this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
-22 points (21.1% liked)
Games
16944 readers
109 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What if Chuck E Cheese was in your bedroom and it was marketed to make you feel like you were missing out if you didn't have the thing your friend's had, but you can't buy the thing, oh no that's too easy. We'll let you buy the chance to own the thing.
I'll give you the proximity point, it is easier to access loot boxes when they are in a game.
But as for the missing out part, yeah that's how it works. Your friend wins something from the claw machine or gets a bunch of tickets, now you want that. That's part of the fun, your parents could just buy the toy but that's lame
But your parents can't just buy the toy. The only way to get the toy is through the element of chance - sometimes with a near zero win chance - by spending real world money.
The only reason it's not de-facto gambling is that there are consolation prizes, but in most peoples' view that doesn't make it morally okay to push on children, nor does it make it completely not gambling either. It's just gambling with consolation prizes.
I disagree that most people view it as bad. Arcades and stuff have been around forever, and are still being used by a ton of people. Just because you don't want send your kids to chuck E cheese doesn't mean most people agree with you
You keep relying on the Chuck E. Cheese anology, but it simply doesn't work. At Chuck E. Cheese the prizes are a bunch of toys that your parents could otherwise buy, and the fun is in playing the games themselves which pay out tickets toward earning those prizes. That is in no way the equivalent of gamble boxes in video games.
Gamble boxes contain prizes that can't be bought outside the game, and in nearly every case contain prizes that can't be bought with the "consolation prize" (i.e. "tickets") that are dropped when you otherwise win nothing or very little compared to the actual prizes. And there is no inherent "fun" in clicking an "UNLOCK BOX" button compared to actually... playing a game in order to earn prizes. Not comparable at all, really.
If you're going to try to convince people they're not gambling (and you have quite the uphill battle to fight), you're better off likening them to blind bag grab-packs of card games / collector cards / toys, etc. - Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, sports cards, blind-bag toys etc. That is their closest real-world equivalent. Many would argue that those are also a form of gambling, as well.
I like a lot of your points, but I have to correct you in one area, I'm not trying to convince people this isint gambling. I don't think that casual gambling is a bad thing.
Well fair enough, that is a different conversation. I'm not ready to take a hard stance on how it impacts children, people with addictive personalities, etc. but all I know for certain is that it doesn't feel right to include it in virtually every online video game, and it sure as hell got very annoying and tiresome very quickly years ago when it started.
Oh to be sure, there are way to many examples of jerks taking the loot box concept too far. But I'm not sure I'm ready to demonize it like some people do