I tried playing Quake Champions, because I remember enjoying Quake 3 as a mid-to-late teenager, and on paper, that type of game should be incredibly up my alley. I found the experience of the initial load screen dumping you directly into the daily loot box screen so offputting that I actually couldn't even enjoy playing the game proper. The very act of just opening the game was so nakedly manipulative and felt so unfun that I simply uninstalled it; I just cannot be assed to expend the energy trying to ignore the loot box mechanics to play the game on it's own merits.

What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game."

Star Wars Battlefront 2 at release was a perfect example of this. The entire experience was built for someone to either grind incessantly and/or spend real money to acquire currency to unlock items as only weapon mods were acquired via accumulated experience and not loot crates. Even the awarding of credits were loosely tied to performance. The "level" of a hero/trooper/ship was the number and rarity of star cards you had, not how much you had used them. There was no shared marketplace so the only way to get a certain emote, or pose, or star card was getting lucky and pulling one. It was often the case that you would pull items for troopers/heroes/ships that you would barely (or never) use.

As a result of all of this you ended up with things like "rubber banding" where players would use a rubber band on their joystick to prevent themselves from being booted from game modes. This had a particularly harmful effect on the Heroes vs. Villains game mode, as its small number of participants (4v4) and scoring via target system meant having one or more "rubber banders" on your team put you at a severe disadvantage and wrecked the experience.

If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability.

I really hate seeing this trend come to games that I presumably own.

Loot boxes are the same, except now you also have to gamble.

I feel you my friend.

Also why would you work for EA? I genuinely want to know. After everything I heard / read about them I wouldn't touch that company with a 10ft pole. I even avoid anything they sell intentionally because of it.

CS:GO is not a game using lots of shitty in game mechanics/restrictions etc to drive people to spend money in order to play/compete. Same with Dota2.

I mean, it's not like you get to choose between the version of the game that has this vs the one that doesn't.

For some people, the fun of the real gameplay outways the negative of the lootboxes

The psychological quirk these games exploit is that some humans get a disproportionate internal reward for taking chances that come off. This quirk gets you polar explorers, and a man on the moon, but it also gets you financial crashes and people losing their life savings on the turn of a card. So, you know, maybe not something we want under the control of a for-profit company.

Traditional gambling laws assume the rewards must be financial, but this psych quirk doesn't care what the reward is, shiny Pokémon cards, virtual currency, anything you perceive as desirable. What's important is that you took a risk and it paid off, if you have this quirk your body rewards you for this entirely luck-based success, of course you want it again.

Note that although Magic itself is going nowhere, this game design trope has been somewhat displaced by designs where players buy fixed decks with fixed boosters - no blind buy. Android Netrunner is an example of that. You know going in that to be competitive you're buying so-and-so many packs to have the best cards, a few extreme choices might mean buying one extra copy of something, but there are no truly "rare" cards.

I suppose they could also make the boxes transparent all the way down, but that would just shift the gamble to the account creation phase.

Oh, or is it just the exact same boxes for everyone? I suppose that solves the problem.

Well, yeah. It's called nuance.

Publishers have been using the argument that loot boxes aren't gambling in order to justify making them available to minors. As far as I'm aware, Belgiums' decision to ban them is more a recognition that they are, in fact, gambling, and therefore should not be available to minors.

That extends to gaming platforms and the trend toward randomized loot boxes. It’s not “like gambling”. It is gambling. Arguably worse though as there’s no regulatory oversight.

That's exactly it. They are challenging this in court because they don't want to lose their loot boxes by this enforcement spreading to other countries.

They could pursue it all the way up to EU supreme court. That would set a binding legal precedent for the EU, hopefully not in favor of EA.

Promoting gambling to minors is something I find completely unethical.

Many are not the first part. Many who are the first part are not the second part.

They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it - and when the consumers inexplicably fail to do so, the advocates get mad and blame the consumers instead of adjusting their theory.

Now, it's not that DICE is per se a bad developer, but the deadlines pushed on by EA give rise to lots of bugs on release.(But, I've not played an EA/DICE game since BF3 so I could be wrong there, things might've changed.)

The games are usually playable some time after release.

And things like this: https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-... don't exactly make me warm up to actually buying an EA game.

If a more regulated producer had similar marketshare, I could play the big budget titles of that regulated corporation.

[1] Up through 2k17 (that was on the edge though) you could make your custom player good just by playing the game. It might take some time, but it could be done. With 2k18, you needed to buy the game for $60 and then spend ~$100 to have anything near a playable character.

EDIT

Whoops, my micro transaction hate got ahead of my coffee drinking :) My point still stands though. If you don't like the way a company is doing something, don't buy their product.

$60 is also a bit of a red herring, since $60 is the base price for a game - when you start throwing in all of the special features, the price of a game climbs to over twice that amount. And that doesn't even cover the microtransactions not included in the gambling category - 4-5 expansion packs each the price of an indie game, skins, poses, voice lines, etc.

Let's not forget that EA have openly stated to their shareholders that not having loot boxes in their games doesn't affect their revenue. Either they're lying to their shareholders, or to us. I wonder which one it is.

These companies are raking in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. That's not the sign of a fragile market.

Edit: As an illustrative example, if we neglect economies of scale we should be paying 5,000-10,000$ for our personal computers.

Therefore there are two choices:

Either they get regulated as other slot machine makers around the world, including being taxed as both a slot machine maker and as a slot machine operator.

Or alternatively just make a video game and sell that and not have to deal with all the regulation.

I think less for more naturally would come with inflation across the board but the less for more approach isn't the only way to increase profits or even the most popular one. The computer industry for example is known for scaling by giving more for less. Beverage companies add more drinks for the same price. Less for more requires a monopoly or something close to it, otherwise competitors rush in.

However, I think the entertainment industry is particularly fond of this.

My guess is because its products are both luxury items (so moral arguments against the same practices in housing or pharma don't necessarily apply) and items that consumers potentially have enormous emotional investment in. So once you've managed to build a fanbase, you can get away with a lot before the fans will seriously consider quitting.

A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins" instead of packs in affected territories.. but then you'd have the opposite effect of players there getting a major advantage :-D