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I mean when I was a kid you'd get this sticker album for your favourite thing(be it football players, star wars, whatever) and I'd always beg mum to get me yet another sticker pack so I could complete my collection. There were always stickers that I really really wanted and yeah, the disappointment of going through a few packs and not getting what you wanted was very real.

I think ultimately, this is the same thing - just digitized. I don't really have an opinion whether that's good or bad, just that it's clearly aimed at kids to buy this stuff, just like the stickers were.

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I don't really think "just digitized" captures the problem with these boxes.

Imagine a fairly boring interface that has Pokemon cards or football stickers in. Like your hands holding them and trading them and sticking them on things.

Now contrast that to the loot box stuff that has exciting music, flashing lights, A-B tested into oblivion, the money comes from some ethereal 'account' rather than involving an actual exchange, etc.

I think the analogy is more with the flashing exciting slot machines at the pub (which seem to have evolved a ton since I were a small as well...)

I was part of the development on a game which had loot boxes and we had a lot of talk about the reveal, building excitement, etc.

One team member had previous experience from working on casino games and he said that at least there they had clear rules for how they were allowed to handle it and who they were allowed to target.

The flashing lights are a nice bonus, but the comparison to trading cards is still valid imo. It's basically the same thing. Yes the technology has advanced, but the risks are the same.

Companies that sold trading cards, stickers, whatever did the same marketing and testing as video game companies.

Maybe just a little bit of a way to remove the dopamine high, or make it slightly worse, would be to have the kid physically hand you the money before they open the case so they feel the pain of spending the cash.

Which surely only works for older kids who've had the experience of earning money with hard graft.

Well, you can do it the good ol' way with ceramic piggy banks that do not open but need to be crashed with a hammer.

Anecdata, I had one in the shape of a dinosaur, must have ben 5 or 6 and I still remember (some 50 years later) the day I decided that I needed a new toy the doubts about actually breaking it (with the assistance of my dad) and perfectly remmber the dinosaur, whilst I cannot remember at all which toy I was willing to get, probably a toy gun, but I am not sure.

maybe... though, I think even at that age we are all the same with respect to losing things that you had. i think though that if you are letting your kids do lootboxes before they have earned the money to open them it's probably too soon anyway.

Not just that, digitized also means that it is available for purchase pretty much anywhere and at anytime verses in a specific place during business hours. Also unlike stickers and collectible cards these games get to advertise their newest goods everything you interact with the product.

I completely agree with this - those flashing lights, music and big reveal is all optimised for a dopamine hit. It feels pretty manipulative.

The thing about sticker packs, Pokémon cards, etc. is that you could trade the ones you didn't want with your friends, so even getting a shiny that you already had was exciting because then you had something that you could swap for another shiny or a couple of lower-value cards/stickers. You'd naturally come to the point where some stickers were much more frequent than others so you'd end up with this little schoolyard economy where everybody knew what was worthless and what wasn't. Once your collection is complete there's no reason to buy any more. Hell, some of those things even become collectors items and retain some value over time.

Loot boxes strip all of that away and introduce FOMO, so the only option you have is to keep pumping money into the machine, and then to up the ante if everyone else starts getting skins or emotes or dance moves that you don't have, so you don't get left behind.

What's more is that they're linked to micro transactions, so there's nothing stopping you throwing away as much money as you have in your bank account, or having your kid do it without any awareness of where the money is actually coming from. Spending £1.50 of your pocket money on a pack of stickers is a totally different situation to blowing £10-£20 a pop on in-game currencies to buy loot boxes.

There are few things that I'd call evil but this stuff is beyond malevolent. At best it's a shameless scam and they go to an incredibly effort to make the vanilla game boring without buying into the gamble.

Lots of loot boxes and in game cosmetics can often be traded in the same way though?

For example in Dota 2 people can trade skins for heroes they don't play. Isn't that the same thing as trading a pokemon you don't want?

> Lots of loot boxes and in game cosmetics can often be traded in the same way though?

The majority of free-to-play games from Asia don't provide a mechanism for that.

There was literally the exact same claims being made about kids being turned in to gamblers by pinball games decades ago:

“New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was responsible for the ban, believing that it robbed school children of their hard earned nickels and dimes.[41][42] La Guardia spearheaded major raids throughout the city, collecting thousands of machines. The mayor participated with police in destroying machines with sledgehammers before dumping the remnants into the city's rivers.[42]”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball#Pinball_and_gambling

I don't think it is the same though. With pinball you pay 20c or whatever, and you get to play the game. That's it. It's like paying $100 for an entry ticket into a bike race - you pay, you get to do the activity, the outcome is "random" in that it only depends on your own skill and external factors. With sticker packs the contents are truly random, there is no skill involved, you literally don't know what you are buying.

Pinball games at the time often paid out prizes and didn’t always do so based solely on skill. The shift towards the modern idea of what pinball machines are like today was a reaction to laws threatening to ban them.

> The shift towards the modern idea of what pinball machines are like today was a reaction to laws threatening to ban them.

Then, sounds like the hubbub at the time was both mostly reasonable and effective.

Fair enough, but in that case it's a bit disingenuous to say those claims were being made about "pinball games" without qualification, because what you describe is not what someone today[0] thinks of when you say "pinball".

0: citation: myself and gambiting and barneygale at a minimum

For anyone who's curious, this article has some more details on this: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3740422/the-life-and-deat...

There is more to that story. Pinball and other gaming machines were rackets mostly controlled by the mafia and others of that ilk.

Pinball is skill-based; loot boxes are not.

My feeling is that randomized packs of baseball cards were never great either—but they were never pervasive enough to be a "problem".

