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While loot boxes are pretty scummy what is this going to mean for CCGs like Pokemon and Magic that essentially sell loot boxes only in physical form? Or basebal

While loot boxes are pretty scummy what is this going to mean for CCGs like Pokemon and Magic that essentially sell loot boxes only in physical form? Or baseball cards? Trading cards in random packs have been a thing sold to children for 40+ years now.

spinach 6y ago
Those are at least finite, limited by production and stock. Digital items can be nearly infinite.
- mycologos 6y ago
  "Finite" doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction here, if you're a kid at the limits of "production and stock" buying trading cards, you probably have a problem already?
ljm 6y ago
Those can at least hold value over time as you're buying something tangible that can be traded or sold. And I don't get the feeling that going to the local newsagent and buying a pack with your pocket money sets you up for the same kind of addiction that microtransactions and loot boxes can. I don't really think that they're equivalent. If you were to make a Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh game that encouraged you to buy digital versions of those packs to make any progress in the game, then I think there would be a better comparison. The fact that those are online-only means that the house can essentially rig the game on the fly and engage in many more unscrupulous practices to keep you hooked. Made all the more easy by having a payment method directly linked. It doesn't mean that physical CCGs have no addictive properties, of course.
- akersten 6y ago
  > Those can at least hold value over time as you're buying something tangible that can be traded or sold. Ironically, that makes TCG even more like gambling, in contrast to loot boxes which do not provide a cash-value payout.
  - bashinator 6y ago
    I’d argue that to the contrary, loot boxes have demonstrated that having a cash-value payout isn’t necessary to elicit gambling behavior in people.
- salamandersauce 6y ago
  Yeah, there's more friction to having to go to a store and buy cards but there is also friction in having to go to a casino or bar to find a blackjack table or VLT. What is progress? To compete in the top 1% of Overwatch you don't need to buy loot boxes at all. To compete in the top 1% of paper Magic or Pokemon you absolutely need better cards that have to be acquired from random packs at some point either by you, an LGS or somebody that sold it to an LGS.
cmeacham98 6y ago
To my knowledge, pokemon card packs are not designed to be as addictive and easy to spend money on as possible in the same vein as loot boxes in video games. Additionally, the requirement to go to a physical store (or order online and wait upwards of a week for shipping) is likely a mitigating factor.
Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
And still, I don't know anyone who ruined their life as a result of addiction to buying CCGs or baseball cards (and I do know that many of us learned a few things about economy thanks to them, when we were kids). I'm not saying it can't happen, maybe someone will dig out an example, but it would be an extremely rare edge case. In games with loot boxes, on the other hand, many people end up spending totally crazy amounts for their income and essentially ruin their life. It's true that there is a continuous scale between baseball cards and the casino, with several factors influencing the level of addictiveness (immediacy, amount of maximum reward, etc.) and it's not obvious where one should set the limit. But there should be a limit, and IMO it should be one that heavily regulates loot boxes (and in particular, forbids minors from buying them) and doesn't touch CCGs or baseball cards. Claiming that we should not touch loot boxes because CCGs are similar would be a textbook example of the continuum fallacy.
- mmacvicarprett 6y ago
  I sounds to me that when you say that many people end up spending totally crazy amounts for their income and essentially ruin their life you are just referring to anecdotes (kid using mom phone with activated credit card and no protections), what makes you think this is a real and big problem?
  - Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
    I play a mobile game with loot boxes (although I don't buy them myself) and I am a frequent user of community forums where players talk about the game. Stories about people with modest income spending thousands a month, and sometimes losing their partner for this reason, are very common. Often a thread comes up on the matter and many people chime in with stories of that kind. Of course, it's still anecdotes. It's impossible to have actual data, as obviously the developers aren't going to give us statistics on how many people are spending unhealthy amounts of money in the game. But my impression (and the impression of most players I know) is that it's quite widespread, and I'm not talking about kids, but adults that just don't know when to stop.
  - Can_Not 6y ago
14 6y ago
I think you make a good point and perhaps one day we will see those regulated as well. All we are missing is a news story of some kid who stole his parents money to buy a bunch of these cards and a parent claim it is gambling and we will see legal action.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Trading cards at least hold their value to a certain extent (you can resell them if you're no longer using them) and are a physical object that doesn't depend on a "cloud". Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic The Gathering cards are still just as good as they were when they first came out, where as a lot of games from ~10-15 years ago no longer have a functional multiplayer mode because the servers hosted by the publisher are down.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
