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Comment by trose | Hacker News Reader

And yet folks will keep falling for the CGI trailers and marketing hype EA churns out for every game. The only solution is to wholesale stop supporting ANY game EA produces.

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And a single whale can make up for literally hundreds of lost sales through micro-transactions.

Exactly! Microtransactions are there to grab the big spenders. Mobile "games" follow this pattern to the extreme. For example some guy spent $1M playing a mobile game ([0] and HN discussion [1]). Honestly I don't understand why game companies are left to exploit gullible people (adults and/or kinds) into what is essentially gambling.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/california-man-s...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165780

Yup, and making the game pay to win (as opposed to offering only cosmetic items for sale) means the whales are going to come out in full force. It really is gambling and I think it should be treated as such.

Technically, to be gambling the company would need to give out prizes with monetary value.

I agree that it's perhaps an oversight that dopamine release is not considered a prize under the existing 3-part test for gambling - chance, prizes, risk of loss.

>perhaps an oversight that dopamine release is not considered a prize

If that's the case, how is going to the movies not gambling? I can't predict how much I'm going to enjoy a given movie before I go.

I thought one of the ways they get around being regulated as gambling is that you technically can not lose and get nothing. You will always "win" at least something, even if the item is worthless to you.

That's the reasoning used by the ESRB to rate a game < Mature.

Yeah I think it's really murky too. The interpretation of 'monetary value' is not 100% clear. For example, Japan has a very different stance on these sort of mechanisms.

The only reason the ESRB (admittedly not a regulatory body) does not consider loot crates gambling is because there is no chance of getting nothing from a loot box. Of course, you are almost guaranteed to get items which, in practice, have no value to you.

Let's also not ignore the fact that the micro-transaction model exploits the same exact psychological responses used by gambling houses to get you to spend more money. Combine that with the fact that these games are rated teen and I think you have a problem, regardless of whether or not you call it 'gambling'.

>into what is essentially gambling

I think at this point it's important to differentiate: Loot-Crate systems with resellable content (CS:Go etc) are gambling. Loot-Crate systems without resellable content function by the same mechanism but are different legally.

On the other hand pay-to-win or pay-to-skip are very different from gambling and work by completely different mechanisms. Being ahead of everyone else allows whales to either feel superior or to help fellow players, making the whales feel useful and depended upon. All of these feelings can be hard to get in the offline world, so instead whales pay to get them online.

I'm not condoning predatory microtransaction systems at all, but I think it's important to differentiate them instead of treating them all as if they were gambling

I think it's also important to note that this is not a scenario which was imagined when those rules were put into place and that gacha systems exploit the same psychological responses in order to get you to spend more.

While true, I imagine whales are less likely to stick around if there aren't enough non-whales around to keep things interesting.

Sure, but now you're describing a massive boycott and that simply isn't going to happen. Most people just don't care all that much. They'll buy the game, put in their ~20 hours, and move on. Then you have the next group which will keep playing, but still doesn't care very much about the drama over on reddit and the forums. The issue simply isn't big enough to get e.g. 1M people to decide not to buy.

People say this but look at the online passesEA started then finally got rid up due to overwhelming negative feedback.

Absolutely boycott publishers you feel are harming the industry. It takes time but it does work. Besides, there's so many wonderful games you're not missing anything and you're helping to make the industry better.

Season passes are one thing, not buying a game to begin with is another. EA has a monopoly on the Star Wars license and the game itself is pretty good. So unless you never want to play another Star Wars game, you can't boycott. Your friends are probably playing too, so you miss out playing with them now. People complain and complain, but they still buy the games.

Keep in mind there's also the fact that little 10 year old Timmy doesn't actually care about any of this. He just wants to play star wars damn it! It's mommy's money that EA is taking, and mom doesn't know what's going on and likely doesn't have the time to notice that games are doing what they are

I doubt this would happen as long as EA got hold of various sports licenses.

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