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What is a gacha? It is basically a loot box with less items. You may also see it written as gashapon or gachapon. In asia, these tend to have a few things that make them worse than their western counterparts. Time limited gashapons. Paid player and free player gashas where paid players have better chances. Paid player and free player gashas where paid players have access to items months before free players, if they even ever get them. Chances that are much lower than western games. Instead of a 1% chance we may see in western games, we are dealing with 0.0045% chance or something similar. Quick question, would you roll on a loot box or on a number on roulette? You have better chances at roulette. If you put your money on any number there is 1 in 38 or 2.63% to win. This is better than a lot of western and asian loot boxes. Why should you care about asian loot boxes? When western companies look for new ways to further monetize their games, they have a few options. Other western games, casinos, or eastern games. Western games are a good place since they can just take someone else’s idea and see how those players react to that market. Casinos are a great place to study how influence someone to spend more. They have been doing it for years so why not use some of their ideas. Eastern games are not as good of a place due to some strong cultural differences compared to western audiences. So I am going to talk about two eastern regions and why they may have the systems they do. Mainly japan and china. The idea of loot boxes originally comes from china. You would have internet cafes with pirated software where a lot of people would spend their time. So one video game company developed the loot box as a way to get people on pirated software (playing for “free”) to be able to spend more money in the game. If there is one thing I can say about chinese developers, they love to steal ideas as a starting point then work on them from there. I don’t know where they got their idea of poo poo in a box, but as far as I can tell japan had gachas since the 60s and bandai made it bigger, and america has had it as long as we have had baseball cards. The chinese f2p system is a bit different than western games, and I am gonna generalize here, but the chinese have way less issues when it comes to buying power in video games. Basically confucianism hosed them over something fierce. Imagine if everyone in life is related by being superior and inferior to someone else. If someone is superior, then they are lucky for their position and must have the wealth equal to their status. Transpose this into a video game and although you would expect people in china to treat video games as an escape from reality, those relationships are still in the virtual world. Quite often developers will do things like sell an in game item for a few thousand USD and expect only one person to get it. If your avatar is an extension of yourself, why shouldn’t you be able to spend your money to become better than someone in the game just like you do in real life. Generally, not many people are upset about this. Japan is a bit different due to not having the full strength of confucianism that china got, but it is still there. They love time limited events that make you want to spend now or miss the chance of getting the item. But main difference between a japanese and chinese gacha is that in china you can normally out right buy power while in japan they will give you horrific odds unless you paid and even then those odds would look odd in a western game. Those odds would not look out of place in a casino. These systems were designed in order to maximize profit, but as companies often do (or china in general) they don’t care about their users. Just their money. People often say that is just business, but gambling addiction is a lovely thing for adults and most of these games are not aimed at them. They are aimed at children with some access to someone's money. There are quite a few documentaries about how hosed up japan's economy is and part of what came out of that were NEETs. Not in Education, Employment, or Training. There is an underclass in japan who have given up on the system or the system gave up on them that live in small booths inside of internet cafes. A lot of these people are addicted to games or f2p games or gachas and have issues getting out of this situation because of it. Japan isn’t really dealing with this issue, as is the japanese way of ignoring unsightly things, but one japanese game actually got their government to take a look at gachas. That was granblue fantasy. What the japanese government did was make it so people had to stop lying about what was in the gashas and got the government involved due to rampant fraud. There is a lot more to it, such as multiple companies doing the same or worse, but I’ll get into that in later post. China has also seen some government intervention recently due to gambling addiction in video games and blizzard got a lot of the attention. So blizzard changed how they did loot boxes. Instead of selling you loot crates, blizzard in china gives you packages you can open when you buy in game currency. In the old system, you would buy loot boxes and get special currency. In the new system you buy currency and get free loot boxes at about the same rate as you would in the old system. Open 10 boxes and get 2000 credits? Now you buy 2000 credits and get 10 boxes. The numbers made up but you get the idea. You still have the same The main deal with both countries is that game companies now have to report your chances of getting any specific item. This still doesn’t prevent them from giving you lovely chances or finding loop holes around that law. Blizzard did all of this for overwatch china instead of just posting drop chances (blizzard pls). All of this poo poo has one more thing in common. Statistics. When designing these systems, you run the same math for gambling casinos and their profitability as you can on these gachas. The company's goal is to get you to buy more and they would pump oxygen into your home and give you free drinks if they could. Even to minors. In closing, here is an enemy named gachapon from mega man 4.  TLDR: poo poo in a box is gambling Third World Reagan fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 14:20
