14 ms·
Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court
- defenestration 5y agoThe linked article is an English translation from this article in the Dutch newspaper NRC: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/03/09/gedurfde-uitspraak-lootboxes-in-voetbalspel-fifa-nu-wel-toegestaan-a4099603 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/03/09/gedurfde-uitspraak-loot...
- jmyeet 5y agoThis makes me sad. I think loot boxes with RNG rewards are a disgusting practice. It's gambling that minors are allowed to do. One of the things I respect Epic Games for is they didn't follow this profitable path for Fortnite. In Fortnite, you want the skin, you buy the skin. You don't buy a ton of boxes and hope to get lucky. Gambling with an immediate result is bad. It's particularly bad for children. But it's also bad for adults (eg online slot machines).
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoFortnite is its own evil. They only show an extremely small fraction of the items available each day, with no indication of whether they'll return, so that you feel you have to buy things now in case you never have the chance again.
- politelemon 5y agoFear Of Missing Out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out Yes agreed, Epic's behavior in Fortnite is just as, if not more, predatory and relies on FOMO which is a huge factor in peer pressure among young people. Epic is not deserving of respect but should be called out more.
- oneoff786 5y agoI don’t have any interest in fortnite but I don’t follow why this is bad. These are just skins right? Like no differentiation besides personal aesthetic preference? Couldn’t these be sold with no ambiguity, never ever coming back, and have literally no impact on your desire to buy? Have you ever felt a desire to buy a shirt because it won’t be available to purchase again? Is there really a world where they say “this asset is for sale today and in 28 days” and you say “oh good I will want to be it then but not now”?
- alpaca128 5y agoThis is a textbook example of abusing FOMO (fear of missing out). It's real and Epic does it exactly because of this effect on people. If you're not completely convinced by some cosmetic item you might say "I don't know whether I really want this so I'll just wait and maybe buy it later". But if it's time-limited, in this case without indication whether it'll ever be on sale again, you cannot wait and decide later. It's deliberate time pressure on the decision.
- oneoff786 5y agoIn what universe would you want an aesthetic item later more than you do now? Fear of missing out seems to be more experiential or with regards to items that may turn out to be have more utility in the future in my opinion.
- alpaca128 5y agoDo you really know whether you like an album after listening to a song once? Enough to buy it? Maybe, maybe not. What if you had to decide today, and might never be able to listen to that album again if you don't buy it? You might regret it later... That's the kind of manipulation we see in some games. I don't think this should be considered normal. The same applies to Nintendo's Switch games that were only available for purchase for a short time after release, with Nintendo not saying whether those games will ever be available again [0]. We all know that a lot of people bought those games just in case, and that's the intention. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/1/22307522/mario-limited-time-nintendo-switch-disney-vault https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/1/22307522/mario-limited-tim...
- jmyeet 5y agoI think this argument is a stretch for two reasons: 1. Anyone who sells anything has limited runs, sales and so forth. Like that's just commerce; and 2. Loot box games do all the same thing anyway so at least on Fortnite you know the cost of what you want. This is one of these situations where Fortnite is strictly better than RNG loot boxes. That's not the same as saying they do no wrong. But better? Objectively, yes.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago> Anyone who sells anything has limited runs, sales and so forth. Yes, but Fortnite pushes this to the absolute extreme. It's one thing to visit a store with thousands of products where there's a discount on some of the items and a few limited-time offers. It's a very different thing to visit another store which has thousands of products but only makes eight of them available for sale each day, always as a limited-time offer, with no information about the rest of the catalogue.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nemothekid 5y ago>Fortnite is its own evil. They only show an extremely small fraction of the items available each day, They're skins. They have no in-game effect. If your need for social validation is so great that you would spend your life savings on skins then that should be a personal problem. Unlike lootboxes, the transactions is clear as day and there's no gambling aspect. I wouldn't call Nike evil because they refuse to re-release Jordan 1s.
- Lascaille 5y ago>They're skins. They have no in-game effect. This is true in exactly the sense that the brand and type of sneakers you wear has no-in school effect.
- tragictrash 5y agoThere's a huge difference between the two. Shoes and shoe culture can matter a huge amount to some people. Skins aren't really in the same category. Skins literally do nothing, and don't have the same value or impact on a person's identity or social standing. Shoes do. Not to me, but some people do care.
