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Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

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Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#21
post #3

This makes me sad. I think loot boxes with RNG rewards are a disgusting practice. It's gambling that minors are allowed to do. One of the things I respect Epic Games for is they didn't follow this profitable path for Fortnite. In Fortnite, you want the skin, you buy the skin. You don't buy a ton of boxes and hope to get lucky. Gambling with an immediate result is bad. It's particularly bad for children. But it's also…

Fortnite has way more kids playing than Fifa and makes more money, so they're "more" evil, it does not matter if it's a skin on a store it's still a lot of money and kids are hooked to it.

Lootbox issues are no the problem, games like Fortnite, Roblox, CoD are on the same level.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortnite is its own evil. They only show an extremely small fraction of the items available each day, with no indication of whether they'll return, so that you feel you have to buy things now in case you never have the chance again.

I don’t have any interest in fortnite but I don’t follow why this is bad. These are just skins right? Like no differentiation besides personal aesthetic preference? Couldn’t these be sold with no ambiguity, never ever coming back, and have literally no impact on your desire to buy? Have you ever felt a desire to buy a shirt because it won’t be available to purchase again? Is there really a world where they say “this…

This is a textbook example of abusing FOMO (fear of missing out). It's real and Epic does it exactly because of this effect on people.

If you're not completely convinced by some cosmetic item you might say "I don't know whether I really want this so I'll just wait and maybe buy it later". But if it's time-limited, in this case without indication whether it'll ever be on sale again, you cannot wait and decide later. It's deliberate time pressure on the decision.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#25
post #12

This is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is very real. I've witnessed first-hand a grown in sort of a "gambling" culture amongst kids, as early as elementary school. While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. Part of me, thoug…

I don't think you're way off the mark, or being a "grumps" on the subject. Young minds can be heavily influenced which is why many societies regulate experiences that may cause harm. I'm sure there are children who aren't impacted by EA lootboxes, as I'm sure there are children who are. It's the ones that are I'm concerned about, and the families that will end up dealing with the fallout. I don't see why it's not pos…

This is all really sad and I wonder how I'll ever protect my child from what these cooperations will come up with 10 years from now. I know probably every generation has lamented about this but I wonder if childhood these days is as fun as it used to be. Yesterday we overheard two kids, maybe 9 years old, discuss the local real estate market and how one house across the street went for a million bucks to which the other kid responded that it was probably because of their finished basement. WTH.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're way off the mark, or being a "grumps" on the subject. Young minds can be heavily influenced which is why many societies regulate experiences that may cause harm. I'm sure there are children who aren't impacted by EA lootboxes, as I'm sure there are children who are. It's the ones that are I'm concerned about, and the families that will end up dealing with the fallout. I don't see why it's not pos…

This is all really sad and I wonder how I'll ever protect my child from what these cooperations will come up with 10 years from now. I know probably every generation has lamented about this but I wonder if childhood these days is as fun as it used to be. Yesterday we overheard two kids, maybe 9 years old, discuss the local real estate market and how one house across the street went for a million bucks to which the ot…

Just have a rule against closed software in the house. It works very well.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortnite is its own evil. They only show an extremely small fraction of the items available each day, with no indication of whether they'll return, so that you feel you have to buy things now in case you never have the chance again.

I don’t have any interest in fortnite but I don’t follow why this is bad. These are just skins right? Like no differentiation besides personal aesthetic preference? Couldn’t these be sold with no ambiguity, never ever coming back, and have literally no impact on your desire to buy? Have you ever felt a desire to buy a shirt because it won’t be available to purchase again? Is there really a world where they say “this…

Selling cosmetic things is literally the best way of extracting money from this. Humans are social creatures, and clothes, real or virtual, are part of social display, some people (me for example) don't care about it, but they are exceptions, most people care deeply about using clothes for social display, and "threatening" them with not having a potentially high social status piece is a good way to make these people buy everything.

