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...