EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
It's my strong opinion that the whole loot box phenomenon makes games as a whole worse.
For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these boxes have been handled by many games noticeably warps the design goals of the game from "make an engaging experience" to "motivate the player to buy more loot boxes".
What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game.
This has been at its worst in mobile games, but there are plenty of console and PC titles with this issue as well. It's even gotten so far that big titles with no microtransactions include a heavy focus on loot boxes which can only be gained as quest rewards or bought using in-game currency (Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind).
I really don't like it. I get no joy from wading through mountains of useless items in the hope of finding that one rare gem I actually want. This applies to ordinary loot in RPGs as well. So, seeing that the global trend has been for games to evolve in this direction has been very frustrating for me. As such, this recent pushback - both these legal actions as well as the player backlash of recent loot box controversies - have been very interesting developments which I hope will lead to market-wide improvements in overall game design.
To elaborate: I do not mind microtransactions in general. There are a few games which have plenty of ways to spend real money in-game but which do not bother me (Fortnite, Elder Scrolls Online). The key difference, here, is that those are games in which the core game loop does not heavily incentivize you to spend money and where in-game transactions will mainly get you cosmetic content or additional story campaigns.
I tried playing Quake Champions, because I remember enjoying Quake 3 as a mid-to-late teenager, and on paper, that type of game should be incredibly up my alley. I found the experience of the initial load screen dumping you directly into the daily loot box screen so offputting that I actually couldn't even enjoy playing the game proper. The very act of just opening the game was so nakedly manipulative and felt so unfun that I simply uninstalled it; I just cannot be assed to expend the energy trying to ignore the loot box mechanics to play the game on it's own merits.
- I wont buy your game unless you let me try a demo. (PC-CDROM days)
- I won't buy your game if the demo is too short.
- I won't buy your game if I played your demo for hours and now I am bored of it.
- I won't buy your game unless it has online multiplayer.
- I won't buy your game unless it has twenty hours of single player content.
- I won't buy your game if it has licensed content.
- I won't buy your game unless I can get it used. (Console days)
- I won't buy your game unless it has split screen mode (OK only dumb marketing people ever told me this)
- I won't buy your game if it has online content that can't be unlocked for free used.
- I won't buy your game if it doesn't have X players in multiplayer.
- I won't buy your game if it has paid dlc.
- I won't buy your game if it is free to play (so true).
I won't buy your game!
But I guess if I were trying to be more serious I would point out that people who develop games are extremely aware of the pain points of gamers.
What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game."
Star Wars Battlefront 2 at release was a perfect example of this. The entire experience was built for someone to either grind incessantly and/or spend real money to acquire currency to unlock items as only weapon mods were acquired via accumulated experience and not loot crates. Even the awarding of credits were loosely tied to performance. The "level" of a hero/trooper/ship was the number and rarity of star cards you had, not how much you had used them. There was no shared marketplace so the only way to get a certain emote, or pose, or star card was getting lucky and pulling one. It was often the case that you would pull items for troopers/heroes/ships that you would barely (or never) use.
As a result of all of this you ended up with things like "rubber banding" where players would use a rubber band on their joystick to prevent themselves from being booted from game modes. This had a particularly harmful effect on the Heroes vs. Villains game mode, as its small number of participants (4v4) and scoring via target system meant having one or more "rubber banders" on your team put you at a severe disadvantage and wrecked the experience.
If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability.
I really hate seeing this trend come to games that I presumably own.
I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from.
Where is the skill and gameplay involved in spinning a virtual roulette wheel until a powerful enough unit or item pops out to let you advance to the next level of gameplay? And, of course, the answer is that there is none; it's merely taking advantage of those prone to gambling addiction.
Sure, but that's a rather charitable way to describe it. What you're talking about is basically breaking or mastering the system by sheer force of will. And there is fun in that. But how much did it cost you to get to the point where you were able to play longer than a few minutes?
Arcade games were specifically designed to extract as many quarters as possible from players. That was the stated goal. If a game wasn't able to extract N quarters per hour, it didn't last long.
Ah, but how is that different from, say, swimming, golf, tennis, or racing where one must rent a course or court in order to practice their skill? Yes, arcade games weren't called quarter munchers for nothing but, for the most part, they offered a reasonably fair deal.
