I’m happy with loot boxes being categorized as gambling when money is involved, and regulated as gambling.
By “cool with this” are you refering to age verification? That wasn’t a comment on age verification. You’re putting words in my mouth, or I was ambiguous in the above comment, or both.
Online age verification is tricky to do right, balance effectiveness and privacy. That’s true of any age restriction, whether it’s loot booxes, other kind of gamblings. Existing age verification has bad effectiveness, privacy, or both. That doesn’t gambling shouldn’t be regulated, or that age verification can’t improve.
MudMan@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
Yeeeeah, you're way less down on age verification on principle than I do.
You're also more down on loot boxes than I am, in that I still dispute the equivalence to gambling. It's not absurd, but it requires ignoring a lot of nuance.
Still, the problem I have with this situation in general is that the loot box element (which isn't that heavy, it mostly establishes by law that loot boxes will make a game be automatically listed as 18 and up) is masking the mandatory age verification element. And the mandatory age verification is baaaad. It effectively does the magical wishful tech thinking thing we've been seeing recently elsewhere where it just... says it should be private and comply with privacy regulations but doesn't explain how that's possible, while at the same time demanding that every single store and service provider both design a perfect age verification system AND somehow magic up an API to share that information with each game while remaining entirely private. Which is pretty much impossible.
But nobody is talking about that, everybody just wants to dunk on loot boxes. Like four years too late, because most of the industry saw the writing on the wall and moved on to battle passes instead on the PR hit alone.
Hirom@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Good point, it’s a bit late, and may hit hard on some games that already implemented loot boxes. But it’s never too late, assuming it’s indeed a kind of gambling.
Hopefully it’ll lead to less games integrating loot boxes, so that people of all ages can play games with neither loot boxes, nor the age verification that comes with it.
MudMan@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
Less than what?
Who is still doing loot boxes? Valve, for sure, they still have them on CounterStrike, sports games and then... what? Hearthstone/Magic and that type of CCG stuff and... I guess mobile gacha RPGs?
Everybody else is doing battle passes now.
Hirom@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
A majority of Android and IOS games, and 36% of PC games according to a study.