TBH I think it's kind of a shame because I never had a problem with this sort of thing for cosmetic only rewards. It's fun to crack them open and see what you get and it doesn't give you any sort of advantage over other players because it's all cosmetic.
Mobile games where the lootboxes contain stuff you actually need to progress in the game (and often require you to spend hundreds or thousands to get to the upper tiers of power/content) are a whole different story but thankfully that doesn't seem to have corrupted the PC/Console gaming space yet.
Are there any big AAA PC/Console games that still use these mechanics? Fifa/Madden I'm assuming but I'm also out of the loop and haven't played a Fifa game since like 2018.
To your point about cosmetic-only though, that still exists. Rocket League, which I play regularly, gives out boxes you open and get a random cosmetic with varying degrees of rarity. You can get a net larger amount of these cosmetic boxes by paying for the Rocket Pass premium (something like $10 a season). But the loot boxes only ever contain skins, wheels, etc.
And they're correct lmao
Mythic in Standard is possible (played cheap monoblue last season to diamond 1, mono black now almost mythic) and having some fun drafting. 0% need to invest any money. Obvioulsy I won't have all the stuff but that's fine. I'm ok with identifying one deck I like to play for standard and then just drafting until coins/gems run out (ideally never because the winrate is good enough). I also don't care at all about cosmetics and was happy to see there's even an option to turn them sort of off (hide alternate card styles). I still got quite a lot of free cosmetics as well.
It is however interesting that they do have a pretty good value "first buy" option. I was always curious if it is priced so cheaply to get people from a "I'm a free player mindset" to...well payed once, might as well buy more now (+the friction of setting up payment is gone).
I'm an avid board gamer and I can say very confidently that I would never get into any paper based CCG because the pricing/collection is just ridiculous to me. If it wasn't for the free to play online veryion, I wouldn't play magic (I did buy some of the stuff back in the college days but quickly realized what a money sink this would be). I do/did collected some LCGs and still rank Android Netrunner as one of the best gaming experiences in my life.
I admire the strategy and the creativity that goes into reinventing it, but I also wonder if this will mean he misses both the diversity and also story-heavy classics from my childhood and onwards. All while chasing gold guns and dance moves.
Kids play a lot of Fortnite because it's a fun game with a compelling "just one more round" hook (you should try it, or PUBG or Warzone if you want something a bit less wacky, it's fun!). It's not that insidious. When I was younger my peers were just as obsessed with (pick one of WoW, DOTA, Counterstrike).
I think you may be unaware of the extent to which players, including children, are engaging in real-money gambling at the periphery of video games. Here's some recent reporting on the topic.
Tl;Dw there's a thriving, multibillion dollar gray market for gambling with cosmetic items in games, as well as a market for trading these items for real money. Together this creates stealth real money casinos.
* Valve banned servers from "Allowing players to claim temporary ownership of CS:GO items that are not in their inventory (Weapon skins, knives, etc.)"
Be wary of predatory monetization techniques yes, but a bunch of people playing Fortnite because it's a fun, well designed game is not a bad thing.
(I deleted a comment where I worded the same thing much less eloquently. I'll keep the incredulous hostility to the one comment in this thread)
I've played a fair bit of Fortnite Duos with him (or Squads), and don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the design and so on. It's a fun, clever game. The juicing I'm talking about is the chests, and the skins, and rolling in the latest movie co-marketing. And the way it is all stimulus and barely story.
Re: "Juicing" - I saw the word and immediately assumed you were using the definition from this classic gamedev talk, well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
Meanwhile, I can recall dozens of really memorable games I played while growing up. And into adulthood, there have been fantastic games with storylines comparable to all-time classic movies. Imagine missing GTA V, Last of Us, Red Dead, HZD and so on because you only ever played multiplayer CoD for years on end; huge shame, IMO.
And yes, I know that video - we tried to use that thinking with a game we developed. I was thinking of juicing beyond visual gameplay. Chests that act like gambling scratchies, etc.
I can see how the mechanics around lootboxes specifically can be problematic, but overall, f2p + paid skins seems like a pretty good business model for a game. no one is priced out of the base game, which is a) just nice in general, and b) leads to a healthy playerbase size. the people that care the most end up funding the ongoing support, and the developer is incentivized to make the base game enjoyable enough to be worth purchasing skins for.
It's like mobile devices are digital cigarettes.
Pundits have the financial incentive to become memorable caricatures.
Some of the worst odds are offered by state-run lotteries and it's got nothing to do with information imbalance.
People literally line up to play MegaMillions/Powerball and all the information is readily available.
The apologists for this sort of thing are every bit as disgusting as those presiding over it.
Holier-than-thou much?
That's still not what the original poster was talking about. I didn't check his numbers, but involuntary partial employment is a thing, and I don't see a reason why those people shouldn't be counted.
The point isn’t to shame my peers, nor is it that my grandparents generation was without vice, but that maybe there’s something robust about developing a culture of conventional wisdom as a fallback for an increasingly unreliable government? Maybe policy isn’t the only thing that matters?
In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope
Let's say we want a nest egg allowing a two-person household to have a retirement income of $60k: quite a bit below the median household income in the US but still considerably above the poverty line, a net positive considering you don't need to work for a living as long as you don't plan for either one of you to live for more than 30 years.
$60k is 75% of $80k, so that nest egg shrinks down to a mere $1.5 million dollars. But you should aim to live on 80% of your pre-retirement salary, so your pre-retirement salary should therefore have been $75k. In order to get there you need to set aside 15% of that $75k household salary (including any 401(k)s) every year, or just shy of $12k, leaving you with $62k actual income after retirement savings or $5.2k per month for the household (you, your spouse, any children, rent, cost of living and savings for emergencies like health, maintenance or replacements).