- Lascaille 5y agoIt may surprise you to know that there's a similar culture that revolves around skins. That's why people buy them and trade them. I don't know a lot about it and it isn't as clearly visible as sneaker culture but I know it exists, because I used to play that game and there were people in various discords and steam chats who were obsessed with skins to the point it was all they could talk about.
- nemothekid 5y agoThis is a "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" take. Ok, both Nike and Epic are evil; Nike & every other luxury brand should now be banned from any artificial scarcity.
- 5y ago
- JoshTriplett 5y ago> I think loot boxes with RNG rewards are a disgusting practice. I completely agree. I think there exist many disgusting practices; that doesn't mean those practices should be prohibited. As an alternate approach, suppose that this were addressed through ESRB or similar: "gambling elements" could be called out as a theme (alongside "smoking" or "gore"), and have a minimum associated rating (e.g. not "E for Everyone").
- AlexandrB 5y agoYes. Just apply existing VLT gambling laws to this stuff. 18+ rating and odds of winning must be made public.
- Thaxll 5y agoFortnite has way more kids playing than Fifa and makes more money, so they're "more" evil, it does not matter if it's a skin on a store it's still a lot of money and kids are hooked to it. Lootbox issues are no the problem, games like Fortnite, Roblox, CoD are on the same level.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- willis936 5y agoState endorsed gambling laundering.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoI’d have upvoted if you just omitted the last word. I’m not sure where the money laundering obviously comes in (I’m sure it’s possible, I just don’t see how it’s particularly applicable here).
- CommanderData 5y agoI'm not sure why this is down voted. This is exactly what I feel this is.
- gpm 5y agoI'm not sure "endorsed" is quite correct, as I read this it's a court saying it's "not-yet-forbidden" gambling laundering.
- icu 5y agoI was really hoping that the pushback on videogame gambling by minors would gain more regulatory momentum, not less. I think it's going to take longer to see regulation stick due to a lack of first hand knowledge of lootboxes by politicians and judges, who to be fair, are of a generation that just do not understand the subject matter.
- zht 5y agoim sure they understand the lootboxes of cash they get here and there on a nudge nudge wink wink basis
- kmeisthax 5y agoI don't think legislators are entirely ignorant of the problem. They probably don't want to even try regulating artists; and the companies selling these lootboxes have insisted that any regulation would impinge upon freedom-of-speech. The regulations we have on gambling applies because the games involve wagering money; things like loot boxes[0] get around this primarily by not offering anything of value. Of course, the counterargument (which I agree with) is that these have the spirit of gambling - i.e. being designed to maximally fuck with the heads of people who are even slightly vulnerable to dopamine. You will probably get politicians to agree with you on that, but they won't want to waste political capital on an antipartisan[1] issue. Sure, it might have popular support, but it harms the country's interests to be regulating things that make money. [0] And their historical antecedents such as TCG booster packs, figurine blind bags, coin-op arcade games, and so on [1] Political issues can be broadly categorized into "partisan", "bipartisan", and "antipartisan": - Partisan issues are ones that typically find their way into a political party's "agenda". They are issues that one or more parties support and one or more parties oppose. Examples include basically any wedge issue in American politics. - Bipartisan issues are ones that are obvious to a supermajority of politicians. These are issues that "everybody supports" and pass Congress with wide margins. Examples include things like copyright law. - Antipartisan issues are ones that are obviously bad to a supermajority of politicians, regardless of whatever popular support they might have. Examples include things like right-to-repair.
- sofixa 5y ago
- ChicagoBoy11 5y agoThis is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is very real. I've witnessed first-hand a grown in sort of a "gambling" culture amongst kids, as early as elementary school. While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. Part of me, though, wonders if this is just me getting older and becoming one of those "grumps." It's painfully obvious that as a whole society is moving to becoming more and more accepting of things like this (for instance, the huge push towards gambling in organized sports in the US), that it has the feel of inevitability. My sense is this will be a net social negative, but perhaps experience will prove it to be not so bad.
- falcolas 5y agoOne thing FIFA has that MTG never did: it effectively destroys you collection of cards every year. You can’t carry over cards between their yearly releases, and you can’t get updated rosters without getting the latest release. It is, at least for sports games, incomparable to MTG or Pokémon.
- stodor89 5y agoHmm, aren't MTG releasing new sets every year? And don't they only allow cards from the last few years in tournaments?