Buying a CCG pack is a rather detached process; you fork over you money and you get a foil wrapped packet. You unwrap it afterwards and that's fun but it's clear that an ordinary purchase is occurring. That's much less stimulating than the glitzy animation and audio one gets that is carefully designed to give kids the impression that something special and exciting is happening and to spark that bit of hope that they'll get something good. Add on top of that the additional animation/voice-over when they do get something good to reward them and it's therefore not surprising that children are strongly attracted to it.
- rriepe 6y ago
  That's the old way of doing it. Now you open it years later on a stream in front of thousands of people.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- richwater 6y ago
  I don't really think is a strong argument. You can present it wrapped in whatever glitz (or lack of) that you want, but the process is pretty much the same. You're exchanging currency for a chance at getting something from a known subset of items.
  - DecoPerson 6y ago
    There’s a huge difference. You could write a terminal program in which people can buy and open loot boxes; I guarantee you it won’t be as “effective” as a fancy loot box ceremony in an AAA video game. (I put effective in quotes because it depends on what axes you’re looking at.) Pokémon cards are clearly different enough is enough ways that they don’t cause the same amount of harm to anywhere near as many people as other forms of gambling do (such a pokies machines in bars and loot boxes in video games). Sure, the core process may be the same, but that’s not all that matters. It’s how it connects to everything else and what the overall resulting effect is.
david2ndaccount 6y ago
They are bad as well. I remember stealing as a child to fuel my purchases of Magic cards...
fendy3002 6y ago
1. Lootboxes available 24/7 anywhere 2. Lootboxes can be purchased easily with credit cards and can be hidden easily from relatives 3. Login bonus and free pulls 4. CCG is arguably pay 2 play 5. Progression & achievements 6. Nation-wide or international-wide reach 7. Gameplay session and purchasing session most of the time are different
curryst 6y ago
Those are a substantially different economies. For one thing, you end up actually owning something (you often don't even own the software you use the item in for lootboxes). That comes with a bunch of changes, but the most significant is that you can buy things from other players. I can build Magic decks without opening a single pack; I just buy the exact cards I want from other players. That's huge because you never get to a spot where you're spending $1,500 on packs to get that one card you really need. It amortizes the randomness of the packs across a huge group of people, so it can always be had at a specific price relative to it's rarity. Excluding cards no longer in print, which you can't buy packs for anyways. You can gamble for cards in Pokemon or Magic, if you choose to. If you'd rather, you can hand me a list of cards and I can give you an exact to-the-cent price for you to get those. Loot boxes generally don't have that option. The price is anywhere from the price to get a box up to infinity, period. You can also simply buy knock-offs. They aren't tournament legal, but nobody cares if you're using a Chinese knock off that you bought for $5 because you didn't want to pay $500 for a legit version. If lootboxes gave players the option to buy and sell the items contained within, I think things would be different. Of course, that would also kill the profitability. If a casual player gets a really rare item right now, they have no choice but to keep it, and the whales have to keep buying boxes to get that item. If they could sell items, that casual player might decide they'd rather cash out that item for $300. Whale pays $300, consumer gets $300, game producer gets nothing. They could charge a transaction fee, but they probably could have gotten the whale to buy $500 worth of lootboxes trying to get that item. The fact that duplicates are basically worthless doesn't help either. At least with Magic or Pokemon, you'd be hard pressed to buy a $5 pack that you couldn't resell for at least $1. Your worst case is bounded at a 20% return. It is entirely possible, and not at all rare, to get a lootbox full of duplicates and end up with nothing. The number of players you contact also makes it easy for them to create items that are common to see, but not easy to get. If an item has a 1/20,000 drop rate, and the average player has opened 50 lootboxes, each player has roughly a 1 in 400 chance of having that item. If a Magic or Pokemon card is that rare, you'll maybe see one of them. It'd take a while to play Magic against 400 people. Meanwhile, in a 25 vs 25 game (or just 50 player for stuff like Fortnite), you'll see it in 1 out of every 8 games on average. That makes it seem like it's not too hard to get, right? You see it all the time. And lastly, lootboxes are generally cosmetic, while trading cards are usually functional (maybe except baseball cards? I don't know if there's a game that goes with those or not). The rarity of cards can have a substantial impact on how the game plays, to the point where you can absolutely ruin the game by making some cards too rare. Nobody wants to play a card game where the winner is determined by who blew more money on their deck. Again, knock offs help with this.
gregopet 6y ago
Phones & tablets have the additional advantage of being able to get your attention regularly and reliably. They can train you like an animal: open this chest in 40 minutes and that one after 2 hours. This is very useful when you're trying to create & enforce a habit (and once you're well locked into the habit spending real money for that stuff starts to seem more reasonable).
laughingbovine 6y ago
We need at least 2 lens flares and a firework in order for it to be addictive. Maybe if the "new card smell" contained some nicotine?

