Note that the "it's just cosmetics" argument is flawed. Loot boxes are still exploiting the human psyche to earn enormous amounts of money from a small amount of customers (or whales, as they put it, ugh...), regardless of the perceived value they actually offer.

There's actually the toxic culture revolving around cosmetic upgrades in games, where using the default skins is considered a sign of poverty, and leads to discrimination among groups of young people. Fortnite is one of the games where this issue is more prominent.

My nephews who are _barely_ into double digits in age spend more on Fortnite than I spend in an average year on games games themselves. I'm a gamer on PC and several consoles.

A lot of that is driven by "default" culture. They joke about it between themselves and use the terms to call each other names jokingly, who knows what they're calling others online.

As a and parent in my 30s I despise Fornite as a game and the culture it's creating with young children and the money it has them spending on a cosmetic candy cane or whatever it is this week.

Not a parent yet, and not a Fortnite player either, so I might miss the point.

But I totally recall that my parents in theirs 30's were desperate that I requested to wear mostly "surfers's brand clothing" which was the big hype when I was a teenager.

Peer pressure is a thing, videogame is one way to express it, but I don't think it's the root cause.

I think you're right on point.

At least with clothing, you're getting clothing out if it (though frankly I prefer the system of my high school which was to have a uniform; evens the playing field, particularly for me as a working class child at a grammar school in an upper class area).

My issue with Fornite is the speed and cost with which they produce this stuff. I see my nephews spending 10s of £s at a time every week or so.

I'm not sure how I'll deal with the peer pressure issue, my child is too young right now, but Fornite has a strong affinity to children, I'd argue it's mostly played by children and the culture is a real issue which they're doing nothing to resolve that I can see.

Even uniforms aren't perfect at hiding economic differences. Those who buy one that fits now with the expectation they'll buy a new one when they outgrow it vs those that need it to last all year and buy one for their kid to grow into. Those that have multiples to rotate between vs those that have just the one which ends up with holes in by year's end. The official uniform of my school had the school crest on and cost €50, which resulted in some of the poorer students getting jumpers with approximately the right colour for €20 and €5 iron on crests which would look obvious and start to peel in short order.

I agree. My circumstances were a little different. My family wasn't poor, we were just comparatively less wealthy as a working class family when I was attending an all boys grammar school (on merit) with the sons of mayors and company directors and doctors. My uniforms were fine (I was in the iron-on blazer crest gang) and it was never picked on, although my non-brand shoes were.

Being the only brownish person in a very white middle and upper class grammar school in a very white part of England at the time _was_ something to be picked out on.

Spoiled kid always was always a thing.

Electronic communications & transactions enable theses mechanics to happen faster & without schedule constraints if left unchecked. Same as for bullying by the way.

As far as social interaction goes we live in uncharted territory. Does it necessarily mean that it's bad? On the other side of the spectrum this enable YouthForClimate, BLM, and things yet to come...

It's really hard to analyze thing as they happen, this is not new either ;)

PS: Also not spoiling you kid seems like a good old advice still standing!

Interesting. I didn't know skins were something people took seriously. I play overwatch from time to time. In overwatch, skins are obtained from lootboxes, which can be bought with real-life currency, but which you also get free after matches; so I have accumulated some skins. I don't think I've ever used one, and I don't think anyone's ever cared that I use the default skin.

So, I can only assume this culture arises in specific games, not out of cosmetic microtransactions in general.

Which is not to say I think cosmetic microtransactions are a good thing. Just that they're not by necessity as bad as some in this thread are making them out to be.

With Fortnite it's that my nephew's are really into Fortnite and Fornite YouTube. They're very aware, even at their young age of the "default" slur, they call each other names related to it jokingly. Peer pressure and probably influential YouTubers have them convinced they _must_ have particular skins at certain times.

They're so into the YouTube culture they recently requested (and received) RGB keyboards and accessories to adorn their desks even though they're gaming on consoles.

Overwatch seems to have a different culture than Fortnite. People might say "heh" if the play of the game is Default Skin Reinhardt using the Heroic highlight intro... but that's as far as it goes. Playing the game seems to give enough skins that nobody is particularly concerned about it.

