11 ms·

Diablo Immortal won't release in the Netherlands and Belgium due to loot box law

224 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

jwmoz 4y ago
I hate how games nowadays have credits and tokens and gambling things. Totally ruined the purity of games, I'm a millennial ex-gamer and recently got back into games via a PS5 and noticed how everything has changed now for the worst.
- smegma2 4y ago
  Agree to disagree maybe, but I'm happy that many games are free because of microtransactions.
  - diob 4y ago
    Given how microtransactions are typically there to reduce time / grind, I'd hardly say they're free though. Time is money.
  - Madmallard 4y ago
    His argument is that games nowadays are devoid of depth and content outside thinly veiled addiction models with shinies. He's totally right about it. Even competitive games are taking a turn for the worst with forced changes to the meta. It makes more money but it is an abusive addiction cycle of making someone's favorite thing broken but making someone else's favorite thing useless.
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- Izikiel43 4y ago
  Elden ring
  - amatecha 4y ago
    True. I did feel an actual sense of relief at like... you just buy the game, and you have the game, and you get what you paid for, and there's no manipulative BS trying to bilk even more money out of you. None of this "there's sooo much more available, but at a price, on top of what you already paid". Plus the game is just damn awesome outside of all that!
- m463 4y ago
  It would be funny to take a stab at micro-transaction based classic games. I mean chess, checkers, crazy-8's, uno, etc (of course funny until it makes money and you follow l ron hubbard's course)
eftychis 4y ago
Honestly, I personally hope most countries mark it as gambling. Good for both countries.
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gleenn 4y ago
Given the game is free to play (freemium), I find it interesting that random stuff can't drop on the ground. So games can't give away free digital goods? Is this only in the context of people who paid something?
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- RandomBK 4y ago
  Where did "free digital goods" come from? People have to pay money - sometimes a lot of money - for these loot boxes. I'm fine with random loot tables, but the moment I need to pay to roll the dice it stops being a "random item drop" and starts looking awfully like a "slot machine".
  - kbenson 4y ago
    To be fair, the last sentence in GP comment makes it fairly obvious they're just trying to understand the context in which this applies. "Lootboxes" means different things to digfer people, depending on their experience with the genre, even if those that have been following along think of it as "pay for random item roll", as I believe is the case here.
    - adra 4y ago
      They boost the chance of getting rare loot in dungeons and possibly (no confirmation without posted loot table odds) some items can only ever be acquired with the boost active. It's loot boxes with more steps.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think they are talking about unpaid loot/ loot boxes
- kbenson 4y ago
  Yes, I'm fairly sure this is in the context of people that pay addrioltional money to unlock a random item roll chance in game. For additional context, see all the news about star wars battlefront 2 a few years back, there this really got a lot of popular coverage.
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
> The lootboxes in the game are against the law in your country, so unless the gambling restrictions change, the game will not be released in the Netherlands and Belgium. Anyone know what the law is?
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  I think unpredictable prizes with nominal cash value (ie, digital gambling)
- Bud 4y ago
  Here's a good article on the law in Belgium and the issue generally. https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-gambling-law-review/belgium#:~:text=A%20player%20who%20pays%20for,boxes%20from%20the%20Belgian%20market https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-gambling-law-review/be...).
Victerius 4y ago
Diablo Immortal faces a backlash as Metacritic user score drops to Blizzard’s third lowest ever https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/diablo-immortal-faces-a-backlash-as-metacritic-user-score-drops-to-blizzards-third-lowest-ever/ https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/diablo-immortal-fac...
- ronsor 4y ago
  A fitting fate for the "do you guys not have phones"[0] game. [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-guys-not-have-phones https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-guys-not-have-phones
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    A substantial portion of that audience probably wishes they could get away with not having phones.
- mrpopo 4y ago
  "Third lowest" says a lot about Blizzard's recent releases. They might have made more money in the short term, but their reputation is thrashed.
- Sakos 4y ago
  The Play Store review score is also steadily dropping. It used to be at 4.4. It's at 3.5 now.
- friendlypeg 4y ago
  Wonder how many people actually played the game as opposed to parroting whatever they heard from YouTubers? Metacritic user score has become useless since people started to doing review bomb.
pvg 4y ago
Related, couple of days ago, 700 million comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628848
Pelam 4y ago
I wonder if it would be ok if the player age was verified to be above the ”gambling age limit”?
- WheatM 4y ago
- adra 4y ago
