44 ms·

Ban kids from loot box gambling in games

296 points by MarcScott 7y ago

nurettin 7y ago
How does a free market self-regulate this problem? What is the competitive advantage of not providing chance items?
- switch007 7y ago
  I’m not a parent so of course have no right to make a suggestion, but could parents only buy devices without an internet connection? Games that cost X and X only?
  - kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
    There are devices just for children available, presumably with limitations on the available content. I think they are popular with parents, too.
  - xxs 7y ago
    Pretty much every single game adopts loot boxes alike - as it's profitable. That leaves very options (if any) for a decent games overall - children excluded. Children are not the only target - far from, but the argument is easier to make. Video Game industry suffers massively, lacking good content as loot boxes dominate most popular titles - the freemium model. Kids would like to play what their friends play and often online - the latter statement is not limited to kids at all. Also a parent is extremely unlikely to limit phone usable (prime target) to no inet connection. It's doable of course but it's futile and the kids feel excluded.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    The report isn't just about children.
- kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
  By providing better games, and parents waking up and closing the money faucet.
  - tudorw 7y ago
    Hello sanity, we should hang out :)
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    That's the thing though - games nowadays are ridiculously good. Doesn't mean they're successful, but they're good. And they don't even HAVE to be good - I mean pubg looks and runs like shit but it was ridiculously popular. Fortnite's popular battle royale mode was more like a weekend project (iirc), but it had a benefit over pubg in that it had a big professional studio behind it that was able to scale its production up enormously once Fortnite took off. And Apex was developed from scratch (or well, probably based off of a lot of work done for Titanfall) and intent. Another example is Overwatch, which was salvaged from the remains of Blizzard's Project Titan. Anyway long story short, a lot of these games are really really good. And that's also why they have microtransactions (according to the manufacturers / publishers) - they take a lot longer and cost a lot more to make. They (feel like they) have to earn money from a game for at least one year, preferably more after the initial release / purchase. (one year for the annual game series - CoD, Assassin's Creed, FIFA, etc, more for the longer term ones that will likely not get a sequel like Apex, Fortnite, even Minecraft).
    - kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
      Maybe there isn't really a problem with all of those games. To adults it seems ridiculous to spend money on virtual items, but to be honest, a lot of other things kids would spend their money on also seem ridiculous. If those games cost a lot of money to make, perhaps it is fair to ask for money for some items.
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        The nasty trick isn't the "asking for money for some items". As you observe that's not so different from asking for money for sugar candy, it's basically useless but it did cost money to make and you don't need it per se, so fine. But what is being called out here as _gambling_ is that you pay your money and then you get something random. It will probably be something you don't want, it might even be something you consider utterly useless. Example: You want the Funky Guitar for Tara, your favourite character in a game. A Funky Guitar is "often" found in a Cluster Artefact the game tells you. For $10 you can buy 480 diamond blibbets. For 600 diamond blibbets you can buy a Cluster Artefact, so you give them $20, now you have 960 diamond blibbets, you can buy a Cluster Artefact. The Cluster Artefact is then smashed open by your character to reveal... a Top Hat wearable only by Steve, a character you hate playing. Too bad, buy more blibbets and maybe Tara will get lucky next time? Gambling. A bad idea for grown-ups, obviously not something we should encourage children to do.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  The free market doesn't regulate flaws in human psychology. Gambling is designed to hit all these flaws to trick and manipulate you out of all your money. Children are especially vulnerable to this. The correct solution is for governments to ban companies shoving gambling at kids.
  - bluecalm 7y ago
    I think education would be more effective than a ban. Teach children to recognize gambling at early stage. Show them with examples how the house/gaming studio wins by exploiting human nature. If you just protect children from exposure to gambling you will end up with vulnerable adults and adults don't have a guardian who can stop the bleeding even if the cost is a lot of kicking and screaming.
    - lvturner 7y ago
      That only works however if the parents or schools are capable of providing the required teaching, many (most?), are not. The games industry also goes to great lengths to obfusticate and hide the mechanics - it is truly predatory. I agree that regulation is no panacea, but in this instance, combined with additional approaches such as education I belive it to be a suitable approach.
    - distant_hat 7y ago
      Would you also be in favor of removing age related gambling restrictions on real world gambling like slot machines? How about on things like purchasing tobacco? Let the free market handle it. These things literally hack the developing brain in not so nice ways. If you were to let marketers control it, you'd end up with a bunch of brain damaged teenagers. Countries like Singapore don't even let adults gamble freely.
      - bluecalm 7y ago
        I think gambling is harmful similarly to the worst of drugs. I would much rather see cocaine legal than gambling. I just think children are a demographic the least vulnerable as there is always a guardian to put stop to it, they can't lost life saving etc. I am all for limiting gambling (or outright banning many forms of it). I see the whole loot box thing as very low priority though and I think better results can be obtained by education and maybe even slight exposure to the exploitive mechanisms. If anything it's better if a child learn the hard way and lose pocket money than an if an unaware adult gets suckered in and lose their live savings, family, job.
- martin-adams 7y ago
  My only thinking is that promoting non-gambling like games to parents would be the advantage. Doubt it would work as there’s too much noise in the marketing and children probably convince the parents. I find it tedious to find the in app purchase amounts of an app or game before purchasing, and even then you’ve no idea what it’s for.
- tudorw 7y ago
  This is a moot point, there does not need to be a competitive advantage in not providing chance items. A 'free market' (an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.) does not equate to zero regulation.
- xxs 7y ago
  Gambling doesn't self regulate overall. It gets predatory. Gambling industry is ==heavily== regulated throughout EU (Swiss too) for instance to a point each slot game [very similar to chance items] is reported to the regulator (Italy, Spain) in close to real time. Responsible gaming options and self exclusions are available everywhere, incl. state-wide options. Also gambling tends to 'enjoy' very heavy taxation.
- piokoch 7y ago
  I would say that kid's parents will notice that a given game is addictive and costs a lot and will just forbid children to play it? Side note. Free market (as imagined by Adam Smith, Hayek and others) does not mean that greed and income maximization is everything. The same way democracy does not mean that majority can do everything ignoring minority. Without ethics neither democracy nor free market can exist. Some people believe that ethics can be replaced by law and regulations. To some extent this can be true, but the law will never cover all aspects of human life and in the society that accepts unethical behavior both democracy and free market will rot.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Free market (as imagined by Adam Smith, Hayek and others) does not mean that greed and income maximization is everything. (...) Without ethics neither democracy nor free market can exist. In real markets, there are feedback loops that are much stronger than individual ethics. Under intense enough competitive pressure, unethical actors outcompete ethical actors, because the former can sacrifice more human values. > in the society that accepts unethical behavior both democracy and free market will rot Unfortunately, in a society that is less accepting of unethical behavior, that is still only one input to the economy as a system, and to the extent the society is malleable, the input may diminish. Consider the following mental picture: imagine society's ethical standards as a tilted landscape, through which the river of market activity flows. In a maximally amoral society, the landscape would be so that the river flows straight. The more ethical/moral concern the society has, the more meandering the river becomes. Now two effects happen: one, a strong enough river flow will outright cut corners and flow over some bends. This can be compared to companies acting unethically and getting away with it. Second, the current will erode the landscape over time, bringing it closer to the amoral straight-line terrain. This can be compared to effects of competitive pressure described above, when viewed over longer time spans.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      Saying that all ethics must be obstructions commerce is a pretty extreme view, that I really can’t see any justification for. An economy is nothing more than the sum of decisions made by the individuals that comprise it. I’m pretty sure the only way anybody could hold such a view would be to view all decisions they disagree with as unethical. Which is an opinion, I guess...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It doesn't. As a baseline, games with gambling elements will be more profitable than games without, ceteris paribus. You have two competing effects here: games with gambling are better able to monetize their players, but might find it harder to attract these players in the first place if the gambling element is known and understood by the players beforehand. Unfortunately, that "if" is trivially eliminated with marketing, through popularization (people start to play despite their knowledge of gambling mechanisms) and disinformation (people don't know about the gambling elements up front, or about their true impact). This is the case of the market exploiting a quirk of human psyche. Like always, it will stop doing so once exploitation becomes less profitable than not doing it. For that to happen, new costs related to gambling mechanisms must appear that aren't there before - hence the proposal for regulatory intervention, as this is the standard way for market economies to adjust the costs landscape. (Regulatory solutions impose additional overhead on the market, and it would be more profitable to everyone if people voluntarily refrained from an activity instead of having that activity banned. However, a different quirk of human psyche precludes the market from ever doing that.)
