A lobbying blitz made sports betting ubiquitous
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As an industry, gambling doesn't really produce anything. It is a form entertainment, but a very expensive one for the consumer relative to something like movies. It can also be extremely exploitative. The information imbalance between the consumer and provider is massive and there's a whole industry around innovating new ways to make gambling more appealing and profitable.
It's like mobile devices are digital cigarettes.
TBH I think it's kind of a shame because I never had a problem with this sort of thing for cosmetic only rewards. It's fun to crack them open and see what you get and it doesn't give you any sort of advantage over other players because it's all cosmetic.
Mobile games where the lootboxes contain stuff you actually need to progress in the game (and often require you to spend hundreds or thousands to get to the upper tiers of power/content) are a whole different story but thankfully that doesn't seem to have corrupted the PC/Console gaming space yet.
Are there any big AAA PC/Console games that still use these mechanics? Fifa/Madden I'm assuming but I'm also out of the loop and haven't played a Fifa game since like 2018.
To your point about cosmetic-only though, that still exists. Rocket League, which I play regularly, gives out boxes you open and get a random cosmetic with varying degrees of rarity. You can get a net larger amount of these cosmetic boxes by paying for the Rocket Pass premium (something like $10 a season). But the loot boxes only ever contain skins, wheels, etc.
And they're correct lmao
Mythic in Standard is possible (played cheap monoblue last season to diamond 1, mono black now almost mythic) and having some fun drafting. 0% need to invest any money. Obvioulsy I won't have all the stuff but that's fine. I'm ok with identifying one deck I like to play for standard and then just drafting until coins/gems run out (ideally never because the winrate is good enough). I also don't care at all about cosmetics and was happy to see there's even an option to turn them sort of off (hide alternate card styles). I still got quite a lot of free cosmetics as well.
It is however interesting that they do have a pretty good value "first buy" option. I was always curious if it is priced so cheaply to get people from a "I'm a free player mindset" to...well payed once, might as well buy more now (+the friction of setting up payment is gone).
I'm an avid board gamer and I can say very confidently that I would never get into any paper based CCG because the pricing/collection is just ridiculous to me. If it wasn't for the free to play online veryion, I wouldn't play magic (I did buy some of the stuff back in the college days but quickly realized what a money sink this would be). I do/did collected some LCGs and still rank Android Netrunner as one of the best gaming experiences in my life.
I admire the strategy and the creativity that goes into reinventing it, but I also wonder if this will mean he misses both the diversity and also story-heavy classics from my childhood and onwards. All while chasing gold guns and dance moves.
Be wary of predatory monetization techniques yes, but a bunch of people playing Fortnite because it's a fun, well designed game is not a bad thing.
(I deleted a comment where I worded the same thing much less eloquently. I'll keep the incredulous hostility to the one comment in this thread)
I've played a fair bit of Fortnite Duos with him (or Squads), and don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the design and so on. It's a fun, clever game. The juicing I'm talking about is the chests, and the skins, and rolling in the latest movie co-marketing. And the way it is all stimulus and barely story.
Re: "Juicing" - I saw the word and immediately assumed you were using the definition from this classic gamedev talk, well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
Meanwhile, I can recall dozens of really memorable games I played while growing up. And into adulthood, there have been fantastic games with storylines comparable to all-time classic movies. Imagine missing GTA V, Last of Us, Red Dead, HZD and so on because you only ever played multiplayer CoD for years on end; huge shame, IMO.
And yes, I know that video - we tried to use that thinking with a game we developed. I was thinking of juicing beyond visual gameplay. Chests that act like gambling scratchies, etc.
Kids play a lot of Fortnite because it's a fun game with a compelling "just one more round" hook (you should try it, or PUBG or Warzone if you want something a bit less wacky, it's fun!). It's not that insidious. When I was younger my peers were just as obsessed with (pick one of WoW, DOTA, Counterstrike).
I think you may be unaware of the extent to which players, including children, are engaging in real-money gambling at the periphery of video games. Here's some recent reporting on the topic.
Tl;Dw there's a thriving, multibillion dollar gray market for gambling with cosmetic items in games, as well as a market for trading these items for real money. Together this creates stealth real money casinos.
* Valve banned servers from "Allowing players to claim temporary ownership of CS:GO items that are not in their inventory (Weapon skins, knives, etc.)"
