I’ve never heard about loot boxes before. But I wonder: how is this any different from “Kinder Surprise” (a chocolate egg with a small surprise toy inside that you can buy in supermarkets)?
(And also, Kinder Surprise contain chocolate, which makes them infinitely better than any virtual loot box could ever be, but that's just my personal opinion)
Edit: I was assuming gameplay-relevant loot boxes here, apparently some/all of those under Belgian scrutiny are just cosmetic mods, which brings them much closer to the Kinder Surprise analogy (although strictly speaking, I would not consider cosmetics entirely without gameplay effects in something like CS:GO, relative camouflage qualities of avatars were absolutely a consideration no my day)
Chocolate was good, though.
A better example would be if Barbie, with her thousands and thousands of iterations, completely stopped selling the prepackaged outfits. Instead, you now have to buy a mysterious box, that has one top piece of an outfit, one bottom piece of an outfit, and one accessory. The pieces you get don't necessarily match.
On top of that, there are bigger value packs that give you five random ones of each type, or ten, or a hundred, depending on how much cash you want to spend. And on top of that, let's say that these outfits are impossible to trade.
I basically just described Overwatch lootboxes. The problem is not necessarily the lootboxes, which are fine as an in-game reward earned by completing games or leveling or what have you. The problem is that the only way to purchase more cosmetics is by chance; as a new player, there's no way to get a specific cosmetic guaranteed unless you either grind every waking moment or spend untold amounts of money.
At least when buying a pack of cards you know all of them will be cards.
Where as in e.g. CS:GO you can get weapon skins that are worth thousands of dollars and are even tradeable for real money (via 3rd party sites).
Also because the skins are easily tradeable and have a real money value they are basically virtual casino chips. And they are used on real 3rd party gambling sites, which are completely unregulated and even children can participate. At that point it's beyond the loot boxes, it's real gambling with roulette and everything!
Not quite, as I point out in a comment to one of your siblings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16929805
The high prices just come from the money that you theoretically need to unbox a rare one. I wonder however who does actually buy those.
Also, what is the probability distribution for kinder eggs? Most loot boxes have a chance to drop a variety of items at different likelihoods, generally with the most desirable items being very unlikely to drop (0.1-2%, depending on the game).
So yes, basically they are loot boxes, but at least you get chocolate (and a shitty toy).
Unless you were my buddy, who was obese as a kid but also a major collector, trader and seller. His mom prohibited him from eating the chocolate, and yet he still bought hundreds if not thousands of eggs per year, mostly financed by him selling rare collections he previously obtained, on top of his regular allowance. He used to bring huge bags of just the chocolate eggshells to school for us to eat...
Well, it wasn't entirely chance. I once or twice went to the shop with him and watched him select the eggs, by shaking and very carefully listening. He was really good (or really lucky) and IIRC was was close to a 2 in 3 success rate (compared to the 1 in 7 as the ads stated).
The figurines also were kinda shitty, but the ads hyped them and it was entirely a hype/collector thing, not intrinsic value, of course.
There is a vivid aftermarket for these promoted toys. They're worth more if you collect a full set.
You're right insofar as the non-promotional toys are pretty much only worthless plastic.
The ones I got still have value for me. Even some of the "worthless plastic" toys are actually quite creative (at least you often get some fun assembling them) and thus more than anything that can fall out of a digital loot box. As a child I didn't want to throw them away.
What is not coming up here very often is the irrational customer behaviour of buying digital objects, which will disappear when the servers turn off.