Netherlands is close to drawing similar conclusions.
And it makes sense. You can buy, using real money, a virtual ticket for a virtual item. Then that virtual item can in turn often be sold to others for real money. In other words, players can participate by gambling real money in return for less or more real money.
In short, it is gambling. Not all countries make gambling illegal, but those who do, should treat loot boxes the same. And virtually all countries make gambling illegal for minors, and there's currently no working mechanism in play for 15 year olds not to be able to play these games.
Currently in the Netherlands it's required for the proceeds of loot boxes to be tradeable in the real world, giving them economic value, for it to be considered gambling. If it's purely virtual, it's not gambling but just part of the game. (you can question this of course.) The problem is that it didn't matter for the Dutch government whether the items were traded on external platforms (which are often in violation of the games EULA itself), or on a platform of the game itself.
What would help stay legit is for the games to prevent loot box items from being traded between characters at all.
Here's the weird thing though. My entire childhood was filled with opaque plastic packs of cards, pokemon cards, football cards etc. You didn't know which 5 cards were in there. The cards were semi-randomly distributed in the packs in the factory, just like these loot boxes are semi-randomly generated by an algorithm. And you'd pay, not knowing what you'd get. And indeed, sometimes you paid $10 for a pack with a rare pokemon you could sell for $100. That was gambling too under this definition.
The entire mobile app store economy needs major regulation. The platform operators have shown they are willing to allow hugely profitable apps whose business models prey on gambling tendencies in children and they will look the other way, while bragging about their curation of their stores in some cases. It's shameful hypocrisy.
The entire industry knows this is going on. Parents have complained for years, but nothing's changed.
I mostly agree with the idea. Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done.
That said I'm curious what happened and why these things are so addictive. As a kid I collected Wacky Packages. They were parody stickers that came in a pack of like 3 or 5 with a stick of gum just like Baseball Cards. While I probably owned 150 stickers or so I would never have considered myself addicted nor my friends. We were into them for a couple of months, probably spent no more than $20 total each.
Compare to my nephew who was into Pokemon Cards and spent hundreds of dollars. Of course I new a few kids that seriously into baseball cards but they were the exception. With Pokemon cards it seemed much much better. Also before that a large percentage of my adult friend spent hundreds on Magic the Gathering cards. Some spent thousands.
Now we have IAP in apps and some people are spending like crazy.
What happened? What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards? What made IAP so big? I can only guess 2 things about IAP. One that it's super each to buy being connected directly to your account. Two that being a video game they can more easily use psychological techniques to manipulate people. That might explain the IAP issues. Not sure it explains Pokemon + Magic the Gathering vs Baseball Cards.
> What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards?
I grew up with Pokemon and I might have some answer for that.
Before Pokemon I had a binder of basketball cards. I collected them but I never had a lot of them. Some of them were cool and shiny, some were split into three parts so they were three smaller cards in one and I liked those as well. Additionally I had a favorite team; the Chicago Bulls and of course those cards were special to me as well. Still though there wasn't much you could really do with the basketball cards and I think probably the same goes with baseball cards right? I had my binder, I'd sit down and flip through the binder, I'd trade cards with others now and then.
When Pokemon came, it took our school by storm. We were all watching the Pokemon anime on TV, we were playing Pokemon on our Gameboy Color units, and we played Pokemon the trading card game (TCG).
Pokemon the TV series told the story of a boy that was about our age. He went on a grand adventure, he was considerate towards his Pokemons and towards others. But most importantly, he was on a mission to catch them all and to become the very best. This idea; catch them all and become the very best is repeated pretty much non-stop throughout the whole TV series and the movies.
So Ash Ketchum (the main character of the first series) becomes an idol for us kids and we want to be like him. We want to become Pokemon masters.
We play the Gameboy game day out and day in when we are at home. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Battling. Grinding. Advancing in the game. The school did not allow us to bring our Gameboys though. However we played the Pokemon TCG a lot during recess. We also played the Pokemon TCG at home because it was fun -- it wasn't just a substitute for the Gameboy game, but nonetheless I think the fact that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school made us play the TCG even more at school than we would have otherwise. But I think it was good that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school. Playing the TCG was a much more social activity IMO.
So we play the TCG and we all want to be the very best. How do you become best? You build the best deck. But there is no single best deck. The strength of your deck depends on what your opponent has in his/her deck. Also the best cards are more rare than the others of course. Additionally the drawings on the cards were awesome and everyone wanted shiny cards which were also rare.
It was a perfect storm. Very very clever marketing.
I think Pokemon contributed a lot to my childhood though and I am happy that Nintendo made Pokemon.
F2P apps that use dark patterns and psychological tricks to extract money from their userbase might actually be closer in nature to Pokemon than I'd like to admit but still it feels fundamentally different. You might argue that in a way the Pokemon TCG was "pay to win" and in a way I would agree but at the same time the TCG still depended on being able to balance your deck correctly and there was always a strong element of randomness that no amount of money could get rid of for you.
In conclusion, with the Pokemon TCG you had both the prettiness of the cards (some kids collected only and never played even) but you also have the utility of the cards in playing a game combined with the best cards being rare, causing many of us to buy as many of them as we could get money for from our parents so that we could build better decks than our friends had and beat them and also so that we could show off our rarest cards to one-another.