In contrast, there's no analogy to be made between those sports and loot-box based game. One doesn't toss money into a sports equipment store until one randomly gets a drastically better golf club.
I'll admit that it may just be that I don't have the proficiency required, but after playing it again recently it seems that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was simply designed to quickly drain your health as soon as you got to a boss.
I get your point about the addition of randomness, though. Its an interesting element and it does change things relative to the arcade scenario. Personally, I think that it is largely there to make the system not feel as much like pay-to-win as it actually is.
Loot boxes are the same, except now you also have to gamble.
I feel you my friend.
Also why would you work for EA? I genuinely want to know. After everything I heard / read about them I wouldn't touch that company with a 10ft pole. I even avoid anything they sell intentionally because of it.
- Mass Effect
- Dragon Age
- Mirror's Edge
- Titanfall
- Dead Space
- The Sims
- job security
- good salary
- working on AAA games as a full-time job
- working together with other passionate gamers and nerds who share my interests in a way I wouldn't have thought possible before moving to this industry
- Getting a lot of information from contacts in the industry before it becomes public news.
- Learning incredibly much about the behind-the-scenes stuff. Both from EA in general but also from other parts of the industry
I would like to see loot boxes out of games for players under 18. Loot boxes are not a real part of the game anyway, they are a way for the publisher add the types of subconscious psychological rewards to “increase engagement” that are now rightfully criticized in platforms like Facebook.
I have a bit of a double feeling about this as a Belgian - on the one hand I think it's a good direction for the industry. We didn't have that crap a decade ago and I'll be happy to see it removed. OTOH, I hope they don't just remove content for the Belgian market as it'd potentially create an unfair system.
It is EA after all, a company I don't have a lot of faith in.
Why are you playing their games then?
[1] Up through 2k17 (that was on the edge though) you could make your custom player good just by playing the game. It might take some time, but it could be done. With 2k18, you needed to buy the game for $60 and then spend ~$100 to have anything near a playable character.
EDIT
Whoops, my micro transaction hate got ahead of my coffee drinking :) My point still stands though. If you don't like the way a company is doing something, don't buy their product.
Now, it's not that DICE is per se a bad developer, but the deadlines pushed on by EA give rise to lots of bugs on release.(But, I've not played an EA/DICE game since BF3 so I could be wrong there, things might've changed.)
The games are usually playable some time after release.
And things like this: https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-... don't exactly make me warm up to actually buying an EA game.
As someone who play games on macOS, the delay before the Mac/Linux versions are released makes it so when you get to play the games, most of your friends play the next version or something else. I've stopped buying games like CoD and BF because of this.
It seems only Blizzard and Valve understand they can keep people playing the same games for decades with little investment.
I mentioned Linux in the "Mac/Linux" because Linux too suffers from the sometimes more than a year late releases of these games.
They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it - and when the consumers inexplicably fail to do so, the advocates get mad and blame the consumers instead of adjusting their theory.
Comments like these lower the quality of discussion by removing nuance and pushing people into tribalism.
Taken to the extreme, all comments are written by a very dedicated Redditor.
> They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it
Loots boxes exist because they aren't actually a problem. A consumer has a choice between games with varying degrees of loot boxes and games without them.
Obviously if people buy games with loot boxes, they don't oppose them strongly. Personally, I don't have a big problem with loot boxes because I like cheaper games. Loot boxes are a way for game makers to milk more money out of whales while leaving the rest of us better off with a cheaper game. Banning or regulating loot boxes will only take away options from consumers, increase prices, or both.
People don't need to be babied by the government whenever a small minority of people make bad decisions. It just allows people to be lazier and less skeptical than they already are.
In other words, this assumes, as the efficient market hypothesis requires, that consumers are perfectly rational and have perfect information about the market. And I hold that, as always, this is not actually the case in the real world.
Moreoever, loot boxes aren't just some random game design feature. They are currently the best way to make money with a game. (And I believe they are well-known to the vast majority of developers). So there are actual economic forces pushing developers to implement loot boxes unless they explicitly reject the idea and have enough resources to do so.
