6 ms·

I mostly agree with the idea. Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done. That said I'm curious what happened and why these things are so addict

I mostly agree with the idea. Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done. That said I'm curious what happened and why these things are so addictive. As a kid I collected Wacky Packages. They were parody stickers that came in a pack of like 3 or 5 with a stick of gum just like Baseball Cards. While I probably owned 150 stickers or so I would never have considered myself addicted nor my friends. We were into them for a couple of months, probably spent no more than $20 total each. Compare to my nephew who was into Pokemon Cards and spent hundreds of dollars. Of course I new a few kids that seriously into baseball cards but they were the exception. With Pokemon cards it seemed much much better. Also before that a large percentage of my adult friend spent hundreds on Magic the Gathering cards. Some spent thousands. Now we have IAP in apps and some people are spending like crazy. What happened? What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards? What made IAP so big? I can only guess 2 things about IAP. One that it's super each to buy being connected directly to your account. Two that being a video game they can more easily use psychological techniques to manipulate people. That might explain the IAP issues. Not sure it explains Pokemon + Magic the Gathering vs Baseball Cards. Any ideas?

cncrnd 9y ago
Is there a game you can play with baseball cards? If not, then I'd say this is the reason. People like to win.
yomly 9y ago
I see this as a result of the evolution of data-driven optimisation (as a methodology) in concert with data becoming increasingly more available. Back in the day of stickers/baseball cards your data granularity was probably down to state/city-level sales by month. Now in the world of F2P gaming, you have per-minute per-user level of data. You're able to A/B the uplift in sales: - for introducing slot-machine like sound effects when opening the loot box - adding flashes when you open the loot box - giving out fewer lootboxes per hour - introducing more rare and powerful things in the lootbox You have "engagement" people who's sole job is to make stuff addictive nowadays, no longer is it a few people's job to dream up something fun to use and collect. It's now a cynical and scientific exercise to ruthlessly optimise IAP.
sametmax 9y ago
A good game around it.
- baby 9y ago
  kind of like a company behind a share.
- tgb 9y ago
  I agree - the fact that MT:G is actually an extremely good game seems to be underestimated here. I spent a fair amount of money on that game when I played it but almost exclusively the (at the time) $10 fee to play in a draft. So that was a social and gaming thing more than a get-cards thing. Since I was pretty bad I never got first pick of the good cards anyway.
Jonnerz 9y ago
Imagine if you could get your Wacky Packages or Pokemon cards instantly at any time? When I was younger I would have to travel to a shop (which requires begging my parents to take me) just to buy some pokemon cards. Nowadays, the parent's card is on their app store account and the kid can press a button to receive their instant gratification. It's just too easy... Combine that with the fact the collecting aspect is attached to an addictive video game.
rimliu 9y ago
> why these things are so addictive Possible reason: http://psychopathsandlove.com/intermittent-reinforcement/ http://psychopathsandlove.com/intermittent-reinforcement/
kd5bjo 9y ago
People have a better understanding of how much they're spending when they use hard currency instead of an electronic charge. IAP just don't feel like spending money the same way handing bills to a retail clerk for some cards does.
vidarh 9y ago
Pokemon have had the games and 20 years worth of TV series that are pretty much extended ads. For IAP: Instant gratification coupled with tons of analytics. Being able to tweak the balance until you get just enough valuable items to continue even if you don't get the item you really badly want. Making it into a weapons race or status race with other players (I once used about $200 on buying boosts in a niche online strategy game because another player pissed me off enough that I "bankrolled" an entire alliance just to see him lose; I subsequently closed my account and never played the game again, as I realized how easy it'd be to keep throwing money at it - it felt worth it for the satisfaction that once, but it'd have been a really bad habit to get into).
gaius 9y ago
Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done. I was on the train the other day, the girl sitting next to me was playing one of those games where you have to watch an ad to get to the next level. Just as she was about to level up the train went into a tunnel so the ad wouldn’t play. Within seconds literally she was frantic, eyes staring, pounding the screen with her finger, I almost thought she would crack the glass. If that’s not addiction I don’t know what is. Makers of these games need to take a good hard look at themselves in the mirror.
- yomly 9y ago
  I've had a regular end-user who is not in the industry plain-face defend this as an inevitable progression of the improvement of content rather than shady dark-patterns and cynical psychological manipulation. "And what's the big deal that X wants to play candy crush all the time cos it's fun." "And what's the problem in putting heroin in Coca-Cola if it makes everyone feel good?" is my usual stance on that matter, unfortunately not everyone shares my view of the link between UX dark-patterns and addictive substances.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    I know you just used it as an example, but personally I thought Candy Crush wasn't that bad of an offender as most modern games. You could play pretty far into the game without spending a dime (except $0.99 after every 20 levels or so if you didn't want to bug your friends to log in and help get you the ticket to unlock the next section...). I'm pretty sure I got to like level 128 without using any of their consumable items except in one level where I was forced to as a tutorial, and another level where I used one I was given for free because I had replayed the level too many times and was sick of it. You do have limited 'lives' per day (and then they try to sell you on getting more to keep playing), but I saw that as a daily challenge of how far I could get before the lives depleted, since as long as I kept beating levels I didn't lose lives, and once it did, I quit for the day. All in all, I got a lot of enjoyment out of that game and only spent less than $10. And that money spent was easily worth it. That being said, I have heard that the later levels are absolutely brutal, and are nearly impossible to beat without using the consumables or getting damn lucky with the types and patterns of candy that appeared, so it may get more predatory at that point.
wingspar 9y ago
Never into Pokémon or MtG, but aren’t they a ToTALLY different thing from baseball cards? The purpose of Pokémon and MtG cards are to use them in games/competitions, where the more desirable/expensive cards yield a game advantage. But baseball cards were(are) primarily used for fans of the players/game, to learn about players (stats),not a game in itself. Sure some cards were more desirable than others, but more for bragging than game advantage. I think the more comparable to Pokémon and MtG, is fantasy sports leagues where the addiction is rampant.
- ikurei 9y ago
  You are right there are differences, but I don't think they are so huge. Collecting something, having a binder with your collection, showing it to people... is an attractive activity for many, and may not be that different from playing against said people. I was deep into MtG (playing in tournaments, wining a few small ones, throwing a few hundred bucks at it), although I've never gotten into any other collection hobby. To me, playing was the best part and what gave meaning to the rest of it. I loved the competitiveness, and coming up with strategies... but also the social aspects of it, of seeing others do the same activities. Many of these social aspects can still be there for "collecting without playing"-alternatives right? I enjoyed greatly seeing rare cards in other peoples collection, and getting a few of my own (rare editions, customized units, misprints...) So yeah, for people that only care about the competitive aspects, MTG is totally different from baseball cards; for others, both hobbies may share many aspects.
the_drew 9y ago
Same thing is true of football cards here in Europe, to complete 1 sticker book, like for the forthcoming world cup someone calculated will cost something like £1500. I can't remember the numbers, but there's 32 teams of 11 players (not including subs), there's 8 cards in a pack, of which there are typically 2-3 duplicates, so you need to buy multiples of the same team just to complete one team and then swap with friends at school to complete the others. And that's the hook that gets ~~kids~~ parents buying, it's the element of peer pressure. My boy is not into football and isn't collecting the cards, he's currently a social outcast as a result. Fortunately, he has a strong character and isn't bothered by it, but peer pressure is the answer to your question IMO. Edit: typos.
megaman22 9y ago
