Games

What if Chuck E Cheese was in your bedroom and it was marketed to make you feel like you were missing out if you didn't have the thing your friend's had, but you can't buy the thing, oh no that's too easy. We'll let you buy the chance to own the thing.

Your welcome to think that way. It's definitional gambling, some people don't like to enable kids to gamble.

These ”gaming” companies are even worse than Casinos, because they’re unregulated and are studying the psychology of addiction to exploits peoples weaknesses to maximise their profits.

They use techniques such as an “early win” to hook people and override their common sense. (It’s illegal for Casinos to do this in most places.) Examples of other techniques are using artificial in-game currencies to dissociate it from real money; and soft-gating, where something is technically free but it has a delay, so you pay a little bit to skip the delay. It’s super predatory.

Also, exposing kids and teenagers to this is wiring their brain to crave gambling as an adult. It’s the same reason we don’t let 13 years olds smoke - by the time their brain has finished maturing, the desire for nicotine is hard-wired for life.

What is better, offering that skin for a one-time price or putting it in a random box and selling a chance at getting the skin? Let’s say the regular price is $20. Now if the gambling gave a guarantee at around $25, it might be ethical because you could get the skin much earlier and “save” some money. But these companies aren’t doing that (at least not to my knowledge) because they are predatory and not ethical by nature. If they were, they would offer items for a one-time price AND the opportunity to gamble for it with a chance to get it much cheaper.

The issue is the potential age of the potential audience. Some people are too young to understand they are gambling money that has fixed value on a CHANCE to win big without understanding the ODDS of winning big, and the marketing team behind this are counting on that. It's predatory behavior on people too inexperienced to know they are being scammed as the item they get has no real monetary value.

Children's brains aren't adult brains. Some of the dopamine manipulation of casinos is bad, but doing the same thing to kid's brains is outright evil. It breaks how they develop, and every kid you sell a loot box to should be an extra felony charge of illegal gambling operations filed against the CEO.

Ignoring that, lootboxes are unregulated gambling, which means they can (and do) manipulate your win rates specifically to optimize for addiction, so they're extremely malicious to adults as well.

Ignoring the gambling stuff, literally all microtransactions fundamentally break the design of games by taking elements designed to reward gameplay and replacing them with mechanics explicitly designed to be unfun and suck money out of you.

Just to lay out the points, I think real life stuff like card packs, gacha ball/box, rigged claw/arcade machines are at similar addiction level but slightly better than game loot box. There are aspects why it's worse than even casinos and we(including this generation that heavily inflicted by lootbox) will be paying the aftermath in the future.

For physical gambling, casino is heavily regulated, all the "approved" machine are giving out reward listed in that odd table and they get audited for payout etc. And people can "opt-out" by signing agreement that get themselves banned from casinos in that region per local government regulation. Maybe they want to stop it, or the doctor determine that you don't have the self control etc, there is way to get out of that financial/mental trap and are enforceable by law.

Next, the play for fun but only get some chance to win physical stuff (card packs/gacha/arcade), I don't like them cause it's very obvious designed mental traps that drives people too churn their coins. They have a lot lower barrier of access, their labeling is not regulated like casino(no odd table on the claw machine because apparently it's "skill" issue? yeah right, that's exactly what it's deceiving. ) And if you are not there to just play machine like Racing/DDR/TimeCrisis etc, you have much better time/odd doing those basketball machines. The goal was to have fun doing competition between friends, the reward tickets are just extra. (And if you do the math, those things you can buy at dollar store at much cheaper price. ) For card packs/gacha I've seen fucking grown adult argue with store staff why they can't get the card/thing they wanted, like accuse of staff cheating etc.(while everyone else was there mostly for table top games.) People that are addicted really goes to extreme and disregard what they might inflict to themselves or others.

Last, the loot box, the barrier to access is just the phone, a child can literally click an ad on your phone, install a shiny cute game and started playing and keep pressing the "5 more tries" button, and then they might throw that big button with so many gem that are overflowing the box/bag icon and say you can "save 30% when you buy more with this bundle, plus extra!". And it's up to the parent to gate that access and setup their phone/creditcard in ways to prevent bad thousands of dollars outcome you see in the news. Children does not understand until much later. (if you ever see the herd of pokemon go player with more phones than their limbs can access, it's not healthy "gaming" and is very obvious for any external observer. And they can't ban themselves from this type of access like casino/lottery.)

Future consequence, everything is statistics, when you have a population, you have distribution, certain amount of people will be vulnerable to these type of psychologically refined "experience" and can't get out of that dopamine trap specifically designed to trick your age group. When you have your children age group expose to this type of environment, all the stress for preventing them to get addicted to those game is fully on the parent. What "else" can you attract them more? What's your solution when all they want is 20 more pokemon ball? It's like exposing people that may or may not be alcoholic and treat them with unlimited cheap booze, it's only 25c per hit. Then when certain percentage of them became addicted and have social/mental issues, it's the society's problem to get them back on track. Social support, medication, consulting, extra regulation, etc, etc all the fallout are not the responsibility of those company selling it, you as tax payer will be paying for it. And you know what they do if they make big bucks using lootbox? They hire economist/psychologist to further refine that experience, people that addicted would rather skip snack or better food just to have those extra money to throw at the app. AND, for economics, there is that opportunity cost, the money that sunk into those corp would have be doing something different, which IMO even just spend them on chocolate has better outcome than lootbox. Money that eventually become more addictive app is worse then pretty much anything else.

Saying it's not too bad and you should have self control or parent needs to teach their children properly is the typical misunderstanding of how or why people can become addict and then blame the victim. It's more or less like you don't throw Li-ion battery into fire, it's very violent chemical reaction that there is no stopping once triggered, and for addiction you just need that person and environment to match and then the brain go full steam ahead. They are born vulnerable to that specific substance, thrill of winning and can only regain self control after heavy intervention/regulation. Dare I said it, lootbox games are wiring children's brain so they become more vulnerable to similar stimulation later down the road. I don't have actual study to back it up, it would take another 5~10 years for children playing lootbox games to become adults and then another 5~10 years to study the aftermath.

I think with kids and loot boxes, it's not an issue of people should spend money how they want, but more about being left out.

If it was one game and one kid, loot boxes sure, it's a bit of harmless fun. But as soon as there are a bunch of kids, and one kid has a better item, every kid has to have the better item. And it's all blind luck who gets what,unless you spend everything you have

The big difference is loot boxes don't actually return real value. Gambling in a casino has the potential to win money, trading cards have 3rd party markets, arcades are getting pretty crap now but still have prizes. You can't sell things from almost all loot boxes, you can't just buy the reward instead.