Speaking of rarity; I know there are some baseball cards that are more rare than others. I don't know if the same goes for basketball cards but when we collected basketball cards there was never any talk about rarity. Perhaps likewise rarity of baseball cards was not something that kids "knew about"? With Pokemon cards you knew for example that shiny cards were rare because you could tell from the fact that you usually did not get any of them in the booster packs and the full decks contained like one of them or so, so it was immediately obvious that the shiny cards were "special". The Pokemon cards also had various markings that we attributed value to.
Furthermore, with Pokemon you knew the Pokemons from the show and everyone had their favorite Pokemon. For many of the Pokemons, multiple different cards existed, so there were more than just one card to collect for each of the Pokemons that you liked among the 151 Pokemons. Additionally, there were other types of cards that were needed for the game, including "trainer cards" that gave special powers or other advantages and there were "potions" and there were "energy colors" that you needed for attacks. The energy cards were the least valuable because they were so common. Some rare kinds of energy cards existed as well of course but everyone had way more energy cards than they needed. There were some trainers and potions that were very common as well, and some Pokemons that were too. But sometimes you'd find that other kids wanted the cards that you didn't want and you'd trade with them. For example I once traded a common Pikachu card with a kid that was obsessed with Pikachu and he gave me a card that in my eyes was much better, so we both ended up very happy from that trade.
I also remember there was a series of Pokemon cards that were not the TCG type cards. Neither me nor anyone I knew liked those cards, exactly because you couldn't do anything with them other than to just look at them whereas with the TCG cards you could both look at them and play with them. So definitely the being able to play with them aspect was hugely important.
I see this as a result of the evolution of data-driven optimisation (as a methodology) in concert with data becoming increasingly more available.
Back in the day of stickers/baseball cards your data granularity was probably down to state/city-level sales by month.
Now in the world of F2P gaming, you have per-minute per-user level of data. You're able to A/B the uplift in sales:
- for introducing slot-machine like sound effects when opening the loot box
- adding flashes when you open the loot box
- giving out fewer lootboxes per hour
- introducing more rare and powerful things in the lootbox
You have "engagement" people who's sole job is to make stuff addictive nowadays, no longer is it a few people's job to dream up something fun to use and collect. It's now a cynical and scientific exercise to ruthlessly optimise IAP.
Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done.
I was on the train the other day, the girl sitting next to me was playing one of those games where you have to watch an ad to get to the next level.
Just as she was about to level up the train went into a tunnel so the ad wouldn’t play. Within seconds literally she was frantic, eyes staring, pounding the screen with her finger, I almost thought she would crack the glass.
If that’s not addiction I don’t know what is. Makers of these games need to take a good hard look at themselves in the mirror.
It’s a pretty well understood psychological system of variable rewards.
It’s the same reason people open up Facebook or Reddit or Hacker News every day: you don’t know what interesting content you’ll see and that keeps you coming back.
Except games aren’t social network filled with user generated content. Developers make the content (items, skins etc) and have figured out that presenting in a randomised way drives better engagement.
Never into Pokémon or MtG, but aren’t they a ToTALLY different thing from baseball cards?
The purpose of Pokémon and MtG cards are to use them in games/competitions, where the more desirable/expensive cards yield a game advantage.
But baseball cards were(are) primarily used for fans of the players/game, to learn about players (stats),not a game in itself. Sure some cards were more desirable than others, but more for bragging than game advantage.
I think the more comparable to Pokémon and MtG, is fantasy sports leagues where the addiction is rampant.
Imagine if you could get your Wacky Packages or Pokemon cards instantly at any time? When I was younger I would have to travel to a shop (which requires begging my parents to take me) just to buy some pokemon cards.
Nowadays, the parent's card is on their app store account and the kid can press a button to receive their instant gratification. It's just too easy...
Combine that with the fact the collecting aspect is attached to an addictive video game.
Pokemon have had the games and 20 years worth of TV series that are pretty much extended ads.
For IAP: Instant gratification coupled with tons of analytics. Being able to tweak the balance until you get just enough valuable items to continue even if you don't get the item you really badly want. Making it into a weapons race or status race with other players (I once used about $200 on buying boosts in a niche online strategy game because another player pissed me off enough that I "bankrolled" an entire alliance just to see him lose; I subsequently closed my account and never played the game again, as I realized how easy it'd be to keep throwing money at it - it felt worth it for the satisfaction that once, but it'd have been a really bad habit to get into).
Magic the Gathering cards have a use beyond collecting. Its an actual game people play, and card prices are driven not only by their rarity, but their utility. Usually when a card spikes in price it is because someone somewhere has made a successful deck archetype that utilizes the card.
That's why most decks played in competitive Magic only have 75 cards, but usually average several hundred dollars, sometimes pushing 1000 in some formats.
When playing physical card games like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, you are constrained in who can play against due to the physical nature of the cards. The "best" decks you play against are your friends and other players around you, unless you are at the point where you are specifically entering tournaments.
I know when I played for a bit back during my school days it was just me and a couple friends who did it fairly casually, so there was very little pressure to spend lots of money to build a great deck. And if someone did try to spend tons of money we probably would have harassed them about it anyways.
The problem is nowadays, due to the online nature of these games, is that you aren't just playing with friends and other people near you, you are playing with anyone who happens to be online. That means you are much more likely to play against people with good decks who spent lots of money building that deck. So the pressure is much greater to also spend money.
People have a better understanding of how much they're spending when they use hard currency instead of an electronic charge. IAP just don't feel like spending money the same way handing bills to a retail clerk for some cards does.
Same thing is true of football cards here in Europe, to complete 1 sticker book, like for the forthcoming world cup someone calculated will cost something like £1500.