> Obviously if people buy games with loot boxes, they don't oppose them strongly.
This is exactly the circular reasoning I'm talking about in the parent post. If that were the case, then people wouldn't at the same time complain about them so much.
If a more regulated producer had similar marketshare, I could play the big budget titles of that regulated corporation.
If only they'd bring back a usable server browser, or (god forbid) release the server software for community game servers.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/23/17386912/battlefield-5-loo...
[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/battlefield-5-will-have-no-premium-p...
Isn't maximizing profits just a natural consequence of having a for-profit business? It's not just evil video game publishers, everybody wants to sell less for more.
Therefore there are two choices:
Either they get regulated as other slot machine makers around the world, including being taxed as both a slot machine maker and as a slot machine operator.
Or alternatively just make a video game and sell that and not have to deal with all the regulation.
Of course if they are creating slot machines they should follow the related regulations. However there is nothing that forces them to make actual games. If they can make business by selling virtual slot machines let them do so as long as it's legal. After all they are not the only game publisher out there and if there is an actual need for quality games it will be fulfilled by other publishers.
Look at the threads about daily fantasy sports in HN. Many impassioned comments about how the ability to bet on sports is freedom, etc..
If the games are no more than glorified casinos, they should be regulated as such.
They also had a PvP element where you could attack other peoples strongholds, but with the lootboxes it was also pay to win.
Card games are gambling. True, you can get gambling credits by grinding a lot in Hearthstone, but I feel this is despicable especially for a card game catering to mostly underage or very young people.
This applies to non-virtual card games too (e.g. Magic, Pokemon, Yugiho). Pack-opening is kid's gambling. They are made to encourage people to open more packs/make a deck/etc. At least in real-life card games you can trade cards (EDIT: hearthstone has dust - which acts the same).
That's actually rather reprehensible as well since the free loot boxes involve spending extensive time in the game grinding. These children are essentially Judas goats; living enticements to other children to join their friend in the game and possibly spend money.
In France so presumably Belgium too, gambling companies are taxed on turnover.
Somehow though if EA, Activision, etc were taxed like slot machine operators then they would not be as inclined to include this stuff in their games.
However, I think the entertainment industry is particularly fond of this.
My guess is because its products are both luxury items (so moral arguments against the same practices in housing or pharma don't necessarily apply) and items that consumers potentially have enormous emotional investment in. So once you've managed to build a fanbase, you can get away with a lot before the fans will seriously consider quitting.
I think less for more naturally would come with inflation across the board but the less for more approach isn't the only way to increase profits or even the most popular one. The computer industry for example is known for scaling by giving more for less. Beverage companies add more drinks for the same price. Less for more requires a monopoly or something close to it, otherwise competitors rush in.
Video Games have been growing with such a strong trajectory that what consumers expect at a bare minimum in a new release is a large increase in risk for a game publisher.
For example Super Mario World was made by less than 20 people and sold for $69.99 at launch in 1990. That’s nearly $140 in today’s dollars.
Now take into account that a modern AAA game has at a minimum a 150 person staff, with the more content heavy games breaching 500 people; if your game is a flop your studio is dead despite having years of successes before. The margins at $60 don’t provide enough cushion so publishers are continuously scrambling for extra revenue they can get away with before consumer backlash.
The current model is very fragile and not entirely sustainable. It exploits the passions of recent graduates by giving them salaries 30-40% below market only because they’re working on games, with the work being not at all different than working on spreadsheet software except for having serious crunch-heavy deadlines. The attrition rate over 5 years is over 70%, which also leads to those who merely didn’t leave instead of the most qualified being in leadership positions which makes any changes to processes very difficult.
$60 is also a bit of a red herring, since $60 is the base price for a game - when you start throwing in all of the special features, the price of a game climbs to over twice that amount. And that doesn't even cover the microtransactions not included in the gambling category - 4-5 expansion packs each the price of an indie game, skins, poses, voice lines, etc.
Let's not forget that EA have openly stated to their shareholders that not having loot boxes in their games doesn't affect their revenue. Either they're lying to their shareholders, or to us. I wonder which one it is.
These companies are raking in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. That's not the sign of a fragile market.
