Diablo Immortal won't release in the Netherlands and Belgium due to loot box law | Hacker News Reader

Diablo Immortal won't release in the Netherlands and Belgium due to loot box law

gamereactor.eu

224 pointsddtaylor129 comments

It's so sad to see a company throw away its IPs like this. Diablo 1 and 2 are works of art, and they will be remembered as such.

I mean D1 & D2 are not even comparable to Immortal. It might feel like the same franchise, but Immortal is basically like going to Las Vegas and playing a Diablo slot machine. D1 & D2 were self-consistent worlds, where the player is rewarded for killing enemies, and the rewards scale with difficulty. This is rendered completely meaningless the second you can buy items with money. Yes, this was still a problem back then, but the solution should have been removal of the store and trading, instead of making the store and market in-house.

Not just Blizzard, but also a large part of the game industry, have sneaked in a different product... from selling an experience, to selling tokens and items in their store.

I wouldn't care that much if they had created a new franchise, and named it something different (honestly this includes D3). However, it's the blatant disregard for games as an art form, transforming them into software services with stores. They will still make money, but it's not because they made a video game, but rather a fancy slot machine.

IMO this is another example of a company taking established trust in a franchise and exploiting it for a cash grab. The problem is that while players are upset right now they will forget and when Diablo 4 releases everyone will promptly pull out their wallets. There isn't much risk in companies doing these kinds of things because of consumer apathy.

In this specific case it's a "meh" from me because I think Diablo 3 mostly destroyed the franchise for me both in terms of lore and gameplay mechanics. Blizzard has gone on record as saying they aren't competing with Path of Exile in the ARPG market and see the market split into two parts: simple/casual (D3) and complex (PoE) and I prefer the more complex and engaging market. All of the information they have released about Diablo 4 so far fits in line with that thinking and is mostly a re-hashing of the D3 mechanics.

> IMO this is another example of a company taking established trust in a franchise and exploiting it for a cash grab.

It's a franchise. There is no aspect of this which is not a cash grab.

Correct, although the profit is coming from substantially different places and that influences the end product. It's like the difference between an artist selling a painting, and an artist selling parts of his painting by chopping it up and offering different pieces at different prices. In the latter example you end up with something that is less cohesive and a different experience.

"Diablo Immortal: The search for more money"

> Diablo 1 and 2 are works of art,

[...]

> the player is rewarded for killing enemies, and the rewards scale with difficulty.

Diablo 1 and 2 were good video games. They weren't intended as works of art, and they aren't. A game where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies isn't really anything new.

> Diablo 1 and 2 were good video games. They weren't intended as works of art, and they aren't

I disagree and consider both games to be works of art. Both games pushed the boundaries of cinematic story telling for the ARPG genre.

> A game where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies isn't really anything new.

A painting of a woman wasn't new in the early 1500s when the Mona Lisa was painted, but I think most would consider it a work of art.

I feel like you have a point somewhere, but knowing the history of games where you go around killing increasingly strong enemies, like the original Doom, makes me doubt the universality of your statement.

Immortal can be played for the mainline story without spending any money at all. So far, at least up to level 40 (about 12 hours of gameplay) I haven't felt the urge to spend money. It's a little like Path of Exile in that you can enjoy the base game and the story for free; it's only if you "get into it" that you start spending money (I never "got into it). I can't help but feel it's fair to give away a really nice game to everyone, supported by the super fans who stick around to dwell in the experience without bound.

Path of the Exile is not a far comparison. The most you can enhance is extra sorted inventory space.

In Immortal Cosmetics are locked to one character. PoE cross character, remind able, and serve as trophies between leagues.

That's not to mention the breaking of the mold to a near open world versus instanced. Which drives FOMO. As well how the transactions are gamified.

Why people dislike p2w games is that it directly effects gameplay via inflation of grind.

It is nit good game design. Good profit making sure, but at some point you have to admit that these studios pull talent from Vegas.

Be fair. This is an obligation of major studios to make as much profit as possible. However is this short term versus long term? Will the make the needed profit to make up for the lack of trust in the long run?

And with the Path of Exile inventory space purchase, the game is effectively a free trial with an optional purchase when you get sufficiently far into the game for inventory space and management to matter.

the "free trial" is still a great deal though. you get around 10 hours of gameplay per class if you're new (I'm aware the actual way to play the campaign takes only 5-6 hours)

also, there's a cap on how much you can spend on inventory tabs. and even then you don't "win", you still have to grind and be smart about what you do

To you it is a good deal where you save some dollars but at expense of the poor people with addiction disorders who get ruined by this. This isn't a good deal for society as a whole which is why such practices ought to be illegal.

