In games with loot boxes, on the other hand, many people end up spending totally crazy amounts for their income and essentially ruin their life.
It's true that there is a continuous scale between baseball cards and the casino, with several factors influencing the level of addictiveness (immediacy, amount of maximum reward, etc.) and it's not obvious where one should set the limit. But there should be a limit, and IMO it should be one that heavily regulates loot boxes (and in particular, forbids minors from buying them) and doesn't touch CCGs or baseball cards. Claiming that we should not touch loot boxes because CCGs are similar would be a textbook example of the continuum fallacy.
Of course, it's still anecdotes. It's impossible to have actual data, as obviously the developers aren't going to give us statistics on how many people are spending unhealthy amounts of money in the game. But my impression (and the impression of most players I know) is that it's quite widespread, and I'm not talking about kids, but adults that just don't know when to stop.
The average quality of mobile games have plummeted. Most companies have no inventive to make good games when they can legally trick children into gambling.
You can present it wrapped in whatever glitz (or lack of) that you want, but the process is pretty much the same.
You're exchanging currency for a chance at getting something from a known subset of items.
Regarding currency, the real-world monetary cost is kept discreetly out of sight of the player, much like tokens are used in casinos, as part of the sleight of hand. They're not exchanging cold, hard cash; no, no, that would be crass. They're merely exchanging "gems", "crystals", "orbs", etc.
You could write a terminal program in which people can buy and open loot boxes; I guarantee you it won’t be as “effective” as a fancy loot box ceremony in an AAA video game.
(I put effective in quotes because it depends on what axes you’re looking at.)
Pokémon cards are clearly different enough is enough ways that they don’t cause the same amount of harm to anywhere near as many people as other forms of gambling do (such a pokies machines in bars and loot boxes in video games).
Sure, the core process may be the same, but that’s not all that matters. It’s how it connects to everything else and what the overall resulting effect is.
It's very different than having a number invisibly go down from your playstation gift card or a number invisibly go up on their parent's credit card.
If you have to hand over some number of physical tokens, and actively see your stash of them diminish, it's going to hit differently than letting someone handle your card, and then a number that you have to log into the bank to even see goes down.
I see ads for programs where you give your kids their allowance on a prepaid debit card, so it could get to the point where you could reach maturity without ever touching a dime. Will those kids be as frugal as the ones who got notes?
When you buy a loot box, you get some bits set on your account with the loot-box-seller. You can only resell them if the publisher lets you, and only via publisher-approved methods.
The reason this is a meaningful point of difference is that you no longer have the "I want X, and the only way to get it is to keep buying loot-boxes and hope". If you want a specific M:TG card, someone is happy to sell it to you for the right price; you don't have to dig through booster packs.
I don't really think that they're equivalent. If you were to make a Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh game that encouraged you to buy digital versions of those packs to make any progress in the game, then I think there would be a better comparison. The fact that those are online-only means that the house can essentially rig the game on the fly and engage in many more unscrupulous practices to keep you hooked. Made all the more easy by having a payment method directly linked.
It doesn't mean that physical CCGs have no addictive properties, of course.
Ironically, that makes TCG even more like gambling, in contrast to loot boxes which do not provide a cash-value payout.
What is progress? To compete in the top 1% of Overwatch you don't need to buy loot boxes at all. To compete in the top 1% of paper Magic or Pokemon you absolutely need better cards that have to be acquired from random packs at some point either by you, an LGS or somebody that sold it to an LGS.
2. Lootboxes can be purchased easily with credit cards and can be hidden easily from relatives
3. Login bonus and free pulls
4. CCG is arguably pay 2 play
5. Progression & achievements
6. Nation-wide or international-wide reach
7. Gameplay session and purchasing session most of the time are different
Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic The Gathering cards are still just as good as they were when they first came out, where as a lot of games from ~10-15 years ago no longer have a functional multiplayer mode because the servers hosted by the publisher are down.
You can gamble for cards in Pokemon or Magic, if you choose to. If you'd rather, you can hand me a list of cards and I can give you an exact to-the-cent price for you to get those. Loot boxes generally don't have that option. The price is anywhere from the price to get a box up to infinity, period.
You can also simply buy knock-offs. They aren't tournament legal, but nobody cares if you're using a Chinese knock off that you bought for $5 because you didn't want to pay $500 for a legit version.
If lootboxes gave players the option to buy and sell the items contained within, I think things would be different. Of course, that would also kill the profitability. If a casual player gets a really rare item right now, they have no choice but to keep it, and the whales have to keep buying boxes to get that item. If they could sell items, that casual player might decide they'd rather cash out that item for $300. Whale pays $300, consumer gets $300, game producer gets nothing. They could charge a transaction fee, but they probably could have gotten the whale to buy $500 worth of lootboxes trying to get that item.
The fact that duplicates are basically worthless doesn't help either. At least with Magic or Pokemon, you'd be hard pressed to buy a $5 pack that you couldn't resell for at least $1. Your worst case is bounded at a 20% return. It is entirely possible, and not at all rare, to get a lootbox full of duplicates and end up with nothing.
The number of players you contact also makes it easy for them to create items that are common to see, but not easy to get. If an item has a 1/20,000 drop rate, and the average player has opened 50 lootboxes, each player has roughly a 1 in 400 chance of having that item. If a Magic or Pokemon card is that rare, you'll maybe see one of them. It'd take a while to play Magic against 400 people. Meanwhile, in a 25 vs 25 game (or just 50 player for stuff like Fortnite), you'll see it in 1 out of every 8 games on average. That makes it seem like it's not too hard to get, right? You see it all the time.
And lastly, lootboxes are generally cosmetic, while trading cards are usually functional (maybe except baseball cards? I don't know if there's a game that goes with those or not). The rarity of cards can have a substantial impact on how the game plays, to the point where you can absolutely ruin the game by making some cards too rare. Nobody wants to play a card game where the winner is determined by who blew more money on their deck. Again, knock offs help with this.