US State Rep: "This game is a Star Wars themed online casino."

I'm usually a free-market "not too into the government" kinda guy, but I do agree that if the games industry as a whole doesn't check themselves before they riggity diggity wreck themselves about this kind of shit The Man should step in and do something about it. I'm a capitalist, I'm all for marking money and a good profit, but things like this are just immoral. Same with ISP monopolies and all that, too. There's good business, and then there is the scummy "fuck them over because we can" kind of business. That's not cool.

@sammo21 said:

But we got ourselves there from the moment we started paying for "intangible goods", like video games, as such we already recognized it as being stuff, quite a while ago.
Since then the stuff we've been paying for has only gotten "smaller", in terms of units we buy. Instead of spending money on a full game, which we consider stuff, we can now spend money on smaller parts of it, like horse armor or skins, which then is also considered stuff.

At this point it's normalized that this is "actual stuff" to us, even when in reality it's just a bunch of 0's and 1's saved on some company server, you can't even touch, it's still worth a lot of money. This isn't even reserved to gaming: Think about smartphones and their whole "app economy", it's pretty much what got us out of the 2008 recession into something that some call an "App bubble".

It's from that logic that you can deduct: Games give you random chance to win stuff, which the same game sells you directly for a predefined sum in another place . As such you are "gambling" for the cost of the stuff if you'd just buy directly.

Someone should convince Sheldon Adelson and Frank Fertitta that this stuff is cutting into their casino profits. That'll get it shut down in a bug hurry. ?

Let's maybe not put this issue into the hands of the people who we have to convince every few years to not fuck up the internet.

@thegame983: Best burn of the day congratulations !

@xanadu: Who do you trust the most Companies or the Government :D.

Also they should look into this geekbox / Nerdcrate thing cause A there gambling B are on every terrible you tube channel promoting this dumb thing !

this is a complicated problem, and legislating a way out of it is like trying to use a butcher's cleaver to perform surgery.

but it's kinda the only tool we have. and as an american, i'm really, really starting to resent this country's ever-present anti-governmental intervention contingent. so many of our current problems are due to a pervasive hands-off-the-wheel approach, and the counter arguments always are "it's been bad before, and therefore we must never try again." if that's the fate we're resigning ourselves to- then why have a state at all.

and anyway this is a consumer issue, not a content one. no one is clutching pearls about breasts and gore- this is about extracting money from wallets using psychology.

What they're saying: Will somebody please think of the children!

What they're thinking: How do we get a piece of this action?

Go deal with the rampant homeless problem in Hawaii, instead of this nonsense.

Here is State Rep Chris Lee's twitter profile if you'd like to leave him a comment on the issue.

In a way that it's completely and utterly false? When you get a lootbox you are guaranteed to get some items. Find me anything in a casino that has 100% odds to get something.

I doubt any law will actually materialize but it might get the industry to take a step back from pushing loot boxes if they suspect they could get regulated. So that's good I think.

Well if government intervention was free I think most people would be OK with it. However the model most governments follow is "OK, we're going to regulate X industry. It costs money for us to have employees enforcing these rules. Therefore there will be a special tax or fee on these companies to fund this oversight." On the face of it this seems fair. Except it has two effects in the end. 1) The company paying that fee passes the fee onto the consumer. 2) Smaller companies now have to pay even more money to develop their products and it is even more difficult to compete with the large companies.

Take, for example, the Food and Drug Administration in the US. This is a good service, it oversees products put on the market in an attempt to keep people safe. Let's put aside the argument if they even do this, let's just concede for the sake of argument they do their job 100% correct. OK well take a look at the processes in place to have a drug or product approved in the US. The costs and time are monumental. As a direct result drug manufacturers pass those costs to the people who need those drugs to live.

So consider that government intervention will make games more expensive for consumers at the very least.

@sammo21: I think there is a big difference between having a psychologist on staff to help create a fun gameplay loop and having one to create a profitable gameplay loop.

@evilbill: and if government intervention wasn't always overreaching and generally a disaster thar brings on unforeseen circumstances.

Bit of a jetlaggy rant that seemed on topic in my head when I started writing it:

My job requires me to work with a lot of Social Casino game providers, games with no real money reward but plenty of ways to ingest real money for digital returns.

A lot of my correspondence with these companies is usually them asking for tools to better segment users into finer and finer categories to milk the most money from them by dynamically changing drop rates based on a users session habits and dynamically changing virtual good prices to match their spending habits.

Talk from these devs is never about how fun the game is, it's always "How much money are we making", "How much money can we be making", "If the service goes down how can we predict how much money we've lost" and "How can we target the players most likely to spend money and encourage them to spend more".