I think free to play is fine when they employ less predatory practices, like for example league of legends. Some spent a lot of money in that game, so it works as a business strategy, but it wasn't designed to trigger sick people into a spiral where they spend more and more money. You buy a thing, now you have the thing, you don't pay money to pass artificial barriers or hoping to get the thing you want in a lottery. Paying money to pass a barrier just to get to another barrier you need to pay money to pass is also predatory in my opinion, not just the random lootboxes.

are you assuming I'm talking about D:I? I'm talking about PoE. To the average "gamers", they're not getting addicted to the campaign because it's so god damned hard for the uninitiated. If you get past the campaign and you still want more, obviously you gotta pay for the game, like any other serious game. There's a hard cap on how spending money influences your gameplay (iirc around $40-50), so it's not fair to compare this practice to what D:I (and countless other mobile games) do

The problem with Path of Exile's campaign is that it is dated, frustrating and unfun.

It pushes away new players with difficult instead of convincing them to play.

Maybe the pshchologists hired by the company that makes the game made a psychological profile of whales - and this allows good conversion. However they also wfite thwt they dont use data for decisions (just vibes) so it is not clear.

They seem to be lucky with no real competition apart from maybe Diablo3.

If you treat the campaign as a separate single player game that expects you to finish in 10-15 hours and never have to run it again, it's less bad. That's how new players should feel about it. If they like the game to the point to repeat the campaign, obviously they're the target audience for the game (those like to play RPG with cheatsheets on the side) and can deal with the campaign the "proper" way. I'm not saying they shouldn't fix the campaign though, but anything that we do 100 times over will be boring so I'm not sure what they can do

In Diablo 2 a friend could "rush you through the acts" what took like 20-30 minutes, not 5-10 hours

I would say that there is a huge difference between the amount of money spent on inventory tabs, and what is happening in diablo immortal, where it takes 100k for people to max out their characters.

It's not fair, it's predatory behavior aimed at addicts and children.

I hope the rest of the EU will follow the fine example set by NL and BE.

I agree. Then hopefully some companies will shift back to the model of making games and selling them. This whole FTP model has horribly misaligned incentives.

To be clear, it's not the free-to-play model itself which is illegal here. There are plenty of F2P games which are fine in these countries. It's specifically gambling-style loot boxes where you pay to have a small chance of winning very valuable items which is banned.

F2P games which are clear about exactly what you're getting for your money in each transaction are fine, and there are plenty of F2P games which do this successfully and legally.

There are games with loot-boxes that I believe have implemented it fairly so it is difficult to generalize this for a law. I am thinking of games like Star Trek Online. It has loot boxes but overall a very fair monetization in my opinion and one of the best models I have ever seen for a free to play game. Don't know if that changed since I played that ages ago but it still is very alive as far as I know. You were able to buy loot-boxes with ingame currency too via currency conversion and there was a market where players could trade ingame vs bought currency. It was or is a really smart system.

In general I hate f2p games and any kind of micro-transaction with a loathing passion but this is an example of an extremely fair system in my opinion. I will certainly not play Diablo Immortal. In my opinion they killed the IP and I don't believe Blizzard will ever get to its former success even when completely discounting WoW.

it's predatory behavior aimed at addicts and children.

Have you played the game? I saw the OG YT video on this, and I was expecting to see lots of in-your-face tactics, but wanted to be fair before passing judgement. I really don't think it's predatory. At least, not yet. Maybe things change at higher levels - they sometimes do. (I'm looking for points where you can't progress in the mainline quest without spending money or ridiculous time. Haven't seen that yet but it may be there.)

They give out daily free items to draw you into the cash shop and then have small purchase offers to break the first purchase barrier. They sell in game currency to obfuscate the money you're spending and sell it in random amounts so you need to overbuy or make multiple purchases. They set dubious cost savings measures of 500-800% value on items to make them more artificially tantalizing.

They got me for $7 with the small cheap purchases. Then I hit level 60 and found myself thinking “well $100 is something I can easily afford, why not spend it?”.

I then uninstalled the game. My wife was glad and said I’d been a grumpy zombie all weekend, ignoring her and my kids.

Have you played it? I have. It's constantly throwing bundles with "+x00% value" in your face and does everything it can to try to get you to pay for stuff. And it gets far far worse when you hit the level cap. And no, it's not a valid excuse that it's a free game, so "I shouldn't complain". I'll gladly pay 60-120 Euros for a complete game as long as it treats me fairly as a customer.

