Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 07:43:41 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Loot Boxes and Similar Microtransactions

Started by AsparagusTrevor, October 04, 2017, 12:54:43 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

AsparagusTrevor

I notice that a lot of games are moving towards these 'loot box' purchases. For those who aren't aware of this, you pay real-world money and get a box which contains random items for use within the games, whether it's weapons, costumes, in-game currency. It's adding randomness to the 'pay-to-win' model - a cynic might say it's to fleece more money out of consumers who now have less control over what their money buys so they keep spending until they get what they want.

It's basically gambling with real money hidden within a video game. Does it seem like something like this, something which is accessible by people of all ages, is due some form of regulation? Should there be parental warnings on the boxes to inform of such temptation?


AsparagusTrevor

Yeah in-game shite, not even something you can fondle in real-life.

It's just an evolution of the real life loot creates.  If companies can get away with dumping Teenage Mutant Hero Turles mugs and Pokemon bottler opens on people then the next step is game developers jumping on. I don't touch buying keys in Rocket League and it has no effect on my enjoyment so I'll step out the thread before CS:Go Lotto and all that bullshit is brought up.

AsparagusTrevor

Quote from: Hello! Replies Hidden on October 04, 2017, 01:05:28 PM
It's just an evolution of the real life loot creates.  If companies can get away with dumping Teenage Mutant Hero Turles mugs and Pokemon bottler opens on people then the next step is game developers jumping on. I don't touch buying keys in Rocket League and it has no effect on my enjoyment so I'll step out the thread before CS:Go Lotto and all that bullshit is brought up.

I'll admit I don't know a huge amount about the subject so I don't fully know the extent, I didn't even know Counter Strike had gone this way. I don't actually game online (put off by the toxic attitude of a lot of online gamers), but I see more and more news of this scourge in modern games (Des Tiny 2, Star Wars Battlefront II: The Revenge etc).

It's so easy these days for money to be pumped into games (already premium priced) without a second thought, it's very worrying. It's even more worrying that said money isn't even guaranteed to buy something you want. It's targeted at people with addictive personalities, which is already a huge percentage of online gamers by default.

madhair60

I don't see the harm in it if you like the game and want the goods. As an adult, I mean. Keep it away from kids obvs.

Deception, Lies, and CSGO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8fU2QG-lV0

h3h3Productions did a good overview of the gambling aspect and shadiness.

biggytitbo

It's a bit shit when they obviously start to design the whole game around them though, especially when they then still charge full price for the game. That recent NBA one (ive not played it) apperently requires loads of in game currency to actually advance anywhere on it, even though they charged full price for the game.


Its not just bells and whistles either, the new Lord of the Rings game you can apperently progress through the game quicker if you pay for the loot boxes, and the devs have claimed this is a good feature for people without much time to play. Thats a massively slippery slope argument isnt it, and actually quite insulting to their own product.

Phil_A

Jim Sterling's been going on about this subject at somewhat wearying length recently, but I totally get why it provokes his ire so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igjXK1IAM9I

It's the same business model as all those shitty freemium games like Clash Of The Clans et al, except now developers are expecting you to pay out additional fees on top of what you might have paid for a full-price title. They try and sell it you as just an optional thing, but it's almost a guarantee that players who don't partake of in-game purchasing will get a shittier experience - more grinding, crappier gear, less options etc.

Loot boxes are a total scam and pretty much inexcusable.

chocky909

Isn't this a bit like how chocolate makers are keeping the price the same but reducing the size of the bar? Rather than increase the price of the game they are adding in game purchase and DLC content.

Has the average price of a brand new AAA game increased over the last 20 years? Doesn't the average AAA game cost a lot more to develop now?

I'm not saying that every game gets this balance right but I would say that £45 is quite cheap for what you get these days.

Mister Six

Quote from: chocky909 on October 04, 2017, 04:54:01 PM
I'm not saying that every game gets this balance right but I would say that £45 is quite cheap for what you get these days.

Don't brand new games cost 60-70 quid these days?

biggytitbo

Quote from: Phil_A on October 04, 2017, 04:46:28 PM
Jim Sterling's been going on about this subject at somewhat wearying length recently, but I totally get why it provokes his ire so much.


He's on about the new Forza now, where they've added 'pay to earn' prize boxes which let people advance in the game without playing through it. Make you wonder why people who do that even bother getting the game in the first place if they're just going to pay a bit more to skip through it faster.

asids

Quote from: chocky909 on October 04, 2017, 04:54:01 PM
I'm not saying that every game gets this balance right but I would say that £45 is quite cheap for what you get these days.

