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Comment by messe | Hacker News Reader

> Lootboxes are not slot machines or FBO terminals. If they can't be "cashed out", they are more like collectible card games... which are also IMHO a plague on humanity, but not the same level of destructive activity as gambling for cash. They do need regulation, given how prevalent they are in games popular with teenagers, but need different regulation from casinos.

Even if they can't be cashed out officially, there are often other unofficial ways. Like selling the accounts in question.

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Needing a secondary market to cash out is not the same as the vendor providing both the game of chance and the winnings.

You can sell/trade MTG and Pokemon cards, but that doesn't make them "casinos"

Doesn't stop people from treating them as one, with all the corresponding issues. TBH I think a comparison with CCGs should make people question the CCG model itself, which tends to get far too easy a pass in most people's minds.

Absolutely, I don't think CCGs are innocent. But I do think they're a level of indirection away from straight-up gambling. Being sold a pig in a poke is not the same thing as being offered betting odds.

The “gambling” aspect of CCGs is mostly tacked on by outsiders, though driven by decisions of the manufacturer.

That said, when you have a deck of, say, Pokémon cards in your hand, there’s nothing about it that encourages a gambler’s mindset.

My 8yo has a bunch of Pokémon cards and he just likes playing with them, he has no idea of any monetary value they might have. There’s nothing about the physical product or game itself that betrays that.

It’s the culture created around it that’s poisonous.

The manufacturers are absolutely working to create and profit off of that culture though. For constructed play, booster packs are no different to loot boxes: they only have the effect of increasing and obfuscating the amount of product you need to buy to get the cards you need for a given deck. And they will make very rare, powerful cards precisely because they know it will move boxes.

The games themselves are fine: if, for example, you could just buy specific cards from the manufacturer, fixed price, print-on-demand (and also buy packs for e.g. draft play), then I would have no problems with the business model at all, but it's the sales model that is predatory.

Yes, I don’t mean to let the CCG manufacturers off the hook, but while you can play the card game and have the cards without being exposed to the gambling aspect, that’s not the case in video games where it’s practically forced upon you just by playing.

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