US Senator demands review of loot box policies, citing potential harm
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
http://investor.activision.com/results.cfm
Should be framed as an extension of existing laws regarding child gambling.
Now that I look into it, I think we should also ban all the booster packages for the board games.
These packages can contain or may not contain valuable card and you are effectively gambling when you buy one.
It can also become very addictive.
Unless it's not-for-profit or single use (e.g. lottery revenue going to schools), then it's a regressive tax on people who don't understand probability.
What they didn't tell us is it wasn't additional funds to existing budgets, but they would pilfer the existing budget and replace it with lottery proceeds.
Lying, smarmy politicians. You'd figure we'd learn by now.
This is precisely why I support lotteries etc.
Impressive karma btw.
I could see an argument in favor of them if:
* Sellers were obligated to disclose the odds of winning the jackpot at the time of purchase punishable to the same extent as underage liquor sales
* The state was required to render, upon request, financial consultation at the burden of the state to winners whose consultation can, at the winner's discretion, be recorded and later reviewed to understand the advice rendered and its context with respect to the winner's financial situation and risk profile
That is more than a little heavy handed, if not a downright Draconian economic policy.
I hate the Lego minifig series, and Panini sticker albums, and Pokemon cards.
They should all have to include how many packets you'd expect to buy to complete a collection.
I don't think parents (or children) are aware of that, or have any idea how to work it out. (I didn't, I just searched until I found this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem
Lottery tickets include odds on the back of the cards. I think that has a very small effects on discouraging play. And those odds are pretty straight forward (1 in 2,000,000 for a 500k payout). I imagine information about how randomization works would be even more indecipherable.
Which supposed harm in this case, there is more than one.
Currently online games are free to swap out algorithms in realtime in order to maximize revenue. You have no idea what your chance of winning even is.
Concepts like the "curve" (mana vs P/T), and the value of evergreen keywords greatly help. If there was ever a topic for big data.
Naturally, there are surprises (ex: Standard deck that becomes overly popular and drives demand), but sites like mtggoldfish generally predict prices for most cards to within a few percent and then follow all cards and box prices like stock tickers.
Frankly, I've often thought that investing in MtG cards is more stable than gold. Many cards, like "Liliana of the Veil" [cur $88] are worth more by weight - ~$75/ 1.8 gram card = $41.7 / gram, approx gold price. Plus, value cards generally only rise and are supported by a trading base of a few million yearly players.
I think there have been two, maaaaybe three expansion sets in the multi-decade history of the game where the average price for selling all cards in a booster pack exceeded the price of the booster pack itself.
Which sets are those? I would be shocked if that were true for unlimited-run sets during the time when they were still in print (the first few sets were limited to a fixed number of cards, but every normal set since has been printed to demand).
Unfortunately I can't remember which set this was anymore as I lost all interest in Standard around that time due to power creep. It was some time around 2013-2014 I believe.
Each card is assigned a rarity (common, uncommon, rare, mythic rare) based on its power. All cards of a given rarity have the exact same probability of showing up in a given booster pack. It's possible for a card to get reassigned during a reprint, but it's pretty unusual.
Wizards doesn't set the secondary market prices; the secondary market prices are determined by the demand for that card[0] and the outstanding supply. The outstanding supply is also fairly straightforward: with the exception of cards in pre-built decks[1], cards are basically only printed through booster packs. So, if two cards are both printed at "rare" in a single set (and not printed in any other sets), there will be exactly the same number of each card available in the market - the price there is solely driven by the demand. Wizards has some control in the sense that they can decide which cards to reprint in a given set, or which new cards to print to alter the metagame, but that's very difficult to actually predict, as anybody who plays Magic regularly is aware.
As for the expected value of cards in booster packs: that's always going to be lower than the price of the booster pack. Why? Because stores purchase packs wholesale, and if the expected value of the pack is greater than the MSRP of the pack, they'll just open the packs instead and sell the cards individually.
So Wizards can't tell you the expected value of a given pack, or even predict the price of a given card on the secondary market.
[0] The demand is determined by the metagame, which Wizards has only very loose control over in the short- and medium- term.
[1] Pre-built decks almost never contain cards that are particularly valuable; they're meant for beginners or casual players, whereas the players who care about the valuable cards are "power players", so to speak.