Your numbers are way off. Super Mario World sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Every full Super Mario release has sold millions of copies.
Conversely, even the most popular franchises sell in the tens of millions range. GTA V is one of the few approaching the 100 million mark.
Back in the day games were in fact more expensive, but a lot of the cost was in the cartridge. Games were certainly much less expensive in development costs. Modern console game prices have been locked at around $60 for well over a decade. These games are hideously expensive to develop so publishers have resorted to gaining revenue via DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.
Naturally, publishers have become greedy in this environment and are using these deceptive revenue streams to pad their profits. And really, these practices probably would've arisen even if the price of games kept pace with inflation.
Edit: As an illustrative example, if we neglect economies of scale we should be paying 5,000-10,000$ for our personal computers.
I know people that have spent a lot of money in counter-strike boxes, it works like slots machines, designed to keep you exited while you get a reward. The worst thing is now is the rule in every game (pubg, heartstone and so on..).
Good job Belgium!
CS:GO is not a game using lots of shitty in game mechanics/restrictions etc to drive people to spend money in order to play/compete. Same with Dota2.
I actually agree - it's "pure" gambling in that sense. You're spinning a wheel and getting a random payoff. I just don't think that's an inherently bad thing
It's been around for a while and I've honestly never even been remotely attracted to games like that.
I definitely feel like this has exponentially increased since iOS games called 'freemium'. Generally, the game will be free but then things can take 30minutes to be accomplished unless you buy diamonds that cost 1$ and you get instant gratification.
For some people, the fun of the real gameplay outways the negative of the lootboxes
I mean, it's not like you get to choose between the version of the game that has this vs the one that doesn't.
Your friends play x
You dont like x for reason y
Which is stronger, your dislike of y or the enjoyment of playing x with friends.
EA are trying to turn FIFA into a eSports game (see the recent FIFA eWorld Cup) and the majority of play takes place in the "Ultimate Team" mode. To get the high calibre players you'd use to build up your experience and reputation in UT you either need to make a ton of coins to buy them or buy "FIFA points" with real money and open the packs.
It's pretty standard practice for the higher end players to throw money at these packs to build up teams early on, so I suspect this move will put Belgian players at a disadvantage (it's not a total nightmare as you can buy most players in 'standard' varieties for a lot less, just not the in-form ones you'd use in competition play).
Of course, at the end of the day, it's still just a game.. :-D
The issue is the one of random drops for real money. It’s easy to see that has a gambling element to it.
A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins" instead of packs in affected territories.. but then you'd have the opposite effect of players there getting a major advantage :-D
Preventing this kind of workaround is already part of many gambling laws. They usually define the payment/stake/wager as a very generic term like "anything of value". For example, in NV (as a stereotypical representation of a locale allows gambling), the law defines[1]:
>> “Representative of value” means any instrumentality used by a patron in a game whether or not the instrumentality may be redeemed for cash.
>> “Wager” means a sum of money or representative of value that is risked on an occurrence for which the outcome is uncertain.
Any type of in-game "coin" still represents value to the people playing the game, so trading them for lootboxes with uncertain contents is still a "wager".
The gaming industry could solve a lot of this mess if they simply *sold people the game (or game pieces) directly as a defined product. Of course, that wouldn't exploit the human weakness to operant conditioning[2]... ~sigh~
[1] https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-463.html#NRS463Sec01862
Ah, maybe I'm misunderstanding the concepts involved, but coins in FIFA are more directly convertible into the end result, more like buying a currency. With "coins" you can buy players directly in the game for a known value on a marketplace (you can also buy packs, but this could be disabled).
With the current system (where you buy "FIFA points") you can only use the FIFA points to open packs of "random" players, which is where the gambling element comes in.
So in the first case there is no super significant difference between the players on the field, which means there is no point to buy loot boxes to get better players.
Or in the second case it isn't really an eSport because the person that spends the most money (and is luckiest with the players that they get) will more likely win.
It's the difference between going to the shop and buying the thing you want versus going to a casino and pulling a slot machine handle until you get lucky and win the prize that you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...