From reading the comments, it seems like Fortnite players make fun of each other for not having skins, thus people are pressured into buying them. I am guessing that because the game has so much downtime, there really isn't anything else to do.

Yes it's far from perfect, my point is that is was still better than pay2win.

Whether free2play is more or less discriminating than DRM AAA titles with price starting at 12x the price of an optional pass is a whole other real question.

Regulation of virtual goods economics market will be an important debate. But most people don't even know about these huge markets, let alone politicians.

One key point is that current copyright laws are totally inadequate to latest technologies. Company can build empire based on copyrighted material in a heartbeat while decades are needed before anything enter to the public domain. So much energy is wasted fighting legal roadblock instead of innovating on previous concepts...

Actually I'd say that it's not any better than pay-to-win, and could actually be worse.

At least with pay-to-win you know that it's a sham and that it's only the amount of money that you spend which influences how good you are at the game (more or less).

With cosmetics and appearances it's much more stealthy since you're still a good player if you win, but there is peer pressure to pay for a skin so you can keep up with the latest fashions. You could easily spend more and more money this way before realising what a sham it is, and all you'd have to show for it is maybe a full digital wardrobe of stuff you never wear. (With no way to sell that to recoup even some of the costs).

>>Regulation of virtual goods economics market will be an important debate. But most people don't even know about these huge markets, let alone politicians.

Thats not quite true w.r.t. loot boxes. Several EU and Asian countries have already classified them as gambling and regulated them as such. I believe EA's Fifa soccer was pulled from several countries because of this.

In a way, we're not that far then from the world of Snow Crash[ß]. The thing in the book that always struck me as both unlikely and remarkably accurate as far as human vanity is concerned, was the idea of high-end custom avatars.

Stephenson's notion that in a future with ubiquitous VR there would be well-paid artists who crafted detailed, posh avatars for the well-off might just come true. I always thought it pretty far-fetched: sure, people are vain but they wouldn't be that vain. It appears I couldn't have been more wrong...

ß: We already have the mafia issuing extortion bonds. (ref: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-09/there-...)

Can we stop infantilizing people who choose to waste money on digital cosmetic items and acting like they're being exploited and have no power to stop it? If someone wants to spend $1,000 on weapon skins that's their choice. At what point does personal responsibility play any role?

Literally who does it hurt if there are no lootboxes that are essentially slot machines?

Does it hurt the people who waste huge amount of money, who further develop bad economic habits and potentially harm their loved ones (their parents or god forbid their kids)? No.

Does it hurt regular consumers that want to buy the item they want instead of gambling for it? No.

Does it hurt a large abstract entity that doesn't get to maximize their profits? I guess it would! (Epic has grown from a few hundred million company in the early 2010s to an almost 20 billion company in mid 2020, literally all of it based on Fortnite which only brings money through these microtransactions)

So you're arguing for a business model that is not beneficial to any consumer, that decreases net happiness, all in the name of "freedom".

There are a million other things we don't allow because if we let people take personal responsibility for them they consistently fuck up. It's the exact same situation with a lot of softer drugs.

Gambling addiction is very real and should be treated as seriously as drug addictions. (Serotonin is quite a drug, even if we do manufacture it ourselves in our own glands.)

I'm also not a fan of cosmetics because they make the games harder to play, when the silhouettes of characters change it becomes a nightmare.

Not to mention that they break immersion in the game too, Call of Duty Modern Warfare started off last year as a slick game with mostly realistic skins and characters, now it's full of pink anime guns, colourful tracksuits and even a Hyena...

Note that Valve first introduced lootboxes in TF2, where it was not purely cosmetic.

New weapons in common quality usually popped for everyone very quickly. And were you really unlucky it's was a matter of seconds to find a trade by crafting some metal out of unwanted items.

Was kind of a meta-game, but yes definitively paved the way for virtual goods stock market. Some social science researcher should totally investigate that (if not already done).

Example of an exchange: https://backpack.tf/

Edit: Lot apparently they also suffer from economic crash sometimes like with bitcoin https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-26-team-fortress-...

>Some social science researcher should totally investigate that

I mean, not quite a social scientist, but they hired varoufakis at the time to study the economics of the loot boxes among other things. Here are some of the articles about it from his website.

http://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/category/valveconomics/