I can't remember the numbers, but there's 32 teams of 11 players (not including subs), there's 8 cards in a pack, of which there are typically 2-3 duplicates, so you need to buy multiples of the same team just to complete one team and then swap with friends at school to complete the others.
And that's the hook that gets ~~kids~~ parents buying, it's the element of peer pressure. My boy is not into football and isn't collecting the cards, he's currently a social outcast as a result. Fortunately, he has a strong character and isn't bothered by it, but peer pressure is the answer to your question IMO.
I'm all for seeing items with random distribution inside as gambling too. I recall the monetary value of some pokemon cards caused my school to ban them. This didn't really have any effect other than to allow the school to say, "well, they are banned," if there was any fights or thefts relating to them. I think they probably had a net social negative amongst my friends at the time. In fact the only social positive I saw from them was in getting people, who wouldn't otherwise interact, interacting -- which wasn't always a good thing.
But I do see a few tiny differences in general between loot boxes and physical items like trading cards:
1. the packet does contain physical items which cost money to produce, whereas a duplication of a virtual item is effectively the distribution cost.
2. Retailers made a profit on physical items too. With virtual items sold by developer-publishers like EA and Valve, it's really just one party.
3. There is typically no limit on the number of loot boxes you can purchase. With physical items there is the stock of the shop.
4. Loot boxes can in some cases be purchased with other people's (usually parents) cards by default and without their immediate knowledge.
5. It isn't routine for somebody to give you a pack of physical tradable items for free to go and feel what they are like. If you go and buy them, there is a small amount of honesty in terms of what you are getting. With loot boxes, you are presented with them through in game events and then provided with the opportunity to buy more.
6. With physical items, you don't know how things are distributed but you can be reasonably certain that they can't be targeted at you. If you're looking for card X, the shopkeeper usually has no way of knowing what pack contains that and withholding that pack from you to maximise profit. You have no idea how the loot boxes are distributed. It is entirely possible for developers to detect when somebody is "hooked", work out what they are after, and attempt to maximise profit by withholding the desired item.
The only thing that could prevent such abuses is to regulate loot boxes as gambling as several countries have now done and respond with immense penalties where regulations are violated (a multiple of what would be made * estimated chance of being caught or a fraction of published turnover).
I think candy should be outlawed too. I'd actually be OK with make this illegal. Kids are obviously just addicted to the stuff, it is clearly no good for them, and there is a massive industry both virtual (candy crush) and non (physical candy) that preys, sorry, PREYS on humans sweet tooth instinct. Nestle makes a lot of money in convenience stores via this.
I don't honestly know if lootboxes are gambling or not, but it's time to be honest with the mechanisms behind them, and follow Chinese and Japanese regulations: be transparent and open about the probabilities behind them. Yes, even if it includes pity counters, etc.
But Steam, Google Play, PlayStation, XBox, and smaller platforms all need to follow suite, very quickly. Or they'll face even harsher legislations around the world.
On the one side I am glad that they banned such in-app purchases because sometimes it can get ridiculous on how much people (especially young children without realizing the cost) spend on them but I can't help but feel the irony because many "more legacy" things offer similar system. I remember spending far more then $100 for soccer stickers. You would basically buy a pack of maybe 10 stickers and you didn't know if you needed them or not. There were also stickers that were less common so in the end you ended up with over 300 excess stickers just to complete a book and you ended up doing that every other year for the euro and world championship.
I don't think there is much of a difference and both cases should be more regulated (especially those catering to children who do not know any better).
I was thinking exactly this - I'm not massively clear on where loot boxes and blind-pack card games/sticker collectables differ. Both are fixed price products where you don't know the contents, with the value of said contents varying massively from the invested cost, along with the ability to trade/sell the contents on secondary markets.
Trading Pokemon cards, I reckon I spent more on booster packs trying to get a Charizard than I've spent on all of the chests, loot boxes and packs in games, for nothing more than a piece of card that (sadly) eventually gets water damaged...
The issue with lootboxes specifically is twofold; one, lootboxes generally hold much less content than a pack of cards or stickers. Overwatch, for example, has four items a pack.
The second issue is that a physical object, like cards or stickers, does at least feel like a physical object, in that it's very easy to tell if you start having an excessive amount of them. On the other hand, on a lootbox, there isn't really a innate difference in response to buying one vs buying one hundred. So it eases some of the friction as well.
Like with much in law things exist in an context. In order to compare physical card packs to loot boxes one has to first figure out the market size of each.
So I took a glance doing a few Google searches and it seems that physical card packs has a global market of a few billions. The number varies a lot since some of the data include card trade as well as pack sells. One data point argued a 450 million from news packs and 3 billions from card trade, specific for sport cards. For loot boxes I would estimate the number to be around 100x of that, give or take. For every $10 in the past there is $1000 dollar being spent on virtual packs.
It seems reasonable to me that a government body might not care too much about a $450 million industry, but do care a lot when it is a $100 billion industry.
I understand the idea but what apply to loot boxes may apply to a lot of things.
The first ones are trading cards, including games like "Magic: the Gathering". If you are lucky, you can sell a card you got from a booster pack for way more than what you originally paid. And chances that you can don't even have to leave the shop to do it.
What makes gambling is that you get money for money, not worthless prizes like in the case of most loot boxes. It is an additional risk because there is always hope that you will be able to recover your losses and you may spend more than you can afford. With loot boxes and most other random prizes, it is clear that while you may get something nice, that money will be gone for good.
