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EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

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Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#131

Post by s73v3r_ »

mbel wrote: post #10
beezischillin wrote: post #4

Video game publishers have been trying consistently to implement a "less for more" attitude when it comes to their products. The whole lootbox trend on a whole was the peak of having their cake and eating it (wanting to "chase whales" like the free to play model but charging full price for the product). The only surprising thing about this is that there hasn't been a lot more push-back a way earlier.

> Video game publishers have been trying consistently to implement a "less for more" attitude when it comes to their products. Isn't maximizing profits just a natural consequence of having a for-profit business? It's not just evil video game publishers, everybody wants to sell less for more.

The way one goes about doing it, however, can be quite evil.

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#132

Post by Ntrails »

kazagistar wrote: post #114
Ntrails wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterstrike boxes contain purely cosmetics. I can't get wound up about that. You can even buy the thing you actually want on the open market. CS:GO is not a game using lots of shitty in game mechanics/restrictions etc to drive people to spend money in order to play/compete. Same with Dota2.

It's still gambling... even more so if you can exchange the cosmetics back for real money. Which means it's still exploiting some people's gambling addition tendencies, which is the justification for gambling regulations in the first place. They don't regulate video poker because the gambling is making that arcade machine less fun.

The thing I actually care about is computer games. Good ones, well made, and designed around being fun. I enjoy opening my dota2 chests - but they have (basically) no negative impact on the game.

I actually agree - it's "pure" gambling in that sense. You're spinning a wheel and getting a random payoff. I just don't think that's an inherently bad thing

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#133

Post by pitaj »

molf wrote: post #73
village-idiot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another area where the arbitrariness of the 18 year majority limit is exposed: 18 year olds are not neurologically adults. That doesn’t happen until like 25-29.

Agreed; this should be made illegal entirely – this mechanic benefits no one except the game publisher.

Except that it lowers game cost for everyone else when whales buy a bunch of cosmetic items.

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#134

Post by s73v3r_ »

ihuman wrote: post #118
totony wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more nuanced. You get in-game currency for skins/cards you already have in both Hearthstone and Overwatch, which is equivalent to being able to sell your cards

With hearthstone, can't you also "sell" any card you have for in-game currency, in addition to getting currency when you obtain a duplicate? In overwatch, you just get currency for duplicates (or randomly from a box).

I believe in Hearthstone, the only option you have is to turn the card to Dust, and then it takes so much Dust to craft other cards, based on their power and rarity.

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#135

Post by pitaj »

xg15 wrote: post #28
chinathrow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is EA after all, a company I don't have a lot of faith in. Why are you playing their games then?

Arguments like this is what I find entertaining about (pure) free-market advocates. They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it - and when the consumers inexplicably fail to do so, the advocates get mad and blame the consumers instead of adjusting their theory.

Gaming is one of the most competitive industries I can think of. It's very easily accessible by new developers and there's an entire industry of indie games.

> They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it

Loots boxes exist because they aren't actually a problem. A consumer has a choice between games with varying degrees of loot boxes and games without them.

Obviously if people buy games with loot boxes, they don't oppose them strongly. Personally, I don't have a big problem with loot boxes because I like cheaper games. Loot boxes are a way for game makers to milk more money out of whales while leaving the rest of us better off with a cheaper game. Banning or regulating loot boxes will only take away options from consumers, increase prices, or both.

People don't need to be babied by the government whenever a small minority of people make bad decisions. It just allows people to be lazier and less skeptical than they already are.

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#136

Post by vertex-four »

Spooky23 wrote: post #69
efdee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the ability to bet is freedom. Being seduced (avoiding the word 'forced' here) into betting under the guise of a game... not so much.

I don’t see the nuance between a loot box and a slot machine designed to extract $50-$100/hr from a bettor.

A slot machine is clearly a slot machine, and is additionally labelled as such, with mandated warnings. A video game is not - a video game which is actually a slot machine looks very similar to an actual video game.

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#137

Post by falcolas »

GVIrish wrote: post #127
falcolas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that's not brought up often with this argument - the sales scope for modern games. Super Mario World was doing well if it broke 10,000 or 100,000 sales. In contrast a major game these days will break 100,000,000 sales. $60 is also a bit of a red herring, since $60 is the base price for a game - when you start throwing in all of the special features, the price of a game climbs to over twice that amount. And…

> Something that's not brought up often with this argument - the sales scope for modern games. Super Mario World was doing well if it broke 10,000 or 100,000 sales. In contrast a major game these days will break 100,000,000 sales. Your numbers are way off. Super Mario World sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Every full Super Mario release has sold millions of copies. Conversely, even the most popular franchises s…

You're right, I should have worded it differently. Companies went from a market of a few million of potential customers to hundreds of millions (more if you count mobile gamers who are subjected to even more microtransactions) of potential customers.

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#138

Post by [deleted] »

Crpt774 wrote: post #20

Pretty sure Valve haven't actually removed lootboxes, they just show which common reward you will get if you are in Belgium, Rares are still random. When you consider that the above is enough that Valve haven't been touched yet, it just feels like EA are digging their heels for the sake of it. On the other hand, these are the same people who gave us BF2 and have been releasing a near identical game every year since t…

[deleted]

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#139

Post by cevn »

pharrington wrote: post #100
Agentlien wrote: post #64

Mandatory disclosure: I am a programmer working for EA and the following are my personal opinions. I do not represent EA in any official capacity. It's my strong opinion that the whole loot box phenomenon makes games as a whole worse. For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these…

Here's my anecdote. I tried playing Quake Champions, because I remember enjoying Quake 3 as a mid-to-late teenager, and on paper, that type of game should be incredibly up my alley. I found the experience of the initial load screen dumping you directly into the daily loot box screen so offputting that I actually couldn't even enjoy playing the game proper. The very act of just opening the game was so nakedly manipula…

Hope you can get past it. Quake Champions is a lot of fun. All the games have dumb loot boxes nowadays. At least Quake's are all aesthetic. More annoying is their gating of the champions behind huge amounts of "Favor", but that's f2p.

Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes

#140

Post by larrik »

pitaj wrote: post #133
molf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; this should be made illegal entirely – this mechanic benefits no one except the game publisher.

Except that it lowers game cost for everyone else when whales buy a bunch of cosmetic items.

These games aren't lower in price. Freemium games may have that aspect, but the games in the article are all AAA $60+ games with deluxe editions for $80 or over $100, and still have loot boxes.
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