spinach 6y ago

Those are at least finite, limited by production and stock. Digital items can be nearly infinite.

mycologos 6y ago
"Finite" doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction here, if you're a kid at the limits of "production and stock" buying trading cards, you probably have a problem already?

ljm 6y ago

Those can at least hold value over time as you're buying something tangible that can be traded or sold. And I don't get the feeling that going to the local newsagent and buying a pack with your pocket money sets you up for the same kind of addiction that microtransactions and loot boxes can. I don't really think that they're equivalent. If you were to make a Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh game that encouraged you to buy digital versions of those packs to make any progress in the game, then I think there would be a better comparison. The fact that those are online-only means that the house can essentially rig the game on the fly and engage in many more unscrupulous practices to keep you hooked. Made all the more easy by having a payment method directly linked. It doesn't mean that physical CCGs have no addictive properties, of course.

akersten 6y ago
> Those can at least hold value over time as you're buying something tangible that can be traded or sold. Ironically, that makes TCG even more like gambling, in contrast to loot boxes which do not provide a cash-value payout.
- bashinator 6y ago
  I’d argue that to the contrary, loot boxes have demonstrated that having a cash-value payout isn’t necessary to elicit gambling behavior in people.
salamandersauce 6y ago
Yeah, there's more friction to having to go to a store and buy cards but there is also friction in having to go to a casino or bar to find a blackjack table or VLT. What is progress? To compete in the top 1% of Overwatch you don't need to buy loot boxes at all. To compete in the top 1% of paper Magic or Pokemon you absolutely need better cards that have to be acquired from random packs at some point either by you, an LGS or somebody that sold it to an LGS.

cmeacham98 6y ago

To my knowledge, pokemon card packs are not designed to be as addictive and easy to spend money on as possible in the same vein as loot boxes in video games. Additionally, the requirement to go to a physical store (or order online and wait upwards of a week for shipping) is likely a mitigating factor.

Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago

And still, I don't know anyone who ruined their life as a result of addiction to buying CCGs or baseball cards (and I do know that many of us learned a few things about economy thanks to them, when we were kids). I'm not saying it can't happen, maybe someone will dig out an example, but it would be an extremely rare edge case. In games with loot boxes, on the other hand, many people end up spending totally crazy amounts for their income and essentially ruin their life. It's true that there is a continuous scale between baseball cards and the casino, with several factors influencing the level of addictiveness (immediacy, amount of maximum reward, etc.) and it's not obvious where one should set the limit. But there should be a limit, and IMO it should be one that heavily regulates loot boxes (and in particular, forbids minors from buying them) and doesn't touch CCGs or baseball cards. Claiming that we should not touch loot boxes because CCGs are similar would be a textbook example of the continuum fallacy.

mmacvicarprett 6y ago
I sounds to me that when you say that many people end up spending totally crazy amounts for their income and essentially ruin their life you are just referring to anecdotes (kid using mom phone with activated credit card and no protections), what makes you think this is a real and big problem?
- Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
  I play a mobile game with loot boxes (although I don't buy them myself) and I am a frequent user of community forums where players talk about the game. Stories about people with modest income spending thousands a month, and sometimes losing their partner for this reason, are very common. Often a thread comes up on the matter and many people chime in with stories of that kind. Of course, it's still anecdotes. It's impossible to have actual data, as obviously the developers aren't going to give us statistics on how many people are spending unhealthy amounts of money in the game. But my impression (and the impression of most players I know) is that it's quite widespread, and I'm not talking about kids, but adults that just don't know when to stop.
- Can_Not 6y ago

14 6y ago

I think you make a good point and perhaps one day we will see those regulated as well. All we are missing is a news story of some kid who stole his parents money to buy a bunch of these cards and a parent claim it is gambling and we will see legal action.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Trading cards at least hold their value to a certain extent (you can resell them if you're no longer using them) and are a physical object that doesn't depend on a "cloud". Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic The Gathering cards are still just as good as they were when they first came out, where as a lot of games from ~10-15 years ago no longer have a functional multiplayer mode because the servers hosted by the publisher are down.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

Buying a CCG pack is a rather detached process; you fork over you money and you get a foil wrapped packet. You unwrap it afterwards and that's fun but it's clear that an ordinary purchase is occurring. That's much less stimulating than the glitzy animation and audio one gets that is carefully designed to give kids the impression that something special and exciting is happening and to spark that bit of hope that they'll get something good. Add on top of that the additional animation/voice-over when they do get something good to reward them and it's therefore not surprising that children are strongly attracted to it.

