Lootboxes is not gambling, it's actually something much worse

Lootboxes is not gambling, it's actually something much worse.

Lootboxes is like gambling's more manipulative and deceitful younger brother. He gets away with shit because it's all innocent fun and games, but peel away that layer of lightheartedness and you have something that is way more ripe for exploitation than actual gambling. You can tweak and obfuscate systems in a way not possible in actual gambling, since it's tucked away within other systems. You muddy the waters by injecting it into something else, which is way more fucking dishonest and disgusting.

but you always get a prize unlike gambling. so you never lose

Sup Forums is trying REALLY hard to convince me that retards spending money on bad games is somehow my problem.

the whole mess will be regulated eventually, thats why everyone is exploiting it now. the gold rush will end, it will probably take another few years, but it will end.

It encourages making games grindy so the whales will buy more.

my problem because?

>play slots
>if you dont get 777 a dog shit rolls out
>still got a prize

You get a worse game as a result, and even if you avoid the games that do it iniitially, more people will do it.

>gamble $1
>receive a prize worth .01 cents or less
>it's OK because you won!!

At least shit like gashapon capsules give you a little trinket worth the amount you put in AND potentially will increase in value because it's collectible.

I only play Nintendo games, JRPGs and other jap games like ArcSys games
Why the FUCK should I care about any of this lootbox shit? I've literally never played a game that had them

I'll go play something else.
There's plenty of shit in my backlog, I'll never run out of games to play.

The quality of games has declined significantly because of shit like this. Its not about who spends their money on what, its about games locking you out from the good stuff unless you pay or put in the time grinding the shit out of it.

>>receive a prize worth .01 cents or less
Wrong. The game gives lootboxes equal value, any cash value higher or lower is determined entirely by the community.
Not surprised a namefag doesn't know the law

So they'll decline. I don't think lootboxes going away is going to fix anything. Play an old game and forget modern AAA shit altogether.

>Sup Forums is trying REALLY hard to convince me that retards spending money on bad games is somehow my problem.

That's not the issue here though, the issue is that this is so insanely profitable that it will soon be in every video game that is not smaller indie titles.

oh well RIP new games
let's go play something old instead

And it makes developers care less about making good games and more about creating income streams. They stop bein creative developers in order to sit back and acquire money. See Valve as an example to this.

It also opens them up to vile greed like taking 75% of profits from an item you make for their gambling system.

>its about games locking you out from the good stuff unless you pay
How many amiibos do you own?

>valve game key is 2.50
>open crate
>technically the item I get should be worth 2.50
>it's a gun worth .25
>this is OK because I still got something

This is the entire point of loot boxes and gambling. This isn't like a surprise grab bag of 10 comic books for $2. With the comics you know they're all old vintage issues of stuff you've probably never heard of or read but it's there to relieve the store of excess stock and for you to hopefully find some new series to enjoy.

Lootbox gambling does not give you that.

It's simple

5-20 guys buying just THE GAME

Does not equal 5-10 guys buying THE GAME, AND DUMPING 1,500 USD on it to feel superior to everyone else because reasons (Superiority complex, laziness, lack of time to commit to unlocking progression traditionally)

>>it's a gun worth .25
Says who? You? lol

>I only play Nintendo games, JRPGs and other jap games like ArcSys games
>Why the FUCK should I care about any of this lootbox shit

>Lootboxes is not gambling, it's actually something much worse.
Lootboxes really bring out the socipaths on Sup Forums.

Too many. I buy them because I like the characters, not because it gives Zelda panties with a red bow.

>buy Mario Amiibo for Smash
>can "play" against it while it farms items for me
>turns out the same amiibo will unlock silly useless cosmetic shit in other games
>buy my fuxking yellow nigga PAC-MAN
>does literally fucking nothing for any game but smash and I'm not paying $800 for some low run pac-man statue shit
>later Nintendo updates Mario Kart 8 with a free pac-man skin I never even asked for but looks fucking great
And you know what? You don't even need to buy the figures. If you had the high IQ of a Rick & Morty fan you'd be pirating the NFC tags and making your own. You literally have NO excuse except you want to bitch.

