Created a Petition on the White House Website to stop targeted in-game gambling (loot boxes)

[Speaker to Animals]

I am supposed to be a space captain, master and commander of my ship, and I can't space the creepy guy lurking around my hangar bay??


"ah.. fuck.. I accidentally vented the hangar. Hopefully nobody was down there. Status report."

[BjornP]

It's those damned politicians...with their anti-spacing undesirable ship crew-laws.

[Speaker to Animals]

And how stereotypical was that shit? The homosexual is lurking down in the corner of the hangar bay, like some space truckstop. "Hey man. How are you? What are you looking for?"

[BjornP]

Dunno if that's stereotypical, but you're the one with the most extensive experience of what goes on in and around hangar bays, I guess...

[Dand]

Not sure that a law would be the answer to this. It’s really just another market wave coming through, like MMO, FPS, casual, “open world”, and so on.

What would help, would be some transparency, like we have with mobile games. They have to say on the sales page that the game features “in-app purchases”. Real games should do this as well.

+1

I'd be happy to see the companies that use this gambling model in the US publish the odds of specific results. Gambling in games is not a big deal to me at all but targetting children for gambling is unsavory. People argue that these are just digital versions of trading cards but we at least knew the odds of different rarity cards with those while these loot boxes have unknown rarities.

Loot boxes have recently been getting a lot of attention and imo the best attempt to combat them was petitioning the ESRB to make loot box games automatically rated M for 17+. The ESRB doesn't give a fuck though and wouldn't go to war with big game companies though so it won't happen. In Japan and China, these systems have been around for a few years longer and are much more mainstream. Phone games with gachas a the primary method of playing games for kids there and their markets or governments do put some restrictions on the games like publishing the odds (would be a great improvement) or restricting the randomness by not allowing combinations of random rewards. That second one is hard to describe but it's like the fast food and grocery store events where you win a car if you get all 3 monopoly pieces of a given color but they create millions of 2 of those pieces and only a handful of the third so people feel that "I'm already 2/3 of the way there, I've almost won" but in reality the third piece is far more rare.

I think the internet's battle against these loot boxes is futile, just like the battle against preorders. Customers are easily convinced and they buy all this shit so the companies are going to keep making more of it. Adding a gambling and dick-measuring aspect (apparently Activision might be matchmatching players that haven't spent money together with those that have very rare items extra-often as a way to tease/bait them into buying loot boxes. They're not just weighing skill or connection speed anymore to match people.) to online games is a very effective way of getting extra money so EA and Activision aren't going to stop. There are more and more amateurs making games now that don't have any of these milking aspects and customers will play what they want and buy what they accept.

[DBTrek]

The Conservative has gone full on communist authoritarian on us.

“We must use the force of the state to crush the capitalist loot crates. Uber loot shall be distributed to all, from each dev according to their ability, to each according to their loot needs, comrades!!!”

You don’t get to destroy entire industry finance model because you want a cooler looking sword for your nerd ranger. Did you actually stoop so low as to throw a pathetic “WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN” in there? Jesus, dude, stop being a crybaby over video games, you’re in your 40s. Why don’t you compete if gamers are so fed up with everything. Actually produce the video game you’ve supposedly been working on for a decade, rather than shitting on the people actually making products and trying to cripple their revenue options. No one forced you to buy that game. Stop trying to forbid everyone else from buying it, or any other game that won’t give you the flashiest fake equipment.

[Speaker to Animals]

Voluntary ratings about the transactions used by the game would be nice. If the game is based around having to buy loot crates, then I'll be damned if I pay full price for it. It really should just be free.

The DLC issue I think is a bigger deal, since they shifted core game and plot content onto DLCs now. That's truly shitty behavior. Loot crates are pretty honest practices, even if you don't want to participate. EA never openly admits that, in order to continue playing the full game, you are on the hook for at least as much as the price you already paid. For totally new content, fine, but when the game shops with only four maps, and you damned well know all the maps they will release over the next year were created under the initial game budget, you are getting fucked. They should charge the full price upfront.

[DBTrek]

I’m not seeing why the market is unable to address this issue, and government coercion is required.

Guess the world is a pretty idyllic place when the top complaint of men of this generation is how video games release or charge for content. Content you all voluntarily buy, I’d add.

Every previous generation of man would read this thread and be like “WTF, this is what they’re complaining about? Send me to that time period, please!”

Ridiculous.

[Fife]

I’m not seeing why the market is unable to address this issue, and government coercion is required.

Guess the world is a pretty idyllic place when the top complaint of men of this generation is how video games release or charge for content. Content you all voluntarily buy, I’d add.

Every previous generation of man would read this thread and be like “WTF, this is what they’re complaining about? Send me to that time period, please!”

Ridiculous.

Naw, DB, it makes perfect sense . . .

. . . to GENERATION GIBS.

[de officiis]

I worked really hard on my 800 word petition so that I could work hard playing those video games. It really is sickening that this entire industry is unregulated.

Amusing, for someone who is trolling this topic, you don't know how serious this is in the gaming community, things like this is actually ruining otherwise what would be good games.

Its not serious dude. Its video games. That is the polar opposite of serious. The way you fix a problem like this is by not buying the game and convincing other people to follow suit. I dont see how the government even factors in. Im not even sure that level of effort is warranted though. Arent you a grown ass man?

But he’s thinking about the children.
With their parents’ credit cards.
The situation is ripe for abuse.