Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine
polygon.com
polygon.com
Honestly, these kind of lawsuits are ridiculous. People need to sue General Mills for false advertising instead because sugary cereals causing diabetes; or any other big-food company brainwashing children on YouTube kids.
It is like poker, which is a combination of skill and luck.
Yes it is.
> It is one reason why some places, like California, have poker rooms.
No, that's because some instances of gambling involving betting against other players are sometimes selectively regulated differently than betting against the house. Its the same reason some places, like, again, California, that prohibit casino gambling allow parimutuel betting on horse races.
I was only saying that there is skill involved. Gaming laws never classify gambling games as those that require zero skill. Otherwise, poker, blackjack, even craps wouldn't be gambling, because all bets do not have the same odds, and therefore skilled players do better than unskilled.
The other may never pay out even if you are 100% accurate.
This is a big difference.
It takes a degree of skill and coordination to pull the lever on the slot machine, yet we don't call them a game of skill because of that.
If you're 100% accurate and you still lose, it's a game of chance.
Let's say the game only allows 1/100 tries to have the chance to win. Player A has the skill to win 50% of the time, player B 25%.
Player A will end up winning 1/200 times, while player B will win 1/400.
Skill matters.
Yeah, same can be said about "brainwashing kids on YouTube" (whatever that's supposed to mean anyway) or "false advertising" of cereals ... what is your point?
The machine will not allow a win no matter what until a set number of losses has happened. The default shipped setting is to not allow a win until there has been 700 losses. Some other vendor in Arizona is noted as having been sued because he ran his games at a required 2200 losses to allow a payout.
Actual gambling devices are much more regulated and have much better payout odds most likely (depending on what's winnable), but more importantly are actually random.
These games are not chance, and they aren't skill, they're a scam that market themselves as a game of skill.
A college friend works for my state's gaming commission. During a 'drinking talk' about digital signatures, she told me an interesting part of her job; not just going through the slot machines and validating the payout settings, but also checking the EEProms MD5 Hash* to make sure that it was in a list of 'approved' code hashes.
* - This was 15 years ago, I -really- hope they use something better nowadays.
> checking the EEProms MD5 Hash* to make sure that it was in a list of 'approved' code hashes.
> This was 15 years ago, I -really- hope they use something better nowadays.
I dunno. If the hash is generated and displayed by the hardware on a separate LCD display (or a serial you attach) and maybe a bit of non-flashable code, that seems pretty good to me, especially that it's regularly spot checked in person. Something like that is far harder to fake and fool real people with successfully for an extended period, IMO.
At least the carnival midway games these days have mostly switched from rigged against the kids to everybody wins a crappy prize. But these arcade game types are straight up gambling for children.
I for sure did. In fact, on my long list of "someday/maybe" projects, there was this one entry sitting for some 15 years now: build a little machine for the claw crane game, that would time a button press perfectly. I just saw the video where Mark Rober does this to another arcade game[0], so I won't bother anymore - I can already guess the outcome.
I also don't know anyone else in my circles who thought the claw crane was a game of chance. It looks like a game of skill, it behaves like one. And sure, maybe the crane wasn't oiled in a while, but nobody tells you that in the end, it also rolls a dice to determine whether to allow you to win.
It's a big deal to me, and I think it should be a big deal for everyone. It's yet another violation of trust in society. Yet another seemingly legit business out there to scam you.
When I grew up, we saw arcades as fun places to be with friends, and if we lost on what looked like a game of chance, we assumed we just sucked and need to keep playing to get better (or rather, until all our sources of coin money go dry). We didn't know the cake was a lie.
When my kid grows older and I take her to an arcade, I'm going to tell her up front - you can have fun here, but these games and these people are out there to scam you. Your joy is your own - you have to take it in spite of, not thanks to, this place. I don't want to be telling her such things. I would like for her to live in a world where she can default to trusting businesses and taking their offers as good-spirited attempts of mutually beneficial transactions - not to be constantly on the guard from technically legitimate businesses trying to scam her.
So, I'd very much like to see every single one of these arcades to be investigated, dragged to court for selling illegal gambling services to children, and the entire industry to be beaten up with criminal code, until every such game is either banned or has its exact rules posted on it, in a clear and unambiguous form. Fuck caveat emptor - the measure of civilization is in the things you don't have to actively worry about.
--
Maybe it's cultural/regional? Everyone around me gets explained they're rigged as a kid (I'm late 30s), maybe in your country they prefer to feed the excitement/illusion of kids?