  - xxs 7y ago
    I am curious who would downvote such an explanation.
- otikik 7y ago
  > How does a free market self-regulate this problem? On a free market, if someone has it and someone else wants it, that's all that's needed. A truly free market can not self-regulate against gambling, drugs, child pornography, or slavery. > What is the competitive advantage of not providing chance items? Engaging on these practices isn't exactly riskless. State legislators could decide that "chance items" are, in fact "gambling". And that your company has been doing that to children. So a lot of "fun" can ensue: mass-action lawsuits, cessation of activity in a whole country, incarcelation, etc. The "competitive advantage" is that your competitors might simply become illegal.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  In my experience, a free market does not self-regulate in order to gain a competitive advantage. The self-regulation I've seen has been done in order to avoid punishment by the state or federal government. The formation of the ESRB, for example, or the manta tourism permitting system on Moku O Keawe.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  The ESRB thinks gambling is pretty much an open season from age 13.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  Well in a free society you might think parenting should be left to parents, not governments. Because this is entirely a parenting problem. No market, free or otherwise is going provide parenting to children.
xubar 7y ago
ok
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ian0 7y ago
Myself and my son play Apex legends. Its an online multiplayer game thats free, but you can optionally pay to unlock cosmetic items like character outfits (skins) etc. He came into some cash recently courtesy of the tooth fairy and asked if we could buy a skin for his favorite character. I said ok. However after id purchased some in game coins we realised that we couldn't actually buy the skin he wanted, instead we had to buy 10 boxes with random contents that could potentially contain a skin similar to the one he wanted. Watching his excitement opening up the boxes and his eventual disappointment at not receiving the one he wanted - plus subsequent enthusiasm to buy more coins courtesy of some lesser items granted, I realised Id made a horrible mistake. Id basically introduced a virtual pub gambling machine to a young kid. This sort of stuff is horrible.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  It doesn't allow you to buy the skins directly? In most F2P games I played (HotS, Paladins), you get random skins in lootboxes, but you can buy the skin directly, it just costs more than the lootbox (but obviously much cheaper than buying lootboxes hoping for that one specific skin).
  - ssully 7y ago
    Apex let's you buy most skins directly, but only using a currency you earn from playing or by getting duplicate items from boxes. You can also earn skins from boxes that you earn from leveling up, or by buying directly. There is also a store where you can buy certain skins/items directly with money, but these items rotate (I think weekly?). Finally, there is a "battle pass" that lets you earn rewards by doing in game challenges (get so many skills in a certain part of the map, play as a certain character so many times, etc). The battle pass costs $10 US dollars. You can also spend real money to buy levels for your battle pass - so basically, dump money to earn everything, and avoid doing the challenges. Believe it or not, Apex is one of the better F2P games when it comes to ease of getting items without paying much money. With that said, I think my complicated description above serves as a good example of how filthy these games can get. If Apex is what is considered a "good" model, just imagine the bad ones.
kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
Where does the money come from, that the kids spend? Shouldn't it be the parents concern to limit the spending? While I despise many of the techniques used in modern games to make kids spend money, I also prefer them learning about these things in games, rather than in the real world (with much more money at stake). One thing that cost us a lot of money for example are the "Panini collectible cards", that predate the computer era. I don't know if they are a thing in the US. Basically for soccer world cups and other events, you are supposed to collect all the pictures of all the players. You buy packs of 5 with random stickers, and you swap with your friends to fill the sticker book. It costs ridiculous amounts of money (easy to spend 100€ or more, on a book with some pictures). I grudgingly admitted to it, as it is almost a rite of passage in European childhoods and a learning experience to some degree.
- _Understated_ 7y ago
  Aw man, you're bringing back memories of my childhood here: I spent all my pocket money on those. Well, those and the chewing gum that had a "tattoo" in them :) I'm with you on the "what are the parents doing while this is going on?" camp. My son, now 8, plays some games on the iPad. He's got a bunch of Lego games and a couple of multiplayer games but he cannot interact with the other players except to fight on the same team: so no chatting or anything like that. In addition, he's been told he's not buying anything in-game and we've locked down the iPad so that he can't... in fact it pops up a message if he clicks anything to do with buying. We've used the default list of acceptable websites when you lock down the iPad. We may have removed a couple too and added Nickelodeon I think (for the games on it) and a couple of others but nothing like YouTube... that's pure shite imo! He moans sometimes that his pal has Fortnite and he plays it at his house sometimes but he's not getting it at our house. In all honesty a Google search and a bit of time is all it takes for parents to protect their kids online these days. No excuse.
  - thirdsun 7y ago
    Reading this I can't help but think that Apple Arcade has to be a huge success with parents - a quality, woory-free gaming environment with fixed, affordable cost.
tudorw 7y ago
Great, finally some movement on regulating the children's video gaming industry, it's a total disgrace and reflects very poorly on the tech industry that it's most vulnerable users are frequently the least considered. The UK is working on some of the worlds most progressive child protection legislation and I hope they create an example that will be adopted worldwide.
sdan 7y ago
Agree that games that advertise loot-boxes should be restricted, given their relatively addictive nature to impressionable children. Children of younger ages shouldn't be exposed to this dopamine inducing idea similar to that of slot machines.
- xxs 7y ago
  The income from the loot boxes has to be taxed like gambling. It's a slot machine (or FBT in the UK) essentially. Possible there should be an option to self-define a spending limit (per month, day, week) that cannot be increased immediately.
dominicr 7y ago
I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. Either they understand the issue but it's their profits at stake, so they'll ignore the potential problems. Or have these stealth gambling mechanisms entered the games gradually and without the industry realising that what it's doing is actually gambling and there repercussions to that.
- tudorw 7y ago
  The idea that they are ignorant is repugnant, they know exactly what they are doing, and they have ALL the data that shows how the 'child whales' of their industry can be best exploited.
  - _Microft 7y ago
    A while ago I noticed that a small child in my family had a jigsaw puzzle with a Disney princess on it and since that seemed unexpected, I asked how that came. The answer was that they didn't gift it to her but she wanted it herself. They were surprised themselves but argued that maybe it's really something that girls/kids like. I couldn't help saying that it's hard for children to not like them when the other side is whole departments of grown-ups doing nothing but engineering the best ways to hack a child's brain :/
  - pferde 7y ago
    Indeed they know very well what they're doing. One could even say that they're openly spitting in the face of regulators' inability to do something about it, see for example a trailer for a new NBA game, where you mostly see literal casino-like gambling machines, and only a few seconds of actual gameplay on a basketball court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGZQDOOU6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGZQDOOU6Y EDIT: The above link is not the trailer itself, but a video discussing the trailer, from an independent game critic who has been speaking out against gambling mechanics in computer games for many years, long before it became a big issue.
- prawn 7y ago
  "I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful" Of course it's completely wilful.
dingdingdang 7y ago
That should also include watching adverts as a competitive advantage within games marketed for kids - it leads to constant intake of essentially user hostile videos being shown to young kids and it's predatory imho.
wxbq00 7y ago
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demonbae 7y ago