  Volunteer that your games are not meant for children and permanently submit your cash cow games to legislative scruitany? It'll never happen. If legislated across the world, they still wouldn't admit that their products 'could cause harm's. Why open yourself to the liabilities? No, they'll just do everything they can to prolong the greed.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  That would result in a PEGI 18 classification which is also something the publishers of these games have been fighting tooth and nail.
- jurmous 4y ago
  Not in the Netherlands. They are not allowed for any age players unless it complies to certain rules. If the content of lootboxes are not transferable they are not forbidden. Gambling is strictly regulated here. https://dutchgamesassociation.nl/2018/04/26/loot-boxes-netherlands-gaming-authoritys-findings/ https://dutchgamesassociation.nl/2018/04/26/loot-boxes-nethe...
javajosh 4y ago
Immortal can be played for the mainline story without spending any money at all. So far, at least up to level 40 (about 12 hours of gameplay) I haven't felt the urge to spend money. It's a little like Path of Exile in that you can enjoy the base game and the story for free; it's only if you "get into it" that you start spending money (I never "got into it). I can't help but feel it's fair to give away a really nice game to everyone, supported by the super fans who stick around to dwell in the experience without bound.
- hh3k0 4y ago
  It's not fair, it's predatory behavior aimed at addicts and children. I hope the rest of the EU will follow the fine example set by NL and BE.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    it's predatory behavior aimed at addicts and children. Have you played the game? I saw the OG YT video on this, and I was expecting to see lots of in-your-face tactics, but wanted to be fair before passing judgement. I really don't think it's predatory. At least, not yet. Maybe things change at higher levels - they sometimes do. (I'm looking for points where you can't progress in the mainline quest without spending money or ridiculous time. Haven't seen that yet but it may be there.)
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    - lijogdfljk 4y ago
      I don't think it matters _when_ it becomes predatory. Whether or not gambling should be legal aside, if gambling for minors is illegal in a jurisdiction then i'd expect any game that becomes predatory at any point to be managed as gambling. All of this is subject to the definition of gambling, predatory, etc - of which i'm not trying to argue. Just saying that befriending children with the goal of handing them drugs after a "long" period doesn't change that i'm still handing them drugs. Same goes for this, i would think - if it falls within those definitions, of course.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I’m fine with micro transactions in games (even “pay to win” although I don’t play those myself). But digital gambling is manipulative and should be regulated just like physical gambling. Props to these countries for stepping up.
bryik 4y ago
Weird, if true. Diablo Immortal is rated M (17+) [0], the gambling age in the Netherlands is 18 [1]. 0 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blizzard.diablo.immortal&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blizzard.d... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_age
- falcolas 4y ago
  The age rating creates no legal restrictions on purchasing a game. It’s “self regulation” with all the attendant chicanery.
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ammo1662 4y ago
It was developed by NetEase, which is even worse than Tencent. In Tencent's game, if you pay some money, then you can enjoy the game. The more you pay the better experience you will get. NetEase: "Yes, you paid some money, but I'm still your father"
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nonethewiser 4y ago
Remember when Blizzard mocked the fans who said Diablo 3 was too colorful and cartoony? Path of Exile is such a better successor to diablo 2.
- baby 4y ago
  Diablo 3 was really bad if you liked Diablo 2. Always felt like PoE was the real successor but didn’t really try it…
  - Madmallard 4y ago
    it's simply the best action RPG available. It has limitless depth and tremendous player agency
    - str34m 4y ago
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      I have to be the voice of dissent. I played it for a few hundred hours (but nothing like the hours I sunk into Diablo I & II!), and for the first few days of play it was almost more fun finding bugs and little "polish issues" than the actual game itself. PoE is the diametric opposite of the quality you see in a typical Blizzard game. It's fun in its own way, and it is free, but calling the the "best RPG available" is a stretch. I had a list of all of the issues I found, but I lost the text file to a PC upgrade, so I won't type them all out here, but the most glaring one for me was that when you moved from one area to the next, the door orientation was inconsistent/random, so you'd often end up going click-click-click to move and then move back to the previous area by accident. With the slow loading times this was particularly frustrating. I've had debates with PoE fans, and they gaslight me by telling me that "there are no issue", "the game is perfect", etc... That's actually an interesting psychological phenomenon all by itself! People can get acclimatized to anything and learn through trial and error what to do to avoid issues. For example, I learned to avoid the door orientation thing by pausing the move clicks when entering new areas, so I stopped noticing the bug. But the bug is still there! It didn't go away. I changed, the game didn't. This is why players with 1K+ hours in PoE swear that it is awesome, polished, and bug-free. They don't even realise all the tiny habits they've