Apple Says Apps Must Now Disclose Odds for Loot Boxes
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
The real problem is that players are getting tricked into installing a "free" game but later sucked into gambling once they're invested and addicted. Showing the odds somewhere in the app doesn't change this deceptive and unethical practice.
What they should really do is force apps to disclose the maximum amount a player can spend, front-and-center in the app store. And then also display other statistics - like the ARPU and ARPPU (average revenue per user, and average revenue per paying user). And then allow us to filter apps based on that criteria. If it were visible enough, and filterable enough, we'd see the developer landscape change to make games that are better for players.
Developers will probably increase the drop rates for things so that people will continue to buy their crates.
I agree it's still gambling but this is a step.
“You’d probably have to buy this one thousand times to get what you’re looking for”
People still buy lottery tickets though because “there’s still a chance”.
Not sure how you fix that.
The average person doesn't understand expected outcome, that it means ON AVERAGE it will take this many times to obtain the thing. Lottery tickets are a bad example because the expected outcome is still really high, though most people still understand this.
Also, it's Sid Meier.
(Also, fixed my post. Thanks)
Like that time I lost my entire squad in X-Com because they all kept missing their 80% to 95% chances to hit. There was much rage that day.
Sometimes you just roll snake eyes. Then you deal with it.
So, you can roll dice over and over, but you actually need a lot of samples for the stats to converge. That's why it is called the law of LARGE numbers. It is still possible to roll two 12s in a row on dice, but we wouldn't expect it to be common. By your clumping together, you need to not only store a lot of data, but now your "random" events are dependent rolls and not independent.
Really it is just a question of what you want to do and how you want fairness perceived. Do you want your game to act like dice? Or do you want a slight advantage? BTW, i2om3r linked the video I was talking about there Meier discusses peoples' perception of fairness. In the end, you have to determine what is best for your game. Maybe stacking the deck makes better gameplay, maybe it doesn't.
In the pursuit of making a fun and interesting experience, it's not as bad as it sounds since it leads to a rewarding experience (though getting 2 hours of sleep because Civ is so addictive could be construed as negative). When providing questionable reward to the player and in a money grab via psychological manipulation, well, yeah, seems pretty exploitative and not so honorable.
What's most interesting to me is the wildly different perspectives that gamers on different platforms will tolerate. Zynga/Facebook gamers seemed to never care. Mobile gamers follow suit but some are a bit sensitive to this manipulation. Console gamers are familiar with these tactics since the horse armor days but have a red line (Destiny 2 just crossed). PC gamers have zero tolerance and will go up in arms as soon as their precious games are violated with F2P mechanics (though Ubisoft is doing pretty good here since they're doing it somewhat respectfully).
Making it available in the app is no different; the user would have to be rational and look for it.
A user that would be stopped by this can already go online and find the probability.
The same sort of person that would google it.
I am not assuming people look it up. I'm just pointing out this isn't really changing anything because people who would look at it or care, already could look at it often... but most people won't, so the change of requiring apps to show it in the app matters basically not at all.
What is the EV on those? Some it's something like .5 or less. HORRIBLE odds. If you want to gamble, go play $1000 hands of blackjack or something, you can get something like a .97 EV.
It's not profitable to buy all the tickets, though: that changes the odds enough that it becomes unprofitable.
There have been cases of people buying out all the numbers.. and there are times when it is worth the risk.. but not really relevant to my store. Millions of people buy lotto tickets every day, with an EV of .5.
For Blizzard's Hearthstone, for example, their stated odds of getting their highest category of cards (legendary) is 1:100 and given that that 1% chance is spread across several different cards across multiple sets, getting a specific legendary card is only a fraction of that 1%.
For Nintendo's Fire Emblem Heroes, the chance of getting their highest category of characters (5 stars), is a relatively generous 6%. However, that's split across 2 batches of 3%, one of which is split across 3 specific characters (i.e. 1% specific card) and the other which has about 100 cards (0.03% to get a specific character). As each character is one who appeared in the long-running Fire Emblem series of games, there's significant incentive to try and get specific characters.