I don't think it matters _when_ it becomes predatory. Whether or not gambling should be legal aside, if gambling for minors is illegal in a jurisdiction then i'd expect any game that becomes predatory at any point to be managed as gambling.

All of this is subject to the definition of gambling, predatory, etc - of which i'm not trying to argue. Just saying that befriending children with the goal of handing them drugs after a "long" period doesn't change that i'm still handing them drugs. Same goes for this, i would think - if it falls within those definitions, of course.

Diablo Immortal is wild too because Diablo 2 primed me 15 years ago to be a gambling addict. It took them awhile but the finally turned the casino of my teens into a real casino. I hate it, I wish I could get my teen hours back that I played Diablo 2.

Agreed. I've often thought of this, with respect to MMOs, and RPGs/etc with drop rates.

Inherently games are all just dopamine drivers. Some are of course based on physical skills (coordination/timing/etc), others on knowledge as a skill (exploiting game mechanics/etc). Where it gets fuzzy fast for me is very basic MMOs, RPGs, etc - RNG based mechanics. The fact that i completed the dungeon with a skill (knowledge/etc to play the dungeon correctly and win) doesn't seem, to me, to change the RNG roll at the end.

I'm in no way arguing that any RNG equates to gambling.. in the classical sense.. but it kinda does, if you squint. So when does it become bad? Is it when we make gambling addicts? Because old fashioned games with RNG rewards (loot/etc) likely form addicts (if we stretch the word for discussion).. myself included. Or is it just when we involve money?

Money seems an easy line to draw.. but is it fair to children if we make them gambling addicts and only charge them once they hit 18? Spend their youth training for the casinos, only to take part when their old enough to lose it all?

I don't have any answers.. but it feels like we're playing fast and loose with weaponized dopamine here. As with most of our society, i suppose.

I fully agree that we're training future addicts. And it's not like people don't know. There will be a deliberate sequence of hook, time sink, random reward because that's most addictive.

But I find balancing this very difficult. We want fun games and fun things are addictive. But we don't want addict-creating games. So how do you measure which amount of addiction is the correct amount?

I suspect we're unable to do anything until we understand the brain better, what defines addiction (at a very measurable, concrete way), etc.

The one thing that does scare me about addiction + money is that, like Diablo, the companies incentive seems aligned with getting players to spend vast quantities of hours and money. Regardless of what it is right now or what value it offers for free, that seems to be their incentive.

Simple buy models without MTX seem an easier model to keep company incentives aligned with player incentives.

I played a bunch of D2 as well, and D3. The thing with those games is that you can still enjoy the end game content after finishing the main game. Repeat on higher difficulty and then you have the option of respecing without having to start from scratch.

If you are having to pay to enjoy end game now, that's pretty sad.

Diablo Immoral!

People aren’t really addicted to progress, that’s window dressing for the mechanic that gives you the gambler’s high.

I think a lot of folks who are effectively immune to gambling’s allure dismiss the danger to others when they don’t see anything slowing or blocking progression because that’s what would motivate them to even entertain the thought of engaging the gambling mechanic. I think what you’re really evaluating is whether or not it’s pay to win which while terrible, isn’t insidiously predatory.

Being predatory isn't about gating later advancement, that's actually less of a problem in my eyes, that's just a different form of DLC. What makes some games predatory is when when combine payments with randomness as to what benefit you get. That's why people are calling it gbling, because it uses the same mechanisms and is using all the lessons learned from casinos as to how to effectively maximize engagement and income.

The difference? Gambling is often regulated so there's specific payout percentages. Because there's not a direct monetary payout but instead a decoupled game benefit, it's not regulated the same way, so they're free to do whatever they want with the payouts (including valuing all the items however they want if they are called on to), as well as market to children who may not recognize the system for what it is.

Europeans understand that you don't have to play, right? I'm not playing. I don't think I've ever played a game with a lootbox. No part of me feels compelled to legislate away the liberties of my fellow countrymen.

If my tax money pays for treating the ruined lives that these games create, then I feel justified in legislating the risk away.

Your tax money pays for treating the ruined lives that alcohol creates. Should alcohol be illegal?

It is mostly children playing these games, and yes we absolutely should save our children from gambling-based games.

So you maintain that it is the role of the state to determine what our children do, and you think that in order to have the state determine what children do...we need to restrict what everyone else does as well?

It isn't designed to prod you into spending much before level 40 precisely because they want you to form the daily habit, the investment first. Whales are harder to create now that awareness of gacha is more mainstream. Make no mistake, you'll feel the pull to swipe soon, do report back about whether you decided to quit or pay in a few weeks.

And my golden rule of thumb, you either spend 0 in microtransaction, or at least 1000$, almost never in between since usually this game is designed with additional content that will dangling your carrot further and further, needing more and more money.