picked up to avoid the bugs. It's like knowing to double-click desktop icons, but single-click web URLs. This isn't consistent. It isn't good. But people learn and get used to it, and stop thinking about it as a problem... until they watch Grandma use a PC. That's when you realise... oh... it's actually a terrible, unintuitive user interface. This is why Microsoft famously used to use random people off the street for UX testing. Internal testers learn to avoid the rough edges after years and years of clicking around the same GUI. PS: I just remembered another glaring bug. Setting the game resolution to 4K would set the monitor resolution to 4K, but the game would render in 1080p and upscale. This wasn't a feature, the game simply couldn't write the value 3840 to the config file because there was a "sanity check" in the config GUI (why!?). If you manually edited the config file, you could play it at actual 4K. Again, people would swear up and down that no-no-no, I was wrong, it's a flawless game and runs buttery smooth at 4K, etc... meanwhile they're playing a blurry game that they just assume is "the PoE look" and some sort of stylistic choice.
olliej 4y ago
Sounds like a success to me?
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falcolas 4y ago
Just remember folks: According to ABK this game took as many resources as a mainline PC game. So, instead of having a D4 release, with a D5 release on the horizon, we got Diablo Immoral.
- water554 4y ago
  Nah this one was developed by Chinese devs.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    ... who could have been working on Diablo 4.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    They didn't develop it without Blizzard's help.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      It was outsourced to Netease, they already make comparable games. I'd bet they mostly just got some Blizzard assets and maybe some high level signoff on things to ensure they are ok. Chinese developers aren't incompetent, they just have a hard time marketing their games to a western audience. Slapping a western brand name on one of their games is a perfectly reasonable way for them to do that.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
        Sorry, I wasn't implying they were incompetent. But they got Blizzard sign off on this. Otherwise they would just have another sleazy pay to win game. Now they have a sleazy game wrapped in Diablo assets.
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zgs 4y ago
Seriously, good.
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jessedrain 4y ago
I hope that loot-boxes and eventually micro-transactions become outlawed or at least age-restricted. One time, I had to help an immigrant neighbor investigate why $400 of his paycheck went missing, and it turned out that his son (who had no appreciation of how much money that is in West Virginia) blew it on Fortnite skins. I never found out if the bank refunded the transaction.
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hetspookjee 4y ago
It’s a bizarre scenario that this is not allowed, yet if you’d visit the Netherlands right now. You’d be swarmed with gambling ads since online gambling has been legalised since a year now. Even worse is that if you visit any nice museum there’s a huge chance you’d find some folks there try to recruit people to join the national lottery. It’s a disgrace. Especially as they do it all under the guise of non-profit and all that while only giving 45% to charities of which none are supporting addiction prevention. I think it’s good that this game is not allowed here as loot boxes are a sham, but it does seem weird that gambling is such an overt and condoned activity by almost everyone, including the parliament.
- sverhagen 4y ago
  >You’d be swarmed with gambling ads Presumably the Dutch government had an agreement with the industry to voluntarily stop the public advertising. Presumably also a number of parties held to that agreement, while some others are still advertising. An excuse I've seen is that they had advertisement scheduled before the agreed-on date, but billboard space and such didn't come available until later. It sounds like the government will introduce regulations if the self-regulation doesn't work. It may still wind down and be fine?
  - hetspookjee 4y ago
    To my knowledge the one law introduced was the disallowance of public characters (mostly footballers at this moment) appearing in advertisements. Other than that it was indeed hoped that the industry would regulate itself. The very odd thing is that a lot of shows still include them. The intent of the Dutch government is to be the largest shareholder in most gambling activities, to not allow the illegal field to take over. Yet you can find it being normalised in so many shows. TOTO has been winning the advertisement prize awards years on end already. And not be targeted to the younger audience yet you find most advertisements especially targeted to them. The latest change in legalisation of online gambling made it explode to ever more absurd levels. There is very little reason to expect the market to manage itself. It’s great that these loot boxes are banned and I hope it stays that way, and the severe advertisement industry around these gambling practices is winded down.
_nalply 4y ago
Malicious compliance. I don't know the game, but even before reading this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662776 I couldn't help supposing that some people at the company think, fuck them for this stupid law, let's punish these countries. Then I started wondering how to prevent malicious compliance. In my opinion it makes sense to steer dangerous products causing addictive behavior like drugs as in opioids, cannabis, nicotine. Note! Only steer, not forbid. For me it looks like that Europe is trying to do the right thing but they didn't yet find out how. Malicious compliance somehow needs to be steered, too, because it causes real damage. Edit: I am not sure whether one uses the word "steer" as I did, but the synonym "regulate" sounds too bureaucratic to me.