This is not really true. Rarity is a combination of power level, complexity and some other design principles. For example, cards which appear at common rarity can have powerful effects, but they must be simple and straightforward effects, easy for a newer player to understand (since commons will be the majority of the cards a new player sees). Uncommons are permitted to be slightly more complex, and rares and mythics more complex yet.
Several cards which even in recent years appeared at common in their respective sets are considered too powerful to reprint in the Standard format at any rarity. And of the seven cards currently banned in Standard (which is a massive failure on the part of the set design/development teams, and almost unprecedented in the game's history), one (Attune with Aether) is a common, and three (Felidar Guardian, Ramunap Ruins, Rogue Refiner) are uncommons.
All cards of a given rarity have the exact same probability of showing up in a given booster pack.
This is also not always true due to the logistics of the printing process.
A while back I posted a comment on reddit about how it can happen, sometimes, that not all cards of a given rarity are equally likely to appear in a booster pack:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/2fblta/odds_of_...
The tl;dr is that the math of setting up the printing sheets doesn't always work out perfectly with the number of cards the set needs at a given rarity (commons are printed on one set of sheets, uncommons on another, and rares/mythics on a third set of sheets). Which sometimes -- though not always -- can lead to a card being slightly underprinted relative to other cards of the same rarity.
For example, if a booster pack costs $10, and the chance of including a given card is X%, then price the card a la carte at X% * $10 and allow people to buy it directly. I wouldn't be opposed to them selling randomized boosters as well, based on gambling concerns [1], if it were possible to buy individual cards for this price. You could additionally offer a bulk discount.
(OK, it's a little more complicated than that because the library of cards is larger than a booster pack, so it's not just a flat percentage chance to include each card, but you could normalize the probabilities to account for this.)
[1] I'm not sure that I'm actually opposed to this, but I understand the argument.
I’m not sure if there is any harm, but he’s in to it.
I do wonder if regulation is the answer though. Shouldn’t we expect people (parents, here) to make their own choices?
> Hassan urged the ESRB in the letter to examine whether loot boxes are being marketed "in an ethical and transparent way that adequately protects the developing minds of young children from predatory practices."
In the end we got a lot of new cards and my parents got a decent amount of chores done. I’m about to turn 28 and I’ve never had any sort of gambling problem (but I have had my own other non Pokémon related problems that were probably at least somewhat related to my parents)
Ultimately people will make the decisions about what they do. Paid DLC is nearly loot boxing, but I guess the difference is there is more reasonable pressure when deciding whether to buy the DLC vs. a loot box? It's less pressure than a perceived threat in the game provoking your purchase, but it's funny how there is still a lot of pressure to buy DLC when you're simply on the Steam store page (giant green buy button, videos with 25% actual gameplay flashing at you, reviews urging you to buy the game, etc). But that's not a problem, it's only a problem when a real-money store is moved inside the game.
Crucially, it's all regulated. You have to be 18 to enter a betting shop or a casino. A slot machine has to be inspected by the Gambling Commission and must clearly state the payout ratio. Every business and employee involved in gambling has to be licensed. There's a voluntary self-exclusion scheme, so problem gamblers can ban themselves from being able to place a bet.
Lootboxes are effectively a form of gambling - you pay x, but you get a prize worth anything from 0.01x to 1000x based on a random number generator. That RNG isn't audited. Customers don't know the odds. There's no age restriction or controls on advertising. Nobody involved in the business is licensed or subject to scrutiny by a suitable regulator. The operators have no social responsibility obligations.
I'm a gambler myself. I think that US gambling laws are a bit weird. I don't want to ban gambling, but it needs to be properly regulated, regardless of the form it takes. I don't want to see children being stealthily introduced to gambling by predatory game developers.
I dislike loot boxes but I have a hard time seeing it as gambling if you explicitly can not liquidate the assets you receive from it. Then it's just a grab bag.
It's true that x might not be able to converted to fiat or resold.
That makes it effectively equivalent to a raffle, which often put restrictions on reselling similar to these cases.
Raffles are considered a form of gambling, and are heavily regulated, in the UK[0] and Australia [1].
[0] http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/for-the-public/Fundrais...
[1] https://www.vcglr.vic.gov.au/gambling/raffle/licensee-resour...
Sure, you can't convert its items into money, but you can convert them into wins in the game. And it has a "random" item drop system that's known to be rigged.
No exchange takes place. No fiat is given for a chance to open a box.