That's silly. I've spent like $40 in Hearthstone over the last 5-6 years. And I know a lot of people like that. It's not "all or nothing", plus there's a sense of fairness when you really like a f2p game, to spend something out of appreciation. (Although in general I'll cap my own spending to the price of a typical AAA game, e.g. $60, because otherwise I feel stupid and taken advantage of.)

Back in the earliest days of Hearthstone, control warrior was more colloquially known as “wallet warrior” due to how expensive it was to craft all the epics and legendaries needed to fill out the meta deck. And yet, it wasn’t the best deck in the game. Depending on when exactly we’re talking about, that title belonged to decks like miracle rogue (two legendaries but only Leeroy was truly core) or combo druid (zero legendaries iirc, possibly Cenarius). And then you had incredibly cheap aggro decks like zoo warlock that could still compete at the highest ranks.

By the time I quit HS at the beginning of this year, the “cheap” aggro decks generally cost about as much as old miracle rogue and nearly all the non-aggro top meta lists were at least in the same ballpark as a deck formerly considered so expensive it was nicknamed wallet warrior.

The game has definitely gotten dramatically more expensive for anyone looking to branch outside the aggro archetype. What turned me off enough to finally quit were the yearly tweaks to monetization that kept being sold as a good thing but were obviously just further efforts at obfuscating the cost of playing.

- played since beta, sunk a couple grand into ranked standard, maintained legend or dad legend (rank 5) every month for years. Idk if I’m a whale, but the predatory practices finally reached a head

Isn't spending "at least $1000" already whale territory?

Maybe if you spend that in a month and only play for a month. Whale territory isn't even affordable for average people.

Gacha meaning: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gacha

Very little like Path Of Exile. That game can be played to its full extent without ever spending. If you feel like spending 5-10 dollars you can get a premium tab so your item gets easily listed on trade -- but that's a single purchase and then you are done with spending. This makes it easier to trade your gear for in game currency with others -- but it's possible if clunky without and also there's a solo self found mode where you can't trade anyways so why bother. I can't emphasize enough: there's nothing in Path Of Exile where real world money affects the gameplay. You can't get better gear, skill points or whatever by paying real world money for it.

No. Sell me a game, not a matryoshka of skinner boxes I have to pay for.

I don't get this comment. This is how the game is incompatible with gambling regulation. This is same as "casinos are great to stay because foods and drinks are cheap", it's cheap because the cost is offset by gambling income which is horrible. Am I missing something?

Not remotely similar to Path of Exile and that comparison reveals inexperience in the field.

Diablo Immoral is a very thinly veiled Lost Ark clone gacha game reskinned as a simplified diablo 3. There is very little meaningful feeling to loot. The skills are all really simple and there's just a couple different builds to pick between that it even lays it out for you. It hand holds you all the way through to the point of being bottable with an auto-clicker.

You can't do any of that in Path of Exile and you find meaningful items all the way throughout the game at every step of the way and your build truly your own if you want it to be at every step of the way. Then the content itself has great variety and there is extensive challenge to it.

I haven't gotten to end-game in diablo immoral but I wouldn't be surprised if it's literally a direct clone of end-game lost ark but simpler and basically hard stops you if you don't pay for legendary gem upgrades on every piece of gear. And at that point there really is nothing to the game at all. It's pay us money to beat the monster. No technical skills no build depth no variety of equipment. It's your 5 star gacha rolls or no dice.

Even at level 40 now I'm experiencing serious content rot. There's just nothing to the game at all. It is such a thin veil it's easy to see through instantaneously. It's the same as Lost Ark. Do this auto-generated dungeon from this town portal in town or do that one. They're all the same thing with very little variation. But you don't even get anything out of them meaningful. You either get a very obviously rapidly declining EXP curve or a tiny bit of loot (unless you bring those precious legendary crests!)

The first part of your comment resonates with me, there are certainly freemium games out there that feel great if you commit to not spend any money on them. I put about 100 hours into Destiny 2, and got a lot of fun and immersion out of it before I quit -- I felt like I was "over" the free content.

Meanwhile, I see people who are deep into that game (season passes, expansions, etc) and they look like someone you know who's on the bad end of an unhealthy relationship. They keep on playing and paying for the new content, but they loathe it and just can't summon the strength to quit.

A season pass is quite different to a loot box, however. You're spending a fixed amount each month and hopefully getting entertainment value in return. Not much different to a Netflix or Spotify subscription.

Loot boxes, on the other hand, are tapping in to addictive gambling behaviours. They're like casino slot machines, except unregulated!