- frumper 5y agoI can still pull out my 20+ year old cards and play with friends. Some cards are reprinted and remain legal. Either way you aren’t playing your old fifa ones vs new ones
- ayngg 5y agoThey have different formats that people play with varying amounts of sets being legal, one of the most popular formats is a casual format where almost every card printed is legal. Sure a lot of it becomes chaff, but it is not unusual for cards you buy to appreciate in value, or even gain a substantial amount of value when they become viable and popularized in decks or are enabled by new cards that are released. The cards I played with decades ago when I was a kid in school have appreciated in value many multiples of times over.
- Shadonototra 5y ago
- ComputerGuru 5y ago(For anyone going just by the title: this is the purchase of loot boxes.) I’m personally against this for moral reasons having to do a lot with corporate greed and and then some to do with gambling in general, but I do want to point out this isn’t remotely new and isn’t something that the digital gaming/entertainment industry came up. When we were kids, we all used to gamble by buying Pokémon booster packs for $4 or $5 hoping they would contain a Charzard or a holographic Magikarp only to discover just another Koffing. That was specifically marketed towards and aimed at kids - probably even younger than those playing FIFA. Although - I realize now that I may be speaking out of ignorance as I have no clue if the Netherlands allowed the sale of Pokémon cards to minors in the first place? (I learned a few years ago that the smarter guys used to go in with a scale and weigh the packs to see which one was heavier due to the presence of a holographic card until Hasbro/TPCI wisened up and began adding blanks to make up for the weight difference.
- Doxin 5y ago> I have no clue if the Netherlands allowed the sale of Pokémon cards to minors in the first place? They did. Technically you can't sell anything to a minor since they aren't allowed to enter into contracts. In practice everyone all over sells shit to minors and just crosses their fingers their guardians don't show up for their money back. Seems to work in practice.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoI kept hoping someone would answer my question as it was nagging at me. Thanks!
- akersten 5y agoThank goodness. I was genuinely worried they'd make Pokemon card booster packs illegal next. Let kids live a little and learn the perils of gambling play money early. They can safely learn the disappointment of throwing 20 bucks into a box with no reward during a time when it's relatively consequence free, instead of throwing 20 grand into stock options and being shocked when it goes to 0. Loot boxes are not really gambling anyway, because there's not even monetary payout. It's the most tame form of "money pit" there is, and I'm glad we're not continuing this trip down "make things I don't like illegal" lane.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vmception 5y ago> the packages are part of a game of skill, not a separate game of chance in itself. hahahhahahahaha lolwut! that's hilarious, is that what EA actually argued too or did the judges reach that conclusion on their own from a reading of the statute! Either way that is hilarious and obviously not the intention of the parliament, but I'll leave it up to them to figure that out if they actually care as much as the executive branch did.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoIs this somehow much worse than the football (soccer) sticker albums I used to buy in little foil-wrapped packets when I was a kid? Or Pokemon cards etc.
- kregasaurusrex 5y agoAs a kid I used to play the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game a lot, and the odds for getting cards of certain rarities were published on the packaging so you knew how many packs on average it would take to hit a super rare/ultra rare card. There were 8 commons and one rare slot per pack which had a 1:5 chance of being a super rare, 1:12 for an ultra rare, and 1:23 for a secret rare.[0] Additionally the cards had actual utility where the rarest cards often had better effects than commons and decks would be built around these rarer cards to be used in a duel. For games like Fortnite where the items in the lootboxes are purely cosmetic, the kids who are playing know that they aren't getting any competitive advantages with different skins in playing. However this becomes a bit murkier in games like FIFA and Star Wars Battlefront 2, where the rarest items from lootboxes contained items that were better than those obtained through leveling up alone. The article says that "92 percent of the FIFA boxes are not bought with real money, but unlocked via football matches and are therefore simply part of the game of skill." which implies players can expect to get a reasonable number of good players to build a team with and a team constructed of said players on aggregate would not provide a significant competitive advantage. My opinion is that players should spend time in games because they consider it to be fun rather than to be the best for the sake of being the best, and the in-game whales who spend the most $ on a game shouldn't be overpowered to the point where free to play players should feel they need to spend money to win. [0] https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Booster_Pack https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Booster_Pack
- firekvz 5y ago> My opinion is that players should spend time in games because they consider it to be fun rather than to be the best for the sake of being the best, and the in-game whales who spend the most $ on a game shouldn't be overpowered to the point where free to play players should feel they need to spend money to win. this is very debateable all games have (egaming and regular sports) have a competitive level, you always start playing for the fun, then you either become bored or you realize that you are good and want to start playing vs people with your same or more level of skill/ability, and thats where monetization comes. You talk about whales being able to pay for the best cards/items/etc in a game, but those usually get quickly demoralized as having overpowered stats/items/etc doesn't mean you can enter competitive skill inmediatly, it's easy for people in those games ti quickly identificate players who bought their way to the pro scene of the game, usually called pay to win players and defeat them I see it as something that needs to happen, in the past I've been the one in the other side of the trade, mostly in MMORPGS, where I was able to farm/craft/bot for really rare/unique items and sell to those willing to pay thousands of USD for them and yet, beat them in regular matches/pvp/etc, so it somehow encouraged the economy inside the game, and kept actual pro gamers happy, kept devs happy, kept the general population happy, the only ones really unhappy were the ones that paid for the items and got sad when it really didnt help of course, I understand that it should be regulated and not to make it fully stupid, but well, at the end, all of this things keep people invested and interested in games, otherwise, they would generally just die.