And these are games from companies that behave relatively ethically in this space. I can think of Asian games that are much worse.
In contrast, Fire Emblem Heroes has always been upfront about the odds, and you can see the odds whenever you want. (although in my personal experience the 5 star odds are less than 6%, hmrph)
It is possible that Blizzard uses different odds by region but that seems unlikely.
It would not surprise me if odds were indeed different by region. It would be smart to do that, anyways, since player behavior may be different.
The same way that a person can have a correct (at least within a few orders of magnitude) understanding of their numerical odds of winning the lottery, yet still go on purchasing tickets. Our intuitive grasp of the idea of one in a million, billion, trillion, etc is such that those odds all "feel" the same. But those differences might make all the difference in whether purchasing a lottery ticket is rational.
I've always wondered what the logic behind that was. Why not have a fair wheel?
Each section was equal in size but not in weight. We wanted to give the feeling that they could win big but not give so much currency that people would not spend on the currency.
It worked so we kept the wheel weighted.
Anon because making free to play games is admittedly kinda evil.
I'd love to see the grand parents' suggested made active. Hunting whales isn't about making fun games. It's about exploiting addictive behavior with a tiny set of people.
It's not fun to make and it's not fun to play.
It's the same reason slot machines always "almost" hit the jackpot.
It's more addictive that way.
Don't be cowardly.
If you're ashamed, then don't participate. Otherwise, own it.
If I shouldn't, why should someone doing what they believe to be unethical things not take a paycut in order to stop doing those unethical things? And why should we not criticise those who do unethical things for money?
Did you do experiments with the weighting to find this?
Not to say these gambling mechanics aren't reprehensible but you're focusing on the wrong thing. There is no "tricking" involved; games with in-app purchases are clearly labelled and gambling-like mechanisms are so standard now that it would be more surprising to find a popular game with IAP that _didn't_ use a gambling-like mechanism than one that did.
Setting a "max payed" will most definitely warn you of a game that will eventually become money-based.
There is no easy way to distinguish between the IAP for Mario Run ($10 once, to buy the full game) and $10 in coins for spins for lives for Candy Crush (or however it works now).
The result is that people don’t want to spend ANY money on mobile because so much of it is scamming garbage, that the rest of It might as well be too.
This is just one example of a huge philosophical question -- how much should we, as a collective, try to set things up to save people from themselves?
I tend to come down on the favoring individual autonomy side.
Give me my drugs, my alcohol, and my F2P.
Caveat emptor!
(But I do like requiring odds to be disclosed, and purities of alcohol and drugs enforced. Those are hard things to do as an individual, so bringing collective strength to bear makes sense. But partaking or not is something I can do alone; please don't force me to do what you think is good for me, society.)
That's just the shareware model though; there's no gambling involved. Granted, it could be labeled better.
I like this model as it removes the risk of you not liking the game and being out $49. If you get bored after the first few levels you're not out the full amount–I'd be willing to try out more games this way.
And there is a distinction to be made if any of the benefits from in-app purchases can be acquired without actually making an in-app purchase--earned through gameplay or traded from paying players, for instance. In those instances, it would be useful to report the number of hours of unpaid gameplay per dollar of in-app purchase. If I know up front that it takes 1000 hours of in-game farming to get something that a paying player can get instantly for $1, I'm probably not going to bother with that game.
I recently saw an article about Star Wars Battlefront's upsell options that basically said all new players will now start without legs, and legs could either be purchased immediately in the in-game store, or players could earn their legs without paying by dragging themselves through a 100-hour questline using just their arms and buttocks. I had to check that it was actually satire.
At absolute minimum, ARPU and ARPPU should be required disclosures for any application. (Mine would be around $0.75 and $7.00 even, respectively. I made it for myself, so I don't care, but it's interesting.) It's a partial patch and doesn't solve it. But it's better.
[1] - (shameless-ish plug) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tracecompl...
