13 ms·

EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

172 points by Mustafabei 8y ago

Buffodecon 8y ago
I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm a libertarian and don't like regulations. On the second hand, these kinda regulations make sense.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Maybe you have just discovered that you're not libertarian after all, as some regulation seems to be better than no regulation is certain cases.
- pluma 8y ago
  "On the one hand, I'm a libertarian. On the other, I'm not an anarcho-capitalist." Well, yeah. It's called nuance.
- pdpi 8y ago
  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.
lelima 8y ago
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..). Good job Belgium!
- empath75 8y ago
  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.
  - Halop 8y ago
    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.
- Ntrails 8y ago
  Counterstrike boxes contain purely cosmetics. I can't get wound up about that. You can even buy the thing you actually want on the open market. CS:GO is not a game using lots of shitty in game mechanics/restrictions etc to drive people to spend money in order to play/compete. Same with Dota2.
  - kazagistar 8y ago
    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.
    - Ntrails 8y ago
      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
beezischillin 8y ago
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.
- mbel 8y ago
  > 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.
  - daemin 8y ago
    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.
    - mbel 8y ago
      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.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      The culture has changed and is ok with gambling being inserted everywhere, especially in tech circles. Look at the threads about daily fantasy sports in HN. Many impassioned comments about how the ability to bet on sports is freedom, etc..
Luc 8y ago
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.
- icc97 8y ago
  Indeed Panini world cup stickers too. You can't trade the results of the loot boxes though.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Insanity 8y ago
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.
- chinathrow 8y ago
  > It is EA after all, a company I don't have a lot of faith in. Why are you playing their games then?
  - matwood 8y 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.
    - Totoradio 8y ago
      NBA 2k is not an EA game
    - blueagle7 8y ago
      NBA 2K18 isn't made by EA. It's made my 2K Sports. EA's NBA game is NBA Live.
  - Insanity 8y ago
    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 things like this: https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-the-most-hated-1820391000 https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-... don't exactly make me warm up to actually buying an EA game.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
yAnonymous 8y ago
Ultimately, most publishers will probably handle it like Valve, who have found a brilliant workaround: Show players the contents of the next box they buy, which makes it not gambling. I hate it, but it's a very elegant solution to avoid any legal problems.
- dtech 8y ago
  That seems like a hack that won't hold up in court. Now it's still loot box gambling, but with the n+1 th box instead.
  - s3m4j 8y ago
    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.
    - kazagistar 8y ago
      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.
  - buckminster 8y ago
    Exactly. You're buying a known thing and an option. What's the option for? That's the gamble.
  - yAnonymous 8y ago
    I actually think it will hold up quite comfortably, as no court will be able to tell when exactly it starts being gambling.
    - seszett 8y ago
      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.
Crpt774 8y ago
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.
- dtech 8y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
pimmen 8y ago
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.
comboy 8y ago
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.
- koolba 8y ago
  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.
- nicktelford 8y ago
  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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dagw 8y ago
  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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tomhoward 8y ago
  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.
cyanbane 8y ago
Other than being digital, how are loot boxes different than being M:TG cards or baseball card packs?
- stestagg 8y ago
  Their impact
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- watwut 8y ago
  Not much, except that a.) probabilities of cards with given rarity are well known b.) M:TG are niche product.
  - archi42 8y ago
    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.
- gambiting 8y ago
  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.
  - cyanbane 8y ago
    This is a great point. No post-market locks the user into only purchasing via loot crates.
    - daemin 8y ago
      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.
golergka 8y ago
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?
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Either make all games 18+ so adults can be making such decisions, or restrict gambling within games available without age restriction. Promoting gambling to minors is something I find completely unethical.
- chrisoverzero 8y ago
  >I am an adult who is capable of making such a decision. Many are not the first part. Many who are the first part are not the second part.
petercooper 8y ago
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
- jpz 8y ago
  It’s not just the Belgians, if it stands up there that will be the thin edge of the wedge. The issue is the one of random drops for real money. It’s easy to see that has a gambling element to it.
  - petercooper 8y ago
    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
    - pdkl95 8y ago
      > 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~ [1] https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-463.html#NRS463Sec01862 https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-463.html#NRS463Sec01862 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c
Agentlien 8y ago
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.
- pharrington 8y ago
  Here's my anecdote. 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.
kgilpin 8y ago
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.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  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.
  - molf 8y ago
    Agreed; this should be made illegal entirely – this mechanic benefits no one except the game publisher.
    - kgilpin 8y ago
      That totally works for me as well :-)
    - cloakandswagger 8y ago
      And also the grown adults who enjoy gambling responsibly?
    - pitaj 8y ago
      Except that it lowers game cost for everyone else when whales buy a bunch of cosmetic items.
      - 8y ago
kakarot 8y ago
This is a growing problem in the gaming industry. 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.
arnvald 8y ago
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 $70 for. I stopped playing after a few weeks and I don't think I'll be buying this year's edition.
LiterallyDoge 8y ago
Remember when we made good games that people played for the sheer enjoyment of it and didn't need marketing witchcraft to hand-hold lazy designers?
lechiffre10 8y ago
They were also heavily criticized for adopting this game mechanic in star wars battlefront and eventually decided to drop it. I don't even understand the appeal of wanting to play games that have this sort of predatory feature. It's been around for a while and I've honestly never even been remotely attracted to games like that. I definitely feel like this has exponentially increased since iOS games called 'freemium'. Generally, the game will be free but then things can take 30minutes to be accomplished unless you buy diamonds that cost 1$ and you get instant gratification.
- ihuman 8y ago
  > I don't even understand the appeal of wanting to play games that have this sort of predatory feature. For some people, the fun of the real gameplay outways the negative of the lootboxes
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  " I don't even understand the appeal of wanting to play games that have this sort of predatory feature." I mean, it's not like you get to choose between the version of the game that has this vs the one that doesn't.
  - m000z0rz 8y ago
    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.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      Social pressures are another problem though with multiplayer games. Your friends play x You dont like x for reason y Which is stronger, your dislike of y or the enjoyment of playing x with friends.
DonHopkins 8y ago
Peter Molyneux's "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?" is the paradigm of loot boxes gone bad, taken to an absurd extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the_Cube%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the... Curiosity - what's inside the cube winner video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU >"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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SejMdncxbnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SejMdncxbnk >Curiosity Winner, Once Promised a "Life Changing" Prize by Peter Molyneux, Has Received Nothing: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/curiosity-winner-once-promised-a-life-changing-pri/1100-6425241/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/curiosity-winner-once-prom... Peter Molyneux A Pathological Liar? | Feature Creep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efeq_9XwU7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efeq_9XwU7s >"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."
zeroname 8y ago
A criminal investigation? Does that mean EA managers could get jailed if they visit Belgium? I'm just kidding of course. There's no reason to visit Belgium.
taobility 8y ago
China already released an enforced regulation about this last year: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/2/15517962/china-new-law-dota-league-of-legends-odds-loot-box-random https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/2/15517962/china-new-law-dot...

