18 European countries’ consumer groups have joined the fight against loot boxes

Dragnelus

Just found this;

   


https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/18-european-country-groups-have-joined-the-fight-against-loot-boxes/

20 consumer groups from 18 European countries are launching a coordinated action asking authorities to pass regulations on loot boxes.

Iselin

Pretty good list in the Norwegian document for anyone still having problems with the "why?" part:

• “Exploiting cognitive biases and vulnerabilities through deceptive design”
• “Using aggressive marketing practices to push sales at every opportunity”
• Giving “meaningless or misleading transparency disclosures about the likelihood to win or lose that are difficult to assess”
• Using “opaque algorithms and skewed probabilities”
• “Using layers of virtual currencies to mask or distort real-world monetary costs”
• The “very high cost of freemium and endless grinding”
• The “risk of losing content at any time”
• The “targeting [of] loot boxes and manipulative practices at kids”

Scot

Iselin said:

Pretty good list in the Norwegian document for anyone still having problems with the "why?" part:

• “Exploiting cognitive biases and vulnerabilities through deceptive design”
• “Using aggressive marketing practices to push sales at every opportunity”
• Giving “meaningless or misleading transparency disclosures about the likelihood to win or lose that are difficult to assess”
• Using “opaque algorithms and skewed probabilities”
• “Using layers of virtual currencies to mask or distort real-world monetary costs”
• The “very high cost of freemium and endless grinding”
• The “risk of losing content at any time”
• The “targeting [of] loot boxes and manipulative practices at kids”

Some of these principles could be applied to many other gaming industry cash shop practices, it is good to see that they have got past the concept of loot boxes to the underlining mechanics.

lahnmir

Ahhh, you found it, great! That was what I have been referring too in several posts.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

Kyleran

Scot said:

Iselin said:

Pretty good list in the Norwegian document for anyone still having problems with the "why?" part:

• “Exploiting cognitive biases and vulnerabilities through deceptive design”
• “Using aggressive marketing practices to push sales at every opportunity”
• Giving “meaningless or misleading transparency disclosures about the likelihood to win or lose that are difficult to assess”
• Using “opaque algorithms and skewed probabilities”
• “Using layers of virtual currencies to mask or distort real-world monetary costs”
• The “very high cost of freemium and endless grinding”
• The “risk of losing content at any time”
• The “targeting [of] loot boxes and manipulative practices at kids”

Some of these principles could be applied to many other gaming industry cash shop practices, it is good to see that they have got past the concept of loot boxes to the underlining mechanics.

I'd say most if not all could be applied to most modern games designed around  F2P / cash shop monetization models, not specifically just loot boxes themselves.

My granddaughters play Toca Life World which has no loot boxes, but you will find most of this list in their monetization and gameplay designs.

TheDalaiBomba

I am happy to see action being taken to advocate for some oversight of the evolution of video game monetization.  Really, it goes farther than that, though.

Digital products are becoming part and parcel of every aspect of our lives.  What we own of those products, how we purchase them, how they track data regarding our personal habits, and how they are marketed to us are all of the utmost importance in the upcoming age.  This is just one facet of a much-needed push across the board for society to regulate business in the digital realm.

olepi

Fortunately, I seem to be immune to loot boxes and gambling.  Our town has a horse track and several casinos, and I don't go to any of them. I also never buy loot boxes, and have no interest in NFT/Crypto/P2E.

I guess at some point I'll only be able to play the old games without all that.

WhiteLantern

olepi said:

Fortunately, I seem to be immune to loot boxes and gambling.  Our town has a horse track and several casinos, and I don't go to any of them. I also never buy loot boxes, and have no interest in NFT/Crypto/P2E.

I guess at some point I'll only be able to play the old games without all that.

Well you better stay away then. Because according to published reports, as soon as you open one of those boxes, er /rifts/, you'll head to the track and lose your ife savings.

olepi

WhiteLantern said:

olepi said:

Fortunately, I seem to be immune to loot boxes and gambling.  Our town has a horse track and several casinos, and I don't go to any of them. I also never buy loot boxes, and have no interest in NFT/Crypto/P2E.

I guess at some point I'll only be able to play the old games without all that.

Well you better stay away then. Because according to published reports, as soon as you open one of those boxes, er /rifts/, you'll head to the track and lose your ife savings.

As a hobby I'm thinking of trying to use machine learning to help program a horse racing system. When I learned craps, I did the same thing, Wrote a program to run millions of different strategies, figured out what was the best one, and then tried it out at the casino in Vegas. After winning about $1,000, it looked like it was a winning plan, but then I lost interest.

The most fun part was figuring out how to write a truly random number generator. Computers don't do random very well, so I took a Geiger counter and used the time between ticks as the seed for the rng.

cameltosis

As I mentioned in the diablo thread, this report is from consumer groups who have absolutely zero power. They don't write laws, vote on laws or anything like that. They cannot affect change.

We can hope that this report will come to the attention of someone with power. and then we can hope that the person who reads it will be motivated to make changes. and then we can hope the changes they want to make will actually be beneficial for gamers.

But thats a lot of if's and but's.

Kyleran

cameltosis said:

As I mentioned in the diablo thread, this report is from consumer groups who have absolutely zero power. They don't write laws, vote on laws or anything like that. They cannot affect change.

We can hope that this report will come to the attention of someone with power. and then we can hope that the person who reads it will be motivated to make changes. and then we can hope the changes they want to make will actually be beneficial for gamers.

But thats a lot of if's and but's.

Well think of consumer groups as influencers, and I suspect in the EU their influence is greater than here in the US.

kitarad

Taxation is the only way governments will get interested. They have to be made aware of the potential earnings for them to take an interest. It can never be just purely to save the consumer. Who has time for that?

Iselin

cameltosis said:

As I mentioned in the diablo thread, this report is from consumer groups who have absolutely zero power. They don't write laws, vote on laws or anything like that. They cannot affect change.

Ralph Nader would like to talk to you about automobile safety.

Vrika

cameltosis said:

As I mentioned in the diablo thread, this report is from consumer groups who have absolutely zero power. They don't write laws, vote on laws or anything like that. They cannot affect change.

We can hope that this report will come to the attention of someone with power. and then we can hope that the person who reads it will be motivated to make changes. and then we can hope the changes they want to make will actually be beneficial for gamers.

But thats a lot of if's and but's.

In EU people in power do pay attention to what their consumer protection organization/council/equivalent says.

After that it's always a political question whether politicians take that change into their agenda. But the consumer groups are state funded organizations and they don't have to worry about going unheard, even if it's always a question whether their advice gets followed or ignored.

Scot

tzervo said:

Scot said:

Some of these principles could be applied to many other gaming industry cash shop practices, it is good to see that they have got past the concept of loot boxes to the underlining mechanics.

There will always be some problem in defining them. For example, one easy definition is that anything that takes real money as input and a random chance to get something as output is a lootbox. Then you have BDO's memory fragments, where you pay to get a fixed amount of them. But they are used in-game in the gear upgrade process, which is inherently random. And that upgrade process is done with in-game earnable money. It's very easy to elongate and fork the chain from A to B (A being "give money" and B being "get random effect") to obfuscate things, and not just with virtual currencies, like these guys mention. 

It is tricky to be sure, my hope is that once loot boxes are stopped studios will rethink the gambling as they will see the writing on the wall. Self regulation is always preferable and if that takes of we won't need to get governments involved which is always the best way.