My suspicion is that more parents are tolerant of wasting money on such things and enabling their children than in the past.
ozmbie 9y ago
It’s a pretty well understood psychological system of variable rewards. It’s the same reason people open up Facebook or Reddit or Hacker News every day: you don’t know what interesting content you’ll see and that keeps you coming back. Except games aren’t social network filled with user generated content. Developers make the content (items, skins etc) and have figured out that presenting in a randomised way drives better engagement.
codetrotter 9y ago
> What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards? I grew up with Pokemon and I might have some answer for that. Before Pokemon I had a binder of basketball cards. I collected them but I never had a lot of them. Some of them were cool and shiny, some were split into three parts so they were three smaller cards in one and I liked those as well. Additionally I had a favorite team; the Chicago Bulls and of course those cards were special to me as well. Still though there wasn't much you could really do with the basketball cards and I think probably the same goes with baseball cards right? I had my binder, I'd sit down and flip through the binder, I'd trade cards with others now and then. When Pokemon came, it took our school by storm. We were all watching the Pokemon anime on TV, we were playing Pokemon on our Gameboy Color units, and we played Pokemon the trading card game (TCG). Pokemon the TV series told the story of a boy that was about our age. He went on a grand adventure, he was considerate towards his Pokemons and towards others. But most importantly, he was on a mission to catch them all and to become the very best. This idea; catch them all and become the very best is repeated pretty much non-stop throughout the whole TV series and the movies. So Ash Ketchum (the main character of the first series) becomes an idol for us kids and we want to be like him. We want to become Pokemon masters. We play the Gameboy game day out and day in when we are at home. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Battling. Grinding. Advancing in the game. The school did not allow us to bring our Gameboys though. However we played the Pokemon TCG a lot during recess. We also played the Pokemon TCG at home because it was fun -- it wasn't just a substitute for the Gameboy game, but nonetheless I think the fact that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school made us play the TCG even more at school than we would have otherwise. But I think it was good that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school. Playing the TCG was a much more social activity IMO. So we play the TCG and we all want to be the very best. How do you become best? You build the best deck. But there is no single best deck. The strength of your deck depends on what your opponent has in his/her deck. Also the best cards are more rare than the others of course. Additionally the drawings on the cards were awesome and everyone wanted shiny cards which were also rare. It was a perfect storm. Very very clever marketing. I think Pokemon contributed a lot to my childhood though and I am happy that Nintendo made Pokemon. F2P apps that use dark patterns and psychological tricks to extract money from their userbase might actually be closer in nature to Pokemon than I'd like to admit but still it feels fundamentally different. You might argue that in a way the Pokemon TCG was "pay to win" and in a way I would agree but at the same time the TCG still depended on being able to balance your deck correctly and there was always a strong element of randomness that no amount of money could get rid of for you. In conclusion, with the Pokemon TCG you had both the prettiness of the cards (some kids collected only and never played even) but you also have the utility of the cards in playing a game combined with the best cards being rare, causing many of us to buy as many of them as we could get money for from our parents so that we could build better decks than our friends had and beat them and also so that we could show off our rarest cards to one-another. Speaking of rarity; I know there are some baseball cards that are more rare than others. I don't know if the same goes for basketball cards but when we collected basketball cards there was never any talk about rarity. Perhaps likewise rarity of baseball cards was not something that kids "knew about"? With Pokemon cards you knew for example that shiny cards were rare because you could tell from the fact that you usually did not get any of them in the booster packs and the full decks contained like one of them or so, so it was immediately obvious that the shiny cards were "special". The Pokemon cards also had various markings that we attributed value to. Furthermore, with Pokemon you knew the Pokemons from the show and everyone had their favorite Pokemon. For many of the Pokemons, multiple different cards existed, so there were more than just one card to collect for each of the Pokemons that you liked among the 151 Pokemons. Additionally, there were other types of cards that were needed for the game, including "trainer cards" that gave special powers or other advantages and there were "potions" and there were "energy colors" that you needed for attacks. The energy cards were the least valuable because they were so common. Some rare kinds of energy cards existed as well of course but everyone had way more energy cards than they needed. There were some trainers and potions that were very common as well, and some Pokemons that were too. But sometimes you'd find that other kids wanted the cards that you didn't want and you'd trade with them. For example I once traded a common Pikachu card with a kid that was obsessed with Pikachu and he gave me a card that in my eyes was much better, so we both ended up very happy from that trade. I also remember there was a series of Pokemon cards that were not the TCG type cards. Neither me nor anyone I knew liked those cards, exactly because you couldn't do anything with them other than to just look at them whereas with the TCG cards you could both look at them and play with them. So definitely the being able to play with them aspect was hugely important.
madshiva 9y ago
You can't compare Magic the Gathering with loot boxes or maybe only the online version of that game. If you play MTG, you own a real card...
scotty79 9y ago
I think it's just people have more money to gamble. Baseball cards became a thing because Americans already had too much money. Other countries that got hit by world wars didn't have baseball cards. New milenium came and now money is more useless than ever and people have much eadier time to gamble it away.
- slac 9y ago
  Maybe because other countries do not play baseball? (Except japan Canada Cuba and a few other island countries)
  - dempseye 9y ago
    The UK and Ireland had cards representing Premiership soccer players. You would buy a book in which to collect the cards and the goal was to fill in every player on every team in the league. The cards were sold in packs of ten or something, and kids used to trade them with each other in the playground.
  - astura 9y ago
    Uh, you're forgetting a few hundred million people in South America and Korea.
  - xelhark 9y ago
    Yeah, we had Italian Football player cards because Italy loves football.
- paganel 9y ago
  > Baseball cards became a thing because Americans already had too much money. This reminded me that I should start collecting the Panini stickers for the upcoming football World Cup. The only issue is that I've read recently that they doubled in price and I had a hard-time convincing myself to throw money their way even they were cheaper, much less now, with the current price. Which is a shame, because I first collected World Cup Panini stickers 25 years ago, when I was a kid.
thousandautumns 9y ago
Magic the Gathering cards have a use beyond collecting. Its an actual game people play, and card prices are driven not only by their rarity, but their utility. Usually when a card spikes in price it is because someone somewhere has made a successful deck archetype that utilizes the card. That's why most decks played in competitive Magic only have 75 cards, but usually average several hundred dollars, sometimes pushing 1000 in some formats.
Goronmon 9y ago
When playing physical card games like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, you are constrained in who can play against due to the physical nature of the cards. The "best" decks you play against are your friends and other players around you, unless you are at the point where you are specifically entering tournaments. I know when I played for a bit back during my school days it was just me and a couple friends who did it fairly casually, so there was very little pressure to spend lots of money to build a great deck. And if someone did try to spend tons of money we probably would have harassed them about it anyways. The problem is nowadays, due to the online nature of these games, is that you aren't just playing with friends and other people near you, you are playing with anyone who happens to be online. That means you are much more likely to play against people with good decks who spent lots of money building that deck. So the pressure is much greater to also spend money.
boobsbr 9y ago
> Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done. Don't play the games then.

