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U.S bill to ban loot boxes, your thoughts?
The bill is called The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act
Few articles,
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/loot-boxes-could-become-illegal-in-us-if-new-bill-/1100-6466737/
https://www.wired.com/story/videogame-legislation-loot-boxes/
Kinda insane that you have to spend $400 for 1 outfit piece with gacha with abysmal probabilities. Countries such as Netherlands, China, Belgium, Australia, UK, and South Korea have already passed similar bills, some requiring you to be 18+ to purchase gambling packs and outright banning loot box purchases with real money. This is EA and Activision's worst nightmare, your thoughts?
In 2018,
https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/10/south-korea-fines-game-studios-over-loot-boxes/
"The uproar over in-game loot boxes is leading to some real financial penalties -- in South Korea. The country's Fair Trade Commission has fined
Nexon, Netmarble and NextFloor a total of 1 billion won (about $945,200) for allegedly deceptive loot box promotions. The regulator asserted that each of the studios either hid poor odds for obtaining in-game items with the purchases, or else advertised odds that were out of step with reality.
Nexon didn't reveal that the chances of obtaining some in-game items in Sudden Attack (a popular first-person shooter) was just 0.5 percent, for example, while Netmarble's Monster Taming pitched odds of 1 percent for a key creature when the actual chance of winning was as low as 0.0005 percent."
"The problem, of course, is that this can lead to some gamers spending inordinate amounts of money to get items that are far more elusive than they seem. In one case, the Commission noted that a Sudden Attack player spent about $430."
Comments
Instead of banning there are a few solutions
1) Less tickets required for guaranteed loot
2) Better odds (maybe 1% and guaranteed to get it after 100 boxes ???)
3) Age restriction
4) Purchase limit per week (and suggestion 2) would be required)
Pretty sure more people would buy those if 100 boxes was guaranteed to get one S-tier outfit, so it would compensate the ''loss'' from whales. But right now it's 200+ Boxes for one S-Tier prize.
In general the best would be :
IF you buy 55 boxes for 95$ USD, you should be guaranteed to get one A or S-tier OUTFIT prize, but no control on which one you get (And only if you got nothing in the first 54, so it should be ''Rigged'' on #55). If you buy another 55 and you get nothing in the second round (or third etc, because whales), you get to choose a A-tier or S-tier OUTFIT of your choice.
Even if this law does somehow include actual specific and realistically enforceable language that does manage to potentially change something, all games really need to do is just say "you need to be 18+ to sign up" -- which many games already do, and the EULA usually shrugs off all responsibility of sign-up fraud to the end user. 18+ game selling lockboxes = not selling lockboxes to kids = Nexon continuing business as usual.
While it'd be nice if gamers were smart enough to just stop buying this junk, I'll be very impressed if this law actually does anything other than become another tax-draining overhead burden on the already byzantine legal system. But hey, I bet it'll be a great career move for this previously-unknown senator!
I like your post a lot. You just said everything perfectly.
We've also seen Belgium and the Netherlands deem loot boxes to be gambling, which was done after England and others declared them not to be, which likely means many countries across the EU re-evaluating their stances. Japan is currently looking into this as well. Odds are that this will be at worst one of the pricks that helps RNG boxes go by the wayside over time.
This is the argument being made, this bill doesn't say anything about age that's in other countries, I was just putting examples. It's under the guise of protecting children, its targeting predatory addictive gambling because it's now becoming a problem, to get any bill popular you gotta play the whole "THINK ABOUT DA CHILDREN" game.
The language is purposely broad and confusing to make it easier for the government to do whatever it wants to, that's pretty much how all bills are.
For example, flavored cigarettes were banned because even when the smoking age is 21, those flavors and commercials were purposely luring in kids so they can get addicted, this is the same argument that's being made. If you look at that popular vape, they had to change quickly because the government came in and forced them to stop advertising flavors to make it appealing to kids because the smoking rate of teens was starting to skyrocket. Just look at maplestory and all their other games, sure you may have tos that makes you be an adult but how much of them are actually children, and you can stretch that age definition from 1- 21, children, teen, pre-teens, pre - adult. There's been a significant rise in childhood gambling that it's starting to become a serious issue. The children is just put it there to make sound appealing when they vote and to get public support, how much of parents actually look at their kids spending? there are bad parents out there lol
If people wanna throw their money away at 0.00005 percent of drops of pixels, have at it, just state it out in the open of your chances, stop putting it in world chat so people can stop having the illusion of thinking they'll get it too, there are psychological tricks being purposely put to in to exploit people's bad behavior