I'm Spanish, and we have a saying that goes "fallar más que una escopeta de feria", roughly translated to "failing (to work properly) even more than a gun from a fair", as said guns are popularly known to be purposely misaligned, or to use pellets of lower caliber than the barrel to make them lose accuracy. So generally very few people, and almost exclusively kids, show any trust towards fair/arcade games with prizes. They may still play for fun or to burn unwanted change, though.
On the other hand, many people around me needed to reach adulthood to start suspecting WWE fights aren't real.
Born in the 80s, in the US, I understood that carnival games are rigged in some way, but that arcade games were skilled based.
Only as an adult did I start to learn that the 'games of skill' in arcades were worse than carnival games.
I should have known arcade video games were rigged, given the cheap deaths/impossible to dodge attacks, but there's no reason I should have known the crane and other physical 'skill' based games were, for the reasons already mentioned by the GP comment.
Edit: reading further down, it looks like this may have been a recent change with the crane games. That makes me feel better about the arcades I used to frequent as a kid (mall and skating rink).
They were crappy, but I know people won stuff from them. But the usage rate was also quite high, given how popular arcades were back then.
I did not think that apparent games of skill would be rigged so as to be impossible to win when played perfectly until a certain number of losses had occurred. I expected that kind of behavior to be regulated as gambling, and probably outright banned most places that have sophisticated regulations about gambling.
About 30 years ago, my siblings and I went through a claw machine mania phase. We sampled every machine in a 30 mile radius, and found that the ones that slipped, always slipped. And the ones that gripped, gripped pretty frequently. Once we figured out which claws would actually grab, we won constantly. We collected around 50 stuffed animals over the course of a year.
Or maybe we were being superstitious. At any rate, we felt quite claw-machine-rich.
-Base grip power
-Improved grip power
-Probability of improved grip.
Some have two actuators with different powers, some actually introduce a delay in the grip with a single actuator, and so on, so it might be not exactly like that.
What I mean, they're set up according to the wishes of the operator. Sometimes it's the same as the owner of the venue, sometimes the venue rents the space to the operator.
So it's totally normal to find some that are more skill-based than others, even within the same manufacturer and model.
Story time: a friend worked in an arcade/bowling venue in the early 2000s, they had 3 machines, and changed the settings weekly to extract more money. Basically one of the machines had higher probabilities just at the level of breaking even, but that was enough to have someone stick around for longer and attract other customers to the other two. The week after those who had "luck" that came back would stick to the same to show off (and fail). Occasionally short queues for certain machines appeared.
My uncle managed the local Aladdin's Castle and was constantly tweaking the claws when people would win too much. Also the games where a light spins and you stop it- I saw many times where it landed square on jackpot and stalled a half second then moved to the next slot, and this was just for tickets and $.10 plush toys.
Now as an adult having seen this and having been in software so long, I knew instantly these new 'fish games' were totally rigged. People play quarters on a table top arcade game that shoots at fish,like a top down Duck Hunt. I have some family members/friends for whom this is super addicting. They spend hundreds/thousands over time but don't see it because of that time they won $200.
When I try to explain how weights work, how video slot machine games are rigged too...they never believe me.
Why?
It would be illegal if they did that, so I must clearly be wrong.
Last time we went to vegas my friends got mad that I only played a few hands of blackjack for the experience. To me it's all just giving money away.
I was told the machines are programmed with a certain value above which they'll pay out, (e.g. once the machine has taken £200, allow a win, then repeat).
If the machine is not ready to pay out then the claw just releases on the way back up to make it look like you came close to winning.
Likewise block-stacking machines - it's a little harder to tell with those though as you need to get all the way to the top before you'll know. The block very clearly jumps to the next space on the top row if you time it correctly and it's not ready to pay out.
In Japan the items in the game are placed in such a way where they're basically impossible to get on the first try but if you feed in enough yen you can nudge the item and eventually get it, if you're skilled it takes less chances. Literally the first time I ever got a prize I actually wanted (stuffed Pokemon back when the Japan pretty much ignored the massive market of kids who wanted video game and anime branded memorabilia). It left feeling the arcade happy and brought back a few other people who also got items.
I assume the US machines aren't setup in such a way because they just don't want to have attendants. The bigger stuffed animal machines were constantly being refilled by employees after a prize was won. Better to rig the machine, never have to buy new toys nor hire anyone else. Who cares if the kids are happy and want to come back. Another reason arcades work in Japan and not the US.