- Teever 4y ago
  While I agree with the idea that we need to address corporate malicious compliance and other such behavior in very a very swift and stinging fashion I don't think that this is an example of malicious compliance. Being presented with a rule and declining to do the thing that would require you to follow the rule is the opposite of malicious compliance. Malicious compliance is when you do the thing,and follow the rule but for the purpose of inflicting unanticipated damage on the entity that is compelling you to follow the rule. Imagine a situation where a parent tells their child that they must spend 60 minutes cleaning their room or they won't get ice cream. A child who says 'Yeah, no, I don't want ice cream that bad" isn't being maliciously compliant, while a child who says 'Yeah sure thing mom, 60 minutes of cleaning" while they spend that time doing cleaning their room as slowly as possible is malicious compliance.
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  The comparison with nicotine is apt. With that in mind some simple ideas come to mind. - Hard age restriction for all games with money gambling elements - Mandatory product labelling - Restrictions on marketing material, disallow glorification of gambling (not sure I think this is needed, but it's done for cigarettes and alcohol)
- pvg 4y ago
  let's punish these countries. I don't think not having access to Diablo Immortal is meaningful 'punishment' for a couple of small but, you know, sovereign states. I doubt anyone at Activision thinks that.
smolder 4y ago
This is beating a dead horse, but pay-to-win "games" are disgustingly user hostile, and deserve nobodies money. Please, be principled and keep your money. Blizzard was a respectable company around the time StarCraft 1 came out, but it started downhill with WoW and only accelerated with the Activision merger. Support smaller studios that are daring enough to still focus on making things purely fun as opposed to continuously exploiting your psychology for money.
- ddtaylor 4y ago
  I agree with you, but for every hundred or thousand of us that refrain it can be dwarfed by a few whales that get "duped" into enabling these kinds of games. > Support smaller studios In the ARPG space this probably means supporting Eleventh Hour Games and their Last Epoch series. Path of Exile by Grinding Gear Games is a fantastic game, but they are 90% owned by Tencent now, so they probably don't qualify as a "smaller studio".
  - falcolas 4y ago
    By simply playing the game (even without paying), we are helping to support the whaling. After all, not even whales want to play a game that has no players in it. Nobody to show off to; nobody to beat into the ground with the equipment they've purchased.
proc0 4y ago
It's so sad to see a company throw away its IPs like this. Diablo 1 and 2 are works of art, and they will be remembered as such. I mean D1 & D2 are not even comparable to Immortal. It might feel like the same franchise, but Immortal is basically like going to Las Vegas and playing a Diablo slot machine. D1 & D2 were self-consistent worlds, where the player is rewarded for killing enemies, and the rewards scale with difficulty. This is rendered completely meaningless the second you can buy items with money. Yes, this was still a problem back then, but the solution should have been removal of the store and trading, instead of making the store and market in-house. Not just Blizzard, but also a large part of the game industry, have sneaked in a different product... from selling an experience, to selling tokens and items in their store. I wouldn't care that much if they had created a new franchise, and named it something different (honestly this includes D3). However, it's the blatant disregard for games as an art form, transforming them into software services with stores. They will still make money, but it's not because they made a video game, but rather a fancy slot machine.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  > Diablo 1 and 2 are works of art, [...] > the player is rewarded for killing enemies, and the rewards scale with difficulty. Diablo 1 and 2 were good video games. They weren't intended as works of art, and they aren't. A game where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies isn't really anything new.
  - ddtaylor 4y ago
    > Diablo 1 and 2 were good video games. They weren't intended as works of art, and they aren't I disagree and consider both games to be works of art. Both games pushed the boundaries of cinematic story telling for the ARPG genre. > A game where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies isn't really anything new. A painting of a woman wasn't new in the early 1500s when the Mona Lisa was painted, but I think most would consider it a work of art.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    I feel like you have a point somewhere, but knowing the history of games where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies, like the original Doom, makes me doubt the universality of your statement.
Aeolun 4y ago
> The lootboxes in the game are against the law in your country, so unless the gambling restrictions change, the game will not be released in the Netherlands and Belgium. I think it’s disturbing how they frame this as something the country has to change. As if it’s their fault for banning it, as opposed to Blizzards’ for making a gambling game in the first place.
mawadev 4y ago
Diablo Immoral