I can see how the mechanics around lootboxes specifically can be problematic, but overall, f2p + paid skins seems like a pretty good business model for a game. no one is priced out of the base game, which is a) just nice in general, and b) leads to a healthy playerbase size. the people that care the most end up funding the ongoing support, and the developer is incentivized to make the base game enjoyable enough to be worth purchasing skins for.
Pundits have the financial incentive to become memorable caricatures.
Some of the worst odds are offered by state-run lotteries and it's got nothing to do with information imbalance.
People literally line up to play MegaMillions/Powerball and all the information is readily available.
The apologists for this sort of thing are every bit as disgusting as those presiding over it.
Holier-than-thou much?
The point isn’t to shame my peers, nor is it that my grandparents generation was without vice, but that maybe there’s something robust about developing a culture of conventional wisdom as a fallback for an increasingly unreliable government? Maybe policy isn’t the only thing that matters?
In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope
That's still not what the original poster was talking about. I didn't check his numbers, but involuntary partial employment is a thing, and I don't see a reason why those people shouldn't be counted.
Let's say we want a nest egg allowing a two-person household to have a retirement income of $60k: quite a bit below the median household income in the US but still considerably above the poverty line, a net positive considering you don't need to work for a living as long as you don't plan for either one of you to live for more than 30 years.
$60k is 75% of $80k, so that nest egg shrinks down to a mere $1.5 million dollars. But you should aim to live on 80% of your pre-retirement salary, so your pre-retirement salary should therefore have been $75k. In order to get there you need to set aside 15% of that $75k household salary (including any 401(k)s) every year, or just shy of $12k, leaving you with $62k actual income after retirement savings or $5.2k per month for the household (you, your spouse, any children, rent, cost of living and savings for emergencies like health, maintenance or replacements).
If that doesn't sound so bad, consider that this is for someone living just above the median and aiming to maintain a similar standard of living. The further your household income is below the median, the more painful those 15% will be and the only reward will be to get to live in the same level of distress just with a more reliable stable income (assuming it doesn't get eaten up by other expenses you couldn't save for or that arise as a consequence of your already low standard of living, e.g. health issues).
So if that's the "best case" prospect, can you imagine why the chance to become a "millionaire" (and remember: a $2 million nest egg represents a $80k retirement income, a good $10k above the median household income) might be more enticing to a significant chunk of the population than the safer more reliable investments that will at best help them maintain their meager standard of living as long as they don't have any unforseen emergencies?
The exact numbers here are entirely irrelevant. Jobs with higher income generally also offer better options for investment and retirement plans, jobs with low income may not even offer a 401(k). Low income also means any expense represents a larger percentage of your income because costs don't scale linearly, especially when it comes to essentials (e.g. gas prices are the same for everyone and a cheap car may actually get worse mileage and require more frequent repairs compared to a newer model that may still be in warranty).
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/retirement/how-much-you-should-...
[2]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
[3]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...
[4]: https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/povert...
While wealthy "whales" exist and the gambling industry likes to portray them all as Saudi oil barons with more money than sense so you don't feel bad about them sinking a few billion dollars into gambling as extravagance because they still come out as billionaires, the truth is the most reliable source of income are people (and for cultural reasons especially men) with a low income who see no career path to "striking it big" and think gambling will work for them because beating the literal odds feels more managable than doing so at the job market.
On my way to work I drive past four gambling halls, including two sports betting places. There's another sports betting machine at a nearby bodega. The cars parking in front of these places aren't fancy, they're average at best. The people coming in and out of these places or discreetly trying to smoke outside without being identified by people who might know them are mostly typical workers, more likely to be immigrants than not, often enthusiastically chatting about their dead-end side-hustles or acquaintances of acquaintances who have "struck it big" but often just end up "reinvesting" their gains and losing it all again.
The gambling halls and sports betting places don't provide entertainment. They provide empty promises. Especially with sports betting the gamblers understand it as a game of skill rather than chance and they think they just have to do good enough to become millionaires.
So assuming you can put together a down payment (possibly 3.5% for FHA loans), and assuming you believe in the long term stability of US economic conditions in general, the boring, responsible path to a quiet, comfortable life continues to work even below median income levels.
(This also assumes good health for most of your life. Certainly many people get the short end of the stick there, but many more simply don't take care of themselves.)