Years ago, when I was about 12 years old, I was addicted to RuneScape. Every evening after school, you'd find me cutting down trees, cooking, or venturing into the PvP zone for some awesome gear. One day, someone retired from the game by killing their character, which resulted in all of their items being dropped. I lucked out and snagged more gold than I could have ever imaged. I remember running around the house in joy. In RuneScape at the time, there was another PvP zone where you could fight another player and bet gold on whether you would win. Now having "expendable gold" and false confidence, I dropped some big money on this PvP zone, and over the course of a day, I lost it all. I was devastated. I've never lost a ton of money in real life, but this left a really sick feeling in my stomach even in the digital world. Reflecting on this experience, I feel it has actually benefited me. I've experienced the pain and risk that gambling can bring, and have never felt a need to do this with my actual money. To me, games can be a sandbox to learn life lessons without major consequences.
- Grangar 7y ago
  I know right? Runescape back in the day was the perfect sandbox to learn these lessons. I remember lending out my expensive sword to an online "friend" who promptly logged off and blocked me. Lesson learned. Nowadays all these sorts of transactions have been shifted into auction house-like marketplaces to prevent abuse. I think taking out this human interaction component does more harm than good, especially bundled with the new ability to (legitimately) buy game money for real cash. The adversary moved from other players taking your ingame stuff, to the game's maintainer itself taking real world money.
- DanBC 7y ago
  When we talk to people who have problems with gambling we tend to see that they all started young, and had an early win. You can see how if you'd gambled this huge amount of gold, and then won, that things may be different?
- ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
  I used to play a game Puzzle Pirates as a 12 year old, which had an in game currency that could be used to play poker. I easily put 200 hours into that. And I would say I had a similar experience, you win some, you lose some, but it helps show that it's not just up and up. I haven't spent more than $50 in a casino in my entire life, and the gacha games I have played I haven't spent money outside of the starter packs. Some people are gonna lose money gambling, with or without games with similar mechanics. I've never seen a study show that the two are in any way correlated. Just that kids are playing these games (with money they get from their parents, if they do spend money).
antpls 7y ago
If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? As it's written in the article, problems arise for a minority of children. From the article, we know little about the background of these children and about their parents. It is possible that those children would have developed an addiction to something else if it wasn't video games loot boxes. Yes, some of them spend thousands, but what if they are millionaires's kids? They play by different rules. In my opinion, gambling in videos game means your kids will experience the risk of gambling sooner, and if you watch your kid and educate them about it, they can experience it in a safer environment than when they are adults. To me, banning virtual loot boxes is extreme and doesynt solve the actual problem (education programs are misaligned, lack of mental healthcare programs, etc). Addiction might reveal a problem, but it's not necessary the root cause.
- crispyporkbites 7y ago
  Honestly those boosters are a scummy product and we would all be better off without them.
  - dgellow 7y ago
    We even have an alternative system that has been proven: the Living Card Games (LCG) system from Fantasy Flight. Instead of boosters a serie of card is divided in “chapters” that are fixed and have a balanced distribution of cards. Every other month a new chapter is released, at a fixed schedule. All cards are known so you can decide which chapter you care about and want to buy. And a few times each year a big expansion pack is released, dedicated to one faction or group of cards. https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games/ https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games...
- hanselot 7y ago
  Shall we just ban entropy then?
- JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
  Because magic the gathering cards are an actual item tradeable for actual money to other players and resellers. It's still questionable in many ways, sure. But many of these virtual items are closed economies with the supply entirely owned by the producer of the game. These have no intrinsic value outside of this closed system and there is no ability to exchange them for real money. I'm not saying booster packs are necessarily morally correct either, but want to highlight that there is a qualitative difference between them and most loot box economies.
madisfun 7y ago
I wonder when someone in power finally recognizes that Magic the Gathering and other CCGs, especially their digital versions, are essentially gambling machines.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  With collectible card games, one has at least a tangible, transferrable object - meaning if someone wants to sell off their Pokemon/MtG cards, there is a pretty healthy market available. Even if the original manufacturer would go out of business, you would still have the assets. With DLC gambling (which is what lootboxes really are), however, there are many problems: 1) the device OS manufacturer (Google/iOS) can go out of business, rendering the money one spent on the collectibles worthless 2) the application developer not providing updates for the software to run on new OSes or revoking the software outright, leading to the same result 3) there is no real transferability - at best one can restore their account on a different device, at worst (like in Train Conductor) there is no transferability at all. Moving DLCs across platforms (Android <-> iOS <-> PC <-> consoles) is extremely rare. Selling off the collected DLCs is not possible anywhere.
  - madisfun 7y ago
    I'm not sure if transferrable and sellable rewards make CCGs less of a gambling activity. If anything, obtaining a physical object which can be exchanged for cash, with a potential for profit, is the definition of gambling. Non-transferrable rewards exploit the same weakness of the human psycology, but offer even less in return. Both kinds of gambling in games should be regulated. It's not easy to define what constitutes a lootbox, and what kind of randomized output is safe. The industry will probably argue that the lootboxes are actually randomized content, not prizes.. From that point of view they sell a non-transferrable experience (service), not a tangible item (product).
Yuval_Halevi 7y ago
Good point. 99% of the games for smartphones are free but involved a lot of gambling. You might win a price every few minutes. It makes people pretty addictive to the games
aglionby 7y ago
I completely agree -- it's exploitative and relies on parental intervention for those kids who don't know any better. As others have mentioned, these could be an educational opportunity, but I don't think the experiences described here are representative. My exposure to these things isn't through any free apps, but Minecraft. The biggest server by player number has 9 different types of boxes for sale from $3 for 10 [1]. Some of them guarantee a number of boxes at a high 'level' of reward - this seems like reinforcing gambling as something that is certain to be beneficial? [1] https://store.hypixel.net/ https://store.hypixel.net/
FerretFred 7y ago
This is a good idea, but they really need to stop all the gambling advertising disguised as kids games on daytime TV. I've observed (UK) that daytime TV commercials mainly consist of Personal Injury Compensation, mail-order-fashion and "games that you can play on your phone, tablet or computer". Always brightly coloured, very animated, and always played by attractive people. Often there's a "social" theme were the participants all get together with their phones and tablets and game, er, gamble a day away together at bingo. Very sad, very cynical and very pervasive. But hey, it brings in lots of tax revenue, so it won't stop anytime soon.
- robjan 7y ago
  I think those adverts are targeted at lonely housewives/husbands and the unemployed rather than children. As you said, they make it seem like these virtual fruit machine/bingo games are very social, when in fact the users are probably sitting on their sofa alone. It's a similar problem though, it's aimed at exploiting a problem (loneliness) and replacing it with another problem which generates a recurring income.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  But hey, it brings in lots of tax revenue, so it won't stop anytime soon. The current government seems willing to crack down on other areas of gambling, Ladbrokes have announced they are closing 700 shops because of tighter regulations around slot machines.
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  No one watches daytime TV anymore except old people in the US. Is it different in the UK?
travisoneill1 7y ago
It might actually be better to let them learn the hard way before they have real money to lose. Has anyone studied the relation between this and gambling as an adult?
deepnet 7y ago
Sounds like a solution a desk jockey lawmaker, or at least to their knee-jerking constituent pitch-fork mob demanding justus wouls come up with! But in reality a ban prevents regulation and will usher in an era of illegal underground loot-box mods with hyper effective sublimal hypno-tech. Well I mean the prohibtion of kitten-huffing should be example enough of the consequences of an unregulated drugs bazaar. Better to have government issued loot boxes provided to children at school, like the UK lottery or the sugar-tax /Sarcasm But seriously the way things play out on the street is rarely how they look on paper as idealistic laws. The solution ? A little of both ;-)
DanBC 7y ago
