EA Still Believes in Loot Boxes, Will 'Push Forward' With Their Use (variety.com) 145
Electronic Arts will "push forward" with loot boxes in its future video games, despite admitting that all loot boxes are gambling. From a report: "As you might imagine, we're working with all the industry associations globally and with regulators in various jurisdictions and territories, many of whom we've been working with for some time and have evaluated and established that programs like 'FIFA Ultimate Team' are not gambling," Wilson said. "And we don't believe that 'FIFA Ultimate Team' -- all loot boxes are gambling."
The issue of loot boxes, a form of microtransaction that has players spending real money to purchase a virtual box and then open it to discover what's inside it, came to a head late last year with the release of EA's "Star Wars Battlefront II" which featured a form of the box that players felt was costly and unfair. EA later pulled the form of microtransaction and completely retooled it before reintroducing a more accepted form of loot box to the game.
While the debate continues over loot boxes and whether they are a form of illegal gambling, Wilson explained Tuesday why EA believes they're not. "Firstly, players always receive a specified number of items in each ['FIFA Ultimate Team'] box. And secondly, we don't provide or authorize any way to cash out or sell items in virtual currency for real-world money. And there's no way we can make value assign to FUT items in game currency. And while we forbid the transfer of items of in-the-game currency outside, we also actively seek to eliminate that where it's going on in an illegal environment, and we work with regulators in various jurisdictions to achieve that."
The issue of loot boxes, a form of microtransaction that has players spending real money to purchase a virtual box and then open it to discover what's inside it, came to a head late last year with the release of EA's "Star Wars Battlefront II" which featured a form of the box that players felt was costly and unfair. EA later pulled the form of microtransaction and completely retooled it before reintroducing a more accepted form of loot box to the game.
While the debate continues over loot boxes and whether they are a form of illegal gambling, Wilson explained Tuesday why EA believes they're not. "Firstly, players always receive a specified number of items in each ['FIFA Ultimate Team'] box. And secondly, we don't provide or authorize any way to cash out or sell items in virtual currency for real-world money. And there's no way we can make value assign to FUT items in game currency. And while we forbid the transfer of items of in-the-game currency outside, we also actively seek to eliminate that where it's going on in an illegal environment, and we work with regulators in various jurisdictions to achieve that."
It shouldn't matter if they're gambling or not (Score:2, Insightful)
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IF consenting adult(s) want to do something that harms no one else, who are we to say no?
That's the rub now, isn't it? EA isn't targeting consenting adults. They're targeting children. That's why this is such a big deal.
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It happens (Score:2)
Children occasionally do things their parents would rather them not do, [google.com] you know.
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"None of them have their own credit cards and their parents sure as hell aren't going to let them run up massive charges on theirs or even let them use it."
Do you have your head in the sand? Plenty of soccer moms exist which think their little snowflake can do no wrong, and they get credit card access ALL THE TIME.
See: My upstairs neighbor. Kids get EVERYTHING.
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None of them have their own credit cards and their parents sure as hell aren't going to let them run up massive charges on theirs or even let them use it.
You clearly don't have children. Actually based on this comment I'm not even sure that you weren't grown in a lab and brought to life as a fully functioning adult.
Re:It shouldn't matter if they're gambling or not (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important to include in your passionate defense of liberty that you also don't believe in any form of social safety net. If consenting adults are allowed to engage in behavior which is highly likely to harm them in some way such that the taxpayer ends up needing to pay to keep them alive or off the streets then that's a problem.
This is, indeed, the single largest problem with social safety nets: they provide a plausible justification for imposing regulations that limit freedom merely because in some cases people who exercise the freedom may end up requiring more support. This argument says that any country that has universal health care should ban smoking, alcohol and all other drugs.
The right answer, IMO, is to recognize that safety nets and freedom are both social goods and that the potential negative interactions between them are just part of what it costs to have them. You can avoid those negative interactions by discarding one or the other (or both), but the result will be less happiness overall than if you just accept the inefficiency.
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This is, indeed, the single largest problem with social safety nets: they provide a plausible justification for imposing regulations that limit freedom merely because in some cases people who exercise the freedom may end up requiring more support. This argument says that any country that has universal health care should ban smoking, alcohol and all other drugs.
Of course if you weren't trying to make this a jab against socialism you could make the exact same argument about the criminal justice system, like how drunk people cause a lot of violent crime or guns lead to school shootings. This is not a negative vs positive rights issue, you don't have to provide a service to be negatively impacted by other people's abuse of freedom.
P.S. People who die early are not necessarily more expensive than those who die late, and we all die eventually. If you got most your good
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You have a naive and simplistic understanding of addiction.
In countries that have decriminalized and regulated drugs they have seen a drop in addiction the strongest example being Portugal [wikipedia.org].