The issue is that the uniform pricing does not take into account that not every game is the same. You can have a linear single-player game that lasts 8-10 hours be the same price new as a open-world or multiplayer game with a lot of depth and content that you can easily sink 100 hours or more into. Which is a shame as some of those 8-10 hour games are really good, but if people don't think they're going to get enough playtime out of it to make it worth their while then they'll just go for the latter kind of game.

The point about covering the increasing costs is a valid one, although you have to take into account that game sales are increasing year on year as more people take up gaming, so it kinda balances out. Naturally as a business if you make more you're going to start spending more.

chocky909

Quote from: Mister Six on October 04, 2017, 05:38:10 PM
Don't brand new games cost 60-70 quid these days?

£50 max on day one online surely. Unless you're going for the ultimate editions that have all future DLC included which sort of proves my point about the DLC bringing the games up to the price point they'd like to charge.

AsparagusTrevor

Quote from: biggytitbo on October 04, 2017, 04:40:35 PMIts not just bells and whistles either, the new Lord of the Rings game you can apperently progress through the game quicker if you pay for the loot boxes, and the devs have claimed this is a good feature for people without much time to play. Thats a massively slippery slope argument isnt it, and actually quite insulting to their own product.

Yeah this is one of the things I read recently. It's quite a bizarre concept to me where you're paying £40-£90+  for a game then you pay extra to rush through it. I don't understand the logic behind this.

hewantstolurkatad

Quote from: chocky909 on October 04, 2017, 04:54:01 PM
Isn't this a bit like how chocolate makers are keeping the price the same but reducing the size of the bar? Rather than increase the price of the game they are adding in game purchase and DLC content.

Has the average price of a brand new AAA game increased over the last 20 years? Doesn't the average AAA game cost a lot more to develop now?

I'm not saying that every game gets this balance right but I would say that £45 is quite cheap for what you get these days.
A certain amount of that is just a balancing of the scales too surely? The best selling games of the PS2 era must've made an absolutely insane return on investment, GTA Vice City probably cost as little as 5% of what GTA V cost.

Anyways, most of these kinds of things generally amount to the impatient and the rich effectively subsidising everyone else. As someone who rarely gets caught up in release day hype for anything and has no interest in 100%ing anything, it all works out pretty well for me.

Ham Bap

Not fond of all this in games. More of a way to fleece you after youve already paid your money. I barely and would barely pay for this stuff.
However, (and this is gonna to be a 'what about the children') my son who's 5 will be playing games more and more soon and id wonder what effect stuff like this in games will have on him.
Does it get the younger generation into gambling in a way, the buzz etc.
Am I going to come home one day in a few years time to find £2-300 has been spent on Fifa packs.
I just find it a bit dubious and shady. Ive no problem paying for extra content e.g. GTA Online where they may be continually adding to the game and you're paying for further development of that game/world.
I just see this as gambling and ive gambled enough online, on football mostly, and I know how that can be when you're doing it online as opposed to walking into a bookies. It can sometimes not seem like real money but just numbers on a screen. Ive put bets on online that I would not do if i was walking into a bookies and handing over crisp hard-earned £10 notes.

I just think stuff like this needs to be looked at a bit more and perhaps regulated somehow.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Ham Bap on October 05, 2017, 10:25:43 AM
It can sometimes not seem like real money but just numbers on a screen.

Thats the whole reason why you buy in game currency to spend on items and not just buy the items. Its the same strategy used by casinos making you use chips. You might not stick your last 100 quid on black if you had to take the money out of your wallet and put it on the table, but a single chip in your hand? That's almost nothing, go ahead and do it! This is a scummy business practice targeting vulnerable people and spoiling gameplay for people who buy games to, you know, play them. I'm taking a pointless stand and not giving my money to companies that do this sort of thing now, we need to support games like Titanfall 2, that's the correct model for this type of thing.

brat-sampson

It's fucking garbage. Publishers weren't satisfied with the profits made from DLC alone so they moved to inserting the kind of techniques used in free-to-play or mobile games instead. They must have been over the fucking moon when they realised they could do that and still charge *full price* for the game itself. Of course as the mobile market has become ever more predatory so the AAA market follows, hence loot boxes. Because why even charge the consumer for skins and whatnot (that would previously have just been an unlockable free thing you could get with in-game money not too long ago) when you can sell them a full priced product then in that product sell them a lottery ticket to maybe win something they actually want, but more likely just give them something trash that they never would have willingly paid for in isolation. Oh, and they don't even have to reveal the drop rate %s because nobody's taken them to court yet. You can be guaranteed they will some day, or the EU will get a whiff of this legalised odds-hidden gambling scheme targeted at children and then there'll be a real reckoning. Until then, I'm not going near the stuff.