If that doesn't sound so bad, consider that this is for someone living just above the median and aiming to maintain a similar standard of living. The further your household income is below the median, the more painful those 15% will be and the only reward will be to get to live in the same level of distress just with a more reliable stable income (assuming it doesn't get eaten up by other expenses you couldn't save for or that arise as a consequence of your already low standard of living, e.g. health issues).
So if that's the "best case" prospect, can you imagine why the chance to become a "millionaire" (and remember: a $2 million nest egg represents a $80k retirement income, a good $10k above the median household income) might be more enticing to a significant chunk of the population than the safer more reliable investments that will at best help them maintain their meager standard of living as long as they don't have any unforseen emergencies?
The exact numbers here are entirely irrelevant. Jobs with higher income generally also offer better options for investment and retirement plans, jobs with low income may not even offer a 401(k). Low income also means any expense represents a larger percentage of your income because costs don't scale linearly, especially when it comes to essentials (e.g. gas prices are the same for everyone and a cheap car may actually get worse mileage and require more frequent repairs compared to a newer model that may still be in warranty).
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/retirement/how-much-you-should-...
[2]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
[3]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...
[4]: https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/povert...
While wealthy "whales" exist and the gambling industry likes to portray them all as Saudi oil barons with more money than sense so you don't feel bad about them sinking a few billion dollars into gambling as extravagance because they still come out as billionaires, the truth is the most reliable source of income are people (and for cultural reasons especially men) with a low income who see no career path to "striking it big" and think gambling will work for them because beating the literal odds feels more managable than doing so at the job market.
On my way to work I drive past four gambling halls, including two sports betting places. There's another sports betting machine at a nearby bodega. The cars parking in front of these places aren't fancy, they're average at best. The people coming in and out of these places or discreetly trying to smoke outside without being identified by people who might know them are mostly typical workers, more likely to be immigrants than not, often enthusiastically chatting about their dead-end side-hustles or acquaintances of acquaintances who have "struck it big" but often just end up "reinvesting" their gains and losing it all again.
The gambling halls and sports betting places don't provide entertainment. They provide empty promises. Especially with sports betting the gamblers understand it as a game of skill rather than chance and they think they just have to do good enough to become millionaires.
So assuming you can put together a down payment (possibly 3.5% for FHA loans), and assuming you believe in the long term stability of US economic conditions in general, the boring, responsible path to a quiet, comfortable life continues to work even below median income levels.
(This also assumes good health for most of your life. Certainly many people get the short end of the stick there, but many more simply don't take care of themselves.)
I live in an Eastern-European country, and the half-time pause of yesterday's football World Cup opener was more than 75% filled with sports bet adds. This was happening on national television. I can sincerely say that that wasn't the case 10 to 15 years ago.
This is true. And as you say, it can be exploitive. But the same could be said ten times over for casual "click" games that take money for useless tokens, or AAA games that take money to buy mods, or even socal media sites that use deep/dark pattern UX methods developed originally by casinos to monetize every second of user interaction - none of which even have the possibility of returning some of the money or money-for-time spent by the user. With that - 100% theft - as the modern paradigm, a game of chance or skill with a 95% ROI, and provable stats of winning or losing, regardless of how manipulative its marketing may be, is somehow more noble than selling someone useless tokens or virtual goods, in my opinion. As long as they're adults and know what they're signing on for, let's stop treating people like children. But people who buy virtual goods shouldn't be allowed to play blackjack, IMHO. They're not capable of making financial decisions with their own money.
Call me old school but I grew up in Vegas and never believed in offering a wheel of fortune where no one could win, or a game where someone didn't fully understand their risks and chances.
It does provide good estimators of probabilities of real world events. Like if someone would ask me how likely it is that team X will win the world cup I'd look up the betting odds. In general, if there's a betting market for something I'd always use the odds as placeholder until I can come up with a better estimate (which quite frankly seems unlikely). If I were to build an ML model that tries to predict something with a betting market that would be the baseline I'd measure against for example.
This, along with the ubiquity, is the big problem. It's bad enough if you have to go to a physical sports book in a certain state. It's downright exploitative when you're watching a game & you see an ad egging you on to bet, oh and by the way, here's also how to bet with just a few pokes on your phone. Sometimes you can even gamble on credit!
Stuck in a dead end job. Gamble.
Alimoney and no way out. Gamble.
Stuck in a dictatorship which can crush your life for arbitrary reasons every day. Gamble
Its a valve for deeply dysfunctional societies. A faked flame of hope for hopeless situations.
Except online gambling pretty much all of these "technologies" are just "gambling with plausible deniability so that the people who like to look down their nose at the old lady playing slots can engage in it without feeling like a hypocrite.
It's kind like the gambling equivalent of how people who look down their nose at cheap school cafeteria type chicken patties that have plant based filler will happily buy a partially soy chicken patty that costs 5x as much if you market it correctly.
Take away the gambling ads and the pharma ads and there wouldn't be much left.
There's next to no incentive for traditional safe guards to safe guard. I'm not suggesting it go bqck to being illegal, only that the ad impressions be limited.
Doesn't have to be. I gamble on the NFL weekly and in the last 5 years have never lost more than $20 a year, less than the cost of a movie near me somehow.
As an industry, gambling doesn't really produce anything. It is a form entertainment, but a very expensive one for the consumer relative to something like movies. It can also be extremely exploitative. The information imbalance between the consumer and provider is massive and there's a whole industry around innovating new ways to make gambling more appealing and profitable.