Bar that last sentence, it seems Battlefront 2 was designed around the same line of questions. If it was successful, you can speculate that future games would also then start asking the last one too. It's a machine built to identify those most likely to engage and spend and ultimately if you don't get captured by that loop, they don't care, they are happy with only 3% - 5% of the players that drop absolute fortunes on their grind fests. They are just now getting around to using complex systems and machine learning to get those percentages to get into double digits.

I'm quite frankly fine with loot boxes when done well, I don't engage with them for the most part, but at least the social casino stuff is upfront about what it is. Social casinos require users to be of a legal age to use them and the decent ones will geoblock countries where online gambling is illegal. I'd argue that Battlefront 2 is using these exact same systems as the social casinos, but hoping that by putting a video game in front of it it somehow will be immune to the same rules that govern the same systems.

I doubt any legislation will come about, but I'm still glad this happened. Maybe there will be some more rumbling over the next couple months, enough to get publishers to self-regulate for a while. I'm normally entirely against allowing the market to self-regulate, but direct government intervention (in the form of legislation) isn't going to do games much good, much the same as trusting publishers to straighten out wouldn't work. We're walking a fine line here.

Man, as a non US-citizen I am so not interested in having their broken-ass government get involved in games I want to play.

Should the government regulate lootboxes in games? There's far too much ground for over reach for anyone to be 100% comfortable with this.

Should the government threaten to regulate lootboxes in games if the industry doesn't get its shit together? Absolutely.

@bradbrains said:

"Something" is in this case literally nothing, as developers create the items out of thin air. There is no scarcity to them which is what's supposed to define the value of something, that's why the comparison is really lacking. I'm also pretty certain there are casinos somewhere where you get like "$5 in chips for spending $500 in chips" or something similar. It's just a sales tactic like sending people letters which tell them: "You won free shit*. *To get your free shit please pay the <insert whatever fee>".

At funfairs/carnivals there are these "lottery ticket" style thingies where no ticket is a "dud" because you get some cheap stuff for the non-winning tickets, like a lollipop. People spend $1 on the ticket and their guaranteed win is a lollipop worth 2 cents, is that considered gambling? I really don't know.

@nethlem: "Something" is in this case literally nothing, as developers create the items out of thin air. There is no scarcity to them which is what's supposed to define the value of something, that's why the comparison is really lacking.

I'm not sure I'm following your logic... So if they were selling the content for a fixed price, wouldn't that also be an issue per your argument? If the value is zero because it's not scarce, then how can they charge anything for it?

I'm probably just feeling pessimistic because it's the Holiday Season, but:

A) microtransactions have become a major revenue stream for game companies. If you take that away, those companies aren't going to just shrug and say "well guys, you got us! Good on you!" They're going to get that money another way. I don't really want to pay $80 or $100/game, but I suspect that's where we're headed.

B) with the very likely undoing of Net Neutrality in the next few weeks, we're likely all going to be paying more for PSN, Xbox Live, and Steam access (because there's no way ISPs ignore what is definitely in the top three gaming hubs in the world when they start tiering access). It may actually be a good time to learn to play poker because at least a deck of cards is still affordable.

I'm playing the new NFS with my cousin, racing games being one of the few things that really give us joy. I spent 60 euros on it. The game has a slot machine and wants me to gamble for car parts in a game that I payed for.

My friend loves the Battlefront games, and there was the threat of having to grind for hundreds of hours to be able to access the content he paid for.

Battlefield is my favorite online game ever, and I'm expecting this lootbox shit to hit the game when it gets released, and disable me and other players.

Good fucking on them, I hope they cripple EA to the ground.

Oh jesus I forgot all about mobile. Also Dota 2.

@sammo21: Like I said, it’s not exactly gambling. What I said is that it is *like* gambling in that it uses very similar practices. That was the main point of my post.

Oh gee it's good to find someone else who isn't a reactionary moron. You're an oasis of logic and sense in a desert of outrage and idiocy that I've grown horribly sick of trudging through. Thank you for refreshing me with your clear juices.

If people actually want a conversation about loot boxes, their harm, and what can be done about them, drop the false gambling narrative. Nobody with any kind of critical, rational thinking takes you seriously with that.

@finstern: I'm glad we have someone who can speak directly to how microtransactions and loot box systems operate within a segment of the industry that has been using them for a long time now. It's not as if the mobile industry was hiding what it was doing and how all this time either. There's a GDC talk by a guy who works for a part of Google that develops the kind of software your bring up to segment the player base into cohorts to target with specific deals and in the most extreme case down to a specific person. Some mobile games don't necessitate their online pvp component as a part of play and will still do the drop rate adjustments per cohort or individual. The mobile side of the industry has been the model for the push into AAA games for these kinds of practices and I hope people who play games start taking it much more seriously now that the talk of legislation has arrived.