If I buy a video game and play it and occasionally get loot boxes that may have ultra-powerful items or may not, that's gambling. But if I buy a video game and play it and occasionally get items that aren't called loot boxes but may be ultra-powerful or may not, that's not gambling?
Why do you hide the repeated purchase?
The game is bought, once.
Loot-boxes require another purchase - an uninformed one. You purchase an item for a chance at something else, a chance that you don't actually know.
Mario Kart would be gambling, if you had to buy every crate as you hit it. As it is, with no additional purchase, it is simply a randomised strategic feature. Currency of some form needs to be exchanged to create gambling.
Even schools - noting you can't promote gambling to children - get away with that regularly. With those loopholes, you could probably get away with a lot.
Schools can run them fine, as most schools fall under "charitable organisation", so they just need written consent from the board, and a prize less than the state's maximum unlicensed game competition amount. ($5000 in Victoria, $2000 in Queensland).
[0 PDF] https://publications.qld.gov.au/dataset/fc2f9cdd-8799-45bf-9...
To be clear, you're saying that lootboxes in a video game are a problem because they distract people from studying for college?
CS:GO skins lie at one extreme. If you pay $2.49 to open a case and win a valuable skin, you can directly sell it for cash on the Steam community market, with Valve pocketing a cut of the transaction. Skins have also become a form of currency used in casino and sportsbook gambling.
You can buy skins for real money on the Steam community market, gamble them on a game of roulette on a site with Steam API integration, then cash out your winnings on the community market. Valve's role in the process is absolutely brazen.
The situation with FIFA Ultimate Team is slightly more murky - you can't directly cash out cards or coins, but the in-game trading mechanic effectively facilitates transactions in real money. You can open packs, sell the cards for FIFA coins, then trade your coins for cash through a third-party site. In-game items are used as tokens in third-party gambling activities. Unlike CS:GO, this third-party activity isn't facilitated by an API provided by EA.
This is vaguely reminiscent of the loophole used by pachinko parlours - you can only convert your pachinko balls for non-cash prizes, but a vendor just around the corner will give you cash for those prizes.
FIFA-related gambling has led to criminal prosecutions in the UK.
http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news-action-and-statist...
Overwatch skins can only be won from lootboxes and can't be traded in any way, so Blizzard probably have the strongest claim to legitimacy. Opening Overwatch lootboxes might mimic gambling in some respects, but the "prizes" unarguably have no cash value. The business model strikes me as a bit seedy, but it isn't obviously within the purview of a gambling regulator. There may be a case for regulation under consumer protection laws, but it's not obviously different to baseball cards or blind bags.
Our poorest areas have high streets with 4 or 5 betting shops in spitting distance of each other. Addiction and problem gambling has snowballed out of hand. The self exclusion scheme is widely abused by bookmakers. The levy on betting shops pays lip service to the damage done. Fixed odds betting machines are a licence to addict the public whilst printing money.
I don't wish to abolish gambling, but I sure wish the regulations simply returned to those of the 80s or early 90s (i.e. before Tony Blair broke it).
It's looking near-certain that the maximum stake for FOBTs will be reduced to £2, which is a reasonable starting point. The big four bookies are extremely nervous about the upcoming triennial review of gambling regulation, which is good news for everyone else.
https://sbcnews.co.uk/retail/2018/01/22/dcms-deliver-uk-book...
I would say the biggest group at risk are under-stimulated, under-supervised children that may spend 8 hours a day hunched over a smartphone.
It will be interesting to see the long term implications of that behavior.
I do believe the recent EA dust up is a clearer indication of when loot boxes cross the line into gambling. however if they guaranteed an item of specific value you could buy otherwise "but with other items" they might technically not be gambling. Its gambling when you have a chance to lose your money. (at least how I understand it)
Loot boxes, like how Blizzard implements them in Overwatch, are the absolute best business model in an industry that's otherwise filled with predatory pay-to-play DLC business models.
With Overwatch, you pay $30 up-front for the game, and that's it. You don't have to pay a cent more, no matter how often or how long you play it. The more you play, the more XP you get. Every 20,000 XP[0], you get a free loot box that has purely cosmetic items with no impact on game play. If you want to, yes, you can buy extra loot boxes, if you really want a particular skin, but again, it has no impact on gameplay whatsoever. They also give out free loot boxes during promotional events, as well as an additional 3 free loot boxes each week for winning arcade games[1]. I play Overwatch, and I've never even thought to purchase loot boxes, partly because there are already so many ways to get free boxes that there's almost no point.