Regulation works (along with various social programs). Treating addiction as a disease works. It costs less than criminalisation, enforcement and incarceration, it has better outcomes for users and addicts and for the community as a whole.
That the US spends more on health, for worse outcomes and more on waging a war on dr
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Taken to the extreme, it applies to everything.
Don't like air pollution? Feel free to stop breathing.
Don't like turning on your TV and watching porn being freely broadcasted during the day? Feel free to stop watching TV.
Don't like your neighbors' loud music? Feel free to stop hearing it.
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13 year olds can choose to not smoke cigarettes, or do drugs too right? We should really unban everything.
That's the thing about gambling laws. For the most part they don't exist to stop gambling, but exist to stop a vulnerable group who are incapable of understanding their meaning of their choices from getting addicted to gambling from gambling.
You want to add gambling to video games? Fine, allow those video games only to be sold and played in casinos or ban the real world consequences of the action (i.e.
Provide players with a sense of pride (Score:1)
They could also (Score:3)
The $60 price point is pretty hard to overcome (Score:2)
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Ya never know. AAA VR games could easily break that $60 price point and people would still buy them. Recall that the move to $60 games happened with the HD generation, where game production (art) costs rose pretty dramatically. DLC and preorders were probably the main reasons base game costs didn't go up again this console generation. Also now, even among console gamers, there's a growing problem of huge game backlogs driving down demand for new games, made worse by so many titles being huge open worlds wit
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...make better games instead. But that wouldn't give them as much $$$
And fuck Origin right off.
Simple, EA, make better games and get rid of Origin... Erm... to what end? EA wants to make money and as long as people keep buying NB/H/FL games on consoles, they've got no impetus to change. I on the other hand have stopped buying EA games... I've even stopped pirating them as nothing remotely interesting has come out lately (I didn't even bother with that Mass Effect game as I heard it was dreadful).
Glad I quit when I did (Score:2)
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You should see his lawn, dude... littered with the bodies of those who stepped on it.
Jesse James... (Score:5, Insightful)
...believed in bank and train robbery right up to the bitter end, when someone else who believed murdering him for bounty money was ok. The trouble with belief lies in its disconnection with reality. I don't know (or care) if loot boxes are gambling, I do know they suck and undermine games.
This does not bode well... (Score:2, Informative)
...for their upcoming game "Anthem."
It looks like it could be a very nice game. They are going to utterly ruin it with loot boxes.
Oh well, I guess there is always Warframe....
Loot boxes are already very successful (Score:2)
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Jesse James... believed in bank and train robbery right up to the bitter end
Bullshit. Show me any evidence that he believed they were acceptable and should be legal, and that he shouldn't be hunted and prosecuted for committing the crimes. Oh, I'm sure he had his rationalizations and justifications, but I seriously doubt they rose to the level of believing that bank and train robbery should be legal.
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All criminals believe their crimes should be legal: this way they wouldn't be prosecuted for doing them.
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All criminals believe their crimes should be legal: this way they wouldn't be prosecuted for doing them.
No. Criminals would like to get away with their crimes. That's different from honestly believing they shouldn't be illegal.
Not gambling (Score:5, Insightful)
I find the argument that loot boxes are implemented in a way that is 'not gambling' if you can't sell the results for real world money, specious.
Time is money.
If a loot box will potentially save players hours of time getting to some goal, then the value of the loot box is the time it will save. The fact a player can't sell it to someone else is irrelevant.
Any non-cosmetic lootbox mechanic is gambling and should be regulated entirely as such.
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If at first you don't succeed, Russian Roulette is not for you?
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Keep in mind some loot box systems give players items you can't get any other way. So "Time is money" would not apply to those cases. But, I would say that money is too narrow a definition for gambling... you can gamble for anything valuable to you, even digital items that cost nothing to produce* and have no assigned monetary value.
* - Yes, there are typically labor costs involved, but one time labor costs divided over a near-infinite quality of items is as close to 0 as you're going to get.
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This is how Pachinko parlors work around the anti-gambling laws in Japan.
The machines do not award money, they just award more balls. You can trade your balls back in for non-cash prizes (stuffed animals, decorative tokens, etc). You can then go right next door, to a different business, and pawn your prizes. The pawn shops sell them back to the Pachinko parlors, of course.
"Oh it's not gambling, because we don't authorize the resale of the prizes."
But so long is there is any technical means, at all, of re
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This is a legally valid [thelawdictionary.org] argument, even though it wouldn't fly anywhere outside of a courtroom.
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What if what you get is worth less than what you paid for the loot box? I suppose it's a bit specious given that digital items can be reproduced at a whim, and are therefore costless.