This is the whole point of the fashion industry too, every year the "collection" changes, this makes people both afraid of being "left behind", but also of missing "classics" that won't be manufactured again, also it is why fashion designers release things in "collections", idea is seduce people in buying the entire collection, not just the piece they liked.

When you are dealing with something that has an actual value, for example a base-version magic the gathering or pokemon card, the value is exactly whatever the item is useful for, the more useful it is the more people pay for it, but when you are dealing with stuff that is useful to display social status, things change, and you end with people paying ludicrous amounts of money to buy a brick written "Supreme" when the "Supreme" guys themselves are not sure why this is happening.

https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/skate-brand-supreme-se...

Or in case of game cards, people willing to pay sky high prices because the card has special art, sometimes even if the art is UGLIER than the base version, just because it is rare and a social status, things get even wilder when the social status is part of the reason the card exists in first place (for example cards that were manufactured to be given to judges or championship winners)

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#28

This is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is very real. I've witnessed first-hand a grown in sort of a "gambling" culture amongst kids, as early as elementary school. While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. Part of me, thoug…

> While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component.

The more I think about it, the more I realize loot boxes to kids now are what trading card packs were to kids back in the day. When I was in elementary school, I was deep into Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Card packs ran ~$4 and carried the chance that you got a super powerful card. I spent probably close to $100 on cards over the years which, for a 8 year old kid, would be akeen to me dropping $3k on the new Mac Studio.

But there were natural controls in place back then. I had to save up every week to get a new pack, and I only had one chance per week to buy a pack. Now with microtransaction, the biggest problem (in the context of kids), is how easily accessible it is. If I came home and opened my pack to find that it didn't have any good cards, I would have to wait another week to get another pack. Now a kid can just go and get another lootbox instantly.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#29
As a kid I used to play the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game a lot, and the odds for getting cards of certain rarities were published on the packaging so you knew how many packs on average it would take to hit a super rare/ultra rare card. There were 8 commons and one rare slot per pack which had a 1:5 chance of being a super rare, 1:12 for an ultra rare, and 1:23 for a secret rare.[0]

Additionally the cards had actual utility where the rarest cards often had better effects than commons and decks would be built around these rarer cards to be used in a duel. For games like Fortnite where the items in the lootboxes are purely cosmetic, the kids who are playing know that they aren't getting any competitive advantages with different skins in playing. However this becomes a bit murkier in games like FIFA and Star Wars Battlefront 2, where the rarest items from lootboxes contained items that were better than those obtained through leveling up alone. The article says that "92 percent of the FIFA boxes are not bought with real money, but unlocked via football matches and are therefore simply part of the game of skill." which implies players can expect to get a reasonable number of good players to build a team with and a team constructed of said players on aggregate would not provide a significant competitive advantage.

My opinion is that players should spend time in games because they consider it to be fun rather than to be the best for the sake of being the best, and the in-game whales who spend the most $ on a game shouldn't be overpowered to the point where free to play players should feel they need to spend money to win.

[0] https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Booster_Pack

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#30
post #3

This makes me sad. I think loot boxes with RNG rewards are a disgusting practice. It's gambling that minors are allowed to do. One of the things I respect Epic Games for is they didn't follow this profitable path for Fortnite. In Fortnite, you want the skin, you buy the skin. You don't buy a ton of boxes and hope to get lucky. Gambling with an immediate result is bad. It's particularly bad for children. But it's also…

> I think loot boxes with RNG rewards are a disgusting practice. I completely agree. I think there exist many disgusting practices; that doesn't mean those practices should be prohibited. As an alternate approach, suppose that this were addressed through ESRB or similar: "gambling elements" could be called out as a theme (alongside "smoking" or "gore"), and have a minimum associated rating (e.g. not "E for Everyone")…

Yes. Just apply existing VLT gambling laws to this stuff. 18+ rating and odds of winning must be made public.
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