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There is always a chance that people in government may not understand a topic and create bad legislation. After all, they are just people. So what happened in america was the ESRB was created due to the government saying "regulate your selves or we will." So they did. That is why we have age rating based on violence in video games. The ESRB is a non government regulation board that is made by game companies for game companies. When the ESRB fails to regulate, then government probably should step in, which is what we are facing now. If the ESRB regulates properly, then we may have a special rating for gambling or loot boxes on games that should warn parents if they should buy it or not. That would be ideal. That probably won't happen since the ESRB has their heads up their rear end. So you can expect some sort of legislation to be done here. My thoughts on that were a large non us western market (EU) would do it first, causing companies to either design two systems for different markets or design one system that complied with all markets. Some game companies already have to do things like this like when a game featuring nazis gets released in germany. As for the trading cards = loot boxes argument, some things to keep in mind If you buy trading cards, you might find something of equal value or good value If you buy loot crates, you might not find anything worthwhile because they are designed to have very few things inside that you want, especially if they are time limited or series boxes If you did not get the trading card you want, you may trade or sell that to another person as you have gained some worth If you did not get the item from a loot crate, most games only have one option for you to exchange the value you put into it which is selling your account, something game companies tell you that you can not do Trading cards last until they are thrown out by your mother Loot box items last until someone shuts the servers down
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Nov 22, 2017 15:18
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Children are a concern since raising a child on a gambling type game helps create gambling addicts. They are more susceptible than adults. As for adults being the most income source, yah. I got stories about Age of Wushu I should write up some time. Even when you have a system that is f2p with f2p loot boxes, these systems are not designed in a vacuum. They are built in a way that makes you want to gamble some more. Now put a child in that game where they may not have developed enough to understand what they are doing. But you kinda have to remember these people were kids once and may have developed a gambling addiction then as well.
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Nov 22, 2017 16:34
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So lovely f2p chat. Age of Wushu was an amazing idea for a game with some amazing history done by a lovely company and then given to the west to an even more lovely company. If you know things about chinese buisness culture, then you can probably guess what happened. The game absolutely tried to make you stay logged in as much as possible, as you only earned exp while logged in, but offered you a sub feature that let you log out. To make that clearer, anything you kill got you exp, but you didn't absorb it all and had to wait at a trickle wait but could log out to make that go faster. You could also stay logged in, go to special areas, or do events to make it go faster. There was a guy named GreatEast who owned GreatEast Insurance company in SE asia somewhere. He had a weekly budget of about $5,000 USD or his wife would get angry at him. And he spent it. To put this in perspective, that guy is spending roughly the same as 2,000 people a month who are subscribed to a normal mmo. And oh boy did we goons have someone who tried to compete with him and also threw money at the screen. Most players never did, most people you fought never had that crazy poo poo, and for a good period of time in that game throwing money at the screen didn't matter. Then it did. But people stopped spending money so the company would up prices on things to make those whales spend more or create a new server where people would enjoy the early part of the game and have to spend money all over again. These two people were not addicts, just people with a poo poo ton of wealth. On the other hand, I saw people that were not as well off spending $500-$1,000 a month because they were just addicted to the video game. The game was mostly about just buying power with the only example of a loot box I can think of was the begging system. If you gave cash shop currency to a beggar, it would lower your infamy from killing other players and give you a bag. The bigger the tip, the better the bag, and the higher chance of certain skills or a costume and less chance of getting literal poo poo. Also the beggar got no money for this. The average player didn't pay anything or maybe $10-$15 a month. Third World Reagan fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 17:14
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From reddit, about an EA racing game https://my.mixtape.moe/xoyryw.mp4
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Nov 22, 2017 17:31
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Personally I would like cosmetics in loot boxes, but I am pretty sure we can't have that when government steps in and creates a law about this. I loved planetide 1 and disliked planetside 2. In 1, each team has unique colors and shapes so it is easy to tell people apart at a glance. In planetside 2 they went the other way and although there are still some shape differences, you can paint your self up to be pretty or hard to distinguish from an enemy. If both of these were in a loot box, and you tried to say "no unfair advantage" in a video game, how do you write a law so that it would distinguish between an unfair advantage and a fair advantage when it comes to certain camos or skins.