Ever rubbed tickets? Often enough you will receive back the cost of the ticket and think you 'won' something.
Bait and switch, bait and switch.

tl;dr unregulated gambling is worse than regulated gambling
Yes OP you are genius.

Cosmetic lootboxes are fine and you're autistic if you have a problem with them.

All they change is character models or weapon skins or even smaller things.

It preys on weak, vain and stupid people. If you take a look at the most popular things in the past few years, guess what? They're all fucking things that improve how you look or feel about yourself, camera apps to make you look good, "ugly" meter apps to make you feel good when you aren't listed as ugly, things that you can pay money to literally feel good and feel like you're better than other people, lootboxes to make you look better than other people

You're fucking stupid if you buy them and it's your own fault for being a pathetic, weak person that is DESPERATE to feel better than others at any cost.

It's just big businesses preying on the weak and they fall for it every single time no matter how you package it.

Now go buy more LoL skins so you can show off to your friends how cool the skin looks, you did it buddy you spent $20 to look cooler than the other people who play that character.


Lootboxes that cut content or actually hurt gameplay in any way are fucking terrible though and nobody should play games that include them in any way.

>If you had the high IQ of a Rick & Morty fan you'd be pirating the NFC tags and making your own.
Hold the fuck up. You Nintenbros HATE piracy, like you literally start seething in any thread where someone says they pirated a Nintendo game. Why are you suddenly okay with piracy when it's amiibos?

except that people play to get a specific item, most of the time the items that are hardest to get, so the majority of time people lose, like gambling

>amiibos are okay because you can pirate them
>but I will end your life (actual quote from miiverse) if you ever dare pirate a Nintendo game like Zelda

If you don't care about good new games ever coming out, then just stay the fuck out of threads discussing current and future games, you fucking defeatists/shills.

digital content has no monetary value. lootboxes are actually worse than gambling. at least when gambling you have the chance to win

Steam has a market which allocates value you fucking silly cunt. How a consumer can be so anti consumer astounds me.

>I'll go play something else.

until eventually there won't be anything else left

tell me, wouldn't you rather have a new game you can play rather than being forced to go play something else?

sounds like you're being purposefully contrarian

So how is this fixed?

I imagine if even one decently sized country writes it up as gambling it'll change the games release in that country or maybe even for everybody. Smaller ones would just be ignored.

How many amiibos do you own?

The other guy is right.

Ever notice how you've always gotta deal in fake currencies?

Notice how no company sets prices for their own items?

You pay for the crate / key, the transaction between you and the game-company ends there. You've already agreed at this point that you've paid for whatever is in the crate.

A CS:GO Dragon Lore is only worth 1000$ as long as there's supply and demand, they have no value in reality, which you agree to in the TOS.

Fuck the state of AAA gaming.

Fucking communist scum, get off my imageboard.
The video games you know is long dead, and it wont ever come back. Now it is an industry that will eventually grow as big as movies, if not bigger.
When you were playing your beloved games in the 90s and early 00s, the target audience of today wasn't even born. Popularity killed video games, just like smarthones ruined the internet.

You can boycott EA as much as you want but in the end they will still make millions of money.
The free market is the most democratic system there is. Time to move on.

>Cosmetic lootboxes are fine
Stoppes reading there. Lootboxes are the worst unlock mechanic for anything, that includes cosmetics.

You'e right, most of them are closer to 3 cents. Let's not forget the VALVe transaction cut and the fact you can't withdraw money from your steam wallet.
Effectively, you put cash into the virtual world and get nothing back. Best case scenario is you delude yourself into thinking you can now buy that one game you want but that is still the gambling machine influencing your decisions.

if you're not stupid, vain, or weak, then you recognize that they are an inherently poor value proposition and reject them all the same.

