Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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Unlike the US, the UK has quite liberal gambling legislation. You can legally bet online, there's a casino in every town, there's a betting shop on every high street, pubs can legally install slot machines, you'll see adverts for bookmakers during football matches.

Crucially, it's all regulated. You have to be 18 to enter a betting shop or a casino. A slot machine has to be inspected by the Gambling Commission and must clearly state the payout ratio. Every business and employee involved in gambling has to be licensed. There's a voluntary self-exclusion scheme, so problem gamblers can ban themselves from being able to place a bet.

Lootboxes are effectively a form of gambling - you pay x, but you get a prize worth anything from 0.01x to 1000x based on a random number generator. That RNG isn't audited. Customers don't know the odds. There's no age restriction or controls on advertising. Nobody involved in the business is licensed or subject to scrutiny by a suitable regulator. The operators have no social responsibility obligations.

I'm a gambler myself. I think that US gambling laws are a bit weird. I don't want to ban gambling, but it needs to be properly regulated, regardless of the form it takes. I don't want to see children being stealthily introduced to gambling by predatory game developers.

It was far better in the UK before the massive deregulation of gambling. It has gone much too far.

Our poorest areas have high streets with 4 or 5 betting shops in spitting distance of each other. Addiction and problem gambling has snowballed out of hand. The self exclusion scheme is widely abused by bookmakers. The levy on betting shops pays lip service to the damage done. Fixed odds betting machines are a licence to addict the public whilst printing money.

I don't wish to abolish gambling, but I sure wish the regulations simply returned to those of the 80s or early 90s (i.e. before Tony Blair broke it).

The singular problem is FOBTs. Pretty much everyone in the industry hates them, except of course for the big four bookmakers who profit from them. They're the reason for the absurd over-concentration of betting shops in certain areas, they're the reason for the failure of self-exclusion, they're killing the racing industry and they're a gift to petty money-launderers. As a gambler, I can't stand them - local betting shops used to be rather convivial places, but FOBTs have completely poisoned the atmosphere.

It's looking near-certain that the maximum stake for FOBTs will be reduced to £2, which is a reasonable starting point. The big four bookies are extremely nervous about the upcoming triennial review of gambling regulation, which is good news for everyone else.

https://sbcnews.co.uk/retail/2018/01/22/dcms-deliver-uk-book...

I don't disagree with you, but what about cases where the contents of the loot box can't be traded or sold? Or I suppose one could sell their account with the desirable item but that may be disallowed by ToS and get the account banned.

I dislike loot boxes but I have a hard time seeing it as gambling if you explicitly can not liquidate the assets you receive from it. Then it's just a grab bag.

You pay $x, with a chance to receive items worth between $0.1x and $10x.

It's true that x might not be able to converted to fiat or resold.

That makes it effectively equivalent to a raffle, which often put restrictions on reselling similar to these cases.

Raffles are considered a form of gambling, and are heavily regulated, in the UK[0] and Australia [1].

[0] http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/for-the-public/Fundrais...

[1] https://www.vcglr.vic.gov.au/gambling/raffle/licensee-resour...

Fair point.

Is Mario Kart regulated as a gambling game in the UK?

Sure, you can't convert its items into money, but you can convert them into wins in the game. And it has a "random" item drop system that's known to be rigged.

You do not pay to open a Mario Kart item box.

That's a disingenuous comparison at best.

No exchange takes place. No fiat is given for a chance to open a box.

Is the game sold for free?

If I buy a video game and play it and occasionally get loot boxes that may have ultra-powerful items or may not, that's gambling. But if I buy a video game and play it and occasionally get items that aren't called loot boxes but may be ultra-powerful or may not, that's not gambling?

> If I buy a video game and play it and occasionally get loot boxes

Why do you hide the repeated purchase?

The game is bought, once.

Loot-boxes require another purchase - an uninformed one. You purchase an item for a chance at something else, a chance that you don't actually know.

Mario Kart would be gambling, if you had to buy every crate as you hit it. As it is, with no additional purchase, it is simply a randomised strategic feature. Currency of some form needs to be exchanged to create gambling.

If you can't sell it, and it can't be paid for directly how can it be worth "between $0.1x and $10x" Some items might be more desirable but you can't pay more or less for them. That is rather different than a raffle where the prize is usually something easy to put a price on.

We also raffle off dates with celebrities, and other things where value isn't clear-cut. It still usually falls under the same rules.

Raffle regulation in Australia is commonly treated as a joke though. Everyone just calls them "guessing competitions", where you buy a raffle to "guess the name of the three letter easter chocolate that starts with e and ends in g".

Even schools - noting you can't promote gambling to children - get away with that regularly. With those loopholes, you could probably get away with a lot.

Guessing games still fall under regs in Australia [0].

Schools can run them fine, as most schools fall under "charitable organisation", so they just need written consent from the board, and a prize less than the state's maximum unlicensed game competition amount. ($5000 in Victoria, $2000 in Queensland).

[0 PDF] https://publications.qld.gov.au/dataset/fc2f9cdd-8799-45bf-9...

As an European, I can't understand this beancounting. Yes, technically it may not be gambling, but that does not heal the issue. The problem a predatory practices that ultimately harm the victim in any way e.g. money but also time spent unwisely on collecting lootboxes instead of exercizing for college.

> As an European, I can't understand this beancounting. Yes, technically it may not be gambling, but that does not heal the issue. The problem a predatory practices that ultimately harm the victim in any way e.g. money but also time spent unwisely on collecting lootboxes instead of exercizing for college.

To be clear, you're saying that lootboxes in a video game are a problem because they distract people from studying for college?

There's a spectrum of activity.

CS:GO skins lie at one extreme. If you pay $2.49 to open a case and win a valuable skin, you can directly sell it for cash on the Steam community market, with Valve pocketing a cut of the transaction. Skins have also become a form of currency used in casino and sportsbook gambling.

You can buy skins for real money on the Steam community market, gamble them on a game of roulette on a site with Steam API integration, then cash out your winnings on the community market. Valve's role in the process is absolutely brazen.

The situation with FIFA Ultimate Team is slightly more murky - you can't directly cash out cards or coins, but the in-game trading mechanic effectively facilitates transactions in real money. You can open packs, sell the cards for FIFA coins, then trade your coins for cash through a third-party site. In-game items are used as tokens in third-party gambling activities. Unlike CS:GO, this third-party activity isn't facilitated by an API provided by EA.

This is vaguely reminiscent of the loophole used by pachinko parlours - you can only convert your pachinko balls for non-cash prizes, but a vendor just around the corner will give you cash for those prizes.

FIFA-related gambling has led to criminal prosecutions in the UK.

http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news-action-and-statist...

Overwatch skins can only be won from lootboxes and can't be traded in any way, so Blizzard probably have the strongest claim to legitimacy. Opening Overwatch lootboxes might mimic gambling in some respects, but the "prizes" unarguably have no cash value. The business model strikes me as a bit seedy, but it isn't obviously within the purview of a gambling regulator. There may be a case for regulation under consumer protection laws, but it's not obviously different to baseball cards or blind bags.

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