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posted by
cmn32480
on Monday January 08 2018, @03:34PM
from the 1-in-365,214,231-chance-of-getting-the-good-stuff dept.
from the 1-in-365,214,231-chance-of-getting-the-good-stuff dept.
Loot boxes in video games give the player a random item, perhaps a weapon or a skin, typically in exchange for payment. Should they be viewed as a legal sweepstakes or as an illegal lottery? This video examines the legal issues and explains how loot boxes could be structured to avoid running afoul of gambling laws (which vary by state) in the U.S.. The video concludes that many current implementations of loot boxes are really illegal lotteries, and conjectures that major game companies use them anyway because the risk of being prosecuted isn't enough to dissuade them.
Previously: Belgium Moving to Ban "Loot Boxes" Throughout Europe, Hawaii Could Restrict Sale to Minors
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Are Loot Boxes in Games a Violation of Gambling Laws?
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Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
(Score: 1) by mobydisk on Monday January 08 2018, @05:29PM (6 children)
This surprises me because I see stores sell "grab bags" of items all the time. Common examples are action figures & Lego minifigs & toy pets, card games (Pokemon, Magic the Ggathering, ...) t-shirts, etc. I don't want to watch a video so maybe someone can post why video game loot boxes are fundamentally different from randomized grab bags? Or maybe the items I listed above are illegal in Belgium?
(Score: 3, Informative) by WizardFusion on Monday January 08 2018, @05:37PM (1 child)
From what I understand when this first came out with the EA game, loot boxes have a chance of giving the playing nothing at all.
So it's like handing over money for a grab bag and receiving nothing in return.
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday January 09 2018, @09:52AM
I've never seen loot boxes that give literally nothing, but the value of the items in them varies a lot and often the most common items are nearly worthless to anyone but beginning players. The high variance in the value of the reward is what makes both gambling and loot boxes addictive to some people.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 08 2018, @05:45PM (2 children)
I suspect there are close to zero people who think they can get rich from grab bags. Probably zero who will ruin their lives buying grab bags in the hope of winning big.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug into other computer. Right-click paste.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Tuesday January 09 2018, @12:48AM (1 child)
The collectible card industry (baseball, Magic, Pokemon, etc.) is based on the same premise as loot boxes, except that loot boxes are even cheaper to manufacture.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday January 09 2018, @09:59AM
Back when I played Magic, each booster would contain the exact same number of rare, uncommon and common cards. That is not the case with most games using loot boxes: items of the highest rarity levels will appear at random in a small number of loot boxes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tekk on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:19AM
It's mostly the psychological tricks around it. EA, who's the source of this, locked expected features (playing as Darth Vader, for example) behind loot box mechanics. They designed the entire game around pushing the loot boxes as hard as possible, and they don't eliminate duplicates so it's entirely possible to get a loot box which contains nothing in it, practically speaking. These loot boxes also included pay to win elements: it's like you're selling grab bags of chess pieces and some of the grab bags include queens, so the people who can afford to buy a bunch of grab bags just win the game.
Basically these loot boxes came around as an alternative to microtransactions. Blizzard (Overwatch started the current trend, Valve was doing it quietly for years and years before) looked at microtransactions and they looked at what Valve was doing, and they realized that they can get you to pay $5 to buy a skin you wanted, or they could get you to buy 30+ lootboxes all trying to get that damn skin you want. Battlefront, if I recall, went and made this *even worse* by splitting the outfits into parts. So now you don't just need to open loot boxes to unlock Luke Skywalker (or have 40 hours of play time, to use the numbers at launch, to gain enough free currency to avoid playing Luke Skywalker in a Star Wars game,) you need to open loot boxes to unlock his Endor helmet, and his Endor torso, and his Endor boots or however they split it up. You can easily spend hundreds of dollars and get nothing meaningful in return, which is why EA's been forced to roll back on it hard, it was enough to gather interest from Belgium as well as from Hawai'ian legislators.