I guess the stupidest part is people willing to sell this shit for less than keys are worth.

>communist

>implying advocating in favor of an informed and wise consumer isn't a cornerstone of free market capitalism

i've had sex before, so none.

It's also reminding me of gambling because Casinos also don't have you use real money but instead you use chips.

The reason is a psychology trick. You're more likely to have an attachment to a real 10 dollar note but less a 10 dollar chip, so more likely to go through more before you stop. You reading this might not be fooled, but enough people are fooled to make it viable.

>t you can't withdraw money from your steam wallet.
Most stores don't allow you to do that. I'm pretty sure I can't withdraw money from my wallet in the Nintendo eshop

Customer rights aren't communist.

shit you are right, we should stuff slott machines with trash that disposes if you lose to avoid gambling laws

I honestly wonder, who was the first spastic kid to sell an item contained in a 2.50$ case for 1$

You have the right not to buy video games.
Just read yourself, this isn't about medicine or food, it's about fucking vidya.

Dude I own every Nintendo console since the 64 and I still pirate the shit out of Nintendo games.

It didn't start out that way. The market is just a place to undercut the next person in line. So the guy who initially unboxed it was selling it for 3 bucks maybe, assuming it wasn't rare. Then the guy infront of him wanted to sell it faster, so he made it 2.99. The guy next wanted his item to sell first, so he made it 2.98, and so on and so on and so on.

when did Sup Forums do such a turnaround on cosmetic items being behind a paywall / lootbox system? for YEARS people have argued that paid content is fine, on the condition that it is aesthetic in nature and has ABSOLUTELY no bearing on the gameplay, and games that offered non-cosmetic items for cash were considered pay2win.

guess the opinion of "pay2win is bad" is too commonplace nowadays, so the contrarians of Sup Forums now have to rally against their precious cosmetic items being inside a lootbox. another autistic crusade. yet to hear a convincing argument as to why cosmetic lootboxes are bad. fucking pathetic.

You can't give any ground, no matter the medium.

Sup Forums has undergone a real cultural shift since gamergate happened and the twitch era started, lots of idiots came in thanks to poe's law also

False equivalence. Trash isn't worth the money you put into a slot machine. A lootbox is worth the money you put into the game.

>The reason is a psychology trick. You're more likely to have an attachment to a real 10 dollar note but less a 10 dollar chip, so more likely to go through more before you stop. You reading this might not be fooled, but enough people are fooled to make it viable.

There's also the fact that with "pretend money" you can sell currency in batches, which means that you will always have some money left after you buy what you want, meaning you want to buy some more and buy something else because you don't want to leave money on the table.

It can be argued that cosmetic lootboxes are a gateway drug to pay2win content, and as this industry shows, the slippery slope is never a fallacy since it'll eventually happen.

is this gambling

Customer rights are for anything m8, its not just for things you personally feel are important.
If you dont like it go live in china or some other shithole

Nobody actually cares if lootboxes are gambling.

People want to try to argue lootboxes are gambling as an easy way of getting the government or ERSB to ban them without having to get new laws passed.

The core of the issue is that PC gamers hate lootboxes because you can't pirate them, and so they grasp any argument they can possibly find to try to ban them.

>The game gives lootboxes equal value,

That's not true because the cards have different power levels and rarities. Something giving +10 damage is obviously valued higher than something giving +3 damage. Same as something being a 0.001% chance and something being a 2% chance.

This also ties in with how banks are working to stop people from using cashmoney and wants everyone to use their credit and debit cards and bank transfers for their transactions. They remove physical component, the money that you can see and feel and know that this has an inherent value and replace it with a 4 number pin and a receipt you don't read. Preteens today and the children growing up who'll use their smartphone to buy candy on the weekend and will never hold a real 10 dollar note after mowing the lawn will never truly understand the value of money and have no issue with overspending.

I say the trash is worth the money you put into a slot machine, and you can't argue otherwise.