rriepe 6y ago
That's the old way of doing it. Now you open it years later on a stream in front of thousands of people.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
richwater 6y ago
I don't really think is a strong argument. You can present it wrapped in whatever glitz (or lack of) that you want, but the process is pretty much the same. You're exchanging currency for a chance at getting something from a known subset of items.
- DecoPerson 6y ago
  There’s a huge difference. You could write a terminal program in which people can buy and open loot boxes; I guarantee you it won’t be as “effective” as a fancy loot box ceremony in an AAA video game. (I put effective in quotes because it depends on what axes you’re looking at.) Pokémon cards are clearly different enough is enough ways that they don’t cause the same amount of harm to anywhere near as many people as other forms of gambling do (such a pokies machines in bars and loot boxes in video games). Sure, the core process may be the same, but that’s not all that matters. It’s how it connects to everything else and what the overall resulting effect is.

david2ndaccount 6y ago

They are bad as well. I remember stealing as a child to fuel my purchases of Magic cards...

fendy3002 6y ago

1. Lootboxes available 24/7 anywhere 2. Lootboxes can be purchased easily with credit cards and can be hidden easily from relatives 3. Login bonus and free pulls 4. CCG is arguably pay 2 play 5. Progression & achievements 6. Nation-wide or international-wide reach 7. Gameplay session and purchasing session most of the time are different

curryst 6y ago

Those are a substantially different economies. For one thing, you end up actually owning something (you often don't even own the software you use the item in for lootboxes). That comes with a bunch of changes, but the most significant is that you can buy things from other players. I can build Magic decks without opening a single pack; I just buy the exact cards I want from other players. That's huge because you never get to a spot where you're spending $1,500 on packs to get that one card you really need. It amortizes the randomness of the packs across a huge group of people, so it can always be had at a specific price relative to it's rarity. Excluding cards no longer in print, which you can't buy packs for anyways. You can gamble for cards in Pokemon or Magic, if you choose to. If you'd rather, you can hand me a list of cards and I can give you an exact to-the-cent price for you to get those. Loot boxes generally don't have that option. The price is anywhere from the price to get a box up to infinity, period. You can also simply buy knock-offs. They aren't tournament legal, but nobody cares if you're using a Chinese knock off that you bought for $5 because you didn't want to pay $500 for a legit version. If lootboxes gave players the option to buy and sell the items contained within, I think things would be different. Of course, that would also kill the profitability. If a casual player gets a really rare item right now, they have no choice but to keep it, and the whales have to keep buying boxes to get that item. If they could sell items, that casual player might decide they'd rather cash out that item for $300. Whale pays $300, consumer gets $300, game producer gets nothing. They could charge a transaction fee, but they probably could have gotten the whale to buy $500 worth of lootboxes trying to get that item. The fact that duplicates are basically worthless doesn't help either. At least with Magic or Pokemon, you'd be hard pressed to buy a $5 pack that you couldn't resell for at least $1. Your worst case is bounded at a 20% return. It is entirely possible, and not at all rare, to get a lootbox full of duplicates and end up with nothing. The number of players you contact also makes it easy for them to create items that are common to see, but not easy to get. If an item has a 1/20,000 drop rate, and the average player has opened 50 lootboxes, each player has roughly a 1 in 400 chance of having that item. If a Magic or Pokemon card is that rare, you'll maybe see one of them. It'd take a while to play Magic against 400 people. Meanwhile, in a 25 vs 25 game (or just 50 player for stuff like Fortnite), you'll see it in 1 out of every 8 games on average. That makes it seem like it's not too hard to get, right? You see it all the time. And lastly, lootboxes are generally cosmetic, while trading cards are usually functional (maybe except baseball cards? I don't know if there's a game that goes with those or not). The rarity of cards can have a substantial impact on how the game plays, to the point where you can absolutely ruin the game by making some cards too rare. Nobody wants to play a card game where the winner is determined by who blew more money on their deck. Again, knock offs help with this.

gregopet 6y ago

Phones & tablets have the additional advantage of being able to get your attention regularly and reliably. They can train you like an animal: open this chest in 40 minutes and that one after 2 hours. This is very useful when you're trying to create & enforce a habit (and once you're well locked into the habit spending real money for that stuff starts to seem more reasonable).

laughingbovine 6y ago

We need at least 2 lens flares and a firework in order for it to be addictive. Maybe if the "new card smell" contained some nicotine?