Discussion US Bill to Ban Loot Boxes and Micro Transactions

So yeah, a senator introduced a bill to "...ban loot boxes and pay-to-win micro transactions in games played by minors." It seems things have yet to be ironed out at the moment.

As for my thoughts:
I like to play f2p games such as WoWS, and Azur Lane. These games rely on micro transactions to survive as they don't have a price tag on them. With such being the case, I hope they at least/most spare cosmetic micro transactions or maybe ones that don't compromise game balance. Furthermore, to those of us who like gacha games... Although I'm sure we're well aware, Gacha is essentially another form of loot boxes. So it seems things may get prickly with games from overseas.

If there's anything I'm sure of, it's that it's going to be interesting to see how things play out.



Here's the kotaku article on it.

 

the emphasis is on kids....not adults....candy crush is named specifically......
basically games marketed to kids cannot have these types of predatory f2p or p2w mtx.....and grownup games cant be catered to kids....so FIFA cannot be rated 3+ even tho its a casino.....

 

That's true, but with what I saw on YT and other places... It seems some people just want to flat out annihilate loot boxes.

 

with how EA fucked up SW Battlefront 2 everyone is pissed off with loot boxes.....thanks to that devs make a halfass game and milks gamers dry with a carrot on stick approach.....

 

This will probably effect mobile games, but has little bearing on the bigger corporations. Not to mention that I literally feel zero pity for the mobile game network, maybe it'll help them get back to the roots to a one time fair price for a game. Micro transactions made those who played pay to win games pay multiple times over what they would have payed had the game had a one time fair price.

 

I honestly hope they'll ban p2w and loot boxes. f2p is nice and all but I'd rather pay and get a game I actually like, I don't think I've played anything within the last 5 years not made by a indie company and thought "Wow, this is great".
Loot boxes are basically gambling and shouldn't be a part of the gaming industry, gaming has a bad enough reputation without it being associated with gambling.

 

F2p games need to make money somehow although many of them take it way too far.
It should totally be banned for games you already payed for. Its a super unhealthy practice thats becoming more and more common. Like there are actual single player games that you buy that have microtransactions

 

i don't mind microtransactions and the like, so long as the game isn't p2w, and the purchases are mostly or all cosmetic. That still works for a lot of games - just look at fortnite. Lootboxes... well, if there's actual monetary value involved... It just feels too dangerous. Especially if it's unregulated. Like, if you just earn them with in-game cash or whatnot, why not, but if you can only buy them or even if you can do either... nah. Just... nah.

 

I say there is something more behind that bill and they are masquerading it as 'for children protection', perhaps they want a share or something
Perhaps, they will make another bill under the guise of 'for adults protection'

 

Anything that fits the legal and dictionary definition of gambling and yet is not bound in the confines of gambling laws should either be outlawed or bound by said gambling laws. That's just common sense.

 

as a f2p i support that decision but i also know that the game company depends on players using real money to buy in game items or gacha currency to earn money

 

We need new law where every f2p games has to adopt Warframe's microtransaction practices.

 

True, however, let's not forget warframe actually did the loot box thing for a while.

 

Example?

 

some was okay, but we all know that milking scheme are always be there. the only thing that i wasn't mad at all was the cosmetic, but some game give an additional power up from it. so we need gaming community to short the things that need to ban, cuz the player who play the game will know where the real problem is

 

Mod Packs.

 

Literally nobody uses it. Once you played more than 70 hours, you already acquired all the mods offered in that packs. Or if you meet some vets, they'll give those mods for free to you. Those mods may seem op to newbies, but for vets, they have like at least like 200 duplicates.

 

Cosmetics > Actual Equipment

 

My thing about this is that it talks about kids buying these lootboxes. How many kids do you know have enough money and a credit/debit card to buy them with before getting a job and earning their own money to put in a bank account? And whether they are old enough to have a job or not, if they have access to the means to purchase lootboxes, then the impetus is on the parents to regulate their purchasing. Don't blame someone else for selling candy, teach your kid not to purchase it in the first place and apply consequences if necessary to enforce the lesson.

Educating people to realize that these are just flashy money pits is a better idea than trying to ban them because when they get banned, the developers and the marketing team will just come up with another way to package it that bypasses the ban. Or they might just sell the items from the lootboxes individually instead of randomly.

Not to mention that any ban by the Senate would likely only target US-based servers, so companies will just move them somewhere else and continue with practice since we can't really regulate the whole world no matter how delusional politicians are.

 

This isn't really how it works. Let's say lootboxes become illegal in the states. If the game company doesn't want to give up on the entire section of the market, they'll edit their game to be in-line with the law. If they decide to make a separate version of the game for the states without lootboxes, they'll have to redesign the entire economy JUST for the states version, because games with lootboxes tend to focus the economy around it to encourage player spending. Maintaining and updating two completely different versions of the game takes a LOT of work and manpower. Thus, what most game companies do is change everyone's version of the game. When EA tried to skirt Netherland laws, their game pretty much died in Netherlands as a result (they couldn't redesign the game without lootboxes well enough to keep players interested). Do you remember what happened when Rainbow 6 Siege wanted to enter the Chinese market and started censoring/changing things in everyones' versions as well? Incredible backlash that forced a major backpedal.

Also, it's not like educating people that gambling is a major addiction problem for a significant portion of the population has done much to stop people from gambling. At the very least though, gambling regulations stop the worst offenses and abuses of the industry and protect people to a certain degree (thus, still their "choice" to fuck their own lives). Letting children with potential addiction issues get addicted to gambling though? That's a pretty big problem. Real world money isn't directly involved in these "gambling" games. I think it was CS:GO that allowed people to link their valve accounts to gambling sites that used the weapon skins as chips. And ofc there were also sites you could link to where you could "cash out" the skins. Because these sites aren't legally bound to existing gambling regulations, you had scammers like T. Martin and crew tricking impressionable kids into gambling on a website that was rigged against them with what was probably their parents' credit cards.

I do think that regulations won't necessarily fix all the issues and may even create new ones if not made properly, but I think they can at least plug the biggest holes and discourage the overly exploitative monetary models that these AAA game companies are loving these days.