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 boxes have been handled by many games noticeably warps the design goals of the game from "make an engaging experience" to "motivate the player to buy more loot boxes".
What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game.
This has been at its worst in mobile games, but there are plenty of console and PC titles with this issue as well. It's even gotten so far that big titles with no microtransactions include a heavy focus on loot boxes which can only be gained as quest rewards or bought using in-game currency (Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind).
I really don't like it. I get no joy from wading through mountains of useless items in the hope of finding that one rare gem I actually want. This applies to ordinary loot in RPGs as well. So, seeing that the global trend has been for games to evolve in this direction has been very frustrating for me. As such, this recent pushback - both these legal actions as well as the player backlash of recent loot box controversies - have been very interesting developments which I hope will lead to market-wide improvements in overall game design.
To elaborate: I do not mind microtransactions in general. There are a few games which have plenty of ways to spend real money in-game but which do not bother me (Fortnite, Elder Scrolls Online). The key difference, here, is that those are games in which the core game loop does not heavily incentivize you to spend money and where in-game transactions will mainly get you cosmetic content or additional story campaigns.
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 manipulative and felt so unfun that I simply uninstalled it; I just cannot be assed to expend the energy trying to ignore the loot box mechanics to play the game on it's own merits.
What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game."
Star Wars Battlefront 2 at release was a perfect example of this. The entire experience was built for someone to either grind incessantly and/or spend real money to acquire currency to unlock items as only weapon mods were acquired via accumulated experience and not loot crates. Even the awarding of credits were loosely tied to performance. The "level" of a hero/trooper/ship was the number and rarity of star cards you had, not how much you had used them. There was no shared marketplace so the only way to get a certain emote, or pose, or star card was getting lucky and pulling one. It was often the case that you would pull items for troopers/heroes/ships that you would barely (or never) use.
As a result of all of this you ended up with things like "rubber banding" where players would use a rubber band on their joystick to prevent themselves from being booted from game modes. This had a particularly harmful effect on the Heroes vs. Villains game mode, as its small number of participants (4v4) and scoring via target system meant having one or more "rubber banders" on your team put you at a severe disadvantage and wrecked the experience.
If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability.
I really hate seeing this trend come to games that I presumably own.
I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from.
Where is the skill and gameplay involved in spinning a virtual roulette wheel until a powerful enough unit or item pops out to let you advance to the next level of gameplay? And, of course, the answer is that there is none; it's merely taking advantage of those prone to gambling addiction.
Loot boxes are the same, except now you also have to gamble.
I feel you my friend.
Also why would you work for EA? I genuinely want to know. After everything I heard / read about them I wouldn't touch that company with a 10ft pole. I even avoid anything they sell intentionally because of it.
- Mass Effect
- Dragon Age
- Mirror's Edge
- Titanfall
- Dead Space
- The Sims
- job security
- good salary
- working on AAA games as a full-time job
- working together with other passionate gamers and nerds who share my interests in a way I wouldn't have thought possible before moving to this industry
- Getting a lot of information from contacts in the industry before it becomes public news.
- Learning incredibly much about the behind-the-scenes stuff. Both from EA in general but also from other parts of the industry
I would like to see loot boxes out of games for players under 18. Loot boxes are not a real part of the game anyway, they are a way for the publisher add the types of subconscious psychological rewards to “increase engagement” that are now rightfully criticized in platforms like Facebook.
I have a bit of a double feeling about this as a Belgian - on the one hand I think it's a good direction for the industry. We didn't have that crap a decade ago and I'll be happy to see it removed. OTOH, I hope they don't just remove content for the Belgian market as it'd potentially create an unfair system.
It is EA after all, a company I don't have a lot of faith in.
If only they'd bring back a usable server browser, or (god forbid) release the server software for community game servers.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/23/17386912/battlefield-5-loo...
[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/battlefield-5-will-have-no-premium-p...
Why are you playing their games then?
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.
Now, it's not that DICE is per se a bad developer, but the deadlines pushed on by EA give rise to lots of bugs on release.(But, I've not played an EA/DICE game since BF3 so I could be wrong there, things might've changed.)
The games are usually playable some time after release.
And things like this: https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-... don't exactly make me warm up to actually buying an EA game.
