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What's with Loot Boxes?

I keep hearing about loot boxes as a "cancer" on gaming recently, especially in games like Shadow of War and EA's Star Wars Battlefront II. I'm not fond of the practice myself, but where did this obsession even come from? I'm genuinely perplexed at this. I never heard of loot boxes before this year, and now they're everywhere.

Anyhow, I'm curious what everyone here thinks of loot boxes and hopefully someone can shed some light on how this obsession even began in AAA games. Hopefully it's a failed experiment that sticks to mobile gaming.
 

Draymorath

Destroyer of Destruction
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Probably in my room.
It's become such a huge deal because game developers, or at least the corporations they work for, have realized that they can make a ridiculous amount of profit by taking advantage of people with extremely manipulative micro-transactions that are almost completely necessary in order to play their games.
 

Jirohnagi

Braava Braava
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Pay to win that's all it is, and it'll hang around in some form or another for game companies to milk more money out of their player base. A very good example is Grand Theft Auto V those who've played the Online have found that the money rewards for jobs or tasks are sodding crap when they bring out stuff that costs a few million It's done this way so that Shark Cards look like a very good choice and that's paying up to $100 for 8 million in game.

all this pay to win crap sucks but sadly until the companies doing this die out it'll exist. I freaking hate it so much so that on some games i WILL actively find ways to cheat to dodge around the paywalls. Hell there are sites dedicated to this and accounts being sold for 2-3 bucks specifically to mod and cheat.
 

Lozjam

A Cool, Cool Mountain
Joined
May 24, 2015
So, one of the most popular modern gaming series released last year, in May 2016. That was Overwatch, and it provided players with completely cosmetic digital goodies, of which you can either level up in Overwatch, or buy lootboxes. Overwatch was a $40 game.... But Overwatch completely blitzed in popularity, and made a ton of cash.

Then companies started to copy, and try to see how far they can push consumers.

I am actually not that big of a fan of Jim Sterling, he is a dick. However, his video actually explained what happened almost perfectly.

So basically, publishers saw they could exploit people, and they took that chance. And EA sucks(nothing new here).
 

Castle

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Scumbag publishers and their pet developers are always looking for the next way to screw over consumers while they're continuing their business of pinching out unmitigated drek nobody with a functioning brain stem would ever want to waste their time on anyway.

The latest innovation in corporate dickery is the loot box. Gamers are being extremely vocal about this because we're well acquainted with the publishers motivations by now. We know what this is and we're trying to get out ahead of it and make it known that this thing is also not acceptable. If we give the corporate hacks any slack with this they'll take it to the furthest extreme imaginable because you know they will.

The European Union is considering whether or not to regulate this under the pretense of it being gambling. And there in lies the greatest danger of this boneheaded move. If it looks like gambling it will draw the attention of govt regulatory boards and that is something video games DO NOT need. Once feds start hitting games up with legal restrictions they will never go away.

This is how stupid and destructive these hack publishers are becoming in their desperation. It's bad enough they've pillaged and plundered a once thriving creative entertainment business to the brink of ruin like a hoard of vandals, but now they're flirting with getting everyone buried under bureaucratic red tape for all eternity just to make a few extra dollars. Video games have managed to avoid getting regulated under the same pretenses of casinos on two counts. A.) gamers fought against the notion that video games cause degenerate behavior, and B.) nobody made a game that so closely resembled gambling... until now.

The potential repercussions of this are wide ranging and potentially fatal if games can no longer be produced without government scrutiny. You can forget about user mods and indie games if regulatory agencies start enacting policies and restrictions and politicians start writing legislature.

Oh and the ESRB, North America's corrupt internal video game ratings board has gone ahead and given publishers a free pass on this one. The ESRB has one job: to protect this industry from government oversight and they've gone and sold us out.

Literally seconds after I post this, I find this:
https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2017/...watch-investigated-unlicensed-gambling/44284/
 
Last edited:
Joined
Oct 14, 2013
Location
Australia
The developers saw free to pay and pay to win games making yhem lots of money so they thought how can we add in pay to win elements in our full priced games. The loot boxes is what they came up with. Is this developer greed? Maybe. There is arguements to both sides here.

Online games are not free to have servers hosted. Someone needs to pay for the servers to be hosted. The$60-$100 initial game price does not cover years of online servers so the developers need another way to continually monetise the game. Basically passing the server running costs to the end user. Almost every business on Earth tries to pass down all fees and charges to the end customer.

But for some developers they refused to ahve a simple subscription (like World of Warcraft) to cover costs only. They want to get as much money from the end customer. That's where the word immoral comes into the picture. The loot boxes mostly have a set cost but a variable value. It's hard to judge what value digital goods have but most online games do this for us when they class the loot box drops into categories. Common, rare, very rare, etc etc. Luck determining the vale of the loot crates which all cost the same $$ to buy in my opinion is gambling.

In my opinion the loot boxes need a massive overhaul or they should be classified as gambling and be forced to follow all national and international online gambling laws.

******************

As an aside the gambling houses in something liek Super Mario Odyssey get away with this as you can very easily get what you want from them with a little skill. It's not luck based at all. Also this is why Pokemon games of recent have not added in any gambling slot machines in game like the older games did.
 

Lozjam

A Cool, Cool Mountain
Joined
May 24, 2015
Online games are not free to have servers hosted. Someone needs to pay for the servers to be hosted. The$60-$100 initial game price does not cover years of online servers so the developers need another way to continually monetise the game. Basically passing the server running costs to the end user. Almost every business on Earth tries to pass down all fees and charges to the end customer.
That is not true. Online games are already being paid through the $60 a year subscription to PSN or XBOX Live. So players are already paying for that "subscription" to online services.
 
Joined
Oct 14, 2013
Location
Australia
That is not true. Online games are already being paid through the $60 a year subscription to PSN or XBOX Live. So players are already paying for that "subscription" to online services.
PC games don't have such a service. Also for PS4, I'm not sure if the onlnie servers are run by Sony or the game developers themselves. If it's all Sony, then the PSN should cover it as you say.
 

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