cncrnd 9y ago

Is there a game you can play with baseball cards? If not, then I'd say this is the reason. People like to win.

yomly 9y ago

I see this as a result of the evolution of data-driven optimisation (as a methodology) in concert with data becoming increasingly more available. Back in the day of stickers/baseball cards your data granularity was probably down to state/city-level sales by month. Now in the world of F2P gaming, you have per-minute per-user level of data. You're able to A/B the uplift in sales: - for introducing slot-machine like sound effects when opening the loot box - adding flashes when you open the loot box - giving out fewer lootboxes per hour - introducing more rare and powerful things in the lootbox You have "engagement" people who's sole job is to make stuff addictive nowadays, no longer is it a few people's job to dream up something fun to use and collect. It's now a cynical and scientific exercise to ruthlessly optimise IAP.

sametmax 9y ago

A good game around it.

baby 9y ago
kind of like a company behind a share.
tgb 9y ago
I agree - the fact that MT:G is actually an extremely good game seems to be underestimated here. I spent a fair amount of money on that game when I played it but almost exclusively the (at the time) $10 fee to play in a draft. So that was a social and gaming thing more than a get-cards thing. Since I was pretty bad I never got first pick of the good cards anyway.

Jonnerz 9y ago

Imagine if you could get your Wacky Packages or Pokemon cards instantly at any time? When I was younger I would have to travel to a shop (which requires begging my parents to take me) just to buy some pokemon cards. Nowadays, the parent's card is on their app store account and the kid can press a button to receive their instant gratification. It's just too easy... Combine that with the fact the collecting aspect is attached to an addictive video game.

rimliu 9y ago

> why these things are so addictive Possible reason: http://psychopathsandlove.com/intermittent-reinforcement/ http://psychopathsandlove.com/intermittent-reinforcement/

kd5bjo 9y ago

People have a better understanding of how much they're spending when they use hard currency instead of an electronic charge. IAP just don't feel like spending money the same way handing bills to a retail clerk for some cards does.

vidarh 9y ago

Pokemon have had the games and 20 years worth of TV series that are pretty much extended ads. For IAP: Instant gratification coupled with tons of analytics. Being able to tweak the balance until you get just enough valuable items to continue even if you don't get the item you really badly want. Making it into a weapons race or status race with other players (I once used about $200 on buying boosts in a niche online strategy game because another player pissed me off enough that I "bankrolled" an entire alliance just to see him lose; I subsequently closed my account and never played the game again, as I realized how easy it'd be to keep throwing money at it - it felt worth it for the satisfaction that once, but it'd have been a really bad habit to get into).

gaius 9y ago

Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done. I was on the train the other day, the girl sitting next to me was playing one of those games where you have to watch an ad to get to the next level. Just as she was about to level up the train went into a tunnel so the ad wouldn’t play. Within seconds literally she was frantic, eyes staring, pounding the screen with her finger, I almost thought she would crack the glass. If that’s not addiction I don’t know what is. Makers of these games need to take a good hard look at themselves in the mirror.

yomly 9y ago
I've had a regular end-user who is not in the industry plain-face defend this as an inevitable progression of the improvement of content rather than shady dark-patterns and cynical psychological manipulation. "And what's the big deal that X wants to play candy crush all the time cos it's fun." "And what's the problem in putting heroin in Coca-Cola if it makes everyone feel good?" is my usual stance on that matter, unfortunately not everyone shares my view of the link between UX dark-patterns and addictive substances.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  I know you just used it as an example, but personally I thought Candy Crush wasn't that bad of an offender as most modern games. You could play pretty far into the game without spending a dime (except $0.99 after every 20 levels or so if you didn't want to bug your friends to log in and help get you the ticket to unlock the next section...). I'm pretty sure I got to like level 128 without using any of their consumable items except in one level where I was forced to as a tutorial, and another level where I used one I was given for free because I had replayed the level too many times and was sick of it. You do have limited 'lives' per day (and then they try to sell you on getting more to keep playing), but I saw that as a daily challenge of how far I could get before the lives depleted, since as long as I kept beating levels I didn't lose lives, and once it did, I quit for the day. All in all, I got a lot of enjoyment out of that game and only spent less than $10. And that money spent was easily worth it. That being said, I have heard that the later levels are absolutely brutal, and are nearly impossible to beat without using the consumables or getting damn lucky with the types and patterns of candy that appeared, so it may get more predatory at that point.

wingspar 9y ago

Never into Pokémon or MtG, but aren’t they a ToTALLY different thing from baseball cards? The purpose of Pokémon and MtG cards are to use them in games/competitions, where the more desirable/expensive cards yield a game advantage. But baseball cards were(are) primarily used for fans of the players/game, to learn about players (stats),not a game in itself. Sure some cards were more desirable than others, but more for bragging than game advantage. I think the more comparable to Pokémon and MtG, is fantasy sports leagues where the addiction is rampant.

ikurei 9y ago
You are right there are differences, but I don't think they are so huge. Collecting something, having a binder with your collection, showing it to people... is an attractive activity for many, and may not be that different from playing against said people. I was deep into MtG (playing in tournaments, wining a few small ones, throwing a few hundred bucks at it), although I've never gotten into any other collection hobby. To me, playing was the best part and what gave meaning to the rest of it. I loved the competitiveness, and coming up with strategies... but also the social aspects of it, of seeing others do the same activities. Many of these social aspects can still be there for "collecting without playing"-alternatives right? I enjoyed greatly seeing rare cards in other peoples collection, and getting a few of my own (rare editions, customized units, misprints...) So yeah, for people that only care about the competitive aspects, MTG is totally different from baseball cards; for others, both hobbies may share many aspects.