(As a practical matter, if you check top-purchases and it's something like "bucket of gems", there's probably gunna be gacha. :-)
Games have power. They get in your head and they can mess with you. When that's done for the purposes of gambling, that sucks.
people in this case often means minors, because the extreme gamification of gambling, often attached to other videogames, tends to target very young audiences. Hell, even none gambling games explicitly reward this carrot and stick behaviour.
This isn't an issue of individual autonomy, it's one of animal conditioning. Companies use their data, their feedback and the basic things we know about human psychology to groom themselves customers with loose pockets. There's no autonomy involved in any of this.
If you want to have people grow up to be free and autonomous citizens, you better reign those businesses in
but of course some players are kids. so what?
just because kids play games doesn't mean we have to go full-collective-control -- kids have parents that can act as proxies for their individual will until they're of age.
and i strongly disagree with the idea that companies using psychological tricks to motivate people in any way materially weakens the argument for individual autonomy.
of course every action that every person takes is the sum result of the multitude of influences tugging at them, but again, so what: either i have the freedom to make the choices i want, or i am compelled via (ultimately) physical force to do something else. that's the difference i care about.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
I recently quit Hearthstone once I realized that the game was slowly sucking me into paying more. It's a great game. But they obfuscate the true cost of playing.
In that digital card game, players want specific cards to build a specific deck. But the manner in which you acquire specific cards is expensive, and the expense is heavily obfuscated. I doubt that most players understand the real cost of playing.
To get a card, you need to buy a card pack. Card packs have 5 random cards (with a rather complex algorithm behind what cards are in a pack). These cards can be duplicates, which you could transform into "dust" (a kind of currency) to buy the card you actually want. The true cost of buying a specific card that you might want depends on a bunch of factors, such as how many duplicates you already have.
In Hearthstone and other "free to play" games, the true cost of playing is nebulous. The game acquires players partly by advertising that playing is free. However, in reality they are likely among the most expensive games you could play.
The cost of acquiring a complete set of all cards in a Hearthstone expansion is around $400 [1]. Which is insane. In order to play competitively, you probably need half that -- which is still around $200.
If the costs were clearly and honestly labeled, players wouldn't play. So they aren't.
I hope the industry self-regulates, like they did with the ESRB and censorship. I hate the direction the industry has taken here.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/04/14/it-costs-...
There are so many Gacha style games that are WAY more of a rip off than that. They get you sucked into the game, then the only way to progress is to become a whale. It is awful
There are huge tournaments every month, a huge twitch scene, etc
Its a legit game and most people know what they are getting into.
DBZ Dokkan battle on the other hand....
Tournaments or a huge Twitch scene don't make it legit or not. They tell us something about a game's size or impact.
Small (indie) games can be loads of fun. I had more fun with a simple game like Airmash [1] than I ever had in WoW because that game is fair, and you need skill. You can't grind towards an advantage. If you did, you can lose it very quickly. Evens playing field.
Blizzard games, with the exception of Starcraft II, are made for carebears with too much time who want to feel good beating players who put less time in the game not by becoming better (as games used to work) but by getting better gear/equipment/cards/characters. A dog eat dog world, essentially. I've learned and adapted to find that evil.
Hearthstone is an especially great value if you're comparing it to traditional TCGs. The cost to play something like Magic The Gathering is absurd, but you can play Hearthstone for free if you want to.
From the game director, in response to a criticism from earlier this year, says as much:
> I don't think we've done a good job historically supporting Wild enough. But I do think we've been doing better lately, and it's very important to us that Wild be a real format that is properly supported.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/6ynecq/an_open...
It also seriously pisses me off because I spend a good fortune on cards when Hearthstone came out and I didn't expect them to go the MtG route. Boy, was I wrong. Many of them are worthless now.
But this is Blizzard, and they released balance updates to Starcraft for years. Just takes focus.
This is a great thing to bring up, because Hearthstone churns out expansion packs on a two-year basis. The "standard" game mode, which is presently the most well-supported and popular, only allows cards that were created in the last two years. If you want to keep up, you need new cards, and you need a lot of them, and they are expensive, and they are getting more expensive [1].