There's no pressure to buy boxes, no in-game reminders, no dark patterns - really, nothing. Last I checked, you have to click through three menus from the home screen to even get to the place to buy boxes. It's not particularly prominent.
For that $30, you get access to Overwatch for as long as they run servers (which, looking at Blizzard's track record, is probably years after you will stop caring). You get frequent upgrades to characters and maps, as well as free game lore (like the online comics).
The alternative to this business model is to have either a pay-to-win model, where you can spend extra money for superior items and weapons. Or, you can have people pay based on the amount of time they play. The latter is unsustainable for a multiplayer game that receives frequent updates. The former is what most other companies do, and it's incredibly predatory. Almost all the big published, from Zynga to EA to King, practice this heavily.
Actually, there is a third option: provide no support for the game after it ships. Once a player has paid for it, the game is sold, and it doesn't matter if it's so buggy that it's unplayable or if the game is imbalanced. This is by far the most common business model, as evidenced by the sea of Steam reviews for games like these. This may be the most manipulative model of all: release a game that's just tolerable enough that people will buy it, but insist that they buy next year's version at full price to fix any bugs or mechanical issues. EA is one of the worst offenders here.
I'm pretty disgusted with the fact that people like Hassan are zeroing in on the one games company that is actually executing successfully on a rather ethical business model, when pretty much every other company around is actively trying to optimize outright predatory business strategies.
[0] The XP rate depends on a lot of factors (such as how well you personally do), but that's somewhere between 5-10 Quick Play games (which usually take about 10 minutes).
[1] Which is pretty easy. The matchups are generally pretty balanced, so your winrate is usually around 50%. In other words, you get additional loot boxes by playing 6 arcade games, up to a total of 3 boxes per week.
artificial scarcity seasonal events with limited availability on loot boxes which are marketed to children, with fancy skins they want, there's nothing ethical about marketing and profiting from children gambling. Just because even less ethical business models exist, Blizzard and Valve don't get a free pass for being slightly less evil than the competition.
It's not "gambling". Using the in-game currency (which you get for free by playing), you purchase items directly. The mere existence of uncertainty somewhere in the process doesn't make it "gambling"
Ironically, the randomness serves to decrease the pressure to spend money on the game. If you just purchased the items directly for real-world money, as most other games do, you'd end up in a situation where people would feel pressured to spend money on the game, because obtaining skins actually would be a direct function of money spent.
Additionally, framing this as "children gambling" is pretty suspect. Blizzard doesn't publish official demographic data, but all players have to be over 13 by law, and according to third-party data, the majority of the player base is over 18. Given that teenagers already have less easy access to digital transactions than people over 18, and that they already form the minority of the player base, the burden is on critics to provide concrete data that teenagers are actually being negatively affected by lootboxes. (Which I doubt anyone will, because I'm skeptical that it's even true. Of course, the reason that this issue is continuously framed as "children gambling" is because talking about anything affecting children is a great way to pander in politics, and this whole issue isn't about loot boxes in games anyway.)
> Blizzard and Valve don't get a free pass for being slightly less evil than the competition.
On the flipside, by focusing on loot boxes at the expense of actual, actively predatory business models, you are giving the companies that engage in those other business models a free pass.
You might think, "well, the answer is that we should go after both". Except, that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen not only because people's attention for games-related issues is pretty limited, but also because this isn't about ethical business models at all; politicians like Hassan don't actually care about that. They care about scoring political points, and it's much easier to score political points off lootboxes than pay-to-win or abandonware.
Second, there is constant pressure to buy boxes. You have various event-limited lootboxes designed to encourage people buying on impulse, else they miss out. There's constant feedback into that desire loop through a dripfeed of free lootboxes designed to get you hooked.
Third, lootboxes do not prevent P2W behavior. You can see this in various Gacha games whose functionality is similar to lootboxes as well as games like Battlefront 2 where the player was encouraged to buy more to be stronger.
And the option for 'no support' did not seem to be a problem for say, League of Legends. Which until recently was surviving without any sort of lootbox paradigm based off of buying cosmetics. SFV is also similar. You create a bunch of contrived scenarios where the only end result is 'lootboxes or death' which we can see is false, given how many games seem to do just fine without them.
My apologies, I should have explained the context. Perhaps you don't follow gaming news, but the whole reason that this is an issue on Hassan's radar is that there has been a lot of criticism recently targeted at Overwatch specifically over their use of lootboxes, even though other games use lootboxes too.