224 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

I hate how games nowadays have credits and tokens and gambling things. Totally ruined the purity of games, I'm a millennial ex-gamer and recently got back into games via a PS5 and noticed how everything has changed now for the worst.

smegma2 4y ago
Agree to disagree maybe, but I'm happy that many games are free because of microtransactions.
- diob 4y ago
  Given how microtransactions are typically there to reduce time / grind, I'd hardly say they're free though. Time is money.
- Madmallard 4y ago
  His argument is that games nowadays are devoid of depth and content outside thinly veiled addiction models with shinies. He's totally right about it. Even competitive games are taking a turn for the worst with forced changes to the meta. It makes more money but it is an abusive addiction cycle of making someone's favorite thing broken but making someone else's favorite thing useless.
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Izikiel43 4y ago
Elden ring
- amatecha 4y ago
  True. I did feel an actual sense of relief at like... you just buy the game, and you have the game, and you get what you paid for, and there's no manipulative BS trying to bilk even more money out of you. None of this "there's sooo much more available, but at a price, on top of what you already paid". Plus the game is just damn awesome outside of all that!
m463 4y ago
It would be funny to take a stab at micro-transaction based classic games. I mean chess, checkers, crazy-8's, uno, etc (of course funny until it makes money and you follow l ron hubbard's course)

eftychis 4y ago

Honestly, I personally hope most countries mark it as gambling. Good for both countries.

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gleenn 4y ago

Given the game is free to play (freemium), I find it interesting that random stuff can't drop on the ground. So games can't give away free digital goods? Is this only in the context of people who paid something?

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RandomBK 4y ago
Where did "free digital goods" come from? People have to pay money - sometimes a lot of money - for these loot boxes. I'm fine with random loot tables, but the moment I need to pay to roll the dice it stops being a "random item drop" and starts looking awfully like a "slot machine".
- kbenson 4y ago
  To be fair, the last sentence in GP comment makes it fairly obvious they're just trying to understand the context in which this applies. "Lootboxes" means different things to digfer people, depending on their experience with the genre, even if those that have been following along think of it as "pay for random item roll", as I believe is the case here.
  - adra 4y ago
    They boost the chance of getting rare loot in dungeons and possibly (no confirmation without posted loot table odds) some items can only ever be acquired with the boost active. It's loot boxes with more steps.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I think they are talking about unpaid loot/ loot boxes
kbenson 4y ago
Yes, I'm fairly sure this is in the context of people that pay addrioltional money to unlock a random item roll chance in game. For additional context, see all the news about star wars battlefront 2 a few years back, there this really got a lot of popular coverage.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago

> The lootboxes in the game are against the law in your country, so unless the gambling restrictions change, the game will not be released in the Netherlands and Belgium. Anyone know what the law is?

bpodgursky 4y ago
I think unpredictable prizes with nominal cash value (ie, digital gambling)
Bud 4y ago
Here's a good article on the law in Belgium and the issue generally. https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-gambling-law-review/belgium#:~:text=A%20player%20who%20pays%20for,boxes%20from%20the%20Belgian%20market https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-gambling-law-review/be...).

Victerius 4y ago

Diablo Immortal faces a backlash as Metacritic user score drops to Blizzard’s third lowest ever https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/diablo-immortal-faces-a-backlash-as-metacritic-user-score-drops-to-blizzards-third-lowest-ever/ https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/diablo-immortal-fac...

ronsor 4y ago
A fitting fate for the "do you guys not have phones"[0] game. [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-guys-not-have-phones https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-guys-not-have-phones
- JetAlone 4y ago
  A substantial portion of that audience probably wishes they could get away with not having phones.
mrpopo 4y ago
"Third lowest" says a lot about Blizzard's recent releases. They might have made more money in the short term, but their reputation is thrashed.
Sakos 4y ago
The Play Store review score is also steadily dropping. It used to be at 4.4. It's at 3.5 now.
friendlypeg 4y ago
Wonder how many people actually played the game as opposed to parroting whatever they heard from YouTubers? Metacritic user score has become useless since people started to doing review bomb.

pvg 4y ago

Related, couple of days ago, 700 million comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628848

Pelam 4y ago

I wonder if it would be ok if the player age was verified to be above the ”gambling age limit”?