I understand that with the claw machine the claw is unreliable, but the same claw is always equally unreliable and each time I play I could actually win, and my skill does affect that chance. With these games most of the time when you play there is a zero chance you could win, no mater how well you play.
A friend of mine worked at an arcade.
He made the grip tighter whenever he had a surplus of prizes that nobody wanted and looser when he had good new stuff.
He wasn't even coy about it. He would tell the kids who always hung out at the arcade when he was doing it so they could go nuts.
But that's besides the point. You don't need gambling laws to see that this is fraud, deceiving customers to pay in the expectation that the game is fair.
I guess I don't understand what "rigged" means in this context. I thought slot machines could essentially be "tuned" for payout by the owner (e.g. pay out 0.96x of what's put in on average), much like these toy machines.
There’s one machine like this I saw on a mass pike rest stop… there’s a 10 year old iPad fading away in there, but people are always playing it.
Just drive-off with the entire machine in the back of yer truck, heh
Notably pachinko parlors, gashapon, trading card games, loot boxes in video games.
https://www.serkantoto.com/2012/05/05/japan-social-games-reg...
And other than gambling, there are auctions... for the weirdest stuff... koi fish, mango, etc.
I imagine the losses are going to be far worse for those plush toy claw-grabbing machines if this case succeeds. Especially as they attach cash envelopes to them where I live. And those block stacking machines, too.
It’s clearly gambling for kids, I suspect when the first company got away with rigging the game everyone else just assumed it must be legal and ran with it. Now they’re literally everywhere.
The publicity alone will likely cause an EU ban. They don’t like to be seen as trailing on consumer protection law.
I know the arcades of old weren’t exactly innocent either, with many being optimised to consume the players coins, but at least there was some game play involved. At least the player got something out of the experience.
I feel the ethical line has truly been crossed in terms of what kind of machine is suitable for children.
There was an actual slang term for this used by western developers, the name of which I’ve forgotten, but it directly talks about how games should take longer to complete than your average rental loan.
At least the last few I have been too. I guess people for the most part had decided if you were gonna drop 50 bucks you might as well buy a new videogame and play it at home. The scummy part is the "ticket" games, where you have a chance to win below dollar store grade prizes and exist to waste your game time away from games that have actual game play in them. (ski ball is still fun even if its a ticket game)
Last one I went to it was kind of neat to finally be able to beat one of those old school 90s arcade games that in retrospect had their difficulty tuned to do nothing but eat all your quarters.....
Bowling alleys make their money off the alcohol and overpriced appetizers in any case. The other stuff is just to get you inside the door.
Through dumping the ROMs and emulating the machines, it was found that the machines were effectively forcing losses at certain points in gameplay; from the same memory state, you bet high and the machine goes low, or you bet low and the machine goes high, giving you zero chance of winning.
There was a campaign called Fairplay that I believe resulted in a fairly small print label being placed on the machines stating that they would at times give no chance of winning; not a great win, but at least it was being said somewhere - http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit/bre...
The FairPlay site by Stuart Campbell is actually still up, although I remember first reading about it back in PC Zone personally. There's details on there about replicating the findings, but unfortunately the links are broken; http://www.worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit...
Now, the law doesn't say anything about prize structure, and it's common knowledge that big prizes tend to appear within 10 plays when it's "cooled down", because machines increasingly shut big prizes down when they notice they have a compulsive player on them.
And if you get good at it or are already good at it, let me know.
It was a dollar per try, and I shoved in 5 bucks. By the 4th try it was NOTICEABLE that if you press the button at the "right time", there was a lag before it overshot it and you failed. I pretty much could guess that something like the article discusses was at work, and was simply more a game of luck.
Obviously I stopped after that, as a pure luck game is not as fun. If I had known that the default was 700 losses before payout as a default, I would have had a nice drink or 3 and counted the many people that tried it throughout the day
As a side note, saw one winner at the machine get a wrapped stack of 500, 1 dollar bills
In Japan the machines pay out a lot more often due to the strict laws against gambling, but the prizes are a lot smaller. You'll put ~$2 in and get a soft toy that probably cost 50c to make, but it still makes it feel a lot more fun than trying/failing to win bigger prizes.
I recall playing "Stacker" for a little while in the 2000's. It used an LED dot display for gameplay, which was a simple timing game where you "built" a tower by stacking up the blocks, with it getting faster at each level.
