ESRB Introducing 'In-Game Purchases' Label in Response To Loot Box Controversy (polygon.com) 97
The Entertainment Software Rating Board will begin labeling video games that contain in-game purchases, a response to lawmakers who have noticed the outcry over so-called loot crate systems and have signaled a willingness to legislate them. From a report: The labeling will "be applied to games with in-game offers to purchase digital goods or premiums with real world currency," the ESRB said in a news release this morning, "including but not limited to bonus levels, skins, surprise items (such as item packs, loot boxes, mystery awards), music, virtual coins and other forms of in-game currency, subscriptions, season passes and upgrades (e.g., to disable ads)." The label will appear separate from the familiar ESRB rating label (T-for-Teen, M-for-Mature, etc.) and not inside it. Additionally, the ESRB has begun an awareness campaign meant to highlight the controls available to parents whose households have a video game console.
The label will be clearly visible (Score:3)
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In a cellar, where the lights and stairs had gone out
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Surely, this will make a Dent into the complaints.
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MA (Score:2)
Should have just rated these titles as MA.
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Re:MA (Score:5, Funny)
Tits are in the blue lootboxes, but they only drop about 1 in 100. I know a guy - a friend, if you will - who spent $90 before he got a blue lootbox with tits in them, and then they were just little ones with hair on the nipples.
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Tits are in the blue lootboxes, but they only drop about 1 in 100. I know a guy - a friend, if you will - who spent $90 before he got a blue lootbox with tits in them, and then they were just little ones with hair on the nipples.
Oh...my tits for a mod point.
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Tits are in the blue lootboxes, but they only drop about 1 in 100. I know a guy - a friend, if you will - who spent $90 before he got a blue lootbox with tits in them, and then they were just little ones with hair on the nipples.
Oh...my tits for a mod point.
*disclaimer* They're the kind with hair on the nipples.
Should all shareware likewise be AO? (Score:2)
If you claim that the requirement of an electronic payment method ought to be enough to make a game rated AO, then why shouldn't all games on an online store (PlayStation Store, Itch, Steam, Apple App Store, Google Play Store, etc.) be rated AO? Parents are buying games for their minor children to play.
Consider "shareware" games, which are free to play the first few levels, then one payment for the rest, like Doom (1993) or Super Mario Run. Should these be AO because of the possibility to register them?
expansion packs / mission packs / should not be li (Score:2)
expansion packs / mission packs / should not be listed the same way as loot boxes or in game cash that you can buy.
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Sure they should. Parents are only concerned about whether there is a risk that there are additional costs beyond the initial price tag. You're wrongfully assuming that parents understand or care to understand the difference between DLC and loot boxes when they don't.
If, at some point, a legal gaming board determines that loot boxes are gambling then the ESRB will begin labeling games with loot boxes as containing gambling. If they contain loot boxes and DLC then they would be labeled with gambling and in g
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Agreed. The addition of a tiny message saying "Blah blah in-game purchases blah blah" is not only toothless, it will just be ignored by literally everyone - kids, parents, and publishers alike.
In-game gambling for real-world money should not only affect the rating of the title, it should impact who can purchase the item. If people under 18 are not allowed to gamble in casinos, they should also not be allowed to buy a game with real-money random loot boxes.
This is just another example of consumer protectio
Am I the only person left willing to pay for games (Score:3)
I much rather pay $20-$80 for a game and get all of its features. Then have a game where I can buy myself to victory.
I do like often the Free to play first chapter, or limited world just so I can determine if the game is worth my money or not. But after I pay for it, I kinda want access to everything, or at least access to a level where I can get it in game play. And if it is multi-player I want my chances to be just as good as the next guys.
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If people were willing to pay $20-$80 for a game, then EA and Ubisoft would simply treat that as license to charge $20-$80 AND add lootboxes and season passes.
There is no end to their greed.
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I am basically quoting him in my reply.
His idea is that if Triple-Hey games want to act like a mobile freeminum game, they should be free. EA, Ubisoft, and others want to have their cake of $60 games and eat it too with required DLC and microtransactions.
The lootboxes are just a shit icing on that cake.
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If people were willing to pay $20-$80 for a game, then EA and Ubisoft would simply treat that as license to charge $20-$80 AND add lootboxes and season passes.
That's what they're already doing. That's why I usually wait for the GOTY edition to come out that already has all of the "seasons" (or expansion packs as they used to be known). I don't mind a free game that has pay-to-win options, but I hate games that charge you AND have pay-to-win options.