I live in an Eastern-European country, and the half-time pause of yesterday's football World Cup opener was more than 75% filled with sports bet adds. This was happening on national television. I can sincerely say that that wasn't the case 10 to 15 years ago.
This is true. And as you say, it can be exploitive. But the same could be said ten times over for casual "click" games that take money for useless tokens, or AAA games that take money to buy mods, or even socal media sites that use deep/dark pattern UX methods developed originally by casinos to monetize every second of user interaction - none of which even have the possibility of returning some of the money or money-for-time spent by the user. With that - 100% theft - as the modern paradigm, a game of chance or skill with a 95% ROI, and provable stats of winning or losing, regardless of how manipulative its marketing may be, is somehow more noble than selling someone useless tokens or virtual goods, in my opinion. As long as they're adults and know what they're signing on for, let's stop treating people like children. But people who buy virtual goods shouldn't be allowed to play blackjack, IMHO. They're not capable of making financial decisions with their own money.
Call me old school but I grew up in Vegas and never believed in offering a wheel of fortune where no one could win, or a game where someone didn't fully understand their risks and chances.
It does provide good estimators of probabilities of real world events. Like if someone would ask me how likely it is that team X will win the world cup I'd look up the betting odds. In general, if there's a betting market for something I'd always use the odds as placeholder until I can come up with a better estimate (which quite frankly seems unlikely). If I were to build an ML model that tries to predict something with a betting market that would be the baseline I'd measure against for example.
This, along with the ubiquity, is the big problem. It's bad enough if you have to go to a physical sports book in a certain state. It's downright exploitative when you're watching a game & you see an ad egging you on to bet, oh and by the way, here's also how to bet with just a few pokes on your phone. Sometimes you can even gamble on credit!
Stuck in a dead end job. Gamble.
Alimoney and no way out. Gamble.
Stuck in a dictatorship which can crush your life for arbitrary reasons every day. Gamble
Its a valve for deeply dysfunctional societies. A faked flame of hope for hopeless situations.
Except online gambling pretty much all of these "technologies" are just "gambling with plausible deniability so that the people who like to look down their nose at the old lady playing slots can engage in it without feeling like a hypocrite.
It's kind like the gambling equivalent of how people who look down their nose at cheap school cafeteria type chicken patties that have plant based filler will happily buy a partially soy chicken patty that costs 5x as much if you market it correctly.
Take away the gambling ads and the pharma ads and there wouldn't be much left.
There's next to no incentive for traditional safe guards to safe guard. I'm not suggesting it go bqck to being illegal, only that the ad impressions be limited.
Doesn't have to be. I gamble on the NFL weekly and in the last 5 years have never lost more than $20 a year, less than the cost of a movie near me somehow.
Years ago, Gretzky gave an interview about doing promotions and he said he initially refused doing any promotions but that his agent convinced him he could just promote products he actually used and liked.
I think of that interview every time I see him on a garish gambling poster that looks like something you would see on the Atlantic City boardwalk.
But in any case it is sad.
And of course, there's nothing stopping casinos from offering a two-tier system, like how Scientology used to do in Hollywood: the few stars they needed for promotion got to play luxury dianetics, whereas everyone else got milked dry.
When I moved back to Canada from Japan, I wanted to watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs with my kids. (I used to watch Hockey online with my wife but after we had kids, we cancelled the service)
I bought an online package from Sportsnet and was immediately horrified at the number of gambling-related ads. It's not that it was a new concept; horse race betting is a common activity in Japan, and I even remembered a kid from grade 5 proudly betting on some Lotto Quebec games (Mise O Jeu) when I was growing up.
However, I never saw the stuff advertised so blatantly in a media that is so likely to be consumed by families. I resent it, especially since the NHL package in Japan included none of this.
I cancelled Sportsnet subscription after the local team ended their playoff run, and will never subscribe again. I might go watch a local WHL game but I think professional sports are a cesspool.
Now every game has an official "betting on baseball" sponsor (in various forms) but they still have people on lifetime bans. It feels hypocritical.
For sports like horse racing, boxing, and golf where they are more adult oriented and closely linked to gambling that is one thing. But baseball, football, basektball, and hockey are supposed to be wholesome entertainment but every broadcast feels so seedy now.
Even the rich lose to gambling. See Michael Jordan, for example.