Blizzard has a great reputation, as you said. Hearthstone's monetization model puts their reputation at risk.
1. https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/12/16763594/hearthstone-expe...
That's 3 elements you mention. Lets see:
> It is still a "collectible" card game
Yeah, it is, but only the last X expansions are valid for play. So old cards become invalid for standard play. (Forgive me if I used the wrong term for 'standard'; I'm an old Magic: The Gathering player who has seen Wizards of the Coast adopt this model in the 90s; Blizzard just copied it.)
Hence,
> with a lot of expected longevity
is rather relative.
> from a very reputable company
Activision Blizzard, Inc. or Blizzard.
As for reputable, well. Blizzard is very good with RNG in their games. A lot of their games are evolving around RNG, and loot, trying to keep the player playing for their dopamine shot. Lets see: Warcraft 3 was already about RNG (it contained loot), then we got Hearthstone (yup), we got Diablo 3 (yup), we got Overwatch (yup), we got Starcraft II (nope, standard RTS, doesn't contain crit AFAIK), Heroes of the Storm (not sure, not into MOBA at all, seems not?).
Blizzard are the masters of RNG. Not every of their game is P2W (Pay 2 Win), I admit that, but if there is one of these where RNG or loot matters and be downright bought, it is Hearthstone (you can buy gold in WoW legally, but not loot). If you want to play a game competitively, forget Hearthstone. The only fair game mode is the single player one, and the arena one (which requires in-game currency).
They're also masters of grinds, that's deeply entwined in every Blizzard game except Starcraft II. Fat grinds with shortcuts is one profit model. Not all Blizzard games have this model, but one of their games stands out: the P2W Hearthstone game.
> There are so many Gacha style games that are WAY more of a rip off than that.
I don't know that game. I'm sure there are evil schemes out there, but I know about this particular company and this game and this game type quite well.
If you want to play Hearthstone competitive you're going to have to shell out like 200-400 EUR per expansion. Some successful players and streamers can afford, but it stays a gentlemen's elite club that way. Just like Magic was a game for rich student kids. Been there, done it.
And let us not forget, we are ignoring that we're getting children, teenagers, and young adults hooked on gambling.
One friend of mine setup a bot years ago and essentially mined gold (got banned and reinstated) and got most cards. Of course, that's cheating but as my old JH football coach once said "if you're not cheating you're not trying"
Hoping for industry self-regulation is like hoping Wall St. will suddenly grow a conscience. Especially given who's doing the regulating these days.
And time. Time where you're weaker than your enemies who are further in the grind. How about this shortcut here? Points at booster packs
I stopped playing them because of that.
The synergy between cards is interesting but I don't have the patience or want to invest the money into getting card x or y. Not to mention that I don't want 'whether you can spend 500$ on cards' to be a deciding factor in a match..
I find this even more ridiculous in a video game (and even predatory).
Honest gambling, like with slot machines, are also straightforward about their purpose. Attaching a slot-machine experience to ordering food at McDonalds isn't deceptive per se, but would seem as dubious as lootboxes.
It's problematic. It makes players feel bad, in retrospect, when they realize that they've spent more than they would have wanted to spend at the outset.
I would hate for the loot box model to move beyond video games. Can you imagine going to the store and having to buy a mystery box filled with groceries, which you may or may not need or want? Gosh that would be horrible. Not that it would happen but, still. I feel like we should encourage a society with clear prices on specific, concrete products. I give you $10, you promise me specific thing X. If I don't actually get X I can ask for a refund, or I can sue you even if it turns out you're acting in bad faith, etc. Loot box systems don't seem to transact in good faith.
The lottery is legal and government run in many (most?) states. We already live in a society where people willingly give their money to get something.
Also the X gold coins for $X is less of a problem. The old League of Legends style of a "free to play" game was great. They were one of the first to do it. You paid money for a currency, and then the currency purchased items. All items had an alternative cost as well for a currency you could only earn in game. It was explicit about what you were buying.