What it did was exactly as you describe: it had a minor reward level that you could always win, and then a few levels above that where the game would cheat and instantly warp the block ahead to make you lose. I did get a win out of it once(and got an iPod mini), so I think I did come out ahead, but that was it.
Overall, it's better to be good at pinball(replay scores) or DDR(adoration of strangers).
Thanks to the Internet, this has been recorded on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofEb9fM8m0Q
At least there is skill involved with pinball
This isn’t really the same because most gambling devices are regulated so that, while you can adjust payout percentages, you cannot remove random chance. That any given play has some percent chance of winning, even if it is adjusted very low or dynamically adjusted. This game is simply forcing a certain number of guaranteed loses before considering a payout. That isn’t luck.
https://youtu.be/FSLu--j2ooo?t=730
Setup experience begins at 12:10. If you want to skip to win-threshold setup then 12:50. You can configure it per zone (up to 5,000 per win).
While interesting, I'd imagine this lawsuit also requires showing less clear-cut issues like if consumers were misled, and if they were misled if that is legally permissible.
The technicals on this one are maybe less interest than the legal/consumer rights/labelling side. Purely in terms of how the machine works it is a "gambling" machine with skill required to even give you the opportunity to gamble against the win-threshold/rng.
Guy builds a robot to time pressing the button to get the light to land on the winning sections and demonstrates it is not skill but a random number generator.
Sarcasm aside I don’t know who this Mark person is. Never heard of him, never seen a video from him. And I’m quite okay with that. If you were to ask me what is trending on youtube I would tell you it is woodworking videos, zany snippets from musicals, and people discussing how a windpowered car can travel faster than the wind. But I also know that that tells more about my media habbits than youtube itself so I don’t generalise from this to everyone.
You are picking a really dumb fight to be frank. It's ok if people have no clue who this Mark person is or what he does.
I also saw the timer arcade beating device prior. It was well done. He makes some cool stuff, but the former nasa thing and sort of YouTube pandering takes away from it for me.
Ah, Tcl/Tk on a phone in the wild!
Similar situation with pinball machines awarding free games.
The give the illusion of a fair, 1 in 10, chance of getting a free game. But the odds are programmed in by the operator as well.
Every time we spent time within eyesight of the machine, I timed it and counted how many plays went in. After a couple of days, I had something resembling an average number of plays per hour. The machine was one where the prizes were visible, so you could tell how many had been won.
Now I had a bound on the number of plays per prize.
Estimate number of plays based on amount of time passed. Check if prize has been claimed. If not, it's due.
You don't have to be too accurate with your numbers. Just get within ~50% to beat the vig.
We need to put together a team of experts to audit all of these machines.
There were a few jurisdictions, Iowa and New Jersey come to mind, that were already aware of the nature of these machines and required the manufacturers to have their software audited and validated by (state approved) third-party gaming labs identical to what the slot machine companies do when getting code approved for release.
The key point was that the probability of a win couldn't be adjusted on the fly to make the target payout percentage (kind of what the article says). The probabilities had to be fixed for every player on every game. Although the first method is a lot easier to write, software-wise. =)
For the rest of the jurisdictions, the default payout was 40% and anything was fair game to hit that number. Remember that the next time you're in a Chuck E Cheese.
For every play of the game, or across all of those game machines sold?
[1] https://gizmodo.com/how-one-perfect-shot-saved-pinball-from-...
It is the thing that makes it not gambling. In a casino, there is the risk of spending more than your disposable income, hoping to get your money back. In an arcade, you know that once the money is in the machine, it is gone, less chance to overspend. The main point of anti-gambling laws is to prevent addicts from ruining themselves, not to prevent you from spending some money to have fun at the casino, and not to save your disposable income.
The line is blurred when the prize has resale value, and in fact, a common way to disguise gambling is for the machine to give out prizes that the shop next door conveniently buys for a good price.
Legislation vary wildly, so I suppose they are legal in some places and illegal in others.
By the time they reach high school:
- Every kid should know how to play blackjack and poker.
- Every kid must know how to compute the odds of winning.
- Every kid should know how to verify the odds presented to them.
- Every kid should know at least three ways of cheating and being cheated
This might make the earth population a bit more resistant to panic and overreaction in times of uncertainty. Hopefully, fewer people will drink chlorine, stockpile toilet paper, participate in ponzi schemes, go to a real war against a fictitious enemy.
