5 ms·
I never understood why video game lootboxes get regulated while real-life lootboxes like pokemon cards don't.
by nba456_ 7mo ago
I never understood why video game lootboxes get regulated while real-life lootboxes like pokemon cards don't.
- steele 7mo agoThis is the same argument Valve is presenting.
- gmadsen 7mo agoPhysicality. You don’t even own digital games, let alone cosmetics for your digital game license.
- rincebrain 7mo ago(Opinions my own, naturally.) I think they're right, really. Obviously you need to require enough friction that the experiences are comparable (e.g. no letting someone impulse buy 100 times in half a second without having to re-type their "I am an adult" payment info or something analogous, possibly just a hard ceiling for everyone), but I don't think you can ban everything that touches the same sharp edge, and you can't mandate that parents teach their kids how to handle it. So I think the best you can do is put hard limits on people's ability to hurt themselves without at least an "are you really sure" check, and maybe something like not allowing cash in the exchange without adult verification so the kids might, at worst, gamble their FunBux they earned playing a game and get burned on having lost a lot of FunBux, rather than their or their parents' cash. (This doesn't stop parents from giving their kids their credit card, but that's not really a problem you can solve...)
- saulapremium 7mo ago>I don't think you can ban everything that touches the same sharp edge Why not, though? Is this a general stance against banning anything, or do you think loot boxes, video games and/or kids are different?
- rincebrain 7mo agoI do, generally, think that banning (or legalizing) things in their entirety is often ineffective, and if you just make them entirely and equally illegal/legal you no longer have any levers to stop people making them as toxic as possible. (Look at how insanely pinpoint-targeted at addiction exploitation sports betting has become in the US, for example.) In this specific case, it's because I don't think you can whack-a-mole things that tickle the addictive feedback loops in people's brains everywhere faster than people can engineer their ways around it or find new ways to exploit things that do those same things without being caught in the laws, so I think you need to both: - raise the cost of making it too painful for people who aren't self-moderating enough and keep the most lethal edges off it (e.g. ceilings on how much you can spend, making you have to take active action that takes more than a few seconds so you can't impulse-click and blow a fortune on One More Hit, no feedback mechanisms that incentivize spending more when you already spent a lot...) - limit how harmful it can be to people who are too young and haven't yet learned what it does to them and that they need to be careful (e.g. use something like having access to a credit card you can input on request as a proxy for verifying you're an adult, and try to ensure any of the foam padded Kid Slot Machines(tm) can't be traded in a useful fashion for cash or paid for with cash, even with verification) In some sense, the original video games with this kind of feedback loop were arcade games - you got a variable amount of reward for your input token, and they had to give you enough to convince you to keep doing it. Microtransactions with lootboxes are just that feedback loop taken to the logical limit, but I don't necessarily think people who hate microtransactions would consider games like that as a similar evil, precisely because, like physical blind boxes, the quantization and scale is so much smaller, and it's so much higher friction to blow a fortune on it.
- Archit3ch 7mo agoGiven their track record with Artifact, I don't think we should listen to them on the topic.
- benoau 7mo agoBecause in real life the store clerk won't let a child spend $1000 on their parents card making purchases again and again and again and again and again, but a video game will let a child do it in less than an hour and consider that a success and try to understand how to stimulate another child to do so.
- MiiMe19 7mo agoWith the rise of online storefronts and employees who just don't care I beg to differ.
- nurettin 7mo agoDiffer all you want. No child will bankrupt a family at a trading card game store. These are physical goods paid in bulk with provisioning and there are laws for returning them. Another point of contention is the randomness of packs. The way you play is: You save up to buy the entire set of boosters and already get almost all cards you need for competitive or fun play. The rest you need to trade for or buy individually. It is much more of a social interaction than gambling. The value you get from saving up and trading is easily 10x what you get from opening boosters. That's why you will never see a bunch of kids queued up in front of a counter frothing from the mouth saying "just... one more!"
- hiccuphippo 7mo agoAllowing trading is a big part of it. Most online games never allow trading the things bought with real money, they get tied to your account. I guess as a way to prevent CC fraud but it still contributes to the issue.
- JasonADrury 7mo agoJust to be clear, the biggest problems are associated with games that allow trading.
- nurettin 7mo ago
- mikkupikku 7mo agoThose are gambling too, and were criticize as such not just now but also when they were new (but people ignored that criticism because pokemon was hype and adults complaining about trendy things are always uncool and ignored.)