I agree with this. Not a popular opinion, because it's not railing on a company. Free to play with legitimate and enjoyable content is a gift.

I don't think I can enjoy a game so much that I'd spend more than $100 for 40 hours of play. Beyond that dollar amount, it's really $/hr for me. If I'm sitting there spending $50 in a play session, then I will not be able to continue doing so without guilt and self-loathing.

Games, particularly RPGs are about optimizing characters and builds. Especially Diablo/ARPGs. The campaign was never the meat of the game. It's a part of it, but not the core. You can't actually participate in the core gameplay loop without spending decades in game or spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Actually in the case of Immortal some things are simply not possible by only playing.

That's not a game anymore, it's a skinner box.

I'm always fascinated by $/hr of entertainment.

Video games are generally extremely cost efficient entertainment. A $20 Minecraft purchase can lead to hundreds of hours of entertainment. $20 to see Top Gun: Maverick in IMAX is 2 hours of entertainment.

Everyone has their spending habits, but for me I don't think twice about going to see a movie with my family of 6. But I'm pretty selective about buying games.

Hello from the Netherlands!

We consider that it's a really bad idea to have gambling games that are deliberately engineered to be as addictive as possible to encourage players to spend money, particularly when they are available to children.

Interestingly, casinos _are_ allowed here, unlike in much of the US.

> supported by the super fans who stick around to dwell in the experience without bound.

Your "super fan" is what most of us call "a gambling addict".

> Interestingly, casinos _are_ allowed here, unlike in much of the US.

But casino's and other forms of gambling are licensed, and they are held to strict rules. For example: casino's will refuse entry to people when their gambling habit becomes problematic. They also don't allow in minors.

I bet Blizzard doesn't do any of those things. If they wanted, they could simply apply for a license and play by the rules.

Some "free to pay" games are actually quite fun if you force yourself to not pay (or severely limit paying) - Hearthstone is a good one - I've hundreds of wins across the various game modes and only made one purchase to get the beta gold legendary something or other.

You can play it without paying but good luck with the end-game content. To get the most out of a single item at that stage in the game you either have to pay or wait multiple weeks.

If you've made it to the end maybe you should pay?

If it was a mainline Diablo game I might, but that's not the kind of product they're selling. If I chose to treat it as such I would be dropping significantly more than the usual 60-70 dollars. That's a bad deal, even more so for those with gambling tendencies.

I got probably a thousand hours out of Diablo 2 for $100 total. Somehow I feel like the value proposition of $110,000 to have a maxed out character isn’t so great.

I can't believe people are even playing devil's advocate here. The level of quality has dropped so far the company should go bankrupt over games like this in a world not driven by perverse incentives.

These US-based companies that made a couple good games really have too much goodwill going for them. Same with Bethesda. Imagine if CDProject did something like this, the snarky anglo hate would be infinite.

I mean a lot of US companies are like this. Some grifter VC firm buys the face of your favorite thing then starts pumping out garbage and gaslights you for noticing. The people who worked on Diablo 2 or even the original World of Warcraft are long since gone.

I’ve even noticed it with Cocomelon, the YouTube toddler show, funny enough. Then I looked it up and realized it had been bought by a kids show corporation. I could just tell! The episodes are just different and weird somehow. Like the lessons they’re teaching seem off. Before it was just an enterprising mom and dad running a YouTube channel teaching wholesome values.

It also explains all the new toys and marketing around it.

There's a lot of MTX but my guess is that $100k number will change over time. Surely they'll introduce new tiers to reach (or buy). You'll never finish... but on the other hand it's pointless to be maxed out anyway.

The same can also be said for other highly addictive and risky activities. It's possible to try some highly addictive drug once and not get hooked or "use responsibly" - but most would say it's not worth the risk. It's especially strange in this case because there are games that look and play significantly better that don't have the same risks!

Actual lv. 60 player here. (proof: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1533201559776923650 )

There's an interesting amount of misinformation regarding MTX in Diablo Immortal. But the TL;DR is that the significant gameplay advantages from MTX only really apply at higher Paragon levels, especially not before lv. 60. The primary way of increasing power before that is the same as it was in any Diablo; get better gear, which can't be accelerated by MTX at all.

That said, post-60 there are still a few systemic issues surprisingly not explicitly tied to the existence of MTX. (required grouping for dungeons is not fun)

> The lootboxes in the game are against the law in your country, so unless the gambling restrictions change, the game will not be released in the Netherlands and Belgium.

I think it’s disturbing how they frame this as something the country has to change. As if it’s their fault for banning it, as opposed to Blizzards’ for making a gambling game in the first place.

