Gambling is very different from csgo cases and pokemon cards. One of the insidious aspects of gambling is that people can delude themselves that they can actually get rich from it

I'm sorry to tell you this but csgo has a thriving secondary market where you can exchange items for real money.

I'm aware and I'm not going to deal in absolutes because I'm sure there are a few people out there that do think they can make money from csgo skins but it's absolutely nothing compared to actual gambling.

I'm a former gambling addict, it is very very difficult for me to lose the amount of money I have lost at craps or blackjack playing magic the gathering.

I don't think we can classify all variable reward systems as gambling. Even competitive online chess with elo and matchmaking could be classified as gambling.

I find all this handwringing about cosmetics gambling ridiculous when sports betting is becoming more and more accepted and legal.

For me, if there's some good way to gate kids from participating then gambling with loot boxes should be perfectly accepted. Not that it's good game design, but adults can vote with their attention/money

> if there's some good way to gate kids from participating then gambling with loot boxes should be perfectly accepted

There already is, you gotta have a credit card to buy lootboxes. And while I am not aware of the situation all across the globe, in most places you gotta be 18+ to get a credit card. For a debit one you might qualify a couple years earlier in the US (and probably some other countries), but an easy solution would be for Steam to just ping the bank for info on the age of the customer. However, I am not sure if that would be easily possible, especially if we are talking about API-like approaches.

The only current workaround is using gift cards, but I somehow doubt that kids resort mostly to that instead of using their parents’ credit cards. But at that point, it is on parents, because there are all sorts of ways to solve the problem on an individual level (e.g., get a card with a low limit just for steam, use a paypal account that you have to manually log into for every transaction on steam and don’t give your kid the credentials, etc).

Unfortunately, there is no way one could feasibly stop some parents from just handing their kid a credit card and mentally checking out. And any other solution to the problem that won’t massively inconvenience adult Steam customers seems to be difficult to imagine.

It’s simple to add a child as an authorized user so they get a card.

But at that point it comes down to parents.

I feel most of the “children gambling” people just hate the idea of loot boxes in general, which is fine, but the argument is stronger if it’s honest.

At least here in Australia, Steam vouchers get sold in supermarkets and any one at any age can buy them. I'm not sure if those vouchers work on the Steam market but I'd assume they would (I've never seen anything in the Steam UI to suggest that deposited funds will only work in some places).

In Germany there is a big fat 18+ sticker on the vouchers.

I mean I think that's a bad call too.

Oh same. I think it is far, far worse. Sports betting has a really gross social component where the group applies social pressure to push casual spectators to "put their money where their mouth is", I don't think sports betting at a venue should be illegal, but I also don't think letting anyone place bets with a booky from the drunken comfort of their friend's living room is at all beneficial for society.

I kind of get the argument, even if I'm not fully convinced, that betting is something people are going to do anyway so you might as well codify it and keep it honest, but if nothing else, advertising sports betting should absolutely be illegal, and sports betting should probably still be illegal.

>I don't think we can classify all variable reward systems as gambling.

That's true. thank you for your perspective

Look at the wikipedia page: > Gambling (also known as betting or gaming) is the wagering of something of value ("the stakes") on a random event with the intent of winning something else of value, where instances of strategy are discounted. Gambling thus requires three elements to be present: consideration (an amount wagered), risk (chance), and a prize.[1] The outcome of the wager is often immediate, such as a single roll of dice, a spin of a roulette wheel, or a horse crossing the finish line, but longer time frames are also common, allowing wagers on the outcome of a future sports contest or even an entire sports season.

CS cases ticks all of the boxes. I'm really curious why your definition of gambling is.

Most children who had pokemon cards bought for them likely don't consider the act of buying and opening pokemon card packs to be life altering or ruining events. I also doubt the average person considers buying packs of pokemon cards gambling. So while it fits the literal definition, it's considered different colloquially.

This is very much unlike slot machines and blackjack which can and do take over people's lives.

People who were raised from childhood with a particular form of gambling as a regular thing seeing it as different than “real gambling” generally isn't surprising, but it doesn't mean that there actually is a real meaningful difference beside personal acclimatization.

Gambling in a casino also doesn't have to be life altering either. In fact there are people who have destroyed their lives opening pokemon card packs. Reddit is literally full of stories. Here is the first random story I clicked on: https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonTCG/comments/14uucxy/im_in_3...

>One of the insidious aspects of gambling is that people can delude themselves that they can actually get rich from it

Do you really think TCGs are not gambling? Guess people open MTG and Pokemon packs just for "fun" then.

Why would holo cards, foils, and mythic rares exist? Black Lotus is just a piece of cardboard after all.

I agree, I mean to the kids (And some adults with nothing else to do) the digital items and such are "Getting Rich"

Gambling is literally anything where you pay money to have a chance to win something. That includes all these loot box things in literally any and all of its forms.

As someone who was once addicted to these games, they should absolutely be illegal. We really should not allow corporations to print money with drug dealer methods.

That definition is very reductive. Any competitive tournament with an entree fee is gambling?

Also, the reason I'm against banning such games is because when you look at all the things we find fun, you will be sad to see that a lot of them just boil down to variable reward. That variable reward aspect is what makes it fun.

Competitive games are not based on chance. Betting on the outcome is.

> Competitive games are not based on chance

You would be wrong. Even chess has variance, the better player does not always win.

Then there are games that actually integrate chance as a mechanic and are still competitive.

Not being based on chance doesn't mean there's no element of chance.

If you have no skill or training in chess, there's basically zero chance of you winning.

>Any competitive tournament with an entree fee is gambling?

technically yes. But not all gambling is illegal. because the legal definition of gambling is more precise.

I think that's the part that is forgotten in the discussions because we conflate the casual definition with the legal one.

Have you watched pokemon card opening videos?

If you mean gambling in Counter Strike, at least it's not explicitly aimed at children.

Children don’t play Counter Strike?

Whether or not children play CS:GO/CS:2 is irrelevant. It is a game where 50% of the time you play as terrorists shooting law enforcement, it's very obviously not aimed at kids.

The only way for kids to gamble in CS at all is to either steal a credit card, which is obviously not Valve's fault, or for them to have a Steam gift card. If anything is to be done about the children, I think Valve should just 1) require a users to have a credit card on file in order to buy lootboxes, and 2) require re-entering the full credit card details if the user makes several purchases in a short period of time, in order to stop kids who, for example, memorized the CVV of a card already on file in Steam.

Keep in mind that uploading a government ID would have issues, seeing as in the US a driver's license is not universal, not to mention IDs all across the globe. Maybe there's an alternative form of ID that would work that I just can't think of, but anyways, I'm against needing to upload a government ID to access anything unless it's specifically for governmental purposes.

> Whether or not children play CS:GO/CS:2 is irrelevant

My opinion is that it is relevant... but each to their own I guess.

I was a teenaged boy when I first started playing Counter Strike. Maybe I’m a Luddite but the game is still fun; I feel like you don’t have to gamble or buy 48 cosmetic collectibles to enjoy it.

It's explicitly not aimed at children being rated M / mature and with obvious themes implying as much. Obviously children still play it, but there has to be some level of responsibility on the parents here.

Children are not the only group harmed by gambling.

Regardless, many children most certainly do play Counter Strike.

Ok but as a society we’ve settled on letting fully grown adults partake in some forms of gambling. Are we really equating loot boxes in a mature rated game to casinos that will empty your kids college fund in the span of 12 hours?

My point is that the "think of the children" angle is redundant and reductive. We simply don't need to go there to have a discussion on the pros and cons of lootboxes.

you mean because CS is such a mature community?