Disgusting greed, no excuses.

Blue Jam

Is this business model also making developers lazy? I greatly appreciated the Rocket League update that gave us Dropshot mode, a whole new way to play the game, but while the latest one added a new arena or two, it seemed to mostly consist of new cosmetic items. I personally loathe collectibles in games and think they add nothing to a game, but in Rocket League they're even worse than usual as they often cause the online matches to grind to a halt when players only join for the chance to trade items and then don't play the fucking match.

Whenever I'm forced to download a massive update I hope to see something new that will make the waiting time and the reduction in space on my hard drive worth it.

Bazooka

I play Battlefield quite a bit, and in BF4 loot crates actually gave weapon components, yet in BF1 they just give skins to the weapons which in a grey WW1 setting are impossible to notice. The money the devs must be making from this shit is incredible.

Sebastian Cobb

There's a couple of companies that provide the analytics engines for these. You put the hooks into the games and then it gathers all the usage data so you can keep people playing and buying things longer. It also covers stuff with A/B testing.

An agent put me through to an interview with one of them but they weren't that interested as I haven't done anything big datay. Bit of a waste of time really.

Zetetic

Quote from: AsparagusTrevor on October 04, 2017, 12:54:43 PMDoes it seem like something like this, something which is accessible by people of all ages, is due some form of regulation? Should there be parental warnings on the boxes to inform of such temptation?
Yes, and probably not sufficient.

It's something where regulation can actually bite (moreso than with objectionable content say) since it requires at least some sort of infrastructure to operate this stuff in whatever jurisdiction.

I suspect we might easily still be at least a decade off taking this seriously, barring the occasional kid-heavy incident  - we won't even tackle actual gambling in physical spaces spewing onto our high streets at the moment.

Zetetic

Quote from: madhair60 on October 04, 2017, 01:34:45 PM
I don't see the harm in it if you like the game and want the goods. As an adult, I mean. Keep it away from kids obvs.
The difficulty here is probably unpacking 'want', as it is with anything that might cultivate compulsive behaviour.

Yes, people should take responsibility for their own behaviour but we can still look out for things that pose a severe risk to them being able to do so.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Zetetic on October 11, 2017, 04:45:02 PM
Yes, and probably not sufficient.

It's something where regulation can actually bite (moreso than with objectionable content say) since it requires at least some sort of infrastructure to operate this stuff in whatever jurisdiction.

I suspect we might easily still be at least a decade off taking this seriously, barring the occasional kid-heavy incident  - we won't even tackle actual gambling in physical spaces spewing onto our high streets at the moment.

One of the things these analytics companies were looking at was being able to detect problem gamblers early on and offer help. The bookies seem to want that. I think they're happy to boot problem gamblers and retain 'near-problem gamblers' if it keeps the commission off their back.

Blue Jam

Skin betting: 'Children as young as 11 introduced to gambling':

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42311533

It's good that people are starting to sit up and take notice. Hopefully something might actually be done (and people who want to "trade?" will stop ruining games of Rocket League).

brat-sampson

In fairness, this skin betting stuff is a pretty different beast from your standard lootboxes, even if the economies are connected (pretty much exclusively to CSGO (which happens to be one of Valve's most profitable games, shockingly)).

Kelvin

I couldn't work out if the BBC was just really bad at describing how skins work in games, or whether there really are websites that sell you weapon skins for existing games. Surely all that stuff is sold within the game itself, or comes in the form of hacks? The BBC article makes it sound like the problem comes from outside of the games themselves.

I also like how the BBC article focuses on skins for "guns and knives".

brat-sampson

Nope, these are real external unaffiliated websites that let you gamble certain things from your steam inventory with other players, or pay for trades etc with real money that's then facilitated via steam. Just google CSGO bet. It's friggin' weird. If you want to buy a specific skin, you can just do so via the Steam Marketplace, but some of them are super-'valuable' and go for serious amounts of money, so here they all just gamble for credit etc or the chance to win something someone else is willing to pay for. And every time the marketplace is actually used, Valve takes a cut.

This isn't 'Wilson Lootboxes are bad because charging money for a chance at what you want in a game you already paid for is predatory.' This is actually far worse. It was part of that scandal a while back where it turned out Youtubers were advertising these sites to their teen audiences, showing how easy it was to make money from them, and then it turns out had a fucking stake in the sites themselves. They later went to trial but basically got away with a slap on the wrist, I imagine because the courts didn't really understand what they were doing.