This is beating a dead horse, but pay-to-win "games" are disgustingly user hostile, and deserve nobodies money. Please, be principled and keep your money. Blizzard was a respectable company around the time StarCraft 1 came out, but it started downhill with WoW and only accelerated with the Activision merger. Support smaller studios that are daring enough to still focus on making things purely fun as opposed to continuously exploiting your psychology for money.

I agree with you, but for every hundred or thousand of us that refrain it can be dwarfed by a few whales that get "duped" into enabling these kinds of games.

> Support smaller studios

In the ARPG space this probably means supporting Eleventh Hour Games and their Last Epoch series. Path of Exile by Grinding Gear Games is a fantastic game, but they are 90% owned by Tencent now, so they probably don't qualify as a "smaller studio".

By simply playing the game (even without paying), we are helping to support the whaling. After all, not even whales want to play a game that has no players in it. Nobody to show off to; nobody to beat into the ground with the equipment they've purchased.

Diablo Immortal faces a backlash as Metacritic user score drops to Blizzard’s third lowest ever

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/diablo-immortal-fac...

A fitting fate for the "do you guys not have phones"[0] game.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-guys-not-have-phones

A substantial portion of that audience probably wishes they could get away with not having phones.

"Third lowest" says a lot about Blizzard's recent releases. They might have made more money in the short term, but their reputation is thrashed.

Wonder how many people actually played the game as opposed to parroting whatever they heard from YouTubers? Metacritic user score has become useless since people started to doing review bomb.

The Play Store review score is also steadily dropping. It used to be at 4.4. It's at 3.5 now.

Related, couple of days ago, 700 million comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628848

I’m fine with micro transactions in games (even “pay to win” although I don’t play those myself). But digital gambling is manipulative and should be regulated just like physical gambling. Props to these countries for stepping up.

Honestly, I personally hope most countries mark it as gambling. Good for both countries.

I wonder if it would be ok if the player age was verified to be above the ”gambling age limit”?

That would result in a PEGI 18 classification which is also something the publishers of these games have been fighting tooth and nail.

Not in the Netherlands. They are not allowed for any age players unless it complies to certain rules. If the content of lootboxes are not transferable they are not forbidden. Gambling is strictly regulated here.

https://dutchgamesassociation.nl/2018/04/26/loot-boxes-nethe...

Volunteer that your games are not meant for children and permanently submit your cash cow games to legislative scruitany? It'll never happen. If legislated across the world, they still wouldn't admit that their products 'could cause harm's. Why open yourself to the liabilities? No, they'll just do everything they can to prolong the greed.

I hope that loot-boxes and eventually micro-transactions become outlawed or at least age-restricted. One time, I had to help an immigrant neighbor investigate why $400 of his paycheck went missing, and it turned out that his son (who had no appreciation of how much money that is in West Virginia) blew it on Fortnite skins. I never found out if the bank refunded the transaction.

Sounds like a success to me?

> The lootboxes in the game are against the law in your country, so unless the gambling restrictions change, the game will not be released in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Anyone know what the law is?

Here's a good article on the law in Belgium and the issue generally.

https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-gambling-law-review/be...).

I think unpredictable prizes with nominal cash value (ie, digital gambling)

Diablo Immoral

I hate how games nowadays have credits and tokens and gambling things. Totally ruined the purity of games, I'm a millennial ex-gamer and recently got back into games via a PS5 and noticed how everything has changed now for the worst.

It would be funny to take a stab at micro-transaction based classic games.

I mean chess, checkers, crazy-8's, uno, etc

(of course funny until it makes money and you follow l ron hubbard's course)

Elden ring

True. I did feel an actual sense of relief at like... you just buy the game, and you have the game, and you get what you paid for, and there's no manipulative BS trying to bilk even more money out of you. None of this "there's sooo much more available, but at a price, on top of what you already paid". Plus the game is just damn awesome outside of all that!

Agree to disagree maybe, but I'm happy that many games are free because of microtransactions.

His argument is that games nowadays are devoid of depth and content outside thinly veiled addiction models with shinies. He's totally right about it.

Even competitive games are taking a turn for the worst with forced changes to the meta. It makes more money but it is an abusive addiction cycle of making someone's favorite thing broken but making someone else's favorite thing useless.

Given how microtransactions are typically there to reduce time / grind, I'd hardly say they're free though. Time is money.

It’s a bizarre scenario that this is not allowed, yet if you’d visit the Netherlands right now. You’d be swarmed with gambling ads since online gambling has been legalised since a year now.