172 points by Mustafabei 8y ago

I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm a libertarian and don't like regulations. On the second hand, these kinda regulations make sense.

adrianN 8y ago
Maybe you have just discovered that you're not libertarian after all, as some regulation seems to be better than no regulation is certain cases.
pluma 8y ago
"On the one hand, I'm a libertarian. On the other, I'm not an anarcho-capitalist." Well, yeah. It's called nuance.
pdpi 8y ago
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.

lelima 8y ago

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..). Good job Belgium!

empath75 8y ago
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.
- Halop 8y ago
  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.
Ntrails 8y ago
Counterstrike boxes contain purely cosmetics. I can't get wound up about that. You can even buy the thing you actually want on the open market. CS:GO is not a game using lots of shitty in game mechanics/restrictions etc to drive people to spend money in order to play/compete. Same with Dota2.
- kazagistar 8y ago
  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.
  - Ntrails 8y ago
    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

beezischillin 8y ago

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.

mbel 8y ago
> 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.
- daemin 8y ago
  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.
  - mbel 8y ago
    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.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    The culture has changed and is ok with gambling being inserted everywhere, especially in tech circles. Look at the threads about daily fantasy sports in HN. Many impassioned comments about how the ability to bet on sports is freedom, etc..

Luc 8y ago

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.

icc97 8y ago
Indeed Panini world cup stickers too. You can't trade the results of the loot boxes though.
tialaramex 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Insanity 8y ago

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.

chinathrow 8y ago
> It is EA after all, a company I don't have a lot of faith in. Why are you playing their games then?
- matwood 8y 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.
  - Totoradio 8y ago
    NBA 2k is not an EA game
  - blueagle7 8y ago
    NBA 2K18 isn't made by EA. It's made my 2K Sports. EA's NBA game is NBA Live.
- Insanity 8y ago
  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 things like this: https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-the-most-hated-1820391000 https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-... don't exactly make me warm up to actually buying an EA game.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

yAnonymous 8y ago

Ultimately, most publishers will probably handle it like Valve, who have found a brilliant workaround: Show players the contents of the next box they buy, which makes it not gambling. I hate it, but it's a very elegant solution to avoid any legal problems.

