US Senator demands review of loot box policies, citing potential harm

Lottery tickets include odds on the back of the cards. I think that has a very small effects on discouraging play. And those odds are pretty straight forward (1 in 2,000,000 for a 500k payout). I imagine information about how randomization works would be even more indecipherable.

Each card is assigned a rarity (common, uncommon, rare, mythic rare) based on its power. All cards of a given rarity have the exact same probability of showing up in a given booster pack. It's possible for a card to get reassigned during a reprint, but it's pretty unusual.

Wizards doesn't set the secondary market prices; the secondary market prices are determined by the demand for that card[0] and the outstanding supply. The outstanding supply is also fairly straightforward: with the exception of cards in pre-built decks[1], cards are basically only printed through booster packs. So, if two cards are both printed at "rare" in a single set (and not printed in any other sets), there will be exactly the same number of each card available in the market - the price there is solely driven by the demand. Wizards has some control in the sense that they can decide which cards to reprint in a given set, or which new cards to print to alter the metagame, but that's very difficult to actually predict, as anybody who plays Magic regularly is aware.

As for the expected value of cards in booster packs: that's always going to be lower than the price of the booster pack. Why? Because stores purchase packs wholesale, and if the expected value of the pack is greater than the MSRP of the pack, they'll just open the packs instead and sell the cards individually.

So Wizards can't tell you the expected value of a given pack, or even predict the price of a given card on the secondary market.

[0] The demand is determined by the metagame, which Wizards has only very loose control over in the short- and medium- term.

[1] Pre-built decks almost never contain cards that are particularly valuable; they're meant for beginners or casual players, whereas the players who care about the valuable cards are "power players", so to speak.

It's not "gambling". Using the in-game currency (which you get for free by playing), you purchase items directly. The mere existence of uncertainty somewhere in the process doesn't make it "gambling"

Ironically, the randomness serves to decrease the pressure to spend money on the game. If you just purchased the items directly for real-world money, as most other games do, you'd end up in a situation where people would feel pressured to spend money on the game, because obtaining skins actually would be a direct function of money spent.

Additionally, framing this as "children gambling" is pretty suspect. Blizzard doesn't publish official demographic data, but all players have to be over 13 by law, and according to third-party data, the majority of the player base is over 18. Given that teenagers already have less easy access to digital transactions than people over 18, and that they already form the minority of the player base, the burden is on critics to provide concrete data that teenagers are actually being negatively affected by lootboxes. (Which I doubt anyone will, because I'm skeptical that it's even true. Of course, the reason that this issue is continuously framed as "children gambling" is because talking about anything affecting children is a great way to pander in politics, and this whole issue isn't about loot boxes in games anyway.)

> Blizzard and Valve don't get a free pass for being slightly less evil than the competition.

On the flipside, by focusing on loot boxes at the expense of actual, actively predatory business models, you are giving the companies that engage in those other business models a free pass.

You might think, "well, the answer is that we should go after both". Except, that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen not only because people's attention for games-related issues is pretty limited, but also because this isn't about ethical business models at all; politicians like Hassan don't actually care about that. They care about scoring political points, and it's much easier to score political points off lootboxes than pay-to-win or abandonware.

I dislike loot boxes but I have a hard time seeing it as gambling if you explicitly can not liquidate the assets you receive from it. Then it's just a grab bag.