The actual report is here: https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/news/immersive-technology-report-17-19/ https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z... I found this remarkable: "‘Lack of honesty and transparency’ reported among representatives of some games and social media companies in giving evidence." Some quotes from the report: > 62.We were contacted by a member of the public whose adult son built up considerable debts, reported to be in excess of £50,000, through spending on microtransactions in British company Jagex’s online game RuneScape. For example, bank statements showed that in one day the individual spent £247.95 by making five separate payments to the company. The resulting debt caused significant financial harm for both the player and his parents, whose evidence attributed the situation to the fact that Jagex has no limits on the amount of time or money players can spend on the game.118 This demonstrated to us that even companies with good policies to support some aspects of player wellbeing can fall short in other areas. You don't take £50,000 from a player in microtransactions without realising something is fucked up. > 65.With so many games featuring microtransactions, we asked other leading games companies what they do to prevent people from spending more than they are able to in a game. Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite: Battle Royale, said that although it has no specific cap on how much people can spend, purchases are limited to what is in the virtual shop and so the maximum anyone could spend would be about $200 a day.124 The company’s director of marketing suggested that it is an individuals’ responsibility to manage spending and that the company provides tools, including parental controls, “to allow players to make those decisions for themselves.”125 However, as we have already examined, parental controls are of limited effectiveness when it comes to adult players. > 66.The games companies we spoke to were generally reluctant to accept that they might have a role or responsibility to intervene proactively if a player’s spending fell outside of normal patterns. Moreover, they said that it would be too difficult to determine what level of spending might be harmful. Alex Dale, senior vice president for King, the makers of Candy Crush Saga, told us that while it used to alert users when they reached a certain spending threshold, it had stopped doing so because of player feedback. He told us: >> we would send an e-mail out when a player’s spend was $250 in a week for the first time. It was an e-mail that said, “We notice you are enjoying the game a lot at the moment. Are you sure you are happy with this?” […] We got back, “I wouldn’t spend the money if I didn’t have it” and things like, “I’m fine, please leave me alone”. We felt it was too intrusive so we stopped doing that.126 > 67.Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones told us that the games industry might learn from approaches in the gambling industry, which has much clearer, industry-wide protocols enabling people to self-exclude from spending.127 She told us that “gaming is several years behind gambling in relation to protecting the vulnerable”, a situation that the then Minister described, if true, as “lamentable”, adding that “the industry has a job to do.”128 When we asked Neil McArthur, Chief Executive of the Gambling Commission, whether games companies should be obligated to monitor how much people spend, identify people with a problem and proactively support them, he responded that, “this is an area where progress needs to be made.”129 His colleague Brad Enright went on to tell us that self-exclusion measures to protect players “could be adopted by the video games industry voluntarily to address some of the concerns about excessive time [and] excessive expenditure.”130 Yet the Royal College of Psychiatrists goes further in suggesting that: > > There should be no in game spending by children. Children are less prepared to deal with the potentially addictive nature of some modern computer games and are less able to make informed decisions about spending.131 Apple, Google, and game makers need to understand what's happening here. This is a push towards regulation. They need to implement pretty effective self regulation or UK government will impose strong regulation upon the industry.
Jonahgay 7y ago
We all know children can't have credit cards, so parents must be lacking responsibility towards their children.
mcrocop309 7y ago
Don't expose kids to gambling until they're ready to lose real money and seriously mess up their lives.
darepublic 7y ago
Too old to have gambled in games as a kid, but I was at the right age for the POG phenomenon. I remember a rough afternoon at the schoolyard where I went past my limit and lost some of my most cherished pogs.
tablethnuser 7y ago
Remember when loot boxes promising valuable rookie cards of baseball players captured America's youth and squandered the nation's fortune back in the 20th century? Or the countless families devastated by beanie baby addiction? Me neither. Collectibles aren't the problem. And it isn't gambling if you can't cash out. Why do you think there's so many casino games in the app stores even though digital gambling is illegal? Cuz they aren't gambling - they're hobbies. Thirty years ago you bought a $20 handheld slot device from the department store. Now you download an app.
- notTyler 7y ago
  1) They have perceived value, which for children who don't know any better, is really important. 2) In many cases you can cash out. Fortnite accounts with'valuable' or rare skins getting hacked and sold is a real thing. Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 both have real actual economies where things that come out of loot boxes have listed values that someone will probably pay you for in REAL WORLD DOLLARS. 3) Gambling is gambling regardless of whether it fits into your worldview and these companies shouldn't be able to sidestep defined and enforced regulations that exist for a reason. That's the issue here.
- nabergh 7y ago
  I don't think people are arguing that collectibles are the problem. They're arguing that the gambling is. In this context, we're defining gambling as exchanging money for a chance at receiving something of value. I think that's a reasonable definition and it certainly fits here.
  - someexgamedev 7y ago
    Do Happy Meals constitute gambling then, because they contain one of eight great toys?
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      So this goes like lotteries and several other things we already write laws about. What we care about is the behaviour. If your product triggers the problem behaviour then that's a problem. If I go to McDonalds and there's a queue of people buying Happy Meals because they want a specific toy, and they either don't actually take the meal or it goes straight in the garbage, that's a huge problem -> gambling. If I go to McDonalds and every kid just seems to be eating Happy Meals and enjoying whatever crap they got by chance, no problem -> not gambling. You might argue, well, how can McDonalds control this? There are a bunch of things they can do to avoid causing the problem and thus avoid triggering an investigation. For example when somebody proposes "Ooh, let's make Toy #3 way better than the others, and then also only give it out 0.1% of the time" don't do that. That's going to trigger the problem. Or if a parent comes in and says they really need Toy #6 and they're willing to give you the price of a Happy Meal for that toy, you should say "Yes" and hand them the toy, if you insist they keep buying Happy Meals to have a chance you are encouraging the problem behaviour. We see this stuff with other industries that trigger problem behaviour, we say "Don't do that" and we tell them things they should avoid to prevent the problem behaviour. Good actors work very hard to avoid a problem. Bad ones work very hard to avoid getting caught. Either way we did our best to protect people. For example "Direct Sales" companies are told not to allow their "sales partners" or whatever they choose to call them to build up stock, because that's part of a negative behaviour. They're told to make sure those "sales partners" are deriving revenue from actually selling the product, which is ostensibly the point of their business, not from selling the opportunity to also become a partner, which would be a Pyramid Scheme, also negative behaviour. Invariably the people who own (and profit from) these companies insist the problem behaviour isn't what they want, and yet so often they do encourage it, because of course it makes them rich. Similarly with video game gambling.
nscalf 7y ago
I came into this thread with a strong opinion: Ban loot boxes. I think they weaken the value of all gaming, and I think they take advantage of people. Plenty of things have been banned for attempting to take advantage of people. Going through this thread, I am softer on the view, but I think there is two big differences between what most people here are saying. First, with cards, you have a physical exchange of money---kids see that money going away and they can't just hit "OK" in a game again to spend money. Second, with online games like demonbae mentioned, you are spending your own money, not your parents money. YOU reap the consequences, not your parents bank account. I'm less convinced these need to be banned, but I still don't see any upside for people who are not benefiting by getting as much money as possible to be spent in their game.
bazooka_penguin 7y ago
Why this coming into the spotlight now as opposed to collectible sports cards, trading carding games, coin operated gacha/cache capsule machines, etc?
- ianferrel 7y ago
  None of those could result in $thousands charged to parents' credit cards without a lot more effort.
  - bazooka_penguin 7y ago
    These games shouldnt either with parental/family friendly controls. Would that make it good enough? Because I'm pretty sure at least on consoles you need to go through the platform to use saved credit data, and consoles offer parental controls.
- GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
  With trading cards, you can trade with your friends, or buy rare cards on Ebay. Since they're physical, there's no DRM. With skinner boxes, most games don't let you transfer skins so there's no marketplace and the only way to get rare skins is to buy coins and gamble.
  - bazooka_penguin 7y ago
    Physical comes with its own set of problems, like bootlegs, which I've fallen before. And there are games that do have aftermarkets like PUBG and Counster Strike iirc. Are those blameless? They were/are some of the biggest lootbox games actively played today Edit: it's to its
knlam 7y ago
This has me thinking all games with loot box mechanic should be labeled 18+
scarface74 7y ago
And this is the unsung hero of Apple's new Apple Arcade subscription -- 100 games, no loot boxes, pay to win crap. You can safely pay $4.99 and the entire family can have access to the games without having to worry about this crap or advertising. It's a win for everyone. Publishers are reportedly getting paid up front so they don't have to worry about not making their money back on their investments. Consumers avoid the above mention pitfalls of modern mobile gaming. Apple is "commoditizing its complements" and making iOS/MacOS/iPadOS/tvOS a more attractive platform for casual gaming. EDIT: Corrected the price is $4.99 not $5.99.
- nacs 7y ago
  > You can safely pay $5.99 Minor correction: It's $4.99 per month