Today minorities are statistically being given harsher sentences for the same drug crimes than non minorities.
Sports betting is the ultimate second-person game; no individual bettor is the one throwing the football. But somehow, I guess on the back of lobbyists, that's more acceptable than first-person games of skill. It's ridiculous.
I would consider it somewhere in the middle-ground between poker and roulette. It's possible to have an edge in sports betting, it's just very, very hard to find.
It does make sense that in a lot of player-versus-player games, online makes it more risky.
In practice losing/casual players tend to lose their money pretty quickly, and winning/skilled players then take that money that they've earned and withdraw it - while waiting for another casual player. The house has every motivation to increase the amount of time it takes for a skilled player to wipe out a casual player. They also benefit from casual players going on 'hot streaks' early on. The goal there is to convince the casual player that they are skilled, and their later losses are "bad luck." The point being to encourage them to deposit more after they lose their money.
In an online game, how do you know other people at the table aren't side channel communicating? How do you know some of the hands aren't player bots that work for the site where whatever money you lose and they win goes to the casino site? How do you know they don't know the precise order of the "random deck"? Or that they don't know what your hand is?
Now, consider the same for voting machines.
The databases these poker players kept led them to discover the scandal mentioned below, see: https://upswingpoker.com/ultimate-bet-absolute-poker-scandal.
No such scandals were ever found at other big poker sites, despite that there were more, stronger players at those sites, which also allowed improved scrutiny of their random number generator and the play of everyone involved.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Predictions_Ex...
The US senate races had hundreds of thousands of liquidity
But its a steep bell curve
If they're going to use cryptocurrency to fund drugs and crime we might as well use it for the good stuff too.
Colleges and sports-betting companies ‘caesarized’ campus life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33681023 - Nov 2022 (12 comments)
They should have maximized happiness of the users by limiting the pace at which money could be lost, and the odds/ spreads at which it was lost
That wasn't my big eye-opener on this type of corruption, though. I used my little casino as a testbed for dozens of original card games, slot games, and multiplayer games, many of which had adjustable odds that could be set anywhere from pari-mutuel to a specific house rake over time. I spent a lot of time presenting videos and demos to Indian tribes and cruise lines and individual Vegas casinos with the idea of having the online casino work on their premises, i.e. in the hotel rooms. The issues in the way were many, and mostly regulatory. For instance, in Vegas, casino floor square footage is taxed and regulated in a certain way, and off-floor gaming isn't allowed. On the floor, wifi coverage for gaming-connected systems is charted by heat maps and any system connected to the monetized network has to go through extremely expensive ongoing code / hardware testing conducted by the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB). Mostly at the casino's expense. So even though it was a novel concept at the time to let people join satellites of real poker tournaments on their phones while they were at the casino bar, the casinos figured they would hold off until a provider with deep pockets came along.
So then I had the idea of just licensing my original slots and card games. I had all the statistical analyses worked out and playable versions that were already in use with tons of real world data. Sure, said the NGCB. That'll be $500,000 per review of each game variant before you can shop it to casinos. The cost of each review is nonrefundable if it doesn't pass, and the review process takes a year, and there's a 2-3 year backlog because Bally puts out tons of games we have to review.
Not exactly possible for a lone coder making a modest sum from running a Bitcoin casino that has to lock out one country after another.
It was clear to me that sooner or later, once they figured out a way to exclude tech-side competitors with a history of software gaming from the market, (Galewind, Microgaming, et al - not that any of them are very clean) the powers that be in the US would find a way to reward those lucrative contracts to their buddies and/or whoever paid top dollar under the table.
I ran [edit] provably fair games and published every result. But I never encountered a gaming regulatory body from Isle of Man to Costa Rica to Nevada that wasn't crooked as all get-out. Then again, show me an economic field of supposedly questionable morality that hasn't developed a parasitic class of bureaucrats to grift off people's desire to access it.
The two gambling props failed because they came with baggage.
I’m pretty sure that California citizens are ok with sports betting in general.
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch”
Just like we overturned laws because someone’s sensitivities were harmed because other people were drinking and even conservative states think it’s no one’s business if another person decides to smoke weed.
But who gets to decide which ones? Who gets the final word?
I think that the question of which questions are the public's business, is itself necessarily the public's business. Which minority concerns are rights which should not be infringed on by the majority, must still be decided by majority.