Even worse is that if you visit any nice museum there’s a huge chance you’d find some folks there try to recruit people to join the national lottery. It’s a disgrace. Especially as they do it all under the guise of non-profit and all that while only giving 45% to charities of which none are supporting addiction prevention.

I think it’s good that this game is not allowed here as loot boxes are a sham, but it does seem weird that gambling is such an overt and condoned activity by almost everyone, including the parliament.

>You’d be swarmed with gambling ads

Presumably the Dutch government had an agreement with the industry to voluntarily stop the public advertising. Presumably also a number of parties held to that agreement, while some others are still advertising. An excuse I've seen is that they had advertisement scheduled before the agreed-on date, but billboard space and such didn't come available until later. It sounds like the government will introduce regulations if the self-regulation doesn't work. It may still wind down and be fine?

To my knowledge the one law introduced was the disallowance of public characters (mostly footballers at this moment) appearing in advertisements. Other than that it was indeed hoped that the industry would regulate itself.

The very odd thing is that a lot of shows still include them. The intent of the Dutch government is to be the largest shareholder in most gambling activities, to not allow the illegal field to take over. Yet you can find it being normalised in so many shows. TOTO has been winning the advertisement prize awards years on end already. And not be targeted to the younger audience yet you find most advertisements especially targeted to them.

The latest change in legalisation of online gambling made it explode to ever more absurd levels. There is very little reason to expect the market to manage itself.

It’s great that these loot boxes are banned and I hope it stays that way, and the severe advertisement industry around these gambling practices is winded down.

Remember when Blizzard mocked the fans who said Diablo 3 was too colorful and cartoony?

Path of Exile is such a better successor to diablo 2.

Diablo 3 was really bad if you liked Diablo 2. Always felt like PoE was the real successor but didn’t really try it…

it's simply the best action RPG available. It has limitless depth and tremendous player agency

I have to be the voice of dissent. I played it for a few hundred hours (but nothing like the hours I sunk into Diablo I & II!), and for the first few days of play it was almost more fun finding bugs and little "polish issues" than the actual game itself.

PoE is the diametric opposite of the quality you see in a typical Blizzard game.

It's fun in its own way, and it is free, but calling the the "best RPG available" is a stretch.

I had a list of all of the issues I found, but I lost the text file to a PC upgrade, so I won't type them all out here, but the most glaring one for me was that when you moved from one area to the next, the door orientation was inconsistent/random, so you'd often end up going click-click-click to move and then move back to the previous area by accident. With the slow loading times this was particularly frustrating.

I've had debates with PoE fans, and they gaslight me by telling me that "there are no issue", "the game is perfect", etc...

That's actually an interesting psychological phenomenon all by itself! People can get acclimatized to anything and learn through trial and error what to do to avoid issues. For example, I learned to avoid the door orientation thing by pausing the move clicks when entering new areas, so I stopped noticing the bug. But the bug is still there! It didn't go away. I changed, the game didn't.

This is why players with 1K+ hours in PoE swear that it is awesome, polished, and bug-free. They don't even realise all the tiny habits they've picked up to avoid the bugs. It's like knowing to double-click desktop icons, but single-click web URLs. This isn't consistent. It isn't good. But people learn and get used to it, and stop thinking about it as a problem... until they watch Grandma use a PC. That's when you realise... oh... it's actually a terrible, unintuitive user interface.

This is why Microsoft famously used to use random people off the street for UX testing. Internal testers learn to avoid the rough edges after years and years of clicking around the same GUI.

PS: I just remembered another glaring bug. Setting the game resolution to 4K would set the monitor resolution to 4K, but the game would render in 1080p and upscale. This wasn't a feature, the game simply couldn't write the value 3840 to the config file because there was a "sanity check" in the config GUI (why!?). If you manually edited the config file, you could play it at actual 4K. Again, people would swear up and down that no-no-no, I was wrong, it's a flawless game and runs buttery smooth at 4K, etc... meanwhile they're playing a blurry game that they just assume is "the PoE look" and some sort of stylistic choice.

Two or three years ago, I played PoE on PS4 and thought it ran great. I came up with a powerful but boring PvE build. I forgot how I did it but the character would spin like a tornado and blades would twirl around it. I kept on tweaking the build and I think too many effects would trigger at once and it crashed the game. I didn't know I could be interested in this aspect of a game and had a ton of fun pushing the limit. Breaking the game was rewarding in some sense.