296 points by MarcScott 7y ago

nurettin 7y ago

How does a free market self-regulate this problem? What is the competitive advantage of not providing chance items?

switch007 7y ago
I’m not a parent so of course have no right to make a suggestion, but could parents only buy devices without an internet connection? Games that cost X and X only?
- kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
  There are devices just for children available, presumably with limitations on the available content. I think they are popular with parents, too.
- xxs 7y ago
  Pretty much every single game adopts loot boxes alike - as it's profitable. That leaves very options (if any) for a decent games overall - children excluded. Children are not the only target - far from, but the argument is easier to make. Video Game industry suffers massively, lacking good content as loot boxes dominate most popular titles - the freemium model. Kids would like to play what their friends play and often online - the latter statement is not limited to kids at all. Also a parent is extremely unlikely to limit phone usable (prime target) to no inet connection. It's doable of course but it's futile and the kids feel excluded.
- DanBC 7y ago
  The report isn't just about children.
kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
By providing better games, and parents waking up and closing the money faucet.
- tudorw 7y ago
  Hello sanity, we should hang out :)
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  That's the thing though - games nowadays are ridiculously good. Doesn't mean they're successful, but they're good. And they don't even HAVE to be good - I mean pubg looks and runs like shit but it was ridiculously popular. Fortnite's popular battle royale mode was more like a weekend project (iirc), but it had a benefit over pubg in that it had a big professional studio behind it that was able to scale its production up enormously once Fortnite took off. And Apex was developed from scratch (or well, probably based off of a lot of work done for Titanfall) and intent. Another example is Overwatch, which was salvaged from the remains of Blizzard's Project Titan. Anyway long story short, a lot of these games are really really good. And that's also why they have microtransactions (according to the manufacturers / publishers) - they take a lot longer and cost a lot more to make. They (feel like they) have to earn money from a game for at least one year, preferably more after the initial release / purchase. (one year for the annual game series - CoD, Assassin's Creed, FIFA, etc, more for the longer term ones that will likely not get a sequel like Apex, Fortnite, even Minecraft).
  - kmjg88nvf8 7y ago
    Maybe there isn't really a problem with all of those games. To adults it seems ridiculous to spend money on virtual items, but to be honest, a lot of other things kids would spend their money on also seem ridiculous. If those games cost a lot of money to make, perhaps it is fair to ask for money for some items.
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      The nasty trick isn't the "asking for money for some items". As you observe that's not so different from asking for money for sugar candy, it's basically useless but it did cost money to make and you don't need it per se, so fine. But what is being called out here as _gambling_ is that you pay your money and then you get something random. It will probably be something you don't want, it might even be something you consider utterly useless. Example: You want the Funky Guitar for Tara, your favourite character in a game. A Funky Guitar is "often" found in a Cluster Artefact the game tells you. For $10 you can buy 480 diamond blibbets. For 600 diamond blibbets you can buy a Cluster Artefact, so you give them $20, now you have 960 diamond blibbets, you can buy a Cluster Artefact. The Cluster Artefact is then smashed open by your character to reveal... a Top Hat wearable only by Steve, a character you hate playing. Too bad, buy more blibbets and maybe Tara will get lucky next time? Gambling. A bad idea for grown-ups, obviously not something we should encourage children to do.
baroffoos 7y ago
The free market doesn't regulate flaws in human psychology. Gambling is designed to hit all these flaws to trick and manipulate you out of all your money. Children are especially vulnerable to this. The correct solution is for governments to ban companies shoving gambling at kids.
- bluecalm 7y ago
  I think education would be more effective than a ban. Teach children to recognize gambling at early stage. Show them with examples how the house/gaming studio wins by exploiting human nature. If you just protect children from exposure to gambling you will end up with vulnerable adults and adults don't have a guardian who can stop the bleeding even if the cost is a lot of kicking and screaming.
  - lvturner 7y ago
    That only works however if the parents or schools are capable of providing the required teaching, many (most?), are not. The games industry also goes to great lengths to obfusticate and hide the mechanics - it is truly predatory. I agree that regulation is no panacea, but in this instance, combined with additional approaches such as education I belive it to be a suitable approach.
  - distant_hat 7y ago
    Would you also be in favor of removing age related gambling restrictions on real world gambling like slot machines? How about on things like purchasing tobacco? Let the free market handle it. These things literally hack the developing brain in not so nice ways. If you were to let marketers control it, you'd end up with a bunch of brain damaged teenagers. Countries like Singapore don't even let adults gamble freely.
    - bluecalm 7y ago
      I think gambling is harmful similarly to the worst of drugs. I would much rather see cocaine legal than gambling. I just think children are a demographic the least vulnerable as there is always a guardian to put stop to it, they can't lost life saving etc. I am all for limiting gambling (or outright banning many forms of it). I see the whole loot box thing as very low priority though and I think better results can be obtained by education and maybe even slight exposure to the exploitive mechanisms. If anything it's better if a child learn the hard way and lose pocket money than an if an unaware adult gets suckered in and lose their live savings, family, job.
martin-adams 7y ago
My only thinking is that promoting non-gambling like games to parents would be the advantage. Doubt it would work as there’s too much noise in the marketing and children probably convince the parents. I find it tedious to find the in app purchase amounts of an app or game before purchasing, and even then you’ve no idea what it’s for.
tudorw 7y ago
This is a moot point, there does not need to be a competitive advantage in not providing chance items. A 'free market' (an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.) does not equate to zero regulation.
xxs 7y ago
Gambling doesn't self regulate overall. It gets predatory. Gambling industry is ==heavily== regulated throughout EU (Swiss too) for instance to a point each slot game [very similar to chance items] is reported to the regulator (Italy, Spain) in close to real time. Responsible gaming options and self exclusions are available everywhere, incl. state-wide options. Also gambling tends to 'enjoy' very heavy taxation.
piokoch 7y ago
I would say that kid's parents will notice that a given game is addictive and costs a lot and will just forbid children to play it? Side note. Free market (as imagined by Adam Smith, Hayek and others) does not mean that greed and income maximization is everything. The same way democracy does not mean that majority can do everything ignoring minority. Without ethics neither democracy nor free market can exist. Some people believe that ethics can be replaced by law and regulations. To some extent this can be true, but the law will never cover all aspects of human life and in the society that accepts unethical behavior both democracy and free market will rot.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Free market (as imagined by Adam Smith, Hayek and others) does not mean that greed and income maximization is everything. (...) Without ethics neither democracy nor free market can exist. In real markets, there are feedback loops that are much stronger than individual ethics. Under intense enough competitive pressure, unethical actors outcompete ethical actors, because the former can sacrifice more human values. > in the society that accepts unethical behavior both democracy and free market will rot Unfortunately, in a society that is less accepting of unethical behavior, that is still only one input to the economy as a system, and to the extent the society is malleable, the input may diminish. Consider the following mental picture: imagine society's ethical standards as a tilted landscape, through which the river of market activity flows. In a maximally amoral society, the landscape would be so that the river flows straight. The more ethical/moral concern the society has, the more meandering the river becomes. Now two effects happen: one, a strong enough river flow will outright cut corners and flow over some bends. This can be compared to companies acting unethically and getting away with it. Second, the current will erode the landscape over time, bringing it closer to the amoral straight-line terrain. This can be compared to effects of competitive pressure described above, when viewed over longer time spans.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    Saying that all ethics must be obstructions commerce is a pretty extreme view, that I really can’t see any justification for. An economy is nothing more than the sum of decisions made by the individuals that comprise it. I’m pretty sure the only way anybody could hold such a view would be to view all decisions they disagree with as unethical. Which is an opinion, I guess...
TeMPOraL 7y ago
It doesn't. As a baseline, games with gambling elements will be more profitable than games without, ceteris paribus. You have two competing effects here: games with gambling are better able to monetize their players, but might find it harder to attract these players in the first place if the gambling element is known and understood by the players beforehand. Unfortunately, that "if" is trivially eliminated with marketing, through popularization (people start to play despite their knowledge of gambling mechanisms) and disinformation (people don't know about the gambling elements up front, or about their true impact). This is the case of the market exploiting a quirk of human psyche. Like always, it will stop doing so once exploitation becomes less profitable than not doing it. For that to happen, new costs related to gambling mechanisms must appear that aren't there before - hence the proposal for regulatory intervention, as this is the standard way for market economies to adjust the costs landscape. (Regulatory solutions impose additional overhead on the market, and it would be more profitable to everyone if people voluntarily refrained from an activity instead of having that activity banned. However, a different quirk of human psyche precludes the market from ever doing that.)
- xxs 7y ago
  I am curious who would downvote such an explanation.
otikik 7y ago
> How does a free market self-regulate this problem? On a free market, if someone has it and someone else wants it, that's all that's needed. A truly free market can not self-regulate against gambling, drugs, child pornography, or slavery. > What is the competitive advantage of not providing chance items? Engaging on these practices isn't exactly riskless. State legislators could decide that "chance items" are, in fact "gambling". And that your company has been doing that to children. So a lot of "fun" can ensue: mass-action lawsuits, cessation of activity in a whole country, incarcelation, etc. The "competitive advantage" is that your competitors might simply become illegal.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
In my experience, a free market does not self-regulate in order to gain a competitive advantage. The self-regulation I've seen has been done in order to avoid punishment by the state or federal government. The formation of the ESRB, for example, or the manta tourism permitting system on Moku O Keawe.
PeterStuer 7y ago
The ESRB thinks gambling is pretty much an open season from age 13.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
Well in a free society you might think parenting should be left to parents, not governments. Because this is entirely a parenting problem. No market, free or otherwise is going provide parenting to children.