As for game developers, they don't lack options for Skinner box schemes. Loot boxes are just one among others, there are things like energy systems that are popular on mobile games that don't involve chance but have the same effect of making you spend more money than originally intended.
It is just that loot boxes look more like gambling, even though it isn't really, and are disliked by the majority. The rest is politics.
I see other posters saying that it has to do with probabilities and the way they're designed or how you can play a game with the cards etc... and I disagree.
I think what triggered the problem with lootboxes is that the monetary value of the items is immediately obvious and you can trade those items without any friction over the internet at any moment. For many games an item is just equivalent to some amount of money. It's not a good, it's casino tokens that you can exchange for real money at the counter. Selling cards, especially before the internet, was way more complicated and most 12yo at the time probably wouldn't bother unless they were extremely lucky and managed to acquire a very expensive card "charlie and the chocolate factory" style. Cards have pretty limited liquidity, unlike digital goods that can be traded quickly and safely across continents in an instant.
I don't play a ton of games featuring random item drops but if I look at my Steam inventory for instance I can get the immediate value at which any item is trading (including loot boxes and their keys, but also skins, cards, emoticons, profile backgrounds...). Valve itself plays into this by tracking the price and making it easily available to anybody. You can directly, from Steam, trade these items for money (well, money locked into your Steam account, but money nonetheless).
On the other hand when I was a teen and played Magic: The Gattering most of the time I had no idea of the value of an individual card and checking it would have involved buying specialized magazines (the internet was only in its infancy at the time). We traded cards only for other cards and based mostly on our own subjective assessment of their relative values and how they fit into our decks (or even if the drawing looked cool), not based on some global card exchange with real-time trading.
On top of this there are a huge number of 3rd party "casino" sites for these in-game items who add another layer of gambling on top of the lootbox concept. Those websites don't hesitate to pay Twitch streamers to "play" on their site, sometimes even tweaking the odds to make them win more than average to make it even more enticing for the (often very young) watchers. It's scummy as hell and while Valve & friend don't directly partake in this they very clearly enable this behavior with their policies (and they APIs).
I could see the point of somebody arguing that MtG and Pokemon are gambling but these video game economies are on a whole other level.
I'd find it fair for these games to be classified only for adults.
As for adults however, my philosophy is that we should stop treating them as kids that need to be told what they are and aren't allowed to do. Loot boxes are addictive? So is sugar, alcohol, sex and 1000 other things. Do we want to go down that road?
If someone wants to gamble a percentage of his income, that should be his choice. If he wants to gamble away all his money or even put himself into debt, also his choice.
So where does this leave sticker albums (Panini, etc) or any other collectable that does not serve what is seen as a generally practical purpose in the World? (don't think that digital vs. physical should play a part in this)
In gambling you are mostly doing it for a clear financial gain: you play for money/fiat. Loot boxes, sticker albums, and so on, the primary purpose is not a financial gain. That is a byproduct and secondary, which some elect to make it their primary purpose for engaging in it.
IMO this is a symptom of people not being able to manage their finances properly and identify potentially destructive behaviours. This would push the solution for the problem to Education, how schools should help people in learning the skills necessary to both manage their money and notice when a certain behaviour they are about to engage in, or repeat one too many times, will produce a generally negative outcome for their mental and financial health.
And no, I'm not a fan of loot boxes. Never bought one and think they are mostly used by the publishers in a very bad, and silly, way.
Not sure when chance is considered gambling, I presume artificial chance?
Does that include bitcin mining, the probability that your facebook post is visible for your friends, the probability that an advertisement is shown to a specific user, is sortition illegal?
I assume that their definition of gambling also requires a payment to be sent to some party who is offering the probabilistic reward. I doubt that bitcoin mining and Facebook posting would qualify.
It in the article states that you get monetary value out of it, so like in casino you exchange your tokens for money. In games you trade item from loot box, so someone will pay money. If it would be that you cannot exchange it to money it is quite ok.
I’ve never heard about loot boxes before. But I wonder: how is this any different from “Kinder Surprise” (a chocolate egg with a small surprise toy inside that you can buy in supermarkets)?
If you pay fixed price for unknown outcome it should be clasified as gambling/investment and regulated. Odds should be published (if known) or past performance if known, expected value and such. Deviation from any information stated at the moment of sale should nullify the sale and give you your money back. If the company hesitates, funds should be seized immediately and put on hold until people who bought the tickets come for their money.
I have no hard rule about which kinds of gambling/investment should be completely forbidden but all should be scrutinised and some limitations should be imposed. Like a ban on advertising.
App economy is now gambling economy and at some point it will trigger heavy regulations.
The thing we didn't realise / understand when countries outlawed or restricted gambling is that gambling isn't about the tangible reward per se.
Psychologically some humans receive a very powerful reward sensation specifically for gambles that pay off. It doesn't matter what the "reward" is so much as that they gambled and won, they get their buzz if they win a slice of cake for guessing how many puppies the secretary's greyhound would have, for a $50 win on the scratch-offs, or for finding the rare Pink Darth Vader in the loot box.
This compulsion is very powerful, and when harnessed it can be good for society - ordinary people do not try to fly faster than the speed of sound for the first time - and it can take individuals to the height of high-risk activities most of us wouldn't have the nerve to try, all the very good Poker players are gamblers for example. But it's also potentially catastrophic for the individual, because they can't stop - or at least they don't want to, and gambles never pay off forever.