WheatM 4y ago
adra 4y ago
Volunteer that your games are not meant for children and permanently submit your cash cow games to legislative scruitany? It'll never happen. If legislated across the world, they still wouldn't admit that their products 'could cause harm's. Why open yourself to the liabilities? No, they'll just do everything they can to prolong the greed.
tjpnz 4y ago
That would result in a PEGI 18 classification which is also something the publishers of these games have been fighting tooth and nail.
jurmous 4y ago
Not in the Netherlands. They are not allowed for any age players unless it complies to certain rules. If the content of lootboxes are not transferable they are not forbidden. Gambling is strictly regulated here. https://dutchgamesassociation.nl/2018/04/26/loot-boxes-netherlands-gaming-authoritys-findings/ https://dutchgamesassociation.nl/2018/04/26/loot-boxes-nethe...

javajosh 4y ago

Immortal can be played for the mainline story without spending any money at all. So far, at least up to level 40 (about 12 hours of gameplay) I haven't felt the urge to spend money. It's a little like Path of Exile in that you can enjoy the base game and the story for free; it's only if you "get into it" that you start spending money (I never "got into it). I can't help but feel it's fair to give away a really nice game to everyone, supported by the super fans who stick around to dwell in the experience without bound.

hh3k0 4y ago
It's not fair, it's predatory behavior aimed at addicts and children. I hope the rest of the EU will follow the fine example set by NL and BE.
- javajosh 4y ago
  it's predatory behavior aimed at addicts and children. Have you played the game? I saw the OG YT video on this, and I was expecting to see lots of in-your-face tactics, but wanted to be fair before passing judgement. I really don't think it's predatory. At least, not yet. Maybe things change at higher levels - they sometimes do. (I'm looking for points where you can't progress in the mainline quest without spending money or ridiculous time. Haven't seen that yet but it may be there.)
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  - lijogdfljk 4y ago
    I don't think it matters _when_ it becomes predatory. Whether or not gambling should be legal aside, if gambling for minors is illegal in a jurisdiction then i'd expect any game that becomes predatory at any point to be managed as gambling. All of this is subject to the definition of gambling, predatory, etc - of which i'm not trying to argue. Just saying that befriending children with the goal of handing them drugs after a "long" period doesn't change that i'm still handing them drugs. Same goes for this, i would think - if it falls within those definitions, of course.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

I’m fine with micro transactions in games (even “pay to win” although I don’t play those myself). But digital gambling is manipulative and should be regulated just like physical gambling. Props to these countries for stepping up.

bryik 4y ago

Weird, if true. Diablo Immortal is rated M (17+) [0], the gambling age in the Netherlands is 18 [1]. 0 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blizzard.diablo.immortal&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blizzard.d... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_age

falcolas 4y ago
The age rating creates no legal restrictions on purchasing a game. It’s “self regulation” with all the attendant chicanery.
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ammo1662 4y ago

It was developed by NetEase, which is even worse than Tencent. In Tencent's game, if you pay some money, then you can enjoy the game. The more you pay the better experience you will get. NetEase: "Yes, you paid some money, but I'm still your father"

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nonethewiser 4y ago

Remember when Blizzard mocked the fans who said Diablo 3 was too colorful and cartoony? Path of Exile is such a better successor to diablo 2.

baby 4y ago
Diablo 3 was really bad if you liked Diablo 2. Always felt like PoE was the real successor but didn’t really try it…
- Madmallard 4y ago
  it's simply the best action RPG available. It has limitless depth and tremendous player agency
  - str34m 4y ago
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    I have to be the voice of dissent. I played it for a few hundred hours (but nothing like the hours I sunk into Diablo I & II!), and for the first few days of play it was almost more fun finding bugs and little "polish issues" than the actual game itself. PoE is the diametric opposite of the quality you see in a typical Blizzard game. It's fun in its own way, and it is free, but calling the the "best RPG available" is a stretch. I had a list of all of the issues I found, but I lost the text file to a PC upgrade, so I won't type them all out here, but the most glaring one for me was that when you moved from one area to the next, the door orientation was inconsistent/random, so you'd often end up going click-click-click to move and then move back to the previous area by accident. With the slow loading times this was particularly frustrating. I've had debates with PoE fans, and they gaslight me by telling me that "there are no issue", "the game is perfect", etc... That's actually an interesting psychological phenomenon all by itself! People can get acclimatized to anything and learn through trial and error what to do to avoid issues. For example, I learned to avoid the door orientation thing by pausing the move clicks when entering new areas, so I stopped noticing the bug. But the bug is still there! It didn't go away. I changed, the game didn't. This is why players with 1K+ hours in PoE swear that it is awesome, polished, and bug-free. They don't even realise all the tiny habits they've picked up to avoid the bugs. It's like knowing to double-click desktop icons, but single-click web URLs. This isn't consistent. It isn't good. But people learn and get used to it, and stop thinking about it as a problem... until they watch Grandma use a PC. That's when you realise... oh... it's actually a terrible, unintuitive user interface. This is why Microsoft famously used to use random people off the street for UX testing. Internal testers learn to avoid the rough edges after years and years of clicking around the same GUI. PS: I just remembered another glaring bug. Setting the game resolution to 4K would set the monitor resolution to 4K, but the game would render in 1080p and upscale. This wasn't a feature, the game simply couldn't write the value 3840 to the config file because there was a "sanity check" in the config GUI (why!?). If you manually edited the config file, you could play it at actual 4K. Again, people would swear up and down that no-no-no, I was wrong, it's a flawless game and runs buttery smooth at 4K, etc... meanwhile they're playing a blurry game that they just assume is "the PoE look" and some sort of stylistic choice.