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Nov 22, 2017 17:40
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Forums posts on SA are like loot boxes it costs money to have them and often they are poo poo
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Nov 22, 2017 17:56
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Earwicker posted:So are trading cards considered gambling now too? I mentioned this earlier but left one thing out There are established laws to exempt them as gambling. The attourney in this video talks about it a bit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zXJL459eUY about 29 minutes in
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Nov 22, 2017 18:17
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Also here is a 1 hour pod cast from the dude in the video about loot boxes. https://headgum.com/robot-congress/robot-congress-52-are-loot-boxes-gambling-ft-marc-whipple Both that video and this podcast was done before battlefront 2 launched. Third World Reagan fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 18:35
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TF2 HAT MINING RIG posted:Apparently lootboxes aren’t legally considered gambling because there is no way to win money, which implies they are shittier than real gambling. I posted a pod cast earlier where gambling attorneys shred this idea down to the base bones and it is in fact gambling. They have no idea what the ESRB said that and really wish they didn't since they won't pay your legal fees.
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Nov 23, 2017 08:59
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Yardbomb posted:However Tencent owns a chunk of the game now, it's only gonna head downhill. As much as I do not like tencent, I got a feeling they may be able to provide EA with a legal alternative to loot boxes that still generates money called just buying power. World of tanks would also be a good alternative but they are kinder with their buy power model where things you buy get you access to a higher tier or my be unique but are generally less good as things people grinded for.
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Nov 24, 2017 16:10
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Palpek posted:I'd like to have seen that EA CEO meeting when the news broke out that they brought it onto themselves with BF2 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3jpy9b2gvk eDIT: I hate SA and time stamps on you tube videos so here quote:Andrew Wilson - Electronic Arts Inc. - CEO & Director This was before the backlash Third World Reagan fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Nov 24, 2017 |
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Nov 24, 2017 17:22
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Just a reminder about disney, the big mouse already has f2p child games with microtransactions. I am sure they don't want anyone to bring that up at this point in time.
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Nov 24, 2017 22:11
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Groovelord Neato posted:it looks great but these console-first fps control like poo poo. You say that, but rolling around as a droid was pretty fun.
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Nov 24, 2017 22:28
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jisforjosh posted:I just noticed that this is the LootBox thread and not the Battlefront 2 thread, they're fairly indistinguishable. Sorry for any derails It is fine, friend. Loot boxes are a system in game that directly impact those games and talking about loot boxes will involve talking about gameplay as well.
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Nov 24, 2017 23:28
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I am currently procrastinating but I'll see if I can't go get some numbers on children spending money on loot boxes of f2p games. A good majority of the children bit is just marketing players discontent to get people to do something about loot boxes. And it may be working enough to get the attention it deserves.