Video games have managed to make the items significantly more valuable. And it increasingly feels as though _most_ games are built around these gambling mechanics, as opposed to just the occasional game like Magic The Gathering which worked that way.

One major difference between Magic and most skinner box video games: I can sell my magic cards for real world money, and I can just buy the cards I need as singles.

There's a lot of games that try to nudge closer to this with card "crafting" where you destroy card A to create in game currency that you can then use to purchase card B. This is ALMOST to the point where I find it acceptable, but until I can trade card A to another player for card B, it's still complicated gambling.

Real world collectable card games sit in the grayest area imo. You're buying a tangible object that represents some degree of gambling (if you buy packs) but there exists a secondary market that allows for you to bypass that and still enjoy the activity. It's mostly good, but then again my Magic collection sits somewhere around 15,000 total cards, so maybe I'm not the best person to talk about this...

> I can sell my magic cards for real world money

And you can sell CS:Go and TF2 items for Steam credit. I'm not convinced this makes anything better. A slot machine isn't the only way to get money, but I still don't think we should market slot machines to children.

I think a lot of the people who dislike "lootboxes", but grew up with collectible card games like Magic, try to rationalize why one is okay and the other is not. And the hard truth is that it was never okay when Magic did it either, but the problem wasn't pervasive to the point where we had to address it. This isn't to say that Magic is evil or that everyone who bought random card packs as a child is now scarred for life, but it's not a great practice.

Collectible card games should not be a reason to allow loot boxes, and any laws we make ought to apply to both, instead of attempting to create strange carve outs.

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Disclaimer: I've never played Magic, and I avoid any video game that contains micro-transactions.

Edit: And just to be absolutely clear, this isn't to say that Magic should be banned any more than all video games should be banned, just that consumers should know what they're paying for, unless they're explicitly in a casino.

Like I said in my post, I think they're grayer than a lot of skinnerboxes, but that doesn't make them clean.

My understanding is that the vast majority of loot boxes are the sole way of acquiring the in game objects they posses. If there's a CS gun/skin/whatever in a loot box, you can't just go out and buy that thing for money. Transaction behavior is fine to me. That's one problem. Another is that you don't "own" that thing, you just have permission to use it. That's slightly different from owning a physical object.

It's an aggregate, and there are degrees of bad design patterns.

Whole game for single transaction > game with DLC > game with loot box for aesthetic features> game with loot box for core features.

I see your point that CCGs are basically the analogue version of loot boxes, and I can't entirely disagree. It's been called "cardboard crack" before, with good reason. As someone working for a tabletop gaming company who's primary product is randomized miniature figures used to play games, I also am WAY to close to this one to think objectively.

> If there's a CS gun/skin/whatever in a loot box, you can't just go out and buy that thing for money.

So, in Valve's games, this isn't true. Lootboxes are the only "first party" way to buy skins in CS: Go, but you can use the Steam marketplace to trade with other players.

I will stop using this specific game as an example. This particular dev might allow this, but many others don't which is a huge problem on the issue since these things are functioning as gambling for access to a service (the right to use a feature) instead of access to a commodity (that you can trade/sell).

I think the best example of a way to deal with acquired in game intems I can think of personally for something that didn't suck, was Diablo 3 when it first hit. If the game randomly dropped a high tier weapon, you could use it, trade it, or sell it for real money. The real money auction house was a great addition imo.

There are definite parallels between something like MtG and lootboxes, but I think the barrier for purchase is much lower with lootboxes. A physical product like MtG cards must be purchased at a store, which will have limited quantities. It requires effort and occasionally timing to actually obtain the items. Even in our modern world of online shopping, there is typically a wait time between the impulse to buy and the reward of receiving the items of at least 24 hours, often more.

With lootboxes, the payoff is immediate. The barrier between the impulse of someone with an addiction and the payoff is virtually non-existent. I think that makes a difference in the potential for addictive behavior that shouldn't be overlooked.

While I agree with you that loot machines are worse because they're always available and hyper-immediate, we know that gambling addiction is a thing, and CCG cards fit the pattern. I mean to play a slot machine, people used to have to travel all the way to casinos, convert their money to coins, and then play the slots. The addicts still did it.

The problem exists in all of them, we're just talking about the speed of delivery and how it makes somethings worse-bad instead of just bad.

You can also use your packs to draft Magic. Even if you don't get the cards you want, you still get to play a fun game.

In fact, conventional wisdom in MTGO is to never open packs and always draft them.

> I think ultimately, this is the same thing

There's one big difference. Those stickers were immediately tradeable. Actually exchanging the missing pieces with others was most of the fun. If you can only rely on the packs, that's all social fun cut out.

A sticker pack "whale" might be down $50, these games might crave a hundred to a thousand times that. Also while kids make the headlines, grown ups are a far bigger market. Simply banning loot boxes for kids is to ignore the majority of the problem.

The price to fill the World Cup 2018 Panini Sticker album is on average more than 800 Euros. If you can swap with a couple of friends (10+) the average price goes down to ~300 Euros.

A sticker pack whale will spend hundreds of Euros. If you only wanna spend 50 bucks better get another hobby tbh.

£150 for 3x500 stickers at Amazon. That should leave you missing approximately 75 stickers, which you can buy as singletons directly from Panini, at £0.25 a piece. So you can do it for £170 with absolutely no social interaction required. Definitely an unreasonable amount for a bunch of stickers, but still peanuts compared to what a freemium video game can cost.

Just to be clear, sticker collection economy is also shady, it just doesn't have a societal impact remotely like that of loot boxes.

> £150 for 3x500 stickers at Amazon.

This is a good price. I've been paying CHF 1.20 for 5 stickers at the local corner store.

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