olliej 4y ago

Sounds like a success to me?

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falcolas 4y ago

Just remember folks: According to ABK this game took as many resources as a mainline PC game. So, instead of having a D4 release, with a D5 release on the horizon, we got Diablo Immoral.

water554 4y ago
Nah this one was developed by Chinese devs.
- amatecha 4y ago
  ... who could have been working on Diablo 4.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  They didn't develop it without Blizzard's help.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    It was outsourced to Netease, they already make comparable games. I'd bet they mostly just got some Blizzard assets and maybe some high level signoff on things to ensure they are ok. Chinese developers aren't incompetent, they just have a hard time marketing their games to a western audience. Slapping a western brand name on one of their games is a perfectly reasonable way for them to do that.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
      Sorry, I wasn't implying they were incompetent. But they got Blizzard sign off on this. Otherwise they would just have another sleazy pay to win game. Now they have a sleazy game wrapped in Diablo assets.
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zgs 4y ago

Seriously, good.

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jessedrain 4y ago

I hope that loot-boxes and eventually micro-transactions become outlawed or at least age-restricted. One time, I had to help an immigrant neighbor investigate why $400 of his paycheck went missing, and it turned out that his son (who had no appreciation of how much money that is in West Virginia) blew it on Fortnite skins. I never found out if the bank refunded the transaction.

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hetspookjee 4y ago

It’s a bizarre scenario that this is not allowed, yet if you’d visit the Netherlands right now. You’d be swarmed with gambling ads since online gambling has been legalised since a year now. Even worse is that if you visit any nice museum there’s a huge chance you’d find some folks there try to recruit people to join the national lottery. It’s a disgrace. Especially as they do it all under the guise of non-profit and all that while only giving 45% to charities of which none are supporting addiction prevention. I think it’s good that this game is not allowed here as loot boxes are a sham, but it does seem weird that gambling is such an overt and condoned activity by almost everyone, including the parliament.

sverhagen 4y ago
>You’d be swarmed with gambling ads Presumably the Dutch government had an agreement with the industry to voluntarily stop the public advertising. Presumably also a number of parties held to that agreement, while some others are still advertising. An excuse I've seen is that they had advertisement scheduled before the agreed-on date, but billboard space and such didn't come available until later. It sounds like the government will introduce regulations if the self-regulation doesn't work. It may still wind down and be fine?
- hetspookjee 4y ago
  To my knowledge the one law introduced was the disallowance of public characters (mostly footballers at this moment) appearing in advertisements. Other than that it was indeed hoped that the industry would regulate itself. The very odd thing is that a lot of shows still include them. The intent of the Dutch government is to be the largest shareholder in most gambling activities, to not allow the illegal field to take over. Yet you can find it being normalised in so many shows. TOTO has been winning the advertisement prize awards years on end already. And not be targeted to the younger audience yet you find most advertisements especially targeted to them. The latest change in legalisation of online gambling made it explode to ever more absurd levels. There is very little reason to expect the market to manage itself. It’s great that these loot boxes are banned and I hope it stays that way, and the severe advertisement industry around these gambling practices is winded down.

_nalply 4y ago

Malicious compliance. I don't know the game, but even before reading this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662776 I couldn't help supposing that some people at the company think, fuck them for this stupid law, let's punish these countries. Then I started wondering how to prevent malicious compliance. In my opinion it makes sense to steer dangerous products causing addictive behavior like drugs as in opioids, cannabis, nicotine. Note! Only steer, not forbid. For me it looks like that Europe is trying to do the right thing but they didn't yet find out how. Malicious compliance somehow needs to be steered, too, because it causes real damage. Edit: I am not sure whether one uses the word "steer" as I did, but the synonym "regulate" sounds too bureaucratic to me.