xubar 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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ian0 7y ago

Myself and my son play Apex legends. Its an online multiplayer game thats free, but you can optionally pay to unlock cosmetic items like character outfits (skins) etc. He came into some cash recently courtesy of the tooth fairy and asked if we could buy a skin for his favorite character. I said ok. However after id purchased some in game coins we realised that we couldn't actually buy the skin he wanted, instead we had to buy 10 boxes with random contents that could potentially contain a skin similar to the one he wanted. Watching his excitement opening up the boxes and his eventual disappointment at not receiving the one he wanted - plus subsequent enthusiasm to buy more coins courtesy of some lesser items granted, I realised Id made a horrible mistake. Id basically introduced a virtual pub gambling machine to a young kid. This sort of stuff is horrible.

skocznymroczny 7y ago
It doesn't allow you to buy the skins directly? In most F2P games I played (HotS, Paladins), you get random skins in lootboxes, but you can buy the skin directly, it just costs more than the lootbox (but obviously much cheaper than buying lootboxes hoping for that one specific skin).
- ssully 7y ago
  Apex let's you buy most skins directly, but only using a currency you earn from playing or by getting duplicate items from boxes. You can also earn skins from boxes that you earn from leveling up, or by buying directly. There is also a store where you can buy certain skins/items directly with money, but these items rotate (I think weekly?). Finally, there is a "battle pass" that lets you earn rewards by doing in game challenges (get so many skills in a certain part of the map, play as a certain character so many times, etc). The battle pass costs $10 US dollars. You can also spend real money to buy levels for your battle pass - so basically, dump money to earn everything, and avoid doing the challenges. Believe it or not, Apex is one of the better F2P games when it comes to ease of getting items without paying much money. With that said, I think my complicated description above serves as a good example of how filthy these games can get. If Apex is what is considered a "good" model, just imagine the bad ones.

kmjg88nvf8 7y ago

Where does the money come from, that the kids spend? Shouldn't it be the parents concern to limit the spending? While I despise many of the techniques used in modern games to make kids spend money, I also prefer them learning about these things in games, rather than in the real world (with much more money at stake). One thing that cost us a lot of money for example are the "Panini collectible cards", that predate the computer era. I don't know if they are a thing in the US. Basically for soccer world cups and other events, you are supposed to collect all the pictures of all the players. You buy packs of 5 with random stickers, and you swap with your friends to fill the sticker book. It costs ridiculous amounts of money (easy to spend 100€ or more, on a book with some pictures). I grudgingly admitted to it, as it is almost a rite of passage in European childhoods and a learning experience to some degree.

_Understated_ 7y ago
Aw man, you're bringing back memories of my childhood here: I spent all my pocket money on those. Well, those and the chewing gum that had a "tattoo" in them :) I'm with you on the "what are the parents doing while this is going on?" camp. My son, now 8, plays some games on the iPad. He's got a bunch of Lego games and a couple of multiplayer games but he cannot interact with the other players except to fight on the same team: so no chatting or anything like that. In addition, he's been told he's not buying anything in-game and we've locked down the iPad so that he can't... in fact it pops up a message if he clicks anything to do with buying. We've used the default list of acceptable websites when you lock down the iPad. We may have removed a couple too and added Nickelodeon I think (for the games on it) and a couple of others but nothing like YouTube... that's pure shite imo! He moans sometimes that his pal has Fortnite and he plays it at his house sometimes but he's not getting it at our house. In all honesty a Google search and a bit of time is all it takes for parents to protect their kids online these days. No excuse.
- thirdsun 7y ago
  Reading this I can't help but think that Apple Arcade has to be a huge success with parents - a quality, woory-free gaming environment with fixed, affordable cost.

tudorw 7y ago

Great, finally some movement on regulating the children's video gaming industry, it's a total disgrace and reflects very poorly on the tech industry that it's most vulnerable users are frequently the least considered. The UK is working on some of the worlds most progressive child protection legislation and I hope they create an example that will be adopted worldwide.

sdan 7y ago

Agree that games that advertise loot-boxes should be restricted, given their relatively addictive nature to impressionable children. Children of younger ages shouldn't be exposed to this dopamine inducing idea similar to that of slot machines.

xxs 7y ago
The income from the loot boxes has to be taxed like gambling. It's a slot machine (or FBT in the UK) essentially. Possible there should be an option to self-define a spending limit (per month, day, week) that cannot be increased immediately.

dominicr 7y ago

I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. Either they understand the issue but it's their profits at stake, so they'll ignore the potential problems. Or have these stealth gambling mechanisms entered the games gradually and without the industry realising that what it's doing is actually gambling and there repercussions to that.

tudorw 7y ago
The idea that they are ignorant is repugnant, they know exactly what they are doing, and they have ALL the data that shows how the 'child whales' of their industry can be best exploited.
- _Microft 7y ago
  A while ago I noticed that a small child in my family had a jigsaw puzzle with a Disney princess on it and since that seemed unexpected, I asked how that came. The answer was that they didn't gift it to her but she wanted it herself. They were surprised themselves but argued that maybe it's really something that girls/kids like. I couldn't help saying that it's hard for children to not like them when the other side is whole departments of grown-ups doing nothing but engineering the best ways to hack a child's brain :/
- pferde 7y ago
  Indeed they know very well what they're doing. One could even say that they're openly spitting in the face of regulators' inability to do something about it, see for example a trailer for a new NBA game, where you mostly see literal casino-like gambling machines, and only a few seconds of actual gameplay on a basketball court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGZQDOOU6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGZQDOOU6Y EDIT: The above link is not the trailer itself, but a video discussing the trailer, from an independent game critic who has been speaking out against gambling mechanics in computer games for many years, long before it became a big issue.
prawn 7y ago
"I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful" Of course it's completely wilful.

dingdingdang 7y ago

That should also include watching adverts as a competitive advantage within games marketed for kids - it leads to constant intake of essentially user hostile videos being shown to young kids and it's predatory imho.

wxbq00 7y ago

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demonbae 7y ago

Years ago, when I was about 12 years old, I was addicted to RuneScape. Every evening after school, you'd find me cutting down trees, cooking, or venturing into the PvP zone for some awesome gear. One day, someone retired from the game by killing their character, which resulted in all of their items being dropped. I lucked out and snagged more gold than I could have ever imaged. I remember running around the house in joy. In RuneScape at the time, there was another PvP zone where you could fight another player and bet gold on whether you would win. Now having "expendable gold" and false confidence, I dropped some big money on this PvP zone, and over the course of a day, I lost it all. I was devastated. I've never lost a ton of money in real life, but this left a really sick feeling in my stomach even in the digital world. Reflecting on this experience, I feel it has actually benefited me. I've experienced the pain and risk that gambling can bring, and have never felt a need to do this with my actual money. To me, games can be a sandbox to learn life lessons without major consequences.