Loot box systems on the other hand are not explicit. Blizzard's Hearthstone for example, as I talked about in this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983166
The loot box model is video game adaptation of the collectible card game model which is itself a gaming adaptation of the (non-gaming) trading card model, both of which predecessors have other non-video-gaming derivatives, so the basic model is already lots of places besides video games.
Its already there, targeted at kids! Its all the collectible toys in food such as chips.
Wuppies, flippos, "voetbalplaatjes" [1], are just a few local examples.
McDonalds Happy Meal toys must be a world-wide example?
I don't care if a free game makes lots of money from paying users, I care if I'm likely to find it satisfying without becoming a heavy payer. Actually, if a company does that and gets people willing to recurringly spend lots of money on the game to subsidize it, that's a plus, as far as I'm concerned.
The real problem is that hardly anyone wants to pay for anything upfront.
Developers much prefer to make traditional games with no tricks in them to hook free customers. But take those systems out and charge $1 upfront on the App Store and watch your number of installs fall by orders of magnitude.
The market spoke, and freemium games is what they got.
[1] https://zhugeex.com/2016/12/chinas-new-online-gaming-regulat...
Honestly any transparency in this area is probably a nice win, even if this isn’t as good as banning the things are fixing a lot of the other scummy practices out there.
Even if you do know the odds, do you even know the cost of the loot box? Say the loot box cost 500 murp points, and you can buy 25 merp points for $1 or 700 merp points for $9 or 10000 merp points for $80, and the odds of your loot box are 1:100 for having a rare item - what is your EV to spend to get the rare item?
Disclosure would probably reduce the temptation to offer really shitty odds.
You consider the smaller merp packages to have an intrinsic penalty, to punish the player for not being a whale.
And yet that $400 will only give you a 63.4% chance of getting a rare item. An 80% chance will cost you $640, a 90% chance costs $920, and a 99% chance a whopping $1800. On average, you'll spend $400 per rare item. But can you imagine all your whale players spending $1800 each, and that 1% of them might not even have a rare after all that? Can you imagine being that whale that spends $1800 and gets nothing?
If I were developing that game, I would certainly add an "odds pressure" escape valve to the randomness, so that both your overall win-loss record and your recent win-loss record influence your odds of winning on the next play. But as long as we're doing that, we might as well also set up an intermittent reinforcement schedule that essentially guarantees one win in the first five boxes you open, one in the next five, the next ten, the next fifteen, etc.
Now add a distinction between IAPs for consumables vs features vs content.
As soon as any game I ever come into contact with starts to “well, you can wait an hour OR have it get finished right now with 1 doohickey!”, immediate delete.
What is frustrating is that this toxic mechanic has been applied to franchises I have previously loved such as Simpsons and Star Trek.
> of items ranging from common to rare. [...] you can buy these loot
> boxes [...] for real money, which has led some players to classify
> them as gambling—a label that the Entertainment Software Rating
> Board doesn’t acknowledge.
Is the ESRB using some strange definition of gambling that the rest of us are unaware of? This seems like the textbook definition.
In other words, what you describe may appear as a form of payment for consideration to win, but if you aren't really winning anything that can't be classifed as gambling.
This is why most game sales specifically mention they cannot be converted to cash and are for digital items only.
The difference is you can trade rare X with someone else for money, but the company is not going to pay you when you get rare X.
The threat of losing a large proportion of their customers would hopefully dissuade some companies from including gambling in their games.
The bottom line is this new micro payment business model is here to stay, and hopefully people give money to the games that do it well and avoid paying the games that are simply exploitative.
In the mobile market, Arena of Valor just released in the US and it's surprisingly polished, gives a lot of heroes for free, and isn't aggressive about monetization. (in contrast, Vainglory, an earlier mobile MOBA, is very aggressive about getting you to spend money, including locking a lot of content behind lootboxes)
(1) tournaments, challenges, friendly matches are all played at tournament card levels which are quite easy to reach as f2p (and friendly and special challenges level new players up to the tournament levels).