Good point, yes.

yeah this, also proxy currencies also serve to obfuscate and warp the sense of value involved with partaking in the games

>A lootbox is worth the money you put into the game.
says who?

I can though, because it's literally not the monetary value

would you consider this gambling

I think technically it's classed as a game of skill, so no.

This, capitalism gave is Steam Refunds.

Oh no wait, that was thanks to EU laws. Fucking commies amirite?

Demographic shift and us sad unfortunates who were here back then are well and truly adults now, complete with the cynicism it brings

no its not
this is skill based

a benign form of it yes

Yeah just like how everyone stopped producing anything except American Idol clones after they saw how popular it was. And Fifty Shades of Grey crashing the book industry. Oh wait, that didn't happen. There are still markets for people who want good quality products even if cheap mass produced trash is more profitable.

If I can convince someone to buy it off of me at that price, you're objectively wrong.

the people buying them for the price the company set them at

the claw is programmed to only grip with proper force after a certain number of plays
so if you happened to land your "skill shot" and the claw doesnt grip hard enough to pick up the thing...

how is that not gambling

>pre-determined before you even start playing if the claw will grasp efficiently this turn
great game of skill

t. grey goo

Not him but a good idea coming out of what is otherwise a scum hive of corporatist villainy doesn't make me want to keep it around.
For any decent politician that can put that through they're outnumbered by a dozen scumfucks who'd sell you for a corn chip and call me a nativist or some shit if I try to stop them from screwing you.

every price is the same thing so no

Apparently not because they're one of the biggest money makers online right now.

because you say it's not a fallacy doesn't mean shit. nice slippery slope fallacy you slippery faggot.

people demonstrably don't buy trash. people demonstrably do buy lootboxes. You're not going to win this one user

It's fucked.
>inject small, "acceptable" quantities of cancerous practices into young business
>there is aome uproar but it will die down as more and more shit is injected in
>starts with DLC, then Microtransactions, then day one DLC, then Lootboxes
>dumb customer base is okay with this or completely unaware of the existence of bad bractices
>core fanbase leaves the customer base by becoming pirates/sticking to older games/buying only indie
>young industry now dues without even having explored itself enough to discover all of the potential

>he doenst know about the metal oopa

>the claw is programmed to only grip with proper force after a certain number of plays
thats fucking bull
i played these things regularly and i always manage to get prize

all lootboxes have the same price in the same game, idiot.

Have you ever been to a casino?

>every price is the same thing
Same for lootboxes.

>people demonstrably don't buy trash.
Then why are lootboxes popular in the first place, when they hold no value as digital items?

goalposts.jpg

Because instead of crying there's a solution to the problem some people have against amiibo but they're unwilling to commit and choose cry about it on my video game forum. If we can satisfy these people then we can have less children crying about a toy company making toys.

No, the stupid part is people willing to pay $1000 for a vtf file. But hey, I'm not innocent of not using the steam market to literally get free games.

You.

Hate this for the sole fact that this is why cosmetics for DOTA have been 3 cents each for years.

Some Sup Forums users are just not vocal. I know several people who hate season passes, hundreds of dollars worth of missions, costumes, skins, etc.

The people who are not against it are same 12-25 year Olds buying and defending loot boxes.

The difference is that videogames are a closed system. If you get something in a gacha for 25 cents, you can always sell it, or trade it, or use it as a paperweight. In a videogame, that's not an option.

It's okay for things to fail.

They are designed that way

They're designed so no matter what the owner of the machine makes money.

So maybe you pay $2 and get 5 plays you'll come out with some $0.3 piece of shit from china, congrats

But the bigger ones are designed to be like $1 per play so you'd pay $5 for 5 and you won't win anything until you have multiple tries, then after playing like 15/20 plays you might finally get something worth $5


reminder that you can buy things wholesale from alibaba for insanely low prices

sounds like the intro to a twilight zone episode

Nintendo is a video game company, not a toy company.

Prove that the goalposts were moved. You have to argue that digital content has value.