Grangar 7y ago
I know right? Runescape back in the day was the perfect sandbox to learn these lessons. I remember lending out my expensive sword to an online "friend" who promptly logged off and blocked me. Lesson learned. Nowadays all these sorts of transactions have been shifted into auction house-like marketplaces to prevent abuse. I think taking out this human interaction component does more harm than good, especially bundled with the new ability to (legitimately) buy game money for real cash. The adversary moved from other players taking your ingame stuff, to the game's maintainer itself taking real world money.
DanBC 7y ago
When we talk to people who have problems with gambling we tend to see that they all started young, and had an early win. You can see how if you'd gambled this huge amount of gold, and then won, that things may be different?
ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
I used to play a game Puzzle Pirates as a 12 year old, which had an in game currency that could be used to play poker. I easily put 200 hours into that. And I would say I had a similar experience, you win some, you lose some, but it helps show that it's not just up and up. I haven't spent more than $50 in a casino in my entire life, and the gacha games I have played I haven't spent money outside of the starter packs. Some people are gonna lose money gambling, with or without games with similar mechanics. I've never seen a study show that the two are in any way correlated. Just that kids are playing these games (with money they get from their parents, if they do spend money).

antpls 7y ago

If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? As it's written in the article, problems arise for a minority of children. From the article, we know little about the background of these children and about their parents. It is possible that those children would have developed an addiction to something else if it wasn't video games loot boxes. Yes, some of them spend thousands, but what if they are millionaires's kids? They play by different rules. In my opinion, gambling in videos game means your kids will experience the risk of gambling sooner, and if you watch your kid and educate them about it, they can experience it in a safer environment than when they are adults. To me, banning virtual loot boxes is extreme and doesynt solve the actual problem (education programs are misaligned, lack of mental healthcare programs, etc). Addiction might reveal a problem, but it's not necessary the root cause.

crispyporkbites 7y ago
Honestly those boosters are a scummy product and we would all be better off without them.
- dgellow 7y ago
  We even have an alternative system that has been proven: the Living Card Games (LCG) system from Fantasy Flight. Instead of boosters a serie of card is divided in “chapters” that are fixed and have a balanced distribution of cards. Every other month a new chapter is released, at a fixed schedule. All cards are known so you can decide which chapter you care about and want to buy. And a few times each year a big expansion pack is released, dedicated to one faction or group of cards. https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games/ https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games...
hanselot 7y ago
Shall we just ban entropy then?
JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
Because magic the gathering cards are an actual item tradeable for actual money to other players and resellers. It's still questionable in many ways, sure. But many of these virtual items are closed economies with the supply entirely owned by the producer of the game. These have no intrinsic value outside of this closed system and there is no ability to exchange them for real money. I'm not saying booster packs are necessarily morally correct either, but want to highlight that there is a qualitative difference between them and most loot box economies.

madisfun 7y ago

I wonder when someone in power finally recognizes that Magic the Gathering and other CCGs, especially their digital versions, are essentially gambling machines.

mschuster91 7y ago
With collectible card games, one has at least a tangible, transferrable object - meaning if someone wants to sell off their Pokemon/MtG cards, there is a pretty healthy market available. Even if the original manufacturer would go out of business, you would still have the assets. With DLC gambling (which is what lootboxes really are), however, there are many problems: 1) the device OS manufacturer (Google/iOS) can go out of business, rendering the money one spent on the collectibles worthless 2) the application developer not providing updates for the software to run on new OSes or revoking the software outright, leading to the same result 3) there is no real transferability - at best one can restore their account on a different device, at worst (like in Train Conductor) there is no transferability at all. Moving DLCs across platforms (Android <-> iOS <-> PC <-> consoles) is extremely rare. Selling off the collected DLCs is not possible anywhere.
- madisfun 7y ago
  I'm not sure if transferrable and sellable rewards make CCGs less of a gambling activity. If anything, obtaining a physical object which can be exchanged for cash, with a potential for profit, is the definition of gambling. Non-transferrable rewards exploit the same weakness of the human psycology, but offer even less in return. Both kinds of gambling in games should be regulated. It's not easy to define what constitutes a lootbox, and what kind of randomized output is safe. The industry will probably argue that the lootboxes are actually randomized content, not prizes.. From that point of view they sell a non-transferrable experience (service), not a tangible item (product).

Yuval_Halevi 7y ago

Good point. 99% of the games for smartphones are free but involved a lot of gambling. You might win a price every few minutes. It makes people pretty addictive to the games

aglionby 7y ago

I completely agree -- it's exploitative and relies on parental intervention for those kids who don't know any better. As others have mentioned, these could be an educational opportunity, but I don't think the experiences described here are representative. My exposure to these things isn't through any free apps, but Minecraft. The biggest server by player number has 9 different types of boxes for sale from $3 for 10 [1]. Some of them guarantee a number of boxes at a high 'level' of reward - this seems like reinforcing gambling as something that is certain to be beneficial? [1] https://store.hypixel.net/ https://store.hypixel.net/

FerretFred 7y ago

This is a good idea, but they really need to stop all the gambling advertising disguised as kids games on daytime TV. I've observed (UK) that daytime TV commercials mainly consist of Personal Injury Compensation, mail-order-fashion and "games that you can play on your phone, tablet or computer". Always brightly coloured, very animated, and always played by attractive people. Often there's a "social" theme were the participants all get together with their phones and tablets and game, er, gamble a day away together at bingo. Very sad, very cynical and very pervasive. But hey, it brings in lots of tax revenue, so it won't stop anytime soon.

robjan 7y ago
I think those adverts are targeted at lonely housewives/husbands and the unemployed rather than children. As you said, they make it seem like these virtual fruit machine/bingo games are very social, when in fact the users are probably sitting on their sofa alone. It's a similar problem though, it's aimed at exploiting a problem (loneliness) and replacing it with another problem which generates a recurring income.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
But hey, it brings in lots of tax revenue, so it won't stop anytime soon. The current government seems willing to crack down on other areas of gambling, Ladbrokes have announced they are closing 700 shops because of tighter regulations around slot machines.
tenebrisalietum 7y ago
No one watches daytime TV anymore except old people in the US. Is it different in the UK?

travisoneill1 7y ago

It might actually be better to let them learn the hard way before they have real money to lose. Has anyone studied the relation between this and gambling as an adult?

deepnet 7y ago

Sounds like a solution a desk jockey lawmaker, or at least to their knee-jerking constituent pitch-fork mob demanding justus wouls come up with! But in reality a ban prevents regulation and will usher in an era of illegal underground loot-box mods with hyper effective sublimal hypno-tech. Well I mean the prohibtion of kitten-huffing should be example enough of the consequences of an unregulated drugs bazaar. Better to have government issued loot boxes provided to children at school, like the UK lottery or the sugar-tax /Sarcasm But seriously the way things play out on the street is rarely how they look on paper as idealistic laws. The solution ? A little of both ;-)