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Nov 25, 2017 05:16
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Re: Age https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/...gaming-content/ quote:According to PC and Video Games – DLC and Microtransaction Purchasing, the latest report from global information company, The NPD Group, among the U.S. population of males and females age 13-54, 28 percent have purchased additional video game content in the past three months, with males and teens being the primary purchasers. Microtransactions are purchased more often than downloadable content (DLC), at 23 percent and 16 percent, respectively. Finding a lot of places don't like to track what ages they are targeting and getting money from. Still looking though.
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Nov 25, 2017 05:31
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A lot of what I am finding out about age groups is video game companies don't want to release that information. But I did find this. It doesn't have to do with microtransactions but should be useful if people believe anyone under 18 is opening a loot box and if that is gambling.  
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Nov 25, 2017 05:42
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CodfishCartographer posted:This is really interesting, thanks for posting it! I hadn't much considered how even if a minor isn't paying lots, they may be more prone to typical casino gambling later in life. Although, I'm curious if microtransactions / loot boxes in games that AREN'T social casinos would have the same effect. Although it's probably not been A Thing long enough to have solid data on. Thanks for the research! I hit up a professor who does research with games and children and side effects but she is on maternity leave so I am still trying a few more spots.
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Nov 25, 2017 07:12
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blackguy32 posted:Wait, is this thread about all microtransactions or just loot boxes? GTA online doesn't really fit if it's just about lootboxes. this thread is for what ever you want it to be about, friendo
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Nov 25, 2017 07:12
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Friends, please do not mock pies in this thread.
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Nov 25, 2017 18:51
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If you don't want it regulated, you only have to blame those that decided they needed bigger profits and got the attention of the government.
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Nov 25, 2017 20:53
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That was covered earlier in the thread in several forms. The general definition of gambling varies by state, but generally you put money in, you got a game of chance out of your control, and then a possibility for money back. In casinos, you have to be able to show to a gaming commissioner what the chance to win is. The rate that loot boxes are set at are well below what any casino could be without being considered rigged and shut down. Can you get money back out of the loot box game? In some cases yes, in other cases yes if you sell your account. Can you lose all of the money you put into the loot box? No, but you can get close to that by having loot boxes be near worthless in terms of what you want out of it. Even if the box always gives you a prize, these boxes are not generally bought for those lesser prizes. And apparently, things like that have existed in the physical world and have laws against them. You can't call something not gambling even if everyone wins a prize.
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Nov 25, 2017 21:09
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Also as a reminder, here is a loot box from EAs need for speed https://my.mixtape.moe/xoyryw.mp4 This is entirely designed to look and play like a slot machine for a reason
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Nov 25, 2017 21:14
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Xae posted:Is WoW gambling then because you buy it and get a chance at the "correct" item which you can then transfer by selling your account? Did you put a quarter in the machine for a single roll? IANAL but that may be an important distinction I would write to your state gaming commision to find out
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Nov 25, 2017 21:15
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You don't actually do that though. You pay 15 for access to a game which is time. How you spend your time is your choice. Loot boxes are not paying for time or access, but paying for an item.
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Nov 25, 2017 21:19
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central dogma posted:So, what's the end goal really of involving the government? Here's what happens. The government forces game companies to list the % chance per item, which is fine by me. The government taxes loot box expenditures in order to have money to enforce these regulations. Game companies will still incorporate loot boxes, because they're essentially free money. And whales and addictive personality types will still spend large sums on loot boxes. This is what happened in asia and yep, that is what I expect may happen. I do not believe that loot boxes will go away unless some how gaming commissions force the ESRB to set games to 18+ or suffer fines.
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Nov 25, 2017 21:48
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Those resources you are talking about are called gaming commissioners and they already exist. Once regulation comes into place, they will ask certain games if they comply, and if they don't, they have the power to deal with it. This will not be an increase in cost of government.
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Nov 25, 2017 23:28
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Xae posted:"This will be more work, but there it will not take an manpower to accomplish it". There are these things called casinos that have had electronic slot machines for god knows how many years. Guess the similarities between asking a video game developer about their odds and asking a video game developer who makes a slot machine about their odds.
