Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Loot boxes are obviously gambling

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 171 posts

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#51

Post by oldcynic »

zerostar07 wrote: post #27

Most games contain calculated random rewards or else the game would be boring and predictable. However to call this gambling it's quite a stretch as you can't cash out. Whoever decided to make those "boxes" look like slot machines spinning brought it upon themselves.

Even if you can't trade the items (and you often can), they have a perceived value, and often a hard cash market value. A value that is frequently over-promoted by the game to encourage purchase of more premium currency by the naive to buy more boxes.

I can't distinguish a loot box from a scratch card -- except a scratch card must reveal odds.

I'm old-school in terms of paying for games: £xx for a complete game, £x for a month's access as they provide a known value exchange. Doubly so when it's the underage being sold to. My kids learnt never to ask - my answer was always no. Lootboxes and other variable rewards, time unlocks and so forth are just a piss-take driven by sheer greed of the GameCo that's ruined many games.

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#52

Post by pfisch »

oldcynic wrote: post #43
pfisch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that would not be the appropriate comparison at all. That is the comparison that is more similar to loot boxes, but not to the definition you have decided upon. Loot boxes give you variable entertainment, but for that to be gambling you have now defined entertainment value as the element of prize. Gambling requires chance, prize and consideration. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e7b39fc2-501e... At…

> Loot boxes give you variable entertainment, but for that to be gambling you have now defined entertainment as the element of prize Variable entertainment? Then a lottery scratch card is "variable entertainment", whatever that is supposed to be. As is I can't distinguish a scratchcard from a lootbox except one has some regulation. They have a feature prize that is the reason for purchase, they have small odds of ach…

Let me clear it up for you. The entertainment you derive from a scratch lottery ticket is not the "prize" element of gambling. The prize is the money you win from the scratch off.

Gambling devices pay out a prize that is worth a real redeemable cash value and can be sold on an open market.

What prize does a loot box give you that is not purely for entertainment value? They do not give you a prize that is redeemable for cash.

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#53

Post by pfisch »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #34
pfisch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with whether it is gambling or not.

It's pretty obvious that both CCGs and loot boxes are forms of gambling. The question is what effects they're having and how they need to be regulated. Loot boxes have a lot more of the features that make gambling a problem, and children are less equipped to handle it. It's reasonable to regulate the benign thing differently from the harmful thing.

I think it is more clear that a CCG is a form of gambling. Loot boxes do not give you anything that you can redeem for cash.

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#54

Post by saintPirelli »

jmiserez wrote: post #40

The same arguments could apply to physical card packs (e.g. MtG cards) sold at tabletop gaming stores. Yet nobody seems to mind there?

When I was ~8 I spent 700 Schilling on trading cards in one go (I guess about 100 in today's Dollar, it was everything I had saved up to this point).

My parents minded very much.

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#55

Post by [deleted] »

gkya wrote: post #49
radicalbyte wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong per se with using the dash, at least if you get the spacing right. If you use a dash as a punctuation you should either use spaces or - as you said - the correct glyph.

I'd say otherwise. It's not like it's really important here, but in a book, that would be a very bright sign of amateurishness to me. Just like with sans serif dotless `i', `n' and `m' the only difference is not the number of the loops, the same with the hyphen, endash and emdash, they mean different things. Hyphen compounds words or breaks them across the line break, endash connects them in logical relations, and an…

[deleted]

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#56

Post by staticelf »

> Regulations that tightly restrict or absolutely prohibit loot boxes will definitely hurt the gaming industry and will hurt, perhaps even fatally, games I love.

Maybe actually charge for the game that companies used to?

I hate free 2 play games because I am a whale and I know it. When I get hooked I can easily pay hundres of dollars of digital shit. Much more than I would ever have if I had just purchased the game.

Fuck loot boxes and fuck companies trying to defend the practice.

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#57

Post by m12k »

I think there's a pattern here: 'Highly talented company makes highly praised product but eventually realizes there is much more money in exploitative products instead'. Valve made the amazing Half-Life series, then later seems to have come to the conclusion that their return on investment is just much higher if they focus on multiplayer games with loot boxes (plus selling other people's games and taking a cut). Blizzard went through a similar transformation from e.g. Warcraft 3 to World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone (these days WoW is probably even the less exploitative of the bunch). Facebook went from being 'the place to hear about what my friends are up to', to just trying to show me as targeted ads as possible. I don't blame them, per se - these companies are just following the economic reality, but I just wish being exploitative wasn't so damn profitable.

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#58

Post by PeterisP »

itake wrote: post #37
Deestan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical CCGs have always been on the nice side of a gray area, digital CCGs are worse, and most loot boxes are much worse. Some important differences (experience drawn from Magic: the Gathering CCG, Rocket League, Team Fortress 2, Hearthstone, Pokémon CCG, Hustle Castle, Merge Dragons, Call of Duty WW2, and a bunch more I don't remember off the top of my head; I play a lot of games): Games with loot boxes will const…

I don't see how this is related to whether or not CCGs or loot boxes are gambling. - "heavily advertised" is not necessarily a feature of gambling - Being able to easily resell reminds me of poker chips. - The longevity of the prize is not a requirement for gambling. - CCG could be instant gratification too. Time delay is not a feature of gambling.

Think of it as a "boiling the frog" situation. The fact that this is close to CCGs, and CCGs haven't been banned, doesn't necessarily mean that it's just fine - it's a slow, gradual increase in "water temperature for the frog" that's has over time become unacceptable. So it's going to be equated to gambling and regulated - obviously, there needs to be a line somewhere through that fuzzy, gradual, unclear border, but IMHO it remains to be seen whether that line will be above or below current CCGs.

Re: Loot boxes are obviously gambling

#60

Post by ocdtrekkie »

m12k wrote: post #57

I think there's a pattern here: 'Highly talented company makes highly praised product but eventually realizes there is much more money in exploitative products instead'. Valve made the amazing Half-Life series, then later seems to have come to the conclusion that their return on investment is just much higher if they focus on multiplayer games with loot boxes (plus selling other people's games and taking a cut). Bliz…

I would easily argue Blizzard has the most generous/least exploitative loot box models. Cosmetic only with a fairly regular/healthy rate of freebies, not to mention the currency you get that lets you acquire the ones you actually want without relentlessly "rolling". Heroes of the Storm steps it up even further with a reroll mechanic you can use for disappointing boxes. Compared to the others in the industry, Blizzard is downright pleasant.
Post reply on HN