but for me +
| friends growing up the purchase of trading cards had a
| different place in life. They were like one of life's small
| rewards you had a chance of rolling whenever going into a
| shop with a parent/guardian. Being at the checkout, putting
| on the little kid puppy-dog 'pleaseeeeeee' and the adult
| deciding if you've been 'good enough' and possibly giving you
| something for that. Acquisition was separate from their
| consumption and social role.
|
| With lootboxes, you're actively pursuing the purchase to
| immediately try to meet a goal. You want the purchase, make
| it, have the question answered of whether your roll was good
| or not and that's mostly it. Trading cards were taken home
| (or at least to the car), physically admired, stored,
| socially shared even if they weren't 'worth' sharing, and had
| a larger variance in subjective value for trading or gifting
| later.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| One small caveat: digital collections of lootbox items can
| be admired, organized, displayed, and in some games traded
| to other players. Of course, all these actions are dictated
| by the software for the most part, and can be arbitrarily
| restricted. I won't be able to seal a fancy digital hat and
| donate it to a local museum.
| BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote:
| It's true, which is why I tried to caveat it with 'even
| if they aren't worth sharing'. If I got a Tangela and had
| it in my pocket I'm still going to show the neighbour
| friend, she might even like Tangela especially well as a
| preference (tried to get at this with 'subjective
| value'). But with the number of football players and how
| it's much more stat/goal-based and the collector aspects
| are skewed towards the higher level, kids probably aren't
| making Discord calls to show their friend John Smith from
| the English division 2 league because he has a cute nose
| :)
| mFixman wrote:
| Did we have different childhoods, or do you not really
| forget yours?
|
| Children used to steal trading cards and have violent
| fights over them. Only a few dedicated nerds played the
| game; the rest just collected the cards and showed them as
| a proxy of self-worth.
|
| This is perfectly normal child behaviour, and I'm sure it
| was much worse than whatever's happening right now with
| lootboxes. The main difference between them isn't the lack
| car rides to the store; it's the moral panic mostly
| distributed by social media about how $fun_thing is killing
| children.
| BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote:
| We had different childhoods, I never saw violent fights.
| Totally didn't mean to present my memory as a universal
| truth which is why I led with the first sentence.
| Definitely whole weavings of intertwined complexities to
| unravel!
| k__ wrote:
| Doesn't gambling mostly come down to diposition?
|
| I did many addicting things in life an never became
| addicted.
| blockwriter wrote:
| I played Magic: the Gathering competitively growing up, and me
| and all of my contemporaries revered the idea of gambling. Loot
| boxes may be a different beast, which I would think would
| actually lead you more toward making simply bad financial
| decisions, like buying status items that you do not need and
| cannot afford with debt you will struggle to pay back. My
| adolescent milieu went on to have mixed results with regards to
| their participation in society. I think the gambling that
| Magic: the Gathering players revere is actually preferable to
| these items, which are a purchase and seem to discourage
| analysis of the value proposition or expected value of the act
| of purchase.
| vmception wrote:
| > the packages are _part_ of a game of skill, not a separate game
| of chance in itself.
|
| hahahhahahahaha lolwut! that's hilarious, is that what EA
| actually argued too or did the judges reach that conclusion on
| their own from a reading of the statute!
|
| Either way that is hilarious and obviously not the intention of
| the parliament, but I'll leave it up to them to figure that out
| if they actually care as much as the executive branch did.
| abcc8 wrote:
| I haven't played a FIFA game in probably 20 years so please
| excuse my potentially uninformed question. Do loot boxes improve
| the play experience of the game in any meaningful way?
| roofio wrote:
| They made a mode where you assemble a team of players from past
| and present called Fifa Ultimate Team (FUT). You start with a
| team of players who each of a rating of about 70.
|
| EA will release packs that contain star players with much
| higher ratings. In order to get these higher rated players on
| your team, you can either grind the game for several hours a
| day or pay to open some packs that might have the high rated
| players inside.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Grinding the game to open the boxes sounds fine to me, but
| how is it not a game of chance if you're just paying money to
| open a box? That's literally a lottery. Even if only 8% of
| boxes are opened that way, they should just not allow it
| flat-out.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It's interesting how we've gone from heavily regulating content
| in shows and games made for children to putting kids in digital
| Skinner boxes that extract the wealth of their parents in
| exchange for conceptual things of which there is no shortage.
|
| On the other hand, how different are loot boxes and DLC from the
| days where we played games at an arcade and had to insert 6 more
| quarters to complete a level, sometimes even if the player still
| has health? I guess the difference is that you leave behind an
| arcade, whereas modern video games stay with kids at all times
| and are designed to addict kids to an even greater degree than
| anything I ever played at TILT! arcades.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Authority (parents or otherwise) has a responsibility to protect
| people (particularly children) from vice and vultures. Children
| are particularly vulnerable because they are inexperienced in
| life, lacking will, consciousness, and wisdom.
|
| This is irresponsible. This is a failure of authority to protect
| children.
| goldfeld wrote:
| > "Lootboxes" .. "highest Dutch court"
|
| This is either high sci-fi parody or I want another hitech
| future, because it continually feels that all the technology in
| the world is only ever useful, successful for the most petty and
| meaningless ends. There needs to be a law that humanity's
| ignorance grows quadratically with scientific achievement.
| Ignorance of course is a proportional quality; when all the
| information in the world is at your fingertips you are doubly
| ignorant not to make expedient use of it. Oh, there are
| government rogue agents with all their noise and misinformation
| campaigns, sure. But there are also millions of programmers
| workings on clickbait ads for a living. Clearly some choice and
| free will is thrown in at some point in the learning curve. An
| isolated pre-discovery south american native is as wise or
| ignorant as his means (culture) allow. Our means are the most
| luxuriant humankind has seen yet. Great responsibilities and all
| that.. so that we're devolving into incoherent grunts. Yes I'd
| like a rant.
|
| Maybe TFA is about revisionist high medieval history and FIFAs
| are kinds of fiefs.
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