- idiotsecant 7mo agoWhen you buy a pokemon card at least you get a card
- teeray 7mo agoThere’s something to be said about the visibility of gambling as a signal to people that someone may have a problem. Gambling on your phone just looks like being on your phone. It even improves access to the addiction. Needing to go to a casino looks a lot different, provides some friction, and could spur intervention. The same could be said about loot boxes vs buying Pokemon cards in a store.
- jayd16 7mo agoI will say card packs are somewhat useful for drafting formats where you need a sealed pack of random unknown cards. Just ripping packs hurts my soul. What a waste.
- djtango 7mo agoPokemon cards are addictive and fun but they're kind of analogue. Loot boxes are more like slot machines - they have flashing lights, animations and jingles to hook you in deeper. And because the lootboxes are in game they can be tuned in frequency and payout just right to keep you playing in a way boring cards could never be (beyond just boring probabilities)
- dietr1ch 7mo agoIdk about pokemon cards, but I'm sure the wotc guys use something to make sniffing newly opened packs addicting.
- TheAceOfHearts 7mo agoPokemon cards have gone full circle, GameStop now has an online service where you can gamble on cards digitally just like lootboxes. You buy a roll at different price points to win a PSA graded card from a set of probabilities, and then you can sell it back for 90% market value to GameStop or have them ship it to you. The proliferation of gambling over so many domains has radicalized me against it in a way that I didn't think would've been possible a few years ago.
- travisjungroth 7mo agoWoah, you can sell it back to them? That’s normally the line that isn’t crossed. You sell it at the store next door (pachinko) or on the open market (trading card games and digital items).
- riffraff 7mo ago> The proliferation of gambling over so many domains has radicalized me against it in a way that I didn't think would've been possible a few years ago. I grew up in Italy when sport betting was illegal and you had to do it through illegal channels, and I did it now and then like everyone else, and thought we should totally make it legal. At some point all betting, slot machines etc.. became legal and it's been a disaster and I'm also totally radicalized against it.
- rvnx 7mo agoThe best solution is through education. For example by showing in big letters the return-to-player ratio: On 100 EUR you will get → 79 back, if you put them again in the machine you will get → 62.41 → 49.30 → 38.95 → 30.77…
- mikkupikku 7mo agoJust trying to get normies to understand that slot machines aren't "hot" and "due" for a jackpot because nobody has won recently is virtually impossible. Stats class is hard and people don't really trust what they've learned anyway. A huge portion of the public even believes in such a thing as a person having "good luck". It's nonsensical, tantamount to believing the god of fortune is going to intercede on your behalf, but people really do think this way.
- EQmWgw87pw 7mo agoBecause neither loot boxes nor Pokémon cards are actually that addicting. There is no strong link to actual gambling and these mechanics. The reason loot boxes get regulated at all is because people simply don’t like them, and they scream the loudest for someone to fix it. Very bad precedent.
- philistine 7mo agoResale value protects The Pokémon Company. Your child spent all your money on Pokémon cards? Resell the cards. You've just realized your 15 years long obsession has broken your life? Resell the cards. Aggrieved parties can partly get restoration. That way there never is enough political momentum to legiferate them. Try to resell your Fortnite account and they close it.
- shevy-java 7mo agoReselling never recovers all costs, for most people. I know that because I sold many of my old magic cards when I stopped playing magic (due to lack of time). I recovered about 20% of my expenses at most.
- philistine 7mo agoWhich was enough to mollify you and make it impossible for you to think they should legiferate this mess.
- themafia 7mo agoThe single layer of abstraction. Pokemon cards have utility within the game of pokemon. They additionally have value in secondary market places which is not strictly tied to the rarity of the item. These markets are not required to exist for the game to function. Lootboxes, especially for competitive games, do not have any utility within the game and are often cosmetic. Their value is strictly tied to the rarity of the item which the vendor fully artificially controls. Absent the secondary markets the cases would not be purchased and the items ignored. So you have a choice. You can make pay to win items and publish the probabilities of actually winning them. Or you can have items that can't be traded. Otherwise you're trending very close to widely known regulated activity like gambling.
- seattle_spring 7mo agoRarity of Pokemon cards is also fully controlled by the vendor, and it's of course very intentional.
- themafia 7mo agoPokemon cards can get destroyed or may never enter the market for all the typical reasons or may not be particularly valuable even though they are rare. They don't have nearly as direct a control over the price.
- bsder 7mo agoTradeability. In real life you can just buy the card. That sets a hard upper limit to the losses. Whereas gacha games and lootboxes are notorious for unpublished, ridiculously bad odds for "desirable" things with no way to outright purchase them.