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Okay that's a little snarky, but these are items which can't be sold or refunded and for the most part do not translate into having any real-world value. Some items might be rarer than others, and some might be more "valued" by the player base, but any such determinations of value
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I find the argument that loot boxes are implemented in a way that is 'not gambling' if you can't sell the results for real world money, specious.
More to the point...
"we don't provide or authorize any way to cash out or sell items in virtual currency for real-world money."
It's a form of gambling that the player can't win.
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They mean it's not gambling by the legal definition of gambling in various countries. It does feed upon the same psychological mechanisms that gambling does, but they don't care about ethics when there is so much money to be made.
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Exactly. Reselling is a red-herring. Hell it's only needed because some gambling laws exclusively define value that way. But the reality is that parting with money for something which may net you disappointment, or may net you joy is inherently no different whether that item has value or not. The results are the same: potential endorphin release for a good reward encourages you to do it again gamifying an addiction all the while parting with money.
The solution is simple (Score:2)
If EA wants to disassociate loot boxes with gambling, they just have to do one of two things:
1. remove the financial outlay element.
2. remove the 'possibility of losing' element.
Now, it's EA, so we can summarily dismiss the first option. The second one, however, is relatively simple: ensure that any time a player purchases a loot box, at least one item in it is an upgraded model of an item the player already has. This way, there's a guarantee to the player that they are paying for an upgrade, while the inab
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Even if duplicates are forbidden, it's still a blind box. If someone REALLY wants one specific thing, and there's a 0.1% chance of getting it, it's still gambling. Of course they'd get it eventually (after they buy out the whole store) but it's simple to stock the store with hundreds/thousands of things, making it impractical to get that rare desired thing by process of elimination.
If it exploits gambling psychology, it's morally equivalent to gambling, regardless of specific mechanics.
I am fine with some lootboxes (Score:2)
Team Fortress 2, Rocket League, etc- you buy them, they have cool cosmetics in them, but do not change the gameplay. Yes. Good.
If a lootbox gives you an advantage in the game, it is not good.
Simple as that.
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It would be silly for lawmen to enforce particular views on fairness in games.
Pay to win mechanics = your cubicle getting flashbanged by a SWAT team.
Casual vs Hardcore Gamers (Score:2)
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Not sure I read right but you say harcore gamers buy loot boxes and casual don't?
I think you got that the wrong way round.
A certain MMO went free to play and introsuced loot boxes. The dumb casual's don't realise they have ruined the game mechanics (was not designed as FTP from the start), but the company makes more off then then they would have had if they subscribed.
$10 a month sounds like a chore to these fools but spending $100 when they want to is nothing. Idiots.
Good thing that Disney cracked down! (Score:2)
Good thing that Disney cracked down!
Pokemon and Magic the Gathering (Score:2)
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But that's not really an apt comparison. You're not buying a blind box where who knows what type of CPU you're getting. You're getting a minimum amount of CPU for the money you spend, as advertised.
To have the same comparison to trading card games, you'd have to get something that's advertised, with the potential to get something something extra. Like...there's a booster pack where you definitely get a Charmander, a Squirtle, and a Bulbasaur. You may or may not get a few extra cards beyond that.
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What I never understood about MTG is why people didn't just fab up their own cards. It's just a piece of cardstock with ink on it.
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Those are called 'proxies' and their use is restricted in official tournaments, unlike genuine cards. Also, it undermines 'ante' (putting down a random card that you lose, if you lose the match) which was originally supposed to be an important part of the game.
I don't mind loot boxes, but there is an issue... (Score:2)
I actually don't mind loot boxes at all, I think they can be kind of fun if done well (admittedly there is often room for improvement).
What I do dislike about loot boxes though, is that it seems like in games that have them I spend too much time opening and allocating "loot". That is the real buzz-kill for me, I don't play games as much as I used to so I mainly want to play, not run a warehouse sim for exotic weapons and gear. As a result I end up dropping interest in games that have loot boxes more often
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Oh god now I'm fearing what Borderlands 3 might look like with loot boxes. One enemy camp has 20 loot containers, 10 of which are locked with keys you have to buy with real money; but wait, there are different colored keys which guarantee different minimum rarity levels for the items the key-unlocked containers have.
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Yeah the different colored keys thing is especially irksome when found. I have a stockpile of machine guns and other weapons, I really need a red flamingo key to open this lock? How about my friend Vera here has a little talk with your lock for a few minutes, it has a steel coated tongue...
EA (Score:1)
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EA: Exploitative Assholes: noun, A company who takes advantages of teens and adults by pushing addictive gambling behavior.