Curiosity - what's inside the cube winner video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU
>"I said there's something amazing inside. Something life changing inside. Well, this is what this video is about. After 25 BILLION cubelets have been destroyed, over 150 days, after 4 million people have downloaded it onto their various devices, and after hosting tens of thousands of simultaneous concurrent users, we have reached the end, and one lucky person has reached the rewards of their hard efforts. How can anything be worth all that effort?"
Well what was in the cube? A broken promise.
Curiosity Winner Has Received Nothing - 2 Years Later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SejMdncxbnk
>Curiosity Winner, Once Promised a "Life Changing" Prize by Peter Molyneux, Has Received Nothing:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/curiosity-winner-once-prom...
Peter Molyneux A Pathological Liar? | Feature Creep:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efeq_9XwU7s
>"This week on Feature Creep I discuss the recent controversy about 22Cans head Peter Molyneux, the failure of the GODUS God of Gods plan and how Bryan Henderson, the winner of the Curiosity competition has been ignored."
I've been boycotting EA since the dawn of modern DLC with Battlefield: Bad Company, which was 10 years ago.
Every single gamer who has not stood on this side of the line since then is a part of the problem.
If you have purchased a single EA game directly from the publisher in the last decade, instead of aftermarket, then you have absolutely no right to complain about loot boxes because we live in a time where all of the information about EA's destruction of the gaming industry has been freely available for anyone to find.
You chose to feed the beast for your own selfish desires and now you act like it's someone else's fault that the beast has gotten so big.
The psychological quirk these games exploit is that some humans get a disproportionate internal reward for taking chances that come off. This quirk gets you polar explorers, and a man on the moon, but it also gets you financial crashes and people losing their life savings on the turn of a card. So, you know, maybe not something we want under the control of a for-profit company.
Traditional gambling laws assume the rewards must be financial, but this psych quirk doesn't care what the reward is, shiny Pokémon cards, virtual currency, anything you perceive as desirable. What's important is that you took a risk and it paid off, if you have this quirk your body rewards you for this entirely luck-based success, of course you want it again.
Note that although Magic itself is going nowhere, this game design trope has been somewhat displaced by designs where players buy fixed decks with fixed boosters - no blind buy. Android Netrunner is an example of that. You know going in that to be competitive you're buying so-and-so many packs to have the best cards, a few extreme choices might mean buying one extra copy of something, but there are no truly "rare" cards.
Feels a lot like loot boxes/gambling to me, in either instance. Okay, at least IRL you have a (largely unregulated) secondary market to sell/buy/trade cards.
Show players the contents of the next box they buy, which makes it not gambling.
I hate it, but it's a very elegant solution to avoid any legal problems.
I suppose they could also make the boxes transparent all the way down, but that would just shift the gamble to the account creation phase.
Oh, or is it just the exact same boxes for everyone? I suppose that solves the problem.
Practically speaking, it's a brilliant move because it works around laws without removing the addictive gambling feeling.
Well, yeah. It's called nuance.
That extends to gaming platforms and the trend toward randomized loot boxes. It’s not “like gambling”. It is gambling. Arguably worse though as there’s no regulatory oversight.
Publishers have been using the argument that loot boxes aren't gambling in order to justify making them available to minors. As far as I'm aware, Belgiums' decision to ban them is more a recognition that they are, in fact, gambling, and therefore should not be available to minors.
When you consider that the above is enough that Valve haven't been touched yet, it just feels like EA are digging their heels for the sake of it.
On the other hand, these are the same people who gave us BF2 and have been releasing a near identical game every year since the 90's so they may have just gotten lazy and not even noticed the law. Far too used to no effort money making that lot.
That's exactly it. They are challenging this in court because they don't want to lose their loot boxes by this enforcement spreading to other countries.
They could pursue it all the way up to EU supreme court. That would set a binding legal precedent for the EU, hopefully not in favor of EA.
I don't like games with lootboxes. I don't buy lootboxes. I don't buy games that have them. As a game developer, I don't work on games with lootboxes.
But this is my personal preference, and I am an adult who is capable of making such a decision. I respect other people who decide to buy lootboxes, even if I wouldn't do it myself. Why is it so hard to just live and let live?
Promoting gambling to minors is something I find completely unethical.
Many are not the first part. Many who are the first part are not the second part.