So no, Hassan doesn't mention Overwatch by name, but in the current context, it's pretty relevant to discuss.
> And the option for 'no support' did not seem to be a problem for say, League of Legends. Which until recently was surviving without any sort of lootbox paradigm based off of buying cosmetics. SFV is also similar.
...you're using League of Legends as a point of comparison? LoL uses almost the exact same system as Overwatch, except some of the items do actually have an impact on the gameplay, introducing a pay-to-win dynamic. It's strictly worse than what Overwatch does. SFV uses a DLC model.
That's what actual pressure to spend money looks like - "If you spend more money, you will literally be a better player".
> Second, there is constant pressure to buy boxes.
Compared to any other game of its ilk - including the ones you mentioned - there's basically zero pressure. You're complaining that they give out free boxes, except the alternative to that would mean that there is no free way to obtain the items, and also no other way to obtain them except by random chance and spending money.
I can't imagine a better system that still provides a revenue stream for the company without affecting the game quality, and both of the games you've mentioned are strictly worse.
I mean, this is objectively incorrect. League of Legends is not P2W, in that you can't buy your way to victory. You can get champions, but even the newest ones are not strictly better than earlier ones. The pressure to pay money in this case is to avoid grinding. I don't particularly care for League of Legends either, but their dynamic is not any more P2W than SFV, considering they both have very similar models.
>Compared to any other game of its ilk - including the ones you mentioned - there's basically zero pressure. You're complaining that they give out free boxes, except the alternative to that would mean that there is no free way to obtain the items, and also no other way to obtain them except by random chance and spending money.
The free boxes are given out for the sole purpose of getting you hooked. It's not out of good will. Every single Gacha game on the planet does similar things, they dole out small amounts of currency so that players can play the game without paying money, but the incentive is to pay to have a higher chance of getting something they want.
I'm complaining that the whole concept of lootboxes is predatory, and that every aspect of it is carefully designed to appeal to you, the player. That's why loot is colorized by rarity with special sounds depending on how rare/awesome your loot is. It wants to induce a dopamine hit, then reinforce it through encouraging the player to pull. More and more and more.
That's Gacha Game Design 101.
When there's no pay-to-win dynamic, it is literally the least predatory business model out of all games of that ilk. All of the alternatives for producing a recurring revenue stream, such as abandonware and direct PTW, are far more predatory.
I don't actually think it's predatory at all, but you're complaining about the weakest possible conception of the problem (and even the alternatives you named are worse), which implies that you don't think the alternative models like abandonware are a problem.
> I mean, this is objectively incorrect. League of Legends is not P2W, in that you can't buy your way to victory. You can get champions, but even the newest ones are not strictly better than earlier ones. The pressure to pay money in this case is to avoid grinding
You are literally paying money for the chance at something that will impact your chances of victory, as opposed to something that is entirely superfluous to the gameplay in every way. That is the definition of pay-to-win, even if it's a less extreme form than most King games.
If you don't see that as pressure to keep spending money, or if you don't see abandonware as a direct cash grab designed to exploit people's impulses, then I don't know how to continue this discussion.
Ugh.
I mean, as long as we're ignoring the fact the loot boxes:
1. Don't require you risk anything of monetary value.
2. Don't reward you with anything that can be sold for cash.*
3. Are randomized, but based on skill.
4. Are entirely digital goods with no real-world value.
5. Are philosophically indistinguishable from other forms of procedural content.
6. The ability to purchase a substitute for in-game content requires access to a credit card.
Also, f * * * EA. I'm not defending EA. But I'm also not for out-of-touch Senators urging us all to think of children when the "children" in question need to have a bank account.
*typically. I know things like "trading cards" on steam can be sold for monetary value. So let's outlaw Pokemon and Baseball Cards, too, just to be safe.
It's not just out of touch senators, it's experts in problem gambling who think loot boxes need to be looked at.
Gaming as an addiction is a much much larger problem than lootboxes as an addiction. If this is truly about addiction then where is the movement to restrict the amount of time people spend playing video games everyday?
Points 5-6 just means that we should probably regulate lootboxes like we already regulate gambling. Just because a kid could get some money from their parents to go gambling in a casino doesn't mean it's a good idea. Lootboxes are a well-known concept and regulated in many other parts of the world, including Japan where Gacha is fairly common among their mobile games.