Teever 4y ago
While I agree with the idea that we need to address corporate malicious compliance and other such behavior in very a very swift and stinging fashion I don't think that this is an example of malicious compliance. Being presented with a rule and declining to do the thing that would require you to follow the rule is the opposite of malicious compliance. Malicious compliance is when you do the thing,and follow the rule but for the purpose of inflicting unanticipated damage on the entity that is compelling you to follow the rule. Imagine a situation where a parent tells their child that they must spend 60 minutes cleaning their room or they won't get ice cream. A child who says 'Yeah, no, I don't want ice cream that bad" isn't being maliciously compliant, while a child who says 'Yeah sure thing mom, 60 minutes of cleaning" while they spend that time doing cleaning their room as slowly as possible is malicious compliance.
colonwqbang 4y ago
The comparison with nicotine is apt. With that in mind some simple ideas come to mind. - Hard age restriction for all games with money gambling elements - Mandatory product labelling - Restrictions on marketing material, disallow glorification of gambling (not sure I think this is needed, but it's done for cigarettes and alcohol)
pvg 4y ago
let's punish these countries. I don't think not having access to Diablo Immortal is meaningful 'punishment' for a couple of small but, you know, sovereign states. I doubt anyone at Activision thinks that.

smolder 4y ago

This is beating a dead horse, but pay-to-win "games" are disgustingly user hostile, and deserve nobodies money. Please, be principled and keep your money. Blizzard was a respectable company around the time StarCraft 1 came out, but it started downhill with WoW and only accelerated with the Activision merger. Support smaller studios that are daring enough to still focus on making things purely fun as opposed to continuously exploiting your psychology for money.

ddtaylor 4y ago
I agree with you, but for every hundred or thousand of us that refrain it can be dwarfed by a few whales that get "duped" into enabling these kinds of games. > Support smaller studios In the ARPG space this probably means supporting Eleventh Hour Games and their Last Epoch series. Path of Exile by Grinding Gear Games is a fantastic game, but they are 90% owned by Tencent now, so they probably don't qualify as a "smaller studio".
- falcolas 4y ago
  By simply playing the game (even without paying), we are helping to support the whaling. After all, not even whales want to play a game that has no players in it. Nobody to show off to; nobody to beat into the ground with the equipment they've purchased.

proc0 4y ago

It's so sad to see a company throw away its IPs like this. Diablo 1 and 2 are works of art, and they will be remembered as such. I mean D1 & D2 are not even comparable to Immortal. It might feel like the same franchise, but Immortal is basically like going to Las Vegas and playing a Diablo slot machine. D1 & D2 were self-consistent worlds, where the player is rewarded for killing enemies, and the rewards scale with difficulty. This is rendered completely meaningless the second you can buy items with money. Yes, this was still a problem back then, but the solution should have been removal of the store and trading, instead of making the store and market in-house. Not just Blizzard, but also a large part of the game industry, have sneaked in a different product... from selling an experience, to selling tokens and items in their store. I wouldn't care that much if they had created a new franchise, and named it something different (honestly this includes D3). However, it's the blatant disregard for games as an art form, transforming them into software services with stores. They will still make money, but it's not because they made a video game, but rather a fancy slot machine.

TomSwirly 4y ago
> Diablo 1 and 2 are works of art, [...] > the player is rewarded for killing enemies, and the rewards scale with difficulty. Diablo 1 and 2 were good video games. They weren't intended as works of art, and they aren't. A game where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies isn't really anything new.
- ddtaylor 4y ago
  > Diablo 1 and 2 were good video games. They weren't intended as works of art, and they aren't I disagree and consider both games to be works of art. Both games pushed the boundaries of cinematic story telling for the ARPG genre. > A game where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies isn't really anything new. A painting of a woman wasn't new in the early 1500s when the Mona Lisa was painted, but I think most would consider it a work of art.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  I feel like you have a point somewhere, but knowing the history of games where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies, like the original Doom, makes me doubt the universality of your statement.

Aeolun 4y ago

> The lootboxes in the game are against the law in your country, so unless the gambling restrictions change, the game will not be released in the Netherlands and Belgium. I think it’s disturbing how they frame this as something the country has to change. As if it’s their fault for banning it, as opposed to Blizzards’ for making a gambling game in the first place.

mawadev 4y ago

Diablo Immoral