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Nov 25, 2017 23:32
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Avalerion posted:Don't really think anyone can disagree with this. My concern is that even if the new Battlegrounds or Shadow of war got rid of loot crates and you could buy things directly, without changing anything else - that would be an improvement over "gambling" yea, but wouldn't fix the underlying issue of the games still being pay to win or balanced such that it's unfun to play unless you pay. I would expect this and lower drop chances. Funny enough, warframe is a grindy game that actually shows you the drop chances but just lol at knowing these odds.  You can at least get one of those from a friend to save your self the trouble.
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Nov 26, 2017 11:37
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DOOOUBLE POST I went back and checked some things out. Because of the new chinese law requiring drop rates in video game loot boxes, warframe decided to be compliant with the chinese law which is why they have those drop rates even listed on their wiki. This is probably because the chinese law covers just video game drop chances and not loot boxes as warframe doesn't have loot boxes. Original post from here https://forums.warframe.com/topic/809777-warframe-drop-rates-data/ Drop rate data here https://n8k6e2y6.ssl.hwcdn.net/repos/hnfvc0o3jnfvc873njb03enrf56.html Just an idea of how long this took, those chinese laws were announced in Dec 2016, went into effect on May 1, 2017 and this data was put out on June 28, 2017. also lol if you search for "(0." Third World Reagan fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Nov 26, 2017 |
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Nov 26, 2017 13:48
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cross posting from the gbs thread but here is an study in Australia about gambling and children https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5316223/ does not talk about loot boxes
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Nov 26, 2017 15:59
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Murderion posted:Is video game gambling legally the same as real world gambling? No, unless the items you get have actual cash value. that part isn't entirely correct according to that game attorney podcast I linked earlier it doesn't have to have cash value, just value, a weird law distinction and if your account can be sold for more because it gained a virtual item, then it might have value
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Nov 26, 2017 23:16
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It might. I mean who knows how this will end up. I wrote an email to my state gaming commission to see if they had a stance but I've heard nothing back yet. I am almost certain that the great state of texas is not even remotely prepared for this. If new laws are needed, well... we only pass laws every 2 years.
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Nov 26, 2017 23:32
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Thank you for you schoolies for coming in and talking about your experience with children and loot boxes. Especially when they mock you for not being cool and gambling.
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Nov 27, 2017 13:54
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joats posted:Ok, so I work at a hospitality studio in an architecture firm. I have heard stories about designing casinos, (I haven't done any yet, just starting out). The free Buffet, the shoes, the hotel suits, are designed to keep you inside the casino at all times so that you have more opportunities to head to the gambling room. Welcome to the mmo world where they have to be logged in during certain times and if they get bored of what they are doing in the game they have side games. Let me tell you about fishing.
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Nov 27, 2017 22:37
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This is from earlier in the week but we might as well post it here. http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news-action-and-statistics/news/2017/Loot-boxes-within-video-games.aspx quote:In recent weeks there’s been much interest in loot boxes within video games. Loot boxes provide players with the opportunity to pay to open a box and acquire an unknown quantity and quality of in-game items for use within the game. Here Tim Miller, Gambling Commission Executive Director, explains our stance on this matter. http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/PDF/Virtual-currencies-eSports-and-social-casino-gaming.pdf
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Nov 28, 2017 01:44
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Those are some good articles.
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Nov 28, 2017 10:59
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fez_machine posted:Here's some more from Ben Cousins who did a lot of free to play, exploitative stuff for EA but also documented it: Part of me wants to believe the industry as a whole wants to address this issue. The other part of me remembers a bit of history and believes there are a good number of people taking notes about how to make it more like gambling. also i like this still 
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Nov 28, 2017 12:30
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| # ¿ May 7, 2024 11:20 |
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Star wars is the worst IP now
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Nov 28, 2017 20:13
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