DanBC 7y ago

The actual report is here: https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/news/immersive-technology-report-17-19/ https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z... I found this remarkable: "‘Lack of honesty and transparency’ reported among representatives of some games and social media companies in giving evidence." Some quotes from the report: > 62.We were contacted by a member of the public whose adult son built up considerable debts, reported to be in excess of £50,000, through spending on microtransactions in British company Jagex’s online game RuneScape. For example, bank statements showed that in one day the individual spent £247.95 by making five separate payments to the company. The resulting debt caused significant financial harm for both the player and his parents, whose evidence attributed the situation to the fact that Jagex has no limits on the amount of time or money players can spend on the game.118 This demonstrated to us that even companies with good policies to support some aspects of player wellbeing can fall short in other areas. You don't take £50,000 from a player in microtransactions without realising something is fucked up. > 65.With so many games featuring microtransactions, we asked other leading games companies what they do to prevent people from spending more than they are able to in a game. Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite: Battle Royale, said that although it has no specific cap on how much people can spend, purchases are limited to what is in the virtual shop and so the maximum anyone could spend would be about $200 a day.124 The company’s director of marketing suggested that it is an individuals’ responsibility to manage spending and that the company provides tools, including parental controls, “to allow players to make those decisions for themselves.”125 However, as we have already examined, parental controls are of limited effectiveness when it comes to adult players. > 66.The games companies we spoke to were generally reluctant to accept that they might have a role or responsibility to intervene proactively if a player’s spending fell outside of normal patterns. Moreover, they said that it would be too difficult to determine what level of spending might be harmful. Alex Dale, senior vice president for King, the makers of Candy Crush Saga, told us that while it used to alert users when they reached a certain spending threshold, it had stopped doing so because of player feedback. He told us: >> we would send an e-mail out when a player’s spend was $250 in a week for the first time. It was an e-mail that said, “We notice you are enjoying the game a lot at the moment. Are you sure you are happy with this?” […] We got back, “I wouldn’t spend the money if I didn’t have it” and things like, “I’m fine, please leave me alone”. We felt it was too intrusive so we stopped doing that.126 > 67.Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones told us that the games industry might learn from approaches in the gambling industry, which has much clearer, industry-wide protocols enabling people to self-exclude from spending.127 She told us that “gaming is several years behind gambling in relation to protecting the vulnerable”, a situation that the then Minister described, if true, as “lamentable”, adding that “the industry has a job to do.”128 When we asked Neil McArthur, Chief Executive of the Gambling Commission, whether games companies should be obligated to monitor how much people spend, identify people with a problem and proactively support them, he responded that, “this is an area where progress needs to be made.”129 His colleague Brad Enright went on to tell us that self-exclusion measures to protect players “could be adopted by the video games industry voluntarily to address some of the concerns about excessive time [and] excessive expenditure.”130 Yet the Royal College of Psychiatrists goes further in suggesting that: > > There should be no in game spending by children. Children are less prepared to deal with the potentially addictive nature of some modern computer games and are less able to make informed decisions about spending.131 Apple, Google, and game makers need to understand what's happening here. This is a push towards regulation. They need to implement pretty effective self regulation or UK government will impose strong regulation upon the industry.

Jonahgay 7y ago

We all know children can't have credit cards, so parents must be lacking responsibility towards their children.

mcrocop309 7y ago

Don't expose kids to gambling until they're ready to lose real money and seriously mess up their lives.

darepublic 7y ago

Too old to have gambled in games as a kid, but I was at the right age for the POG phenomenon. I remember a rough afternoon at the schoolyard where I went past my limit and lost some of my most cherished pogs.

tablethnuser 7y ago

Remember when loot boxes promising valuable rookie cards of baseball players captured America's youth and squandered the nation's fortune back in the 20th century? Or the countless families devastated by beanie baby addiction? Me neither. Collectibles aren't the problem. And it isn't gambling if you can't cash out. Why do you think there's so many casino games in the app stores even though digital gambling is illegal? Cuz they aren't gambling - they're hobbies. Thirty years ago you bought a $20 handheld slot device from the department store. Now you download an app.

notTyler 7y ago
1) They have perceived value, which for children who don't know any better, is really important. 2) In many cases you can cash out. Fortnite accounts with'valuable' or rare skins getting hacked and sold is a real thing. Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 both have real actual economies where things that come out of loot boxes have listed values that someone will probably pay you for in REAL WORLD DOLLARS. 3) Gambling is gambling regardless of whether it fits into your worldview and these companies shouldn't be able to sidestep defined and enforced regulations that exist for a reason. That's the issue here.
nabergh 7y ago
I don't think people are arguing that collectibles are the problem. They're arguing that the gambling is. In this context, we're defining gambling as exchanging money for a chance at receiving something of value. I think that's a reasonable definition and it certainly fits here.
- someexgamedev 7y ago
  Do Happy Meals constitute gambling then, because they contain one of eight great toys?
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    So this goes like lotteries and several other things we already write laws about. What we care about is the behaviour. If your product triggers the problem behaviour then that's a problem. If I go to McDonalds and there's a queue of people buying Happy Meals because they want a specific toy, and they either don't actually take the meal or it goes straight in the garbage, that's a huge problem -> gambling. If I go to McDonalds and every kid just seems to be eating Happy Meals and enjoying whatever crap they got by chance, no problem -> not gambling. You might argue, well, how can McDonalds control this? There are a bunch of things they can do to avoid causing the problem and thus avoid triggering an investigation. For example when somebody proposes "Ooh, let's make Toy #3 way better than the others, and then also only give it out 0.1% of the time" don't do that. That's going to trigger the problem. Or if a parent comes in and says they really need Toy #6 and they're willing to give you the price of a Happy Meal for that toy, you should say "Yes" and hand them the toy, if you insist they keep buying Happy Meals to have a chance you are encouraging the problem behaviour. We see this stuff with other industries that trigger problem behaviour, we say "Don't do that" and we tell them things they should avoid to prevent the problem behaviour. Good actors work very hard to avoid a problem. Bad ones work very hard to avoid getting caught. Either way we did our best to protect people. For example "Direct Sales" companies are told not to allow their "sales partners" or whatever they choose to call them to build up stock, because that's part of a negative behaviour. They're told to make sure those "sales partners" are deriving revenue from actually selling the product, which is ostensibly the point of their business, not from selling the opportunity to also become a partner, which would be a Pyramid Scheme, also negative behaviour. Invariably the people who own (and profit from) these companies insist the problem behaviour isn't what they want, and yet so often they do encourage it, because of course it makes them rich. Similarly with video game gambling.

nscalf 7y ago

I came into this thread with a strong opinion: Ban loot boxes. I think they weaken the value of all gaming, and I think they take advantage of people. Plenty of things have been banned for attempting to take advantage of people. Going through this thread, I am softer on the view, but I think there is two big differences between what most people here are saying. First, with cards, you have a physical exchange of money---kids see that money going away and they can't just hit "OK" in a game again to spend money. Second, with online games like demonbae mentioned, you are spending your own money, not your parents money. YOU reap the consequences, not your parents bank account. I'm less convinced these need to be banned, but I still don't see any upside for people who are not benefiting by getting as much money as possible to be spent in their game.

bazooka_penguin 7y ago

Why this coming into the spotlight now as opposed to collectible sports cards, trading carding games, coin operated gacha/cache capsule machines, etc?

ianferrel 7y ago
None of those could result in $thousands charged to parents' credit cards without a lot more effort.
- bazooka_penguin 7y ago
  These games shouldnt either with parental/family friendly controls. Would that make it good enough? Because I'm pretty sure at least on consoles you need to go through the platform to use saved credit data, and consoles offer parental controls.
GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
With trading cards, you can trade with your friends, or buy rare cards on Ebay. Since they're physical, there's no DRM. With skinner boxes, most games don't let you transfer skins so there's no marketplace and the only way to get rare skins is to buy coins and gamble.
- bazooka_penguin 7y ago
  Physical comes with its own set of problems, like bootlegs, which I've fallen before. And there are games that do have aftermarkets like PUBG and Counster Strike iirc. Are those blameless? They were/are some of the biggest lootbox games actively played today Edit: it's to its

knlam 7y ago

This has me thinking all games with loot box mechanic should be labeled 18+

scarface74 7y ago

And this is the unsung hero of Apple's new Apple Arcade subscription -- 100 games, no loot boxes, pay to win crap. You can safely pay $4.99 and the entire family can have access to the games without having to worry about this crap or advertising. It's a win for everyone. Publishers are reportedly getting paid up front so they don't have to worry about not making their money back on their investments. Consumers avoid the above mention pitfalls of modern mobile gaming. Apple is "commoditizing its complements" and making iOS/MacOS/iPadOS/tvOS a more attractive platform for casual gaming. EDIT: Corrected the price is $4.99 not $5.99.

nacs 7y ago
> You can safely pay $5.99 Minor correction: It's $4.99 per month