This means that restricting gambling for money only worked because that was the most harmful practice available that triggered off this harmful pattern. Once video games began to rely on it too, offering $10 "loot boxes", there was a new way for problem gamblers to destroy their lives, even when you can't "cash out" your winnings, because the psychological compulsion doesn't care about that.
Is there anything of value in a Kinder Surprise? In my experience it's always been a tiny plastic toy with no (even perceived) monetary value. I think the point is to ban things where people are paying money for random items in the hopes that those random items are worth lots of money so they can resell them.
Loot boxes which have actually different values should be illegal, but the loot boxes in overwatch don't. They don't change the gameplay of the game at all, having a legendary skin just makes you look cooler and doesn't change your abilities or damage. It also isn't possible to sell/trade the skins, so they don't have any inherent value.
That being said, what about card packs in games like hearthstone? The cards can't be traded or sold, but they do change the gameplay and some cards are inherently stronger than others so gambling and getting "lucky" can give players an advantage. This is definitely closer to gambling than loot boxes in overwatch.
Opening 20 loot boxes in overwatch and getting no legendary skins feels bad but isn't frustrating, you don't need the skins. But opening 20 card packs for a new hearthstone expansion and getting none of the strong legendary cards feels super frustrating, you're at a disadvantage to players that did open those cards.
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|8 years ago|reply
And it makes sense. You can buy, using real money, a virtual ticket for a virtual item. Then that virtual item can in turn often be sold to others for real money. In other words, players can participate by gambling real money in return for less or more real money.
In short, it is gambling. Not all countries make gambling illegal, but those who do, should treat loot boxes the same. And virtually all countries make gambling illegal for minors, and there's currently no working mechanism in play for 15 year olds not to be able to play these games.
Currently in the Netherlands it's required for the proceeds of loot boxes to be tradeable in the real world, giving them economic value, for it to be considered gambling. If it's purely virtual, it's not gambling but just part of the game. (you can question this of course.) The problem is that it didn't matter for the Dutch government whether the items were traded on external platforms (which are often in violation of the games EULA itself), or on a platform of the game itself.
What would help stay legit is for the games to prevent loot box items from being traded between characters at all.
Here's the weird thing though. My entire childhood was filled with opaque plastic packs of cards, pokemon cards, football cards etc. You didn't know which 5 cards were in there. The cards were semi-randomly distributed in the packs in the factory, just like these loot boxes are semi-randomly generated by an algorithm. And you'd pay, not knowing what you'd get. And indeed, sometimes you paid $10 for a pack with a rare pokemon you could sell for $100. That was gambling too under this definition.
[+] [-] ghostcluster|8 years ago|reply
The entire industry knows this is going on. Parents have complained for years, but nothing's changed.
[+] [-] tokyodude|8 years ago|reply
That said I'm curious what happened and why these things are so addictive. As a kid I collected Wacky Packages. They were parody stickers that came in a pack of like 3 or 5 with a stick of gum just like Baseball Cards. While I probably owned 150 stickers or so I would never have considered myself addicted nor my friends. We were into them for a couple of months, probably spent no more than $20 total each.
Compare to my nephew who was into Pokemon Cards and spent hundreds of dollars. Of course I new a few kids that seriously into baseball cards but they were the exception. With Pokemon cards it seemed much much better. Also before that a large percentage of my adult friend spent hundreds on Magic the Gathering cards. Some spent thousands.
Now we have IAP in apps and some people are spending like crazy.
What happened? What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards? What made IAP so big? I can only guess 2 things about IAP. One that it's super each to buy being connected directly to your account. Two that being a video game they can more easily use psychological techniques to manipulate people. That might explain the IAP issues. Not sure it explains Pokemon + Magic the Gathering vs Baseball Cards.
Any ideas?
[+] [-] codetrotter|8 years ago|reply
I grew up with Pokemon and I might have some answer for that.
Before Pokemon I had a binder of basketball cards. I collected them but I never had a lot of them. Some of them were cool and shiny, some were split into three parts so they were three smaller cards in one and I liked those as well. Additionally I had a favorite team; the Chicago Bulls and of course those cards were special to me as well. Still though there wasn't much you could really do with the basketball cards and I think probably the same goes with baseball cards right? I had my binder, I'd sit down and flip through the binder, I'd trade cards with others now and then.
When Pokemon came, it took our school by storm. We were all watching the Pokemon anime on TV, we were playing Pokemon on our Gameboy Color units, and we played Pokemon the trading card game (TCG).
Pokemon the TV series told the story of a boy that was about our age. He went on a grand adventure, he was considerate towards his Pokemons and towards others. But most importantly, he was on a mission to catch them all and to become the very best. This idea; catch them all and become the very best is repeated pretty much non-stop throughout the whole TV series and the movies.
So Ash Ketchum (the main character of the first series) becomes an idol for us kids and we want to be like him. We want to become Pokemon masters.
We play the Gameboy game day out and day in when we are at home. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Battling. Grinding. Advancing in the game. The school did not allow us to bring our Gameboys though. However we played the Pokemon TCG a lot during recess. We also played the Pokemon TCG at home because it was fun -- it wasn't just a substitute for the Gameboy game, but nonetheless I think the fact that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school made us play the TCG even more at school than we would have otherwise. But I think it was good that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school. Playing the TCG was a much more social activity IMO.