If a more regulated producer had similar marketshare, I could play the big budget titles of that regulated corporation.
[1] Up through 2k17 (that was on the edge though) you could make your custom player good just by playing the game. It might take some time, but it could be done. With 2k18, you needed to buy the game for $60 and then spend ~$100 to have anything near a playable character.
EDIT
Whoops, my micro transaction hate got ahead of my coffee drinking :) My point still stands though. If you don't like the way a company is doing something, don't buy their product.
Video Games have been growing with such a strong trajectory that what consumers expect at a bare minimum in a new release is a large increase in risk for a game publisher.
For example Super Mario World was made by less than 20 people and sold for $69.99 at launch in 1990. That’s nearly $140 in today’s dollars.
Now take into account that a modern AAA game has at a minimum a 150 person staff, with the more content heavy games breaching 500 people; if your game is a flop your studio is dead despite having years of successes before. The margins at $60 don’t provide enough cushion so publishers are continuously scrambling for extra revenue they can get away with before consumer backlash.
The current model is very fragile and not entirely sustainable. It exploits the passions of recent graduates by giving them salaries 30-40% below market only because they’re working on games, with the work being not at all different than working on spreadsheet software except for having serious crunch-heavy deadlines. The attrition rate over 5 years is over 70%, which also leads to those who merely didn’t leave instead of the most qualified being in leadership positions which makes any changes to processes very difficult.
$60 is also a bit of a red herring, since $60 is the base price for a game - when you start throwing in all of the special features, the price of a game climbs to over twice that amount. And that doesn't even cover the microtransactions not included in the gambling category - 4-5 expansion packs each the price of an indie game, skins, poses, voice lines, etc.
Let's not forget that EA have openly stated to their shareholders that not having loot boxes in their games doesn't affect their revenue. Either they're lying to their shareholders, or to us. I wonder which one it is.
These companies are raking in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. That's not the sign of a fragile market.
Edit: As an illustrative example, if we neglect economies of scale we should be paying 5,000-10,000$ for our personal computers.
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.
Therefore there are two choices:
Either they get regulated as other slot machine makers around the world, including being taxed as both a slot machine maker and as a slot machine operator.
Or alternatively just make a video game and sell that and not have to deal with all the regulation.
I think less for more naturally would come with inflation across the board but the less for more approach isn't the only way to increase profits or even the most popular one. The computer industry for example is known for scaling by giving more for less. Beverage companies add more drinks for the same price. Less for more requires a monopoly or something close to it, otherwise competitors rush in.
However, I think the entertainment industry is particularly fond of this.
My guess is because its products are both luxury items (so moral arguments against the same practices in housing or pharma don't necessarily apply) and items that consumers potentially have enormous emotional investment in. So once you've managed to build a fanbase, you can get away with a lot before the fans will seriously consider quitting.
I know people that have spent a lot of money in counter-strike boxes, it works like slots machines, designed to keep you exited while you get a reward. The worst thing is now is the rule in every game (pubg, heartstone and so on..).
Good job Belgium!
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 been around for a while and I've honestly never even been remotely attracted to games like that.
I definitely feel like this has exponentially increased since iOS games called 'freemium'. Generally, the game will be free but then things can take 30minutes to be accomplished unless you buy diamonds that cost 1$ and you get instant gratification.
I mean, it's not like you get to choose between the version of the game that has this vs the one that doesn't.
For some people, the fun of the real gameplay outways the negative of the lootboxes
EA are trying to turn FIFA into a eSports game (see the recent FIFA eWorld Cup) and the majority of play takes place in the "Ultimate Team" mode. To get the high calibre players you'd use to build up your experience and reputation in UT you either need to make a ton of coins to buy them or buy "FIFA points" with real money and open the packs.
It's pretty standard practice for the higher end players to throw money at these packs to build up teams early on, so I suspect this move will put Belgian players at a disadvantage (it's not a total nightmare as you can buy most players in 'standard' varieties for a lot less, just not the in-form ones you'd use in competition play).
Of course, at the end of the day, it's still just a game.. :-D
So in the first case there is no super significant difference between the players on the field, which means there is no point to buy loot boxes to get better players.
Or in the second case it isn't really an eSport because the person that spends the most money (and is luckiest with the players that they get) will more likely win.