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That's why I usually wait for the GOTY edition to come out that already has all of the "seasons" (or expansion packs as they used to be known).
But how are you sure that such an edition will come out at all before the game's publisher shuts down the official multiplayer matchmaking server and asserts copyright against unofficial ones?
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That is easy, then I don't buy the game at all. And if the game is crippled beyond belief without microtransactions, people will talk about it online before I buy. People that buy on day one not only pay more, but get fucked over by stuff like this.
At this point I never see a reason to buy a game on day one again. And I sure-as-shit will never pre-order a game again. I will do an occasional kickstarter for an indie dev that I like, and has proven to be able to deliver, though.
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But how are you sure that such an edition will come out at all before the game's publisher shuts down the official multiplayer matchmaking server and asserts copyright against unofficial ones?
I don't usually play multiplayer because I don't have time, so that's not a concern for me.
Re: Am I the only person left willing to pay for g (Score:1)
It's funny, because this is precisely the reason I don't play modern games anymore, which means less income for them.
I like the consistent user experience of "retro" games, and knowing that as long as I have the disc/cartridge/whatever, I can play the same game. Or lend it out. It resell it. But clearly I'm a minority, as is the GP.
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Yep, there have been so many games released over the last few years that I haven't had the time to finish, that I don't feel the need to buy a game on release-day ever again.
Though I am going to buy Into The Breach this weekend, the new game from the devs of FTL. An indie game that did not go the kickstarter route to try to milk money out of people, since they knew they would be making truckloads of cash for this game anyhow? Double respect there.
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I do find that free to play games provide a greater openness to trying games out and engaging in them without fear of either making a heavy purchase up front or being nickle and dimed to death, and generally speaking do not engage in in-game purchases outside of what my wife and I deem "paying for what we got out of it".
In other words, we tend to play a lot of F2P games and while many are so=so or even poor games to us, if we really engage in the game, we hit a point where we way "these devs did a great job
Pay to skip the 24 hour cooldown (Score:2)
And as long as the F2P games are not selling WIN buttons, we're ok with it.
Sometimes it's not a "win" button but a "play at all" button. In the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper, for instance, excavating past a certain distance from the starting point ends up taking 1 day per cell without consumable items purchased with real money, and a typical room is 25 cells. So much for Dungeon Keeper being "real-time" strategy.
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The thing is: $80 may not be enough to cover the full costs and margins of some AAA titles. And only a small part of the benefits are here to make the top executives rich, most of it simply pay normal people who work there. Well there is the communication budget too, but the thing is, these games are ridiculously expensive to produce, and people are not ready to pay more than $80 up front. Loot boxes and paid DLC is how they get the money they need. Paying for cosmetics seems to be relatively well accepted,
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With respect you're talking complete rubbish, first off, you haven't been following AAA news because if you did you'd know that they spend as much as 2x as much on marketing as they do on actual game development. They're not introducing loot boxes because they need to, they're introducing them because of the massive profits they get from this gambling mechanism which is cheap to implement. And secondly Indie game companies have been releasing some great 3d games and also some AAA companies have still been r
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Am I the only person left willing to pay for games
No, but fewer and fewer publishers are willing to accept your one-time payment when they could instead leech off "freemium" transactions for years, not to mention their hopes of catching a whale [gamasutra.com].
I do like often the Free to play first chapter, or limited world just so I can determine if the game is worth my money or not.
The free-to-play idea is what started the trip down this road to microtransaction hell. And determining the value of a game before buying it was something we solved decades ago with the game demo -- but that's pretty much been killed off by early access games, another horrible money grab.
Pointless... (Score:1)
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On the other hand, what fraction of player spending on game purchases (download price, expansion prices, and consumable prices) is on AAA games?
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Verbiage (Score:3)
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I don't think it's greedy to want a full game when you paid full price for the game. I paid for Killer Instinct's "Ultra Pack" or whatever, $60 for all of seasons 1-3, including chars and maps. When I bought it, it said "ALL THE CHARACTERS" and such. Then a few months later they release more characters and maps for a not-insignificant $5 each. Even Mario Kart 8 had two DLC packs. Granted it felt pretty complete before them - but who can really resist an extra 16 courses and 4 characters? Of course, now all
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Things like Train Simulator and the like are special. Namely, they consist of a LOT of licensed content. (Heck, think of it this way - the Swiss sued Apple because the clock looked a lot like the one at the train station).
So while a lot of what you buy is extra trains, remember that most of
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TBH I think you're greedy for wanting a 2018 AAA game at 2004's price point.
TBH I think you're a douche for posting disparaging, stupid, remarks as an anonymous coward.