dtech 8y ago
That seems like a hack that won't hold up in court. Now it's still loot box gambling, but with the n+1 th box instead.
- s3m4j 8y ago
  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.
  - kazagistar 8y ago
    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.
- buckminster 8y ago
  Exactly. You're buying a known thing and an option. What's the option for? That's the gamble.
- yAnonymous 8y ago
  I actually think it will hold up quite comfortably, as no court will be able to tell when exactly it starts being gambling.
  - seszett 8y ago
    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.

Crpt774 8y ago

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.

dtech 8y ago
> 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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

pimmen 8y ago

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.

comboy 8y ago

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.

koolba 8y ago
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.
nicktelford 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dagw 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tomhoward 8y ago
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.

cyanbane 8y ago

Other than being digital, how are loot boxes different than being M:TG cards or baseball card packs?

stestagg 8y ago
Their impact
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
watwut 8y ago
Not much, except that a.) probabilities of cards with given rarity are well known b.) M:TG are niche product.
- archi42 8y ago
  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.
gambiting 8y ago
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.
- cyanbane 8y ago
  This is a great point. No post-market locks the user into only purchasing via loot crates.
  - daemin 8y ago
    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.

golergka 8y ago

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?

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Either make all games 18+ so adults can be making such decisions, or restrict gambling within games available without age restriction. Promoting gambling to minors is something I find completely unethical.
chrisoverzero 8y ago
>I am an adult who is capable of making such a decision. Many are not the first part. Many who are the first part are not the second part.

petercooper 8y ago

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

jpz 8y ago
It’s not just the Belgians, if it stands up there that will be the thin edge of the wedge. The issue is the one of random drops for real money. It’s easy to see that has a gambling element to it.
- petercooper 8y ago
  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
  - pdkl95 8y ago
    > 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~ [1] https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-463.html#NRS463Sec01862 https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-463.html#NRS463Sec01862 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

Agentlien 8y ago

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.

pharrington 8y ago
Here's my anecdote. 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.

kgilpin 8y ago

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.

village-idiot 8y ago
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.
- molf 8y ago
  Agreed; this should be made illegal entirely – this mechanic benefits no one except the game publisher.
  - kgilpin 8y ago
    That totally works for me as well :-)
  - cloakandswagger 8y ago
    And also the grown adults who enjoy gambling responsibly?
  - pitaj 8y ago
    Except that it lowers game cost for everyone else when whales buy a bunch of cosmetic items.
    - 8y ago

kakarot 8y ago

This is a growing problem in the gaming industry. 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.

arnvald 8y ago

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.

LiterallyDoge 8y ago

Remember when we made good games that people played for the sheer enjoyment of it and didn't need marketing witchcraft to hand-hold lazy designers?

lechiffre10 8y ago

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.

ihuman 8y ago
> I don't even understand the appeal of wanting to play games that have this sort of predatory feature. For some people, the fun of the real gameplay outways the negative of the lootboxes
s73v3r_ 8y ago
" I don't even understand the appeal of wanting to play games that have this sort of predatory feature." I mean, it's not like you get to choose between the version of the game that has this vs the one that doesn't.
- m000z0rz 8y ago
  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.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Social pressures are another problem though with multiplayer games. Your friends play x You dont like x for reason y Which is stronger, your dislike of y or the enjoyment of playing x with friends.

DonHopkins 8y ago

Peter Molyneux's "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?" is the paradigm of loot boxes gone bad, taken to an absurd extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the_Cube%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the... Curiosity - what's inside the cube winner video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU >"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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SejMdncxbnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SejMdncxbnk >Curiosity Winner, Once Promised a "Life Changing" Prize by Peter Molyneux, Has Received Nothing: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/curiosity-winner-once-promised-a-life-changing-pri/1100-6425241/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/curiosity-winner-once-prom... Peter Molyneux A Pathological Liar? | Feature Creep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efeq_9XwU7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efeq_9XwU7s >"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."

zeroname 8y ago

A criminal investigation? Does that mean EA managers could get jailed if they visit Belgium? I'm just kidding of course. There's no reason to visit Belgium.

taobility 8y ago

China already released an enforced regulation about this last year: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/2/15517962/china-new-law-dota-league-of-legends-odds-loot-box-random https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/2/15517962/china-new-law-dot...