- abcc8 5y agoI haven't played a FIFA game in probably 20 years so please excuse my potentially uninformed question. Do loot boxes improve the play experience of the game in any meaningful way?
- roofio 5y agoThey made a mode where you assemble a team of players from past and present called Fifa Ultimate Team (FUT). You start with a team of players who each of a rating of about 70. EA will release packs that contain star players with much higher ratings. In order to get these higher rated players on your team, you can either grind the game for several hours a day or pay to open some packs that might have the high rated players inside.
- oh_sigh 5y agoGrinding the game to open the boxes sounds fine to me, but how is it not a game of chance if you're just paying money to open a box? That's literally a lottery. Even if only 8% of boxes are opened that way, they should just not allow it flat-out.
- ffpip 5y ago> how is it not a game of chance if you're just paying money to open a box The player(s) you receive when you open the box is random and not known before you open the box.
- ravenstine 5y agoIt's interesting how we've gone from heavily regulating content in shows and games made for children to putting kids in digital Skinner boxes that extract the wealth of their parents in exchange for conceptual things of which there is no shortage. On the other hand, how different are loot boxes and DLC from the days where we played games at an arcade and had to insert 6 more quarters to complete a level, sometimes even if the player still has health? I guess the difference is that you leave behind an arcade, whereas modern video games stay with kids at all times and are designed to addict kids to an even greater degree than anything I ever played at TILT! arcades.
- VoodooJuJu 5y agoAuthority (parents or otherwise) has a responsibility to protect people (particularly children) from vice and vultures. Children are particularly vulnerable because they are inexperienced in life, lacking will, consciousness, and wisdom. This is irresponsible. This is a failure of authority to protect children.
- goldfeld 5y ago> "Lootboxes" .. "highest Dutch court" This is either high sci-fi parody or I want another hitech future, because it continually feels that all the technology in the world is only ever useful, successful for the most petty and meaningless ends. There needs to be a law that humanity's ignorance grows quadratically with scientific achievement. Ignorance of course is a proportional quality; when all the information in the world is at your fingertips you are doubly ignorant not to make expedient use of it. Oh, there are government rogue agents with all their noise and misinformation campaigns, sure. But there are also millions of programmers workings on clickbait ads for a living. Clearly some choice and free will is thrown in at some point in the learning curve. An isolated pre-discovery south american native is as wise or ignorant as his means (culture) allow. Our means are the most luxuriant humankind has seen yet. Great responsibilities and all that.. so that we're devolving into incoherent grunts. Yes I'd like a rant. Maybe TFA is about revisionist high medieval history and FIFAs are kinds of fiefs.
- jafoi 5y agoGood. The government does not have a right to restrict trade between citizens and companies. On the other hand, it's the parents' job to decide what their children can and can't do.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago> The government does not have a right to restrict trade between citizens and companies. Of course it does, as a matter of category. The government makes it illegal for you to buy grenades, for instance.
- supergirl 5y agothat's funny considering that gambling is so restricted in the Netherlands: only state owned casinos are allowed and online gambling is not allowed
- jnsie 5y agoI don't think I've ever seen so many ads in an article. To the point I stopped reading. Wow
- drcongo 5y agoThey should make the loot boxes brown envelopes just like the real FIFA.
- fomine3 5y agoI don't like such thing, but I don't think it should be banned by law.