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A comment on A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley. Parent comment

Re:A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge ... by Retric on Friday October 26, 2018 @11:58AM (#18310421)
Not necessarily. Right now the industry is largely unregulated, but that's more a question of enforcement than any sort of real legal protection.

In the US you can't build a slot machine that accepts money and dispenses tokens that have value. That's often how things operate in Japan, but the same model is generally illegal in the US.

It's questionable if spending real money on virtual currency to buy "loot boxes" that randomly give things of value is legal. And if that's legal, it's not obvious if changing the rate of rewards is legal.

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Re:A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge ... by manfredo on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:07PM (#18310530)
In game items don't have value. If they did, then effectively all games with RNG mechanics would be banned. Heck, even the original Rogue would fall under that umbrella.
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Re:A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge ... by bobbygoodlatte on Friday October 26, 2018 @05:10PM (#18312720)
That depends on the game. I believe one big trend in gaming will be connecting in-game economies to real-world economies. That might happen by tokenizing in-game assets and allowing free trade via exchanges / auction sites.
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Re:A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge ... by Retric on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:10PM (#18310552)
Depends on the game. In multi player games where people can exchange items, people will pay real world money for other players items.

EX: People buying WoW gold.

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Re:A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge ... by ThrowawayR2 on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:16PM (#18310617)
> "buying WoW gold"

IIRC, Blizzard doesn't profit from that directly and explicitly prohibits it in their ToS.

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Re:A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge ... by Retric on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:40PM (#18310847)
That's simply the most well known example. Blizzard had a real money auction house in DIII which they got a cut of profits from virtual item sales so they clearly understand items have value. PLEX in eve online directly links real world money with their in world currency etc.

I could go on, but saying it's virtual is not necessarily enough to protect these companies.

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Re:A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge ... by Nullabillity on Saturday October 27, 2018 @08:59AM (#18315510)
They released their own PLEX clone ("Wow Tokens") a few years ago.
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