There's no way around it. Constitutions don't interpret themselves or enforce themselves, much less write themselves, so they don't get you out of this pickle. At "best" they let you abdicate your responsibility for deciding that question.
As I recall, many of those abuses of minorities you list, were protected by such abdication, in that people would rather abide by the US's antimajoritarian process rules than use their majority to immediately fix the abuses.
Put money on it though? I’m very engaged
I’m totally fine if the audience completely changes
Short answer, tribal gaming leadership shenanigans. No betting propositions will ever pass in CA without their approval, but they continuously want way too much of the gambling pie.
1. Prop 26 — sports betting at tribal casinos and four race tracks. Tribal casinos can do dice and roulette.
Issues:
- even more power at tribal casinos.
- “ The proposition also would have created a new way of enforcing some gaming laws, allowing anyone to bring a lawsuit if they believe the laws are being violated and the state Justice Department declines to act”. Basically any card room that was not tribal was going to be sued non-stop.
2. Prop 27 - online sports betting.
Issues:
- even more centralized gambling control by tribes.
- extremely high threshold for gaming companies seeking licenses would have made it unusually tough for small but viable vendors to compete.
If any of them just said “yo, ya’ll wanna have sports gambling everywhere so ya’ll stop getting excluded from apps?” we would have voted for it (imo)
nobody here cares about tribal drama, both propositions heavily miscalculated that and got into immature campaigns against each other, they thought their proposals couldn't stand on their own merits and needed these complicated handouts
So taxing it is no solution. It would have been better to let that foul industry keep corrupting Malta, than let them start corrupting the Netherlands as well. They won't be paying taxes for long.
Another reminder that the US is not a normal liberal democracy. It is a very corrupt pseudo-democracy whose extreme wealth lets it have a higher level of development than other countries to which that description applies.
If anything, the US's relatively high level of political liberalness serves as a counterbalance against its own oligarch class.
The exact rank depends on how you measure, of course: according to Wikipedia, the US’s median income is first in the world; I found some other sources saying it’s fifth. At any rate, very high.
The safety net in the US is actually quite strong for citizens (there is a huge illegal immigrant class that gets very little) as SNAP benefits (free food) and Medicaid expansion for low-income people are quite generous. If you can get a Section 8 (free housing) voucher you can essentially live without working.
The pros outweigh the cons IMO but there are some very weird incentives, like poor people are far less likely to get married after having children because government benefits are much stronger for single moms with multiple kids. It’s counter-productive.
And permanent residents. This used to not be the case but changed in the late 90s for reasons I won't derail the thread on.
> SNAP benefits (free food) and Medicaid expansion for low-income people are quite generous
I'm not sure our definitions of "quite generous" are the same. In Washington State, if you are a family of three who makes under $2,300 per month and pays rent and utilities, you qualify for $383/month in food benefit. In western Washington, this is not enough to pay for an entire month of food for three people. It's about a third, or half if you try really hard. (If you have a small child you can qualify for another program, called WIC, but what you get through it is more regulated.)
> If you can get a Section 8 (free housing) voucher you can essentially live without working
The phrase "if you can get" is doing a great deal of work here. The public housing voucher--of all types, not just section 8--waiting list for every populated county in Washington State is closed right now due to far more applicants than availability. In most of the country the waitlist is years long, if not decades. There is that notable story of a person who is now an Alderwoman for the City of Chicago[0] who was on the waiting list for 29 years and finally reached the point where she could apply for (but not yet receive) housing benefits.
The social safety net in the US is neither as strong nor as ubiquitous as you might suspect.
0 - https://www.npr.org/2022/06/23/1104338319/chicago-public-hou...
The purpose of the system is what it does. The bureaucracy must ensure the continued existence of the dependent population it was built to serve. So it breaks up families and support networks in an effort to keep breeding more dependents.
According to this page, the US's median wealth is 21st in the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
Traditionally America had the 'you can only gamble in Vegas' model for decades, then it was forced by court decisions to extend that right to native casinos, then more recently it was forced by the Supreme Court to open it up to states who want it. It really has little to do with lobbying politicians, the US has been forced to relax gambling laws mostly by the courts
Casinos are very good at courting (or grooming) rich and powerful people. It would be very strange if they never applied that skill on politicians - or judges.