Incidentally, since I wrote my post upthread, there’s now an official English translation of the full research report from the Gaming Commission, which includes a lot more context on what the law requires and why the Commission thought certain specific implementations infringe it.It seems like a ruling from 2015 is pretty critical, though as the ruling itself is unpublished I’m not sure what the circumstances were exactly. The report is pretty expansive on what legally counts as winning and losing in a game of chance:
Also this on what constitutes a wager seems crucial:
Not quite sure what to make of this joint declaration by a bunch of European gambling regulators. Key excerpt:
If it weren’t for the presence of the Netherlands on the list, I’d suspect it was a way for the “it’s fine” people to present a united front so that they don’t get made to look bad by the more aggressively enforcing countries, but I don’t really know. It seems particularly telling that there are so many gambling friendly jurisdictions on the list — eg IoM, Jersey, Gibraltar, Malta, Latvia — but it’s hard to say what exactly that means. Maybe the idea is that they end up getting (some) lootboxes defined as gambling, and then the games companies will set up shop as effectively licensed casinos in one of the offshore jurisdictions?
Fuck yeah, burn this whole toxic predatory nonsense to the ground. If there was any justice in the world every MBA asshole who pushed this would be in jail.
Yea, apologies here to anyone who has worked on these titles but fuck em all. The industry had the chance to self-regulate and decided greed was more important.
Heh. I doubt there are a lot of devs, particularly here, who have any warm fuzzies around loot boxes whether or not they’ve worked on a game that has them. I’ve certainly never encountered a designer, developer, or artist – you know, the actual creative people responsible for the games we love – who likes or defends the practice.
Unfortunately the “suits” were successful in getting the developers to pitch it so for the general public, it doesn’t matter. I am tired of predatory, read bullshit, loot box schemes too, but I suspect the downside is some of the less invasive and certainly host schemes could be affected too. But as others have said many times already, they had they chance, the fumbled it and now it’s someone else’s turn.
I think you mean “marketers” here. Unless you mean interviews and such like the utterly ridiculous Shadow of Mordor stuff, in which case you still meant “marketers” as I guarantee you those “interviews” are heavily scripted by the marketing departments.
I was under the impression those guys and gals for some of these games were the people actually working on the game. If it came out of their mouth, they pitched it. It doesn’t matter who told them to say it.
Yeah, e.g., a design lead at a large shooter developer that I have a strong tangential connection to used to get pushed out the door to do marketing shit for his big title all the time, despite being an extremely anxious introvert who hated the PR game with a passion, I guess because they were too cheap to pay someone to do it instead?
Said game went on to make, um. . . a genuinely astounding amount of money, so, you know.
I’m sure they were legitimate devs or artists or whatever (creative director and art director types, generally). I guess I’d say that that part of the job is very much marketing and they are very much marketers when wearing those pants, but okay.
You don’t get to be in that position unless you’re willing to do what your brand manager tells you. I guess you could fall on your sword and refuse to toe the line, sacrificing your career (yeah, you’re never working in any kind of position of responsibility on that kind of project ever again), but that’s an awful tall order since they’ll just get the next person to do it anyway.
I would not expect a developer, artist, designer… whatever to fall on their sword or club or really sharp plastic shiv over anything like this, but when they’re the ones standing in front of the crowds telling everyone how not pay to win their pay to win game is… they’ve kind of lost the ability to say it wasn’t us it was marketing. It will likely be regulated so good news, they don’t have to blur the line anymore thus no more finger pointing.