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TBH I think you're greedy for wanting a 2018 AAA game at 2004's price point.
Why, exactly?
Because of inflation? Wages are stagnant, so nope.
Because development costs have gone up? They haven't gone up to the degree that the market has expanded and production and distribution costs have gone down.
Decades ago you had to make physical discs or cartridges or whatever, an instruction manual, package it all up, sell it to a distributor who took a cut and sold it to a retailer who took a cut and sold it to an end user.
Today, the market is orders of magnitude larger. Major publishers own
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I don't. Game prices keep rising.
But lets say that a 2018 AAA game has a price point of £90. Fine, charge £90 for it.
I wont buy it, and you'll get shit sales, and you'll lose money. You're competing with GTAV which continues to sell at £15-40, with PBUG at £27, with Football Manager 2018 at £38.
So keep your budget low enough to compete on price, or provide a game worth £90. Just don't fucking sell me a game for £40 and try t
Standards requirement? (Score:2)
Doubt this will help. (Score:2)
Parents and grandparents will see the label and say "Oh, well I won't be giving the kids my credit card to make the payments, so no problem."
Except that the publishers will make the games nigh-unplayable without jumping in to the microtransactions.
Make it "in game gambling" (Score:2)
and we can talk. Otherwise you are still playing softball with psychopaths.
Doesn't address the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, this is key to the issue. I mean, I'd prefer to buy a game in one complete lump and don't *like* the idea of buying add-ons, but when you're rolling the dice for a chance at something and it could take tens, hundreds, or thousands of tries to get what you want--and worse, you may not even know what the odds are--that's really problematic.
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It seems more like a distraction than like part of a solution. Indeed the problem with loot boxes is the addictive nature of variable rewards (*), not the fact that it's an in-game purchase. Having a single label for all types of in-game purchases does very little to inform potential buyers. It would be useful if the label listed which types of purchases each game contains, but their announcement suggests that it won't.
(*) They claim "we were unable to find any evidence that children were specifically impac
How about the Content? (Score:2)
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When I was of the proper age to appreciate Happy Meal, the toys were released one per week over the course of the campaign to encourage return visits. Has McDonald's since changed that to random chance without a way to trade in duplicates?
but you can't take rake in a Poker game without it (Score:2)
but you can't take rake in a Poker game.
Are the card rooms Really Legal in Texas? They don't take rake but they are members only (any one can be an member) and you have to rent your seat.
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Sales of gambling and gambling services are regulated, and differently than betting on a game of skill you are participating in.
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But you don't understand, they want to play THAT game. You know, the one with the P2W Loot Crates and the expansion pack that allows you to complete the game. Free games aren't worth paying for, and they shouldn't have to pay for the game they want to play either!
Anything else is "Greedy bastards". Duh.
You can't vote with your wallet (Score:3)
On a side note this is also why people describe these practices as predatory. The industry knows
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I find most video games at least partially addictive, and your basic point, minus the inflammatory remarks is admirable, but I doubt you'll extend your conclusion based on addictiveness of gaming to the whole genre.
My point is people are willingly addicted to video games, anything after that is quibbling over how bad it actually is. Personally, I find the time sink equally bad as a monetary one. Especially when you factor in social problems that arises from vulnerable nerds inability to relate to actual rea
You can't be willingly addicted (Score:2)
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I'm not addicted to slashdot. I can quit anytime I want.
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Playing a game that contains loot boxes and not buying them is indeed ineffective. And in multiplayer games you'll even be providing them a service by letting the whales feel superior to you.
But the OP suggested buying games that don't have loot boxes in them in the first place, of which there are plenty from indie developers, but even in the AAA space there are lots of games without loot boxes.
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Time to play old fashioned games (Score:1)
Go outside, kick a ball around, use stones nuts or dried Lima beans for counters, that kind of thing. Much easier and cheaper, less mentally taxing, and it gives you a chance to talk with real people in person, instead of grinding baddies and typing abbreviations and other dumb stuff. That's becoming a very important rare skill.
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useless label (Score:1)
That's easy (Score:2)
Offer in-game item purchase via the DigiByte crypto-currency and bypass this new requirement.
Not counting the kid part (Score:2)
Lotto tickets are "In-Liquor-Store purchases".
"There," he sniffed self-satisfiedly, and looked around. "That's good enough to make it not gambling."
What will the SJW want from your game? (Score:1)
Every part of a plot has to be SJW pre approved before publication?
Type of characters? Number of characters?
More languages and faiths in every game?
too late (Score:2)