So we play the TCG and we all want to be the very best. How do you become best? You build the best deck. But there is no single best deck. The strength of your deck depends on what your opponent has in his/her deck. Also the best cards are more rare than the others of course. Additionally the drawings on the cards were awesome and everyone wanted shiny cards which were also rare.
It was a perfect storm. Very very clever marketing.
I think Pokemon contributed a lot to my childhood though and I am happy that Nintendo made Pokemon.
F2P apps that use dark patterns and psychological tricks to extract money from their userbase might actually be closer in nature to Pokemon than I'd like to admit but still it feels fundamentally different. You might argue that in a way the Pokemon TCG was "pay to win" and in a way I would agree but at the same time the TCG still depended on being able to balance your deck correctly and there was always a strong element of randomness that no amount of money could get rid of for you.
In conclusion, with the Pokemon TCG you had both the prettiness of the cards (some kids collected only and never played even) but you also have the utility of the cards in playing a game combined with the best cards being rare, causing many of us to buy as many of them as we could get money for from our parents so that we could build better decks than our friends had and beat them and also so that we could show off our rarest cards to one-another.
Speaking of rarity; I know there are some baseball cards that are more rare than others. I don't know if the same goes for basketball cards but when we collected basketball cards there was never any talk about rarity. Perhaps likewise rarity of baseball cards was not something that kids "knew about"? With Pokemon cards you knew for example that shiny cards were rare because you could tell from the fact that you usually did not get any of them in the booster packs and the full decks contained like one of them or so, so it was immediately obvious that the shiny cards were "special". The Pokemon cards also had various markings that we attributed value to.
Furthermore, with Pokemon you knew the Pokemons from the show and everyone had their favorite Pokemon. For many of the Pokemons, multiple different cards existed, so there were more than just one card to collect for each of the Pokemons that you liked among the 151 Pokemons. Additionally, there were other types of cards that were needed for the game, including "trainer cards" that gave special powers or other advantages and there were "potions" and there were "energy colors" that you needed for attacks. The energy cards were the least valuable because they were so common. Some rare kinds of energy cards existed as well of course but everyone had way more energy cards than they needed. There were some trainers and potions that were very common as well, and some Pokemons that were too. But sometimes you'd find that other kids wanted the cards that you didn't want and you'd trade with them. For example I once traded a common Pikachu card with a kid that was obsessed with Pikachu and he gave me a card that in my eyes was much better, so we both ended up very happy from that trade.
I also remember there was a series of Pokemon cards that were not the TCG type cards. Neither me nor anyone I knew liked those cards, exactly because you couldn't do anything with them other than to just look at them whereas with the TCG cards you could both look at them and play with them. So definitely the being able to play with them aspect was hugely important.
[+] [-] yomly|8 years ago|reply
Back in the day of stickers/baseball cards your data granularity was probably down to state/city-level sales by month.
Now in the world of F2P gaming, you have per-minute per-user level of data. You're able to A/B the uplift in sales: - for introducing slot-machine like sound effects when opening the loot box - adding flashes when you open the loot box - giving out fewer lootboxes per hour - introducing more rare and powerful things in the lootbox
You have "engagement" people who's sole job is to make stuff addictive nowadays, no longer is it a few people's job to dream up something fun to use and collect. It's now a cynical and scientific exercise to ruthlessly optimise IAP.
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
I was on the train the other day, the girl sitting next to me was playing one of those games where you have to watch an ad to get to the next level.
Just as she was about to level up the train went into a tunnel so the ad wouldn’t play. Within seconds literally she was frantic, eyes staring, pounding the screen with her finger, I almost thought she would crack the glass.
If that’s not addiction I don’t know what is. Makers of these games need to take a good hard look at themselves in the mirror.
[+] [-] ozmbie|8 years ago|reply
It’s the same reason people open up Facebook or Reddit or Hacker News every day: you don’t know what interesting content you’ll see and that keeps you coming back.
Except games aren’t social network filled with user generated content. Developers make the content (items, skins etc) and have figured out that presenting in a randomised way drives better engagement.
[+] [-] wingspar|8 years ago|reply
The purpose of Pokémon and MtG cards are to use them in games/competitions, where the more desirable/expensive cards yield a game advantage.
But baseball cards were(are) primarily used for fans of the players/game, to learn about players (stats),not a game in itself. Sure some cards were more desirable than others, but more for bragging than game advantage.
I think the more comparable to Pokémon and MtG, is fantasy sports leagues where the addiction is rampant.
[+] [-] Jonnerz|8 years ago|reply
Nowadays, the parent's card is on their app store account and the kid can press a button to receive their instant gratification. It's just too easy...
Combine that with the fact the collecting aspect is attached to an addictive video game.
[+] [-] cncrnd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|8 years ago|reply
For IAP: Instant gratification coupled with tons of analytics. Being able to tweak the balance until you get just enough valuable items to continue even if you don't get the item you really badly want. Making it into a weapons race or status race with other players (I once used about $200 on buying boosts in a niche online strategy game because another player pissed me off enough that I "bankrolled" an entire alliance just to see him lose; I subsequently closed my account and never played the game again, as I realized how easy it'd be to keep throwing money at it - it felt worth it for the satisfaction that once, but it'd have been a really bad habit to get into).
[+] [-] thousandautumns|8 years ago|reply
That's why most decks played in competitive Magic only have 75 cards, but usually average several hundred dollars, sometimes pushing 1000 in some formats.
[+] [-] Goronmon|8 years ago|reply
I know when I played for a bit back during my school days it was just me and a couple friends who did it fairly casually, so there was very little pressure to spend lots of money to build a great deck. And if someone did try to spend tons of money we probably would have harassed them about it anyways.