The issue is the one of random drops for real money. It’s easy to see that has a gambling element to it.
A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins" instead of packs in affected territories.. but then you'd have the opposite effect of players there getting a major advantage :-D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...
Curiosity - what's inside the cube winner video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU
>"I said there's something amazing inside. Something life changing inside. Well, this is what this video is about. After 25 BILLION cubelets have been destroyed, over 150 days, after 4 million people have downloaded it onto their various devices, and after hosting tens of thousands of simultaneous concurrent users, we have reached the end, and one lucky person has reached the rewards of their hard efforts. How can anything be worth all that effort?"
Well what was in the cube? A broken promise.
Curiosity Winner Has Received Nothing - 2 Years Later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SejMdncxbnk
>Curiosity Winner, Once Promised a "Life Changing" Prize by Peter Molyneux, Has Received Nothing:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/curiosity-winner-once-prom...
Peter Molyneux A Pathological Liar? | Feature Creep:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efeq_9XwU7s
>"This week on Feature Creep I discuss the recent controversy about 22Cans head Peter Molyneux, the failure of the GODUS God of Gods plan and how Bryan Henderson, the winner of the Curiosity competition has been ignored."
I've been boycotting EA since the dawn of modern DLC with Battlefield: Bad Company, which was 10 years ago.
Every single gamer who has not stood on this side of the line since then is a part of the problem.
If you have purchased a single EA game directly from the publisher in the last decade, instead of aftermarket, then you have absolutely no right to complain about loot boxes because we live in a time where all of the information about EA's destruction of the gaming industry has been freely available for anyone to find.
You chose to feed the beast for your own selfish desires and now you act like it's someone else's fault that the beast has gotten so big.
The psychological quirk these games exploit is that some humans get a disproportionate internal reward for taking chances that come off. This quirk gets you polar explorers, and a man on the moon, but it also gets you financial crashes and people losing their life savings on the turn of a card. So, you know, maybe not something we want under the control of a for-profit company.
Traditional gambling laws assume the rewards must be financial, but this psych quirk doesn't care what the reward is, shiny Pokémon cards, virtual currency, anything you perceive as desirable. What's important is that you took a risk and it paid off, if you have this quirk your body rewards you for this entirely luck-based success, of course you want it again.
Note that although Magic itself is going nowhere, this game design trope has been somewhat displaced by designs where players buy fixed decks with fixed boosters - no blind buy. Android Netrunner is an example of that. You know going in that to be competitive you're buying so-and-so many packs to have the best cards, a few extreme choices might mean buying one extra copy of something, but there are no truly "rare" cards.
Feels a lot like loot boxes/gambling to me, in either instance. Okay, at least IRL you have a (largely unregulated) secondary market to sell/buy/trade cards.
Show players the contents of the next box they buy, which makes it not gambling.
I hate it, but it's a very elegant solution to avoid any legal problems.
I suppose they could also make the boxes transparent all the way down, but that would just shift the gamble to the account creation phase.
Oh, or is it just the exact same boxes for everyone? I suppose that solves the problem.
Practically speaking, it's a brilliant move because it works around laws without removing the addictive gambling feeling.
Well, yeah. It's called nuance.
Publishers have been using the argument that loot boxes aren't gambling in order to justify making them available to minors. As far as I'm aware, Belgiums' decision to ban them is more a recognition that they are, in fact, gambling, and therefore should not be available to minors.
That extends to gaming platforms and the trend toward randomized loot boxes. It’s not “like gambling”. It is gambling. Arguably worse though as there’s no regulatory oversight.
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 the 90's so they may have just gotten lazy and not even noticed the law. Far too used to no effort money making that lot.
That's exactly it. They are challenging this in court because they don't want to lose their loot boxes by this enforcement spreading to other countries.
They could pursue it all the way up to EU supreme court. That would set a binding legal precedent for the EU, hopefully not in favor of EA.
I don't like games with lootboxes. I don't buy lootboxes. I don't buy games that have them. As a game developer, I don't work on games with lootboxes.
But this is my personal preference, and I am an adult who is capable of making such a decision. I respect other people who decide to buy lootboxes, even if I wouldn't do it myself. Why is it so hard to just live and let live?
Promoting gambling to minors is something I find completely unethical.
Many are not the first part. Many who are the first part are not the second part.