The good news for gamblers is that loot boxes aren't gambling

Not quite – you put in money, you get out money is a very different thing. That is clearly gambling.

With loot boxes, you put in money, you get digital items. Not money.

that wasn’t their definition though, that’s yours. their example on why it can’t be gambling simply had to do with getting something for what you spend.

Yes but getting money back is a very different thing than “a product you paid for”. Money for money, is the essence of gambling.

Not exactly. They said it was not gambling because you always got something and it was always digital, which means it had no inherent value.

Imagine paying $10 for a ticket that either gets you a loaf of bread worth $1 or a car worth $100,000. If you are cheated out of the car, you can argue that you are owed $99,999.

Or imagine paying $10 for a ticket that gets you either 500 virtual gems or nothing. If you are cheated and get nothing, then you are clearly owed a refund of the ticket that was destined to be worthless.

But now imaging paying $10 for a ticket that gets you either a Star Citizen cruiser or an orcslaying sword on WoW. You get the sword, and then realize the game was fixed. Are you owed anything? Hard to prove, because you can’t compare the inherent values of two different digital goods. And it doesn’t really matter if you would have preferred the cruiser.

I’m pretty sure I can prove the monetary value of the Star Citizen cruiser and the orcsaying sword in WoW. Both items would have like objects that have been sold or traded for real money.

Good point on your part. Bad example on my part.

But the biggest prizes offered in loot boxes are not offered for real money, and owners cannot sell them for real money without breaking terms of service. And this is why.

[shitpost]Words on a forum aren’t real words, because they’re digital and have no inherent value.[/shitpost]

LOL, well if you paid for a digital box that displayed a randomly selected quote from a forum, that would not be gambling! No matter how many likes the post received… And that’s probably a better analogy than my original one.

Sometimes posting on Stack Exchange feels like gambling, because you never know if you will get actual help, or snarky derisive comments, and closed threads/questions.

Whales gonna whale. Good thing there’s no rampant systemic wealth inequal… oh yeah.

Oh look. Twitch now has Emote Loot Crates. The ones out now offer time limited Halloween emotes.

Lets play the game of drawing parallels

This is a movie about a game developer that exit a game company with secrets documents that prove that the game industry has been conspiring against society health for years by increasing the addiction of games through gambling. Pushing many people to a gambling addiction, hurting society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcWi7DRWPq4

Man, I love good movies :D

How is not gambling for items gambling? I hope to see the day somebody is in that chair, and asked that. (better formulated).

Sure, I’ll play.

How many times has someone said, “Screw EA and their lootboxes”, uninstalled a lootbox-ridden game, and moved on to something better?

How many times has someone said “Screw EA and their lootboxes”, uninstalled a lootbox-ridden game, tried to move on to new game, but then reinstalled the original EA game again knowing full well that it was garbage?

I’m going to guess that the latter scenario almost never happens. And that’s the difference between a habit and an addiction.

I used to know a guy who went through this process with Hearthstone several times. Play for a few months, uninstall to get away from it, be playing again a week later. It’s also decently common with the major long-running mobile RPGs like Puzzle & Dragons and Fate/Grand Order. The most famous example, though, is Magic: The Gathering, where people will sell or even throw away their physical collections and get out of the game, then be back a year or two later and regret getting rid of their stuff.

Now, there are a few major differences between something like the new Star Wars game and Magic. Buying a physical booster pack of cards feels a lot different from buying a digital loot box. There’s a secondary market for buying, selling, and trading cards, which isn’t the case for 99% of these loot-box games. Needing a physical play space and in-person opponents makes it more difficult to “binge” on paper Magic the way you can spend twenty hours in a regular weekend playing a multiplayer FPS. (Digital Magic is a different story, of course.) But a lot of these differences don’t really apply to these other digital-only games that people quit and reinstall all the time. What does apply to those games and to Magic, and far less so to these AAA loot-box vehicles, is the relentless content release schedule. It’s easy to put down a game like Battlefront II knowing that the DLC coming in a few months is just going to be a couple of maps and a few guns. It’s much harder to permanently stop playing something like Hearthstone or Magic knowing that previews are starting this week (literally today, in Magic’s case) for the next set of cards, to be out at the end of the month. Similarly, those mobile RPGs are constantly adding new characters and dungeons with new mechanics, and Puzzle & Dragons in particular has had a lot of QoL improvements in the five years it’s been around. It’s easy to see where a disillusioned player of one game doesn’t go back, while someone who quit the other game cold-turkey jumps back in after a bit.

As opposed to content ratings that have nothing to do with gameplay?

Also, I’d love to see stuff like this on games so parents know to say “no” with them. A guy at work is out of his mind with his kids constant spending on NBA 2K17 or 18 or whatever, kids probably dropped $200 on it over the last year or so.

I get when parents receive that first unpleasant surprise bill, but why is your work buddy letting this go as a “constant” issue?

It is the kids own allowance/christmas/birthday and etc money. He doesn’t want to tell him how to spend it but hates watching his boy make poor choices.