I didn't have in me to explore more of the game so I stopped. I recently picked it back up on Steam Deck; it runs great and I am getting 6 hours of battery life.

try playing PoE on hardcore with no prior knowledge. 100% guaranteed your run will flop before you blink an eye. run #10 won't do much better. there's way too much weirdly named crap that gives no warning whatsoever. you just suddenly die. I mean - it's hardcore, all good, right? I'm whining about discoverability - lack of natural path to right information at right time and not just some postmortem googling // still better than diablo 3/immoral

> try playing PoE on hardcore with no prior knowledge

Why would anyone do that? I can't imagine this being fun for any game that offers a hardcore mode. Actually I'd pay to watch someone do that with like, Elden Ring.

It was developed by NetEase, which is even worse than Tencent.

In Tencent's game, if you pay some money, then you can enjoy the game. The more you pay the better experience you will get.

NetEase: "Yes, you paid some money, but I'm still your father"

Just remember folks: According to ABK this game took as many resources as a mainline PC game. So, instead of having a D4 release, with a D5 release on the horizon, we got Diablo Immoral.

Nah this one was developed by Chinese devs.

They didn't develop it without Blizzard's help.

It was outsourced to Netease, they already make comparable games. I'd bet they mostly just got some Blizzard assets and maybe some high level signoff on things to ensure they are ok.

Chinese developers aren't incompetent, they just have a hard time marketing their games to a western audience. Slapping a western brand name on one of their games is a perfectly reasonable way for them to do that.

Sorry, I wasn't implying they were incompetent. But they got Blizzard sign off on this. Otherwise they would just have another sleazy pay to win game. Now they have a sleazy game wrapped in Diablo assets.

... who could have been working on Diablo 4.

Weird, if true. Diablo Immortal is rated M (17+) [0], the gambling age in the Netherlands is 18 [1].

0 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blizzard.d...

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_age

The age rating creates no legal restrictions on purchasing a game. It’s “self regulation” with all the attendant chicanery.

Seriously, good.

Given the game is free to play (freemium), I find it interesting that random stuff can't drop on the ground. So games can't give away free digital goods? Is this only in the context of people who paid something?

Where did "free digital goods" come from? People have to pay money - sometimes a lot of money - for these loot boxes.

I'm fine with random loot tables, but the moment I need to pay to roll the dice it stops being a "random item drop" and starts looking awfully like a "slot machine".

To be fair, the last sentence in GP comment makes it fairly obvious they're just trying to understand the context in which this applies.

"Lootboxes" means different things to digfer people, depending on their experience with the genre, even if those that have been following along think of it as "pay for random item roll", as I believe is the case here.

They boost the chance of getting rare loot in dungeons and possibly (no confirmation without posted loot table odds) some items can only ever be acquired with the boost active. It's loot boxes with more steps.

I think they are talking about unpaid loot/ loot boxes

Yes, I'm fairly sure this is in the context of people that pay addrioltional money to unlock a random item roll chance in game. For additional context, see all the news about star wars battlefront 2 a few years back, there this really got a lot of popular coverage.

Malicious compliance.

I don't know the game, but even before reading this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662776 I couldn't help supposing that some people at the company think, fuck them for this stupid law, let's punish these countries.

Then I started wondering how to prevent malicious compliance.

In my opinion it makes sense to steer dangerous products causing addictive behavior like drugs as in opioids, cannabis, nicotine. Note! Only steer, not forbid. For me it looks like that Europe is trying to do the right thing but they didn't yet find out how.

Malicious compliance somehow needs to be steered, too, because it causes real damage.

Edit: I am not sure whether one uses the word "steer" as I did, but the synonym "regulate" sounds too bureaucratic to me.

let's punish these countries.

I don't think not having access to Diablo Immortal is meaningful 'punishment' for a couple of small but, you know, sovereign states. I doubt anyone at Activision thinks that.

While I agree with the idea that we need to address corporate malicious compliance and other such behavior in very a very swift and stinging fashion I don't think that this is an example of malicious compliance.

Being presented with a rule and declining to do the thing that would require you to follow the rule is the opposite of malicious compliance.

Malicious compliance is when you do the thing,and follow the rule but for the purpose of inflicting unanticipated damage on the entity that is compelling you to follow the rule.

Imagine a situation where a parent tells their child that they must spend 60 minutes cleaning their room or they won't get ice cream. A child who says 'Yeah, no, I don't want ice cream that bad" isn't being maliciously compliant, while a child who says 'Yeah sure thing mom, 60 minutes of cleaning" while they spend that time doing cleaning their room as slowly as possible is malicious compliance.

The comparison with nicotine is apt. With that in mind some simple ideas come to mind.

- Hard age restriction for all games with money gambling elements

- Mandatory product labelling

- Restrictions on marketing material, disallow glorification of gambling (not sure I think this is needed, but it's done for cigarettes and alcohol)

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