Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

Change is inevitable... and in the past I used nostalgia as a mental point of origin to judge situations today. However I've come to see that change creates both negative and positive opportunity but it's just a matter of perspective.

I'm sure there are positive aspects to those 9 year olds discussing real estate, like an opportunity to discuss sustainable development or homelessness and charities like Habitat for Humanity. Who knows where those seeds will lead a 9 year old?

In essence, yeah, the core mechanic is the same, but the digitization of it fundamentally transforms its ubiquity, how often it can be iterated, optimized for more and more segmented group of kids, etc. I think there is an argument to be made that enough of that can effectively change the character of the activity itself, even if it is at first glance "sorta the same thing."

Also even the real money gambling in a game like FIFA is more dangerous than physical trading cards. With physical cards, you had to go to a store and pay at point of sale. You couldn't easily do that with your parent's credit card and there was always a person on the other end of the transaction to stop you or even just exist as a social obstacle to discourage obscene spending. Those obstacles don't exist with lootboxes. A parent's credit card can easily be added to an account and you don't have to look another human in the eyes to make a purchase.

Packs of cards also released specific sets with set odds. Games can add or change the contents of lootboxes on the fly, as well as adjust the odds to keep you hooked. They can strategically give you a rare or very useful (for you) item when you've had a long streak of junk to keep you interested, or evaluate your play-style and chats to determine exactly when you're most vulnerable (tired, manic, just got your birthday money, etc).

Loot boxes and gacha mechanics have their place, and can be fun but they are gambling and can also be exploitative. It's worth keeping a close eye on how they're being used and limiting the impact they'll have on kids.

Children used to steal trading cards and have violent fights over them. Only a few dedicated nerds played the game; the rest just collected the cards and showed them as a proxy of self-worth.

This is perfectly normal child behaviour, and I'm sure it was much worse than whatever's happening right now with lootboxes. The main difference between them isn't the lack car rides to the store; it's the moral panic mostly distributed by social media about how $fun_thing is killing children.

I did many addicting things in life an never became addicted.

Converting between currencies is easy "rule of three" - you learn that very early in school. Also, before the introduction of the Euro (and for some border frontiers in Europe even after), children who lived near borders of neighboring countries very often had to become accustomed to two (multiple) currencies from very early on and better were able to convert them in their heads.

> 7. Loot boxes are often built into games on ones phone and use tactics to encourage worse spending habits. This make loot boxes worse.

Encourage bad spending habits: sounds like classical advertising.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-games-make-you-convert-real-wor...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

and so on. I'm confident it's a purely anecdotical side effect, they are tons of reasons to use a virtual currency. Manipulating money on internet if awfully complicated AND Costly. Each transaction cost a lot (when dealing with microtransaction like in games), currencies are complicated and their value change a lot, simply reimbursing someone for low amounts can cost you more than the transaction total, and convincing someone to spend the time to fill a payement form is aldready complicated,asking to do so each time you want to spend less than the cost of a coffee is doomed to fail. In the (frequent) case of working with multiple store/processor, it also help you to abstract things : painfully make your currencies pack once in each store/platform, and them internally code your in game store using this currency, like 'standard' game currency.

"Tricking" users who can't apply a rule of three seems like anecdotical.

You needed to get the money and then make it to the shop that sells packs. It takes time and planning. Get money - maybe earn it by doing chores - go to shop and get the reward. While this might be problematic when thinking about gambling aspect it still taught you work => reward which is positive character building lesson for a child.

Versus use dad's credit card to get dopamine hit of opening the lootbox. Also almost entirely lootboxes are useless as you cannot sell the content, unlike the cards. And companies are introducing new ones with new rewards you NEED to get. I fail to see any positives for a child development here.

It sounds like trading cards and lootboxes are the same but its clearly not if you think about it.

The cards I played with decades ago when I was a kid in school have appreciated in value many multiples of times over.

If you're not completely convinced by some cosmetic item you might say "I don't know whether I really want this so I'll just wait and maybe buy it later". But if it's time-limited, in this case without indication whether it'll ever be on sale again, you cannot wait and decide later. It's deliberate time pressure on the decision.

This is the whole point of the fashion industry too, every year the "collection" changes, this makes people both afraid of being "left behind", but also of missing "classics" that won't be manufactured again, also it is why fashion designers release things in "collections", idea is seduce people in buying the entire collection, not just the piece they liked.

When you are dealing with something that has an actual value, for example a base-version magic the gathering or pokemon card, the value is exactly whatever the item is useful for, the more useful it is the more people pay for it, but when you are dealing with stuff that is useful to display social status, things change, and you end with people paying ludicrous amounts of money to buy a brick written "Supreme" when the "Supreme" guys themselves are not sure why this is happening.

https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/skate-brand-supreme-se...

Or in case of game cards, people willing to pay sky high prices because the card has special art, sometimes even if the art is UGLIER than the base version, just because it is rare and a social status, things get even wilder when the social status is part of the reason the card exists in first place (for example cards that were manufactured to be given to judges or championship winners)

From a neutral party standpoint (i.e. I neither want to purchase the skins, nor do I benefit financially from their purchase, nor do I wish to ban their sale outright), it seems obvious that a fungible, non-exhaustible digital good (with it's near-0 maintenance cost) should be restricted from exclusive periods of sale. There is no reason for it, other than to take advantage of human brain chemistry to drive a specific type of sale by producing artificial demand.

Yes, but Fortnite pushes this to the absolute extreme. It's one thing to visit a store with thousands of products where there's a discount on some of the items and a few limited-time offers. It's a very different thing to visit another store which has thousands of products but only makes eight of them available for sale each day, always as a limited-time offer, with no information about the rest of the catalogue.

This is true in exactly the sense that the brand and type of sneakers you wear has no-in school effect.

The player(s) you receive when you open the box is random and not known before you open the box.