Great Gambling Gumballs!!! (Score:2)
I remember gumball machines full of small toys from when I was a kid. You'd drop your hard earned quarter in the slot and turn the dial with great anticipation that you'd get the cool x-ray ring or reflective sticker featured on the front of the machine. When the sort of egg shaped container dropped, you were generally disappointed to find a gummy artificial worm or a plastic spider ring that you had to remove the flashing from yourself. But, I once lucked out and got one of those flower shaped rings tha
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Gumball machines and so on don't charge $15 for a bunch of unlock keys.
In any case, it was low value and probably not addictive. The question isn't whether it's gambling -- in both cases, it is. The question is if it should be illegal.
The question here is the dollars involved and that it's directed at children. And are they saying the act of unlocking a box is fun gameplay in and of itself?
How about publishing statistics, including average number of dollars to spend to get each piece? I guarantee they k
Ok then (Score:2)
"It's not kids gambling!", EA gambled.
They can continue pushing loot boxes (Score:2)
And I'll continue pushing my money toward other companies that actually listen to their player base, make quality games, and don't try to drain my wallet into the triple and quadruple digits before I have the full game.
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Blizzard - routinely listen to their user base and adjust game balance
Epic Games - Unreal Tournament is community-driven
Digital Extremes - Active Warframe community, in-game updates even acknowledge community issues.
Tripwire Interactive - The Killing Floor games have a lot of community involvement. Forums have a fair amount of suggestions and the game itself has lots of user generated content.
Lots of indie developers listen to feedback from their users as well. The Steam pre-release pages are evidence there
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Also add CD Projekt Red (CDPR) to that list. They self publish games in the Witcher franchise. Super awesome company - games are very high quality, and they don't try to screw their customers with things like nonsense DLC content. Yes, they do offer DLCs, but these are essentially whole new stories in the game with the two expansions offering as much gameplay as the Witcher 3 base game itself (40+ hours). CDPR has also released numerous patches to the base game for free many years after release.
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The last thing I bought from EA was The Ultimate Collection for C&C (with all the C&C games in it) and that was long before all this microtransaction and loot box crap became a thing. None of the games I own have microtransactions or loot boxes and I will not buy or play any game that has them. (and no Fallout 4 Creators Club is NOT microtransactions since you can buy every single piece of content available at a given point in time and not need to spend any more money, if anything it counts as DLC)
what? (Score:2)
msmash's comment and the summary are 180 degrees apart.
Electronic Arts will "push forward" with loot boxes in its future video games, despite admitting that all loot boxes are gambling.
Wilson explained Tuesday why EA believes they're not.
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The confusion is due to this ambiguous line:
"And we don't believe that 'FIFA Ultimate Team' -- all loot boxes are gambling."
Let me rephrase that as "And we don't believe that 'FIFA Ultimate Team' ... all loot boxes, are gambling."
As in, we don't believe that FUT nor all loot boxes are gambling.
And the submitter parsed this wrong and editorialized his false conclusion. Editors, where art thou?
jeek still doesn't believe in EA (Score:2)
Will push forward with continuing to not purchase any of their products.
Lottery (Score:2)
Stop buying those games (Score:2)
This works because EA keeps making lots of money off this system.
People need to stop buying games that have this, and also tell others to do the same. Even if the game is free, don't download or play.
Not buying the loot boxes isn't enough.
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I have a feeling 'stop buying those games' has been about as effective as 'stop voting in incompetent/corrupt politicians'.
What about Draft Kings? (Score:2)
Everything is a Gamble (Score:1)
Life is a gamble.
Go into business for yourself and it's a gamble.
Work for someone else and it's a gamble.
Plant a tomato seed and it's a gamble.
Sitting in a dark hole trying to avoid gambling is a gamble.
Everything is gambling.
Gambling is good.
Electronic games, games in general in fact, are simulations that help teach people how to deal with risk management - also known as gambling.
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There are elements you don't control in nearly everything. Even if you think you control them you don't actually because believe it or not you don't control your own behavior totally. But this is moot - I suspect we agree on the 99.99% point. Place your significant decimal where you like.
Arcade games (Score:2)
Here in the US, about 50% of the arcades I see are not video games, but gambling games. Is this the case in the Netherlands and Belgium?
The games I am talking about take a few forms:
1) Roll a coin down a track and if it gets in the right place you get a prize
2) Pull a lever and if it lands on the right spot you get a prize (or a larger number of tickets)
3) Hit a button at a certain time. Sometimes these games "feel" like games but there is not enough fidelity so they might be random. (Ex: Stacker [wikipedia.org])
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These games are ostensibly 'skill games'. I.e. there's an element of skill involved, even if it's merely timing. Then again, there's an element of skill in poker, blackjack etc. ...
These sketchy games can theoretically be won with skill alone, although it's understood that the skill is essentially impossible to rely upon, and thus it is effectively chance.
Fixed headline For you (Score:2)