the ESRB should have said something about this, not that it would have stopped them, it should have at least required an adult rating for gambling content. The whole point was to self-regulate video game rating to prevent exactly this type of thing from happening
Well guess what, it's happening. Fuck them, they deserve this.
Imagine the shake up if the US bans lootboxes nation wide
Well RIP mobile games industry
Can this bill actually be put into effect? I worry that game publishers will come up with some way to battle it.
The mobile games industry doesn't have to die, just change their monetization. Take CSR2 for example. You get "crates" every 4 hours. The only way to get these uncommon, rare, and epic upgrades, as well as a metric fuckton of cars is in these "crates". So they would just have to change to a system where you can acquire all of these items directly with premium currencies.
I hope this extends to all things that wrong with monetization, since I have a feeling that by the time this comes into effect most companies will just flock over to some other monetizing method and milk the crap out of it until people starts getting sick of it or the law catches up on it
The video game industry has nobody to blame but themselves. They've made their bed and now they have to lay in it.
Fuck them and their money grubbing.
I bet all they are going to do is sell you "currency" but give you "free" lootboxes to go with it. It's exactly what they do in China to get around their so called selling lootbox laws.
Overwatch sells you 10 coins but gives you 11 lootboxes free.
I would argue they do have someone to blame, actually. Battlefront 2's launch really is the catalyst that started this entire controversy, despite the likes of Team Fortress 2 being the start of it and companies taking cues from Overwatch.
Sad to see how videogames have changed. I remember renting games when I was young and at most, buying a game magazine with cheat codes to play around with. Now we have pay-to-win games everywhere and the government has to step in to protect kids from gambling addiction
This could legitimately kill EA, as the only thing keeping it afloat atm is FIFA and madden lootboxes.
"People hate free to play games."
That's not entirely true, how else would Fortnite have become one of the biggest games?
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/224422/f39aa92b-88c1-4d75-b695-533d96862278/i-gLVJvNZ-2100x20000.jpg
those corporations deserve to get fucked hard
I miss Blockbuster Video and N64. Can’t even get ROMs anymore for games that are essentially abandonware.
fuckin' BURN
good riddance
I can't believe it will take an act of Congress for Valve to give TF2 a substantial update
Long over due. I hope other countries legislators follow suit..
TF2 wasn't really the start of it. It was because of EA and the FIFA games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTLFNlu2N_M
It doesn't seem to be a very well written bill, though.
The ban applies only to “minor-oriented” games. But what exactly does
that mean? By the bill’s definition, it’s virtually any video game on
the market. It may be determined that children are the target audience
of a game based on, for example: the subject matter; visual content; use
of animated characters or activities that appeal to anyone under 18; the age of non-player characters in the game; the presence of celebrities who appeal to individuals under 18; any advertising materials; or other evidence related to the composition of the game’s player base, just to name a few.
And
here’s the kicker: This new law would also apply to any game that is
“not a minor-oriented game” if the distributor or publisher has
“constructive knowledge any of its users are under the age of 18.” That
term, “constructive knowledge,” is legalese for information a company should
be aware of, regardless of whether or not it actually is. (Try to
imagine a game developer arguing in court it had no idea its product had
ever been used by a minor.)
https://gizmodo.com/why-the-anti-loot-box-bill-is-actually-kinda-shitty-1834987260
without lootboxes it's just gonna become battle passes which isn't that much better.
so what I'm getting out of this is that all a publisher has to do is make every game have loads of drugs sex and gore and then go into court and say "sorry we're retarded we don't know who plays our game" which is already true.
While I don't like lootboxes, I also don't like the idea of old guys writing laws about something they only vaguely understand.
That said, I dont think this will pass. There are many loopholes these publishers use that make it so the skinnerboxes are, legally speaking, not gambling. I'm happy for the bipartisan support, but I doubt this will make it through the hurdles to become law
Nah they'll just remove it from Steam
ya it being toothless is probably why republicans can get behind it, it looks like they're doing something but their corporate donors won't be affected.
There are probably a ton of loopholes you can exploit to have the exact same business model
Possibly buy premium currency, use premium currency to buy lootboxes. Similar to how places skirted gambling laws by using tokens. Make items side grades or cosmetic, which they mostly are anyway, instead of upgrades. I don't know what they're defining as 'Lootbox' or if they literally just mean Lootboxes and you can just change it to be LootBalloons and poof you're in the clear
Battle passes are at least laid out in what you get for a fixed price. Loot boxes are literally just gambling.
Free to play games need some kind of revenue, and I would really rather they just selling cosmetics and battle passes outright than hide shit in chancy loot boxes.
Using poker chips instead of cash doesn't make playing craps any less of a gamble.
It still could work, they should just refuse to provide ratings for games with predatory features. If the game isn't rated, it can't be sold.
At least to retail markets anyways. Retail stores refuse unrated games, though digital have plenty of unrated ones.
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