Of course, you can get obsessed with getting the best cards and end up wasting unhealthy amounts of money, but it's not the most common behavior. While I see the point that those games can be seen as having a gambling component, I don't think it's fair to group them together with pure gambling where there is no or almost no motivation to the game other than the possibility of winning a prize, like slot machines, roulette, or the game in this article.
Doesn't mean kids care. Or teachers, or parents.
Maybe things have changed. But when I was in highschool in America in the early 00s, statistics was an optional math class offered to juniors. Nobody had taken stats before reaching highschool, which is what the GP calls for, and kids in the "artistic track" weren't required to take stats at all.
Perhaps GP is not from the US. In the UK, statistics is not separate to mathematics, and is first met in primary school (even in three-school areas more analogue to the US) getting progressively more advanced up to and through (compulsorily until sixth form - the two years prior to university) 'high school'.
I've unironically thought the same thing as the top post. Unless you're going into STEM you probably don't need more than the most basic conceptual understanding of calc or trig. But understanding how probabilities work is a huge benefit in every day life.
What also annoyed me when our child was much younger was how many of the toys people bought him were cheap plastic with flashing lights and sounds and how much these reminded me of slot machines.
To be fair, kids don’t care about cheap plastic, and they love flashing lights and sounds.
Expensive plastic toys have the same flashing lights and sounds.
Though I’ll admit that even more expensive wooden toys don’t, they generally still try to incorporate play with light and sound into the toy somehow.
People love all kinds shit that is objectively bad for them... sugar, heroin, gambling, cryptocurrency.
> Expensive plastic toys have the same flashing lights and sounds.
The cheap adjective was unnecessary.
Can't the same be said of heroin, which in the UK is prescribed as a medication under the name diamorphine? Both of these substances can be safe in limited quantities, and both of them exploit vulnerabilities in human physiology or psychology that results in over-consumption being a very common outcome. One of them is strictly regulated when not banned outright, but the other is freely given to any kid who has spare pocket change, no questions asked.
What's not on this list is... toys with flashing lights :).
That is to say, just because casinos use flashing lights and loud sounds too, doesn't mean it's bad per se. And, as I understand it, lights and sounds in casinos are more intense - perhaps they're aiming for light sensory overload.
And personally, I prefer my kid play with that one educational sound/lightboard we got (and that I keep repeatedly fixing after she breaks it), rather than do what many parents I know do - give their 1+ y.o.'s smartphones with videos to play with.
Huh, no it was. I wanted to distinguish between cheap <$5 plastic toys and brand name $10+ (expensive) ones.
Exactly. At least casinos are regulated so that, even if the odds are bad, they still have to be “random chance”. If I put my money in a slot machine, there is some percent, no matter how low, that I could win on any play. With this machine, and likely many others, its literally a 0% chance for some ridiculous number of plays. That is the difference between a game of luck and a scam. And that’s not even getting into that the game is pretending to be a game of skill, while actually being a scam of a game of chance.
1) be advertised and regulated as games of chance (e.g. being required to disclose the odds of winning, etc.)
2) be subject to FTC rules about deceptive advertising
Maybe you could have arcade machines where you:
- play AlphaGo/Stockfish
- factor a huge prime
- Some other "hard" feat
and if you succeed you get an iPad. Those are the only "games of skill" that wouldn't get you bankrupted by expert players
For example the game where the lights go around a circle and you try to land in front of you for the most tickets could instead have you land the light somewhere and then dice are rolled to determine your actual landing spot.
I'm sure a real game designer could think of something more fun where your skill at the game increases your chances but ultimately luck at the RNG determines your prize.
But yeah dressing what is essentially a pure con (I don't think these even count as games of luck given the payout is not fair from game to game) as a game o skill is terrible.
For non-chess people, the Stafford is pretty dubious but very trappy.
We know.
> In 2015, Sega and another angry player reached a class action settlement, but the settlement was rejected by the judge due to administrative reasons, like a high attorney’s fee and failing to identify and paying affected class members.
You can take advantage of people as long as it's impractical to identify them.
It's the regulated kind that always seems like a sleazy stealth tax on the poor. I'm okay with people playing poker privately for stakes, it's the casinos that I can't stand.
Where I grew up there was two places next door to each other which both happened to have stackers. One had junky prizes like cheap earbuds, and the other had great prizes like a gameboy or mp3 player. Sure enough the later was more popular, but no one ever won. Once you got good at the game the one with the junk would 'allow' you to win pretty reliably every dozen or so attempts.