Here's the link to the GDC talk I brought up

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022494/Smart-Strategies-to-Acquire-Monetize

The same can be said for the companies that now find themselves on the receiving end of government legislation. The industry reached too far and community of people who play games spoke up in all the good and terrible ways that it does. There was a balance to be found but it only took one company stepping just far enough beyond to reach the point of consequence. It wouldn't have even been necessary for publishers to listen to just their audience either, had they kept each other and their expectations in check with the reality of limits of their player base they may have avoided this point. I'm just personally glad we're having this discussion now instead of at the point that @finstern describes for the mobile industry. Regardless of your view of loot boxes, I feel like we can agree that is not where we as people who play games want to see this go.

@theht: Yeah, if this goes anywhere it will have a ripple effect across nearly all aspects of the industry. It happened so slowly and the moment that brought about the possibility for legislation so sudden, that it will be hard for many companies big or small to not feel a repercussion. So many banked their futures on this and even those that didn't participate directly may find themselves shouldering the cost of it all.

Of course leave it up to EA to fuck it up for the rest of us. Valve and Blizzard must be pissssssed.

@goodeyeclosed said:

They can charge anything for it because "people spend what it is worth to them", to some people something as "useless" as a playericon in a game can already be worth a lot of money, while others wouldn't even understand why anybody would pay money for something like.

Richard Garfield, the guy who created Magic, issued "A Game Player's Manifesto" on his Facebook last year, which is extremely relevant right now and tries to break the problem down to individual game mechanics/systems with free to play games. There's a part in there about above "tautological definition of value" which is what I tried to reference with my "created out of nothing/no scarcity" notion.

I would totally go to a Star Wars themed casino if they opened one. Just saying...

At the end of the day, ea and companies like them are going to do everything in their power to maximize profits, with or without loot boxes.

I'm generally opposed to government interference in these types of matters, especially at a time where corrupt capitalistic scumbags have all the power in America. But the ESRB and the industry as a whole brought this on themselves by not seeing this potential trainwreck coming from miles away. It was only a matter of time before someone got too greedy with microtransactions. I doubt any actual laws will be written up, but the public sentiment that caused this commotion hopefully puts the fear of god into the industry so they don't try to pull this shit again and make actual design changes.

@drstrangepork: It could just play the Mos Eisley cantina music on an endless loop.

@evilbill: I understand your argument (and i honestly disagree), but what was surprising to me was how much, even in just a short thread like this one, is noticeable the difference in mentality (not to bash the US citiziens, it really is just interesting to me). It's not like european goverments are some pillars of ethics (actually some are arguably rifled with more corruption than the US one, like mine), and around the EU parliament there is a number of lobbyists per politician that would probably rival, if not surpass, the one in Washington, DC; but the immediate response from the public when situations like this arises changes from "this is a problem, but keep the goverment away because they will make it worse" to "this is a problem, call in the goverment and have them try to fix it since they are the ones that have the power to do it". And it made me very curious to try to know where it originated.

It kinda tangentially made me understand better even one of the sources of the difference in "ok until proven dangerous" to "not ok until proven safe" that separates us on some matters.

A Star Wars themed casino? The Star Wars brand being likened to Joe Camel? I would hate to be on the receiving end of whatever phone calls the House of Mouse is making right now...

I ate some Belgian chocolate today. It was like a Kit Kat but WAAAAAAY better. So I'm inclined to believe whatever they say.

I am not in principle entirely opposed to any form of regulation of anything from the US government, but I always felt that it should only happen if there is a problem so severe that people can't fix it themselves. But in the case of Battlefront, the solution is very simple and people who don't like this type of business practice should do this: don't buy the game. Thats my plan at least.

@busto1299: While it might seem the most obvious and simple solution it ignores the realities of how the loot box monetization system works in order for it to be successful from the viewpoint of the maker of the game. They only need between 3-5% of people to engage with the monetization system for it to be successful and the remaining 95-97% of people only need to be there so there's a large enough population in the game for that 3-5% to interact with. If the people who are supposed to take a stand against loot boxes aren't the ones targeted by those same loot boxes their effect by voting with their wallets will not be felt unless it is a significant % of the 95-97% group that acts in this way. This also needs to happen repeatedly with numerous games over a period of time long enough for publishers and studios to realize that kind of monetization no longer works. When was the last time you ever saw the gaming community came together this united? I really recommend you read the comment @finstern left in this thread.

Yeaaaaaah...the US goverment's track record with videogames is pretty bad. There's still a culture here of blaming videogames for various unrelated things. This could very easily turn into a witchhunt. I'd rather any actual investigation happen overseas and we get the trickle down effects like we did for steam refunds. Best case scenario, this scares publishers into backing off of lootboxes for good and nothing else comes of this.