the_drew 9y ago

Same thing is true of football cards here in Europe, to complete 1 sticker book, like for the forthcoming world cup someone calculated will cost something like £1500. I can't remember the numbers, but there's 32 teams of 11 players (not including subs), there's 8 cards in a pack, of which there are typically 2-3 duplicates, so you need to buy multiples of the same team just to complete one team and then swap with friends at school to complete the others. And that's the hook that gets ~~kids~~ parents buying, it's the element of peer pressure. My boy is not into football and isn't collecting the cards, he's currently a social outcast as a result. Fortunately, he has a strong character and isn't bothered by it, but peer pressure is the answer to your question IMO. Edit: typos.

megaman22 9y ago

My suspicion is that more parents are tolerant of wasting money on such things and enabling their children than in the past.

ozmbie 9y ago

It’s a pretty well understood psychological system of variable rewards. It’s the same reason people open up Facebook or Reddit or Hacker News every day: you don’t know what interesting content you’ll see and that keeps you coming back. Except games aren’t social network filled with user generated content. Developers make the content (items, skins etc) and have figured out that presenting in a randomised way drives better engagement.

codetrotter 9y ago

> What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards? I grew up with Pokemon and I might have some answer for that. Before Pokemon I had a binder of basketball cards. I collected them but I never had a lot of them. Some of them were cool and shiny, some were split into three parts so they were three smaller cards in one and I liked those as well. Additionally I had a favorite team; the Chicago Bulls and of course those cards were special to me as well. Still though there wasn't much you could really do with the basketball cards and I think probably the same goes with baseball cards right? I had my binder, I'd sit down and flip through the binder, I'd trade cards with others now and then. When Pokemon came, it took our school by storm. We were all watching the Pokemon anime on TV, we were playing Pokemon on our Gameboy Color units, and we played Pokemon the trading card game (TCG). Pokemon the TV series told the story of a boy that was about our age. He went on a grand adventure, he was considerate towards his Pokemons and towards others. But most importantly, he was on a mission to catch them all and to become the very best. This idea; catch them all and become the very best is repeated pretty much non-stop throughout the whole TV series and the movies. So Ash Ketchum (the main character of the first series) becomes an idol for us kids and we want to be like him. We want to become Pokemon masters. We play the Gameboy game day out and day in when we are at home. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Battling. Grinding. Advancing in the game. The school did not allow us to bring our Gameboys though. However we played the Pokemon TCG a lot during recess. We also played the Pokemon TCG at home because it was fun -- it wasn't just a substitute for the Gameboy game, but nonetheless I think the fact that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school made us play the TCG even more at school than we would have otherwise. But I think it was good that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school. Playing the TCG was a much more social activity IMO. So we play the TCG and we all want to be the very best. How do you become best? You build the best deck. But there is no single best deck. The strength of your deck depends on what your opponent has in his/her deck. Also the best cards are more rare than the others of course. Additionally the drawings on the cards were awesome and everyone wanted shiny cards which were also rare. It was a perfect storm. Very very clever marketing. I think Pokemon contributed a lot to my childhood though and I am happy that Nintendo made Pokemon. F2P apps that use dark patterns and psychological tricks to extract money from their userbase might actually be closer in nature to Pokemon than I'd like to admit but still it feels fundamentally different. You might argue that in a way the Pokemon TCG was "pay to win" and in a way I would agree but at the same time the TCG still depended on being able to balance your deck correctly and there was always a strong element of randomness that no amount of money could get rid of for you. In conclusion, with the Pokemon TCG you had both the prettiness of the cards (some kids collected only and never played even) but you also have the utility of the cards in playing a game combined with the best cards being rare, causing many of us to buy as many of them as we could get money for from our parents so that we could build better decks than our friends had and beat them and also so that we could show off our rarest cards to one-another. Speaking of rarity; I know there are some baseball cards that are more rare than others. I don't know if the same goes for basketball cards but when we collected basketball cards there was never any talk about rarity. Perhaps likewise rarity of baseball cards was not something that kids "knew about"? With Pokemon cards you knew for example that shiny cards were rare because you could tell from the fact that you usually did not get any of them in the booster packs and the full decks contained like one of them or so, so it was immediately obvious that the shiny cards were "special". The Pokemon cards also had various markings that we attributed value to. Furthermore, with Pokemon you knew the Pokemons from the show and everyone had their favorite Pokemon. For many of the Pokemons, multiple different cards existed, so there were more than just one card to collect for each of the Pokemons that you liked among the 151 Pokemons. Additionally, there were other types of cards that were needed for the game, including "trainer cards" that gave special powers or other advantages and there were "potions" and there were "energy colors" that you needed for attacks. The energy cards were the least valuable because they were so common. Some rare kinds of energy cards existed as well of course but everyone had way more energy cards than they needed. There were some trainers and potions that were very common as well, and some Pokemons that were too. But sometimes you'd find that other kids wanted the cards that you didn't want and you'd trade with them. For example I once traded a common Pikachu card with a kid that was obsessed with Pikachu and he gave me a card that in my eyes was much better, so we both ended up very happy from that trade. I also remember there was a series of Pokemon cards that were not the TCG type cards. Neither me nor anyone I knew liked those cards, exactly because you couldn't do anything with them other than to just look at them whereas with the TCG cards you could both look at them and play with them. So definitely the being able to play with them aspect was hugely important.