Surely there are exceptions, but it's like buying from Amazon: it takes too much work to sort through the ripoffs. The fun is spoiled because it requires constant vigilance and active resistance to avoid spending too much money.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." — War Games (1983)
Ratings anywhere can't be trusted. The higher the profile of a critic, the more incentive there is to corrupt them, and the more likely it is that their published opinions are just shilling for the commercial entities that own them.
I was mostly just joking around, but I do think there are reliable ways of finding good games:
-look at player scores/reviews on Metacritic
-look for games with many reviews on Steam that have Very Positive or Overwhelmingly Positive ratings but that you've never heard of
-Tim Rogers (look, I kinda hate the guy too, but he's the real deal)
-More seriously (and this is the best option), blogs / Discord communities / Twitter walls of good indie devs like Michael Brough, Zach Gage, Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, etc. Like, check out freeindiegam.es, or join Brough's Discord. I am old so I don't know the new waves but you could scroll through a few hundred listings on Itch, look up some Twitter accounts from there, and find them. Most of the very best stuff is of course not on consoles at all but on PC, web, and mobile
Is your idea of "commercially successful software game" the top charts on app store or something? There are plenty of games on PC/consoles that are successful and not microtransaction laden.
Basically it would delay the release to just miss if you happen to time it perfectly.
I complained to the Metreon theater in SF and they had the machine removed the next day. I also read of lawsuits years ago so I’m surprised I still see this machine worldwide.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20994663/sega-lawsuit...
What are the practical mechanics of how you do something shady or illegal in an otherwise legit company?
I wonder if discovery will reveal any interesting communications or designs on the matter. Would love to see source code.
I think I've probably played some of these in the US... https://www.segasammycreation.com/en/cabinets?office=usa
Sega is one of the top publishers of video games in the world.
In 2020, they were ranked #1 publisher by metacritic based on average game score:
https://www.metacritic.com/feature/2021-game-publisher-ranki...
They were also #1 in 2016, and are usually in the top 5.
It's a running meme on social media that despite Sega's success as a publisher, many people only know them for Sonic the Hedgehog :)
I did of course play plenty of Sega arcade games, but I didn't know until much later that they started out supplying coin-op slot machines and amusements to military bases in the 1940s and 1950s.
It seems like the company went through 3 or 4 lifespans before they entered my awareness in the 80s.
But here's the thing: Once you step into an arcade in Japan, it's absolutely obvious that you've entered a shady business run by shady people (so in Japan - the Yakuza). It's a dark, smoke-filled room with no windows, and always in the shadier parts of the city next to massage parlours and hooker bars.
The launch of the game did nothing to help those rumours, but certainly made it a bit more difficult to find information about online. :P
[1]: http://jeu-des-6-palets.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/black-...
If it was about skill the prices would be sub-$1 knick-knacks.
Just last week my son told me they tried Key Master at a bowling alley. I told him those games all have switches to control the win rate. He didn't believe/understand me, so it was nice to have screenshots of the manual literally saying "these are the switches that control the win rate".
Also, not enough people know reverse-engineering, much less how software works in general.
I wonder what the "conversion kit" contains, since any one with a software background probably knows that it may take nothing more than patching out a single "don't let player win yet" conditional jump in the software/firmware. Indeed, the code skill-based game would be simpler from that perspective, since it does not have to behave randomly or track the payouts. Of course, setting the number of attempts to 1 (assuming there's no lower limit) could have the same effect.
Since the device has controls for the rention percentage, that leans towards these are not gambling devices, since jurisdictions can differ. However, it is not exactly a skill device, either. There is an option to convert it to skill based, but I doubt an operator anywhere used that option. That is also why the manufacturer put the effort for that on the operator to install, so that it likely wouldn't get installed.
Plus while there can be a rigged factor to the machines, you can still pick up some mechanics that help you shortcut to getting the item to drop. Of course it costs money and you don't always "win" but if you can pick up the pattern, it does become a bit of a fun challenge.
All claw machines Trigger a win if X dollars a spent in a certain duration. I suspect these key machines are based on a similar logic. AFAIK Poker Machines in Australia at licensed venues aren't required to display winning odds :/
The owners manual explains to the operator that they can configure this probability, which they could simply set to 1 to bypass the entire gambling mechanic.
I can imagine it would be the same, e.g. with slot machines?
Ideally; these machines should not be able to work in ways that can be over its local limits.
Wishful thinking, but...in a perfect world.