The problem is nowadays, due to the online nature of these games, is that you aren't just playing with friends and other people near you, you are playing with anyone who happens to be online. That means you are much more likely to play against people with good decks who spent lots of money building that deck. So the pressure is much greater to also spend money.
[+] [-] rimliu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kd5bjo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|8 years ago|reply
Baseball cards became a thing because Americans already had too much money. Other countries that got hit by world wars didn't have baseball cards.
New milenium came and now money is more useless than ever and people have much eadier time to gamble it away.
[+] [-] sametmax|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megaman22|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madshiva|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boobsbr|8 years ago|reply
Don't play the games then.
[+] [-] the_drew|8 years ago|reply
I can't remember the numbers, but there's 32 teams of 11 players (not including subs), there's 8 cards in a pack, of which there are typically 2-3 duplicates, so you need to buy multiples of the same team just to complete one team and then swap with friends at school to complete the others.
And that's the hook that gets ~~kids~~ parents buying, it's the element of peer pressure. My boy is not into football and isn't collecting the cards, he's currently a social outcast as a result. Fortunately, he has a strong character and isn't bothered by it, but peer pressure is the answer to your question IMO.
Edit: typos.
[+] [-] justonepost|8 years ago|reply
There are you tube videos my kids liked to watch of people just literally opening pokemon packs. I'd actually be OK with making this illegal.
Especially considered the frenzied buying and selling of pokemon cards at their school..
This is actually pretty huge. There is a very massive industry both virtual and non that relies on preying on kids and their gambling instinct.
Steam makes a lot of money on Counter Strike via this.
[+] [-] dpwm|8 years ago|reply
But I do see a few tiny differences in general between loot boxes and physical items like trading cards:
1. the packet does contain physical items which cost money to produce, whereas a duplication of a virtual item is effectively the distribution cost.
2. Retailers made a profit on physical items too. With virtual items sold by developer-publishers like EA and Valve, it's really just one party.
3. There is typically no limit on the number of loot boxes you can purchase. With physical items there is the stock of the shop.
4. Loot boxes can in some cases be purchased with other people's (usually parents) cards by default and without their immediate knowledge.
5. It isn't routine for somebody to give you a pack of physical tradable items for free to go and feel what they are like. If you go and buy them, there is a small amount of honesty in terms of what you are getting. With loot boxes, you are presented with them through in game events and then provided with the opportunity to buy more.
6. With physical items, you don't know how things are distributed but you can be reasonably certain that they can't be targeted at you. If you're looking for card X, the shopkeeper usually has no way of knowing what pack contains that and withholding that pack from you to maximise profit. You have no idea how the loot boxes are distributed. It is entirely possible for developers to detect when somebody is "hooked", work out what they are after, and attempt to maximise profit by withholding the desired item.
The only thing that could prevent such abuses is to regulate loot boxes as gambling as several countries have now done and respond with immense penalties where regulations are violated (a multiple of what would be made * estimated chance of being caught or a fraction of published turnover).
[+] [-] boobsbr|8 years ago|reply
You want to make something illegal because you don't like it, because you can't be bothered to parent your children.
[+] [-] DanBC|8 years ago|reply
For a set of 16 Lego figures (ignoring attempts to squidge the packet before buying, but also ignoring swaps) you'd expect to buy over 50 packs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector's_problem
It can cost hundreds of dollars to complete a panini book, and that's with vigorous swapping.
I agree with you about Pokémon cards and Lego minifig packs. They should be regulated.
[+] [-] darepublic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aissen|8 years ago|reply
Apple has started mandating this: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/21/16805392/loot-box-odds-ru...
But Steam, Google Play, PlayStation, XBox, and smaller platforms all need to follow suite, very quickly. Or they'll face even harsher legislations around the world.
[+] [-] Matt3o12_|8 years ago|reply
I don't think there is much of a difference and both cases should be more regulated (especially those catering to children who do not know any better).
[+] [-] wastedhours|8 years ago|reply
Trading Pokemon cards, I reckon I spent more on booster packs trying to get a Charizard than I've spent on all of the chests, loot boxes and packs in games, for nothing more than a piece of card that (sadly) eventually gets water damaged...
[+] [-] bobthepanda|8 years ago|reply
The second issue is that a physical object, like cards or stickers, does at least feel like a physical object, in that it's very easy to tell if you start having an excessive amount of them. On the other hand, on a lootbox, there isn't really a innate difference in response to buying one vs buying one hundred. So it eases some of the friction as well.
[+] [-] belorn|8 years ago|reply
So I took a glance doing a few Google searches and it seems that physical card packs has a global market of a few billions. The number varies a lot since some of the data include card trade as well as pack sells. One data point argued a 450 million from news packs and 3 billions from card trade, specific for sport cards. For loot boxes I would estimate the number to be around 100x of that, give or take. For every $10 in the past there is $1000 dollar being spent on virtual packs.
It seems reasonable to me that a government body might not care too much about a $450 million industry, but do care a lot when it is a $100 billion industry.
[+] [-] GuB-42|8 years ago|reply
The first ones are trading cards, including games like "Magic: the Gathering". If you are lucky, you can sell a card you got from a booster pack for way more than what you originally paid. And chances that you can don't even have to leave the shop to do it.