madshiva 9y ago

You can't compare Magic the Gathering with loot boxes or maybe only the online version of that game. If you play MTG, you own a real card...

scotty79 9y ago

I think it's just people have more money to gamble. Baseball cards became a thing because Americans already had too much money. Other countries that got hit by world wars didn't have baseball cards. New milenium came and now money is more useless than ever and people have much eadier time to gamble it away.

slac 9y ago
Maybe because other countries do not play baseball? (Except japan Canada Cuba and a few other island countries)
- dempseye 9y ago
  The UK and Ireland had cards representing Premiership soccer players. You would buy a book in which to collect the cards and the goal was to fill in every player on every team in the league. The cards were sold in packs of ten or something, and kids used to trade them with each other in the playground.
- astura 9y ago
  Uh, you're forgetting a few hundred million people in South America and Korea.
- xelhark 9y ago
  Yeah, we had Italian Football player cards because Italy loves football.
paganel 9y ago
> Baseball cards became a thing because Americans already had too much money. This reminded me that I should start collecting the Panini stickers for the upcoming football World Cup. The only issue is that I've read recently that they doubled in price and I had a hard-time convincing myself to throw money their way even they were cheaper, much less now, with the current price. Which is a shame, because I first collected World Cup Panini stickers 25 years ago, when I was a kid.

thousandautumns 9y ago

Magic the Gathering cards have a use beyond collecting. Its an actual game people play, and card prices are driven not only by their rarity, but their utility. Usually when a card spikes in price it is because someone somewhere has made a successful deck archetype that utilizes the card. That's why most decks played in competitive Magic only have 75 cards, but usually average several hundred dollars, sometimes pushing 1000 in some formats.

Goronmon 9y ago

When playing physical card games like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, you are constrained in who can play against due to the physical nature of the cards. The "best" decks you play against are your friends and other players around you, unless you are at the point where you are specifically entering tournaments. I know when I played for a bit back during my school days it was just me and a couple friends who did it fairly casually, so there was very little pressure to spend lots of money to build a great deck. And if someone did try to spend tons of money we probably would have harassed them about it anyways. The problem is nowadays, due to the online nature of these games, is that you aren't just playing with friends and other people near you, you are playing with anyone who happens to be online. That means you are much more likely to play against people with good decks who spent lots of money building that deck. So the pressure is much greater to also spend money.

boobsbr 9y ago

> Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done. Don't play the games then.