(2) in 2v2, by far the most fun game mode for me, card levels are massively less important since there's no ladder.
(3) the 1v1 ladder is not a pure skill matchup but still finds everyone a range where they have essentially a 50% win rate based on a combination of progress and skill.
(4) yes the top of the ladder players have almost all spent a lot of money but most of the playerbase of any game isn't serious about being on the very top of the leaderboard. A smaller factor is that the most talented f2p players are sponsored with max decks and stop grinding f2p challenges.
> (3) the 1v1 ladder is not a pure skill matchup but still finds everyone a range where they have essentially a 50% win rate based on a combination of progress and skill.
> (4) yes the top of the ladder players have almost all spent a lot of money but most of the playerbase of any game isn't serious about being on the very top of the leaderboard. A smaller factor is that the most talented f2p players are sponsored with max decks and stop grinding f2p challenges.
That's p2w. If you can't get to the top of the ladder without spending money, it's p2w. That's what p2w means. Just because there are modes that are not p2w doesn't mean it's not p2w. The drop rate of legenadaries is so low it took me ~5 months to get a bandit from a free chest. Rewards are also increased the higher your ladder ranking makes the p2w aspect even worse.
After 18 months I had 1 level 3 legendary with a smattering of level 1s and 2s. It would take me a few more YEARS to get one to max (level 5), and they were releasing more legendaries and epics than commons and rares further decreasing the odds of being able to level up cards that you use.
Also, it wasn't uncommon for newly released cards to be more powerful on ladder than their counterparts (executioner and night witch are big examples), encouraging people to level them up for money, before nerfing said cards when they became more common or other cards were being released.
False, I said that you can get to the top of the ladder without paying although most of the people with the skill are given max decks. If you have top of the ladder skills you will have no trouble grinding tourneys and challenges for tons of free cards and gold.
> Just because there are modes that are not p2w
You just said yourself it's not p2w. These other game modes absolutely do matter, that's where all the competitive focus of the game is.
> The drop rate of legenadaries is so low it took me ~5 months to get a bandit from a free chest... It would take me a few more YEARS to get one to max (level 5),
Legendaries aren't only available as random drops. I've seen the bandit probably a dozen times in the shop. Legendaries also aren't critical or across the board better than other cards, the top 20 cards by ladder win rate at stats royale are all non-legendary and includes 6 commons.
> Also, it wasn't uncommon for newly released cards to be more powerful on ladder than their counterparts (executioner and night witch are big examples), encouraging people to level them up for money, before nerfing said cards when they became more common or other cards were being released.
This seems like cognitive bias, there are also plenty of cards were underpowered on release and had to be buffed, sometimes multiple times, to be competitive (just from legendaries: lumberjack, log, inferno dragon, lava hound, etc.). Balance of new cards isn't perfect, news at 11.
That's actually one of the more extreme ways of Pay 2 Win..
Getting a meaningful shortcut (ie. being able to become more powerful) with real-life currency is also Pay 2 Win. You're skipping the grind that way.
Lets say we got Alice and Bob.
Alice plays 2 hours a day and uses the completed quests in Hearthstone to buy packs.
Bob, who happens to be Alice's father, has a busy life. He does the household while Alice plays Hearthstone.
Friday evening they play a game. Bob just got his paycheck, and buys 50 Hearthstone cards. Bob constructs a nice deck with the new cards in which Bob has a statistical advantage of having likely more choice in cards to construct deck(s). Only thing Alice has going for it is more game experience.
Hence,
Hearthstone? Pay 2 Win. (Except arena)
Magic The Gathering? Pay 2 Win. (Except sealed deck tournament)
Soccer? Football? Hockey? Pay 2 Win. (Why? Cause if your club owns more money, they can buy better players.)
F1? They took some countermeasures to level their playing field IIRC.
Heck, the realization makes a lot of sports less fun to watch. Its also why I can't stand the whole Twitch/streaming circus.
I was just thinking about this this morning, because I think of them as targeting kids too, but the real junkies I know are grownups.