What makes gambling is that you get money for money, not worthless prizes like in the case of most loot boxes. It is an additional risk because there is always hope that you will be able to recover your losses and you may spend more than you can afford. With loot boxes and most other random prizes, it is clear that while you may get something nice, that money will be gone for good.
As for game developers, they don't lack options for Skinner box schemes. Loot boxes are just one among others, there are things like energy systems that are popular on mobile games that don't involve chance but have the same effect of making you spend more money than originally intended.
It is just that loot boxes look more like gambling, even though it isn't really, and are disliked by the majority. The rest is politics.
[+] [-] simias|8 years ago|reply
I think what triggered the problem with lootboxes is that the monetary value of the items is immediately obvious and you can trade those items without any friction over the internet at any moment. For many games an item is just equivalent to some amount of money. It's not a good, it's casino tokens that you can exchange for real money at the counter. Selling cards, especially before the internet, was way more complicated and most 12yo at the time probably wouldn't bother unless they were extremely lucky and managed to acquire a very expensive card "charlie and the chocolate factory" style. Cards have pretty limited liquidity, unlike digital goods that can be traded quickly and safely across continents in an instant.
I don't play a ton of games featuring random item drops but if I look at my Steam inventory for instance I can get the immediate value at which any item is trading (including loot boxes and their keys, but also skins, cards, emoticons, profile backgrounds...). Valve itself plays into this by tracking the price and making it easily available to anybody. You can directly, from Steam, trade these items for money (well, money locked into your Steam account, but money nonetheless).
On the other hand when I was a teen and played Magic: The Gattering most of the time I had no idea of the value of an individual card and checking it would have involved buying specialized magazines (the internet was only in its infancy at the time). We traded cards only for other cards and based mostly on our own subjective assessment of their relative values and how they fit into our decks (or even if the drawing looked cool), not based on some global card exchange with real-time trading.
On top of this there are a huge number of 3rd party "casino" sites for these in-game items who add another layer of gambling on top of the lootbox concept. Those websites don't hesitate to pay Twitch streamers to "play" on their site, sometimes even tweaking the odds to make them win more than average to make it even more enticing for the (often very young) watchers. It's scummy as hell and while Valve & friend don't directly partake in this they very clearly enable this behavior with their policies (and they APIs).
I could see the point of somebody arguing that MtG and Pokemon are gambling but these video game economies are on a whole other level.
[+] [-] Asgardr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nske|8 years ago|reply
As for adults however, my philosophy is that we should stop treating them as kids that need to be told what they are and aren't allowed to do. Loot boxes are addictive? So is sugar, alcohol, sex and 1000 other things. Do we want to go down that road?
If someone wants to gamble a percentage of his income, that should be his choice. If he wants to gamble away all his money or even put himself into debt, also his choice.
[+] [-] SocratesV|8 years ago|reply
In gambling you are mostly doing it for a clear financial gain: you play for money/fiat. Loot boxes, sticker albums, and so on, the primary purpose is not a financial gain. That is a byproduct and secondary, which some elect to make it their primary purpose for engaging in it.
IMO this is a symptom of people not being able to manage their finances properly and identify potentially destructive behaviours. This would push the solution for the problem to Education, how schools should help people in learning the skills necessary to both manage their money and notice when a certain behaviour they are about to engage in, or repeat one too many times, will produce a generally negative outcome for their mental and financial health.
And no, I'm not a fan of loot boxes. Never bought one and think they are mostly used by the publishers in a very bad, and silly, way.
[+] [-] DoctorOetker|8 years ago|reply
Does that include bitcin mining, the probability that your facebook post is visible for your friends, the probability that an advertisement is shown to a specific user, is sortition illegal?
[+] [-] baddox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ozim|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damontal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|8 years ago|reply
I have no hard rule about which kinds of gambling/investment should be completely forbidden but all should be scrutinised and some limitations should be imposed. Like a ban on advertising.
App economy is now gambling economy and at some point it will trigger heavy regulations.
[+] [-] keyle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tialaramex|8 years ago|reply
Psychologically some humans receive a very powerful reward sensation specifically for gambles that pay off. It doesn't matter what the "reward" is so much as that they gambled and won, they get their buzz if they win a slice of cake for guessing how many puppies the secretary's greyhound would have, for a $50 win on the scratch-offs, or for finding the rare Pink Darth Vader in the loot box.
This compulsion is very powerful, and when harnessed it can be good for society - ordinary people do not try to fly faster than the speed of sound for the first time - and it can take individuals to the height of high-risk activities most of us wouldn't have the nerve to try, all the very good Poker players are gamblers for example. But it's also potentially catastrophic for the individual, because they can't stop - or at least they don't want to, and gambles never pay off forever.
This means that restricting gambling for money only worked because that was the most harmful practice available that triggered off this harmful pattern. Once video games began to rely on it too, offering $10 "loot boxes", there was a new way for problem gamblers to destroy their lives, even when you can't "cash out" your winnings, because the psychological compulsion doesn't care about that.
[+] [-] xendo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epanchin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmallDeadGuy|8 years ago|reply
That being said, what about card packs in games like hearthstone? The cards can't be traded or sold, but they do change the gameplay and some cards are inherently stronger than others so gambling and getting "lucky" can give players an advantage. This is definitely closer to gambling than loot boxes in overwatch.
Opening 20 loot boxes in overwatch and getting no legendary skins feels bad but isn't frustrating, you don't need the skins. But opening 20 card packs for a new hearthstone expansion and getting none of the strong legendary cards feels super frustrating, you're at a disadvantage to players that did open those cards.