www.Tobold.com
Tobold@GMail.com
A blog with my thoughts regarding games I am playing and other stuff in life. Please read my Terms of Service
RSS Feed
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Loot boxes, gambling, and regional restrictions
A lot of games these days have loot boxes or equivalent systems, where you can buy a random collection of in-game items without knowing exactly what you will get. From time to time you hear stories of people who went completely crazy with those, spending thousands of dollars on the search for some legendary in-game item. In consequence various authorities have looked at loot boxes and considered whether people needed to be protected from them by applying gambling laws.
Now this is a bit tricky. On the one side the person buying a loot box clearly considers the contents of that box to have some value, otherwise he wouldn't buy the box in the first place. On the other side the content is only every useful inside the game, and usually can't be traded, thus there is no possible monetary gain. With gambling laws being different from one country to the next, the outcome of the decision whether loot boxes are gambling can be different. In April Belgium decided that loot boxes were illegal under Belgian gambling laws. As a consequence this week Blizzard removed the ability to buy loot boxes for Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm in Belgium.
Now I don't play either game, but I understand that in both games loot boxes only contain cosmetic content (although one might argue that Heroes aren't cosmetic content in HotS). But the news still made me wonder what happens if a similar solution is applied to games in which the contents of a loot box give a player some game advantage. It is one thing to decide to want to play a "free" game for free; it is another thing if you want to buy an advantage and it depends on where you live whether you can do so. Pay-to-Win-if-you-are-not-Belgian sounds like a really weird and really bad concept to me. Note that similar laws have been proposed in some US states, so it would be completely possible for loot boxes to become illegal in Minnesota, but not in some other states. We might end up in a situation where your location determined via your IP address determines what games you can play and how, and using a VPN gets you in trouble for circumventing gambling laws.
My preferred solution would be game companies getting rid of loot boxes altogether. They could still sell the contents, but without the random gambling aspect.
Now this is a bit tricky. On the one side the person buying a loot box clearly considers the contents of that box to have some value, otherwise he wouldn't buy the box in the first place. On the other side the content is only every useful inside the game, and usually can't be traded, thus there is no possible monetary gain. With gambling laws being different from one country to the next, the outcome of the decision whether loot boxes are gambling can be different. In April Belgium decided that loot boxes were illegal under Belgian gambling laws. As a consequence this week Blizzard removed the ability to buy loot boxes for Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm in Belgium.
Now I don't play either game, but I understand that in both games loot boxes only contain cosmetic content (although one might argue that Heroes aren't cosmetic content in HotS). But the news still made me wonder what happens if a similar solution is applied to games in which the contents of a loot box give a player some game advantage. It is one thing to decide to want to play a "free" game for free; it is another thing if you want to buy an advantage and it depends on where you live whether you can do so. Pay-to-Win-if-you-are-not-Belgian sounds like a really weird and really bad concept to me. Note that similar laws have been proposed in some US states, so it would be completely possible for loot boxes to become illegal in Minnesota, but not in some other states. We might end up in a situation where your location determined via your IP address determines what games you can play and how, and using a VPN gets you in trouble for circumventing gambling laws.
My preferred solution would be game companies getting rid of loot boxes altogether. They could still sell the contents, but without the random gambling aspect.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:29 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
<< Home
Newer› ‹Older
Loot box items can always be traded, at least via account trade. Just because it's not supported by the game dev, it's still there. Just like if I offer a real life lockbox with paintings in it, I'm still organizing gambling despite I don't run a painting gallery where you can buy and sell.
Taking this argument to the extreme, it would be illegal to charge entry to a draft tournament. After all, the players do not know what cards they will be offered.
Haven't played overwatch in a year but you can ge stimpacks(experience boost) from crates in HoTS so it's notable cosmetic
Frankly, I think Tobold's got the right of it. It doesn't take many countries making life difficult to comply with regulation before the big players will just decide to opt out of doing anything that might need regulating.
In many jurisdictions, gambling is notoriously expensive, complicated, and high-stakes for large enterprises to maintain compliance with, even if you ignore the PR/lost-audience components. And there's a tonne of downsides to even trying.
Whether you decide to make your game include gambling or not, when you operate in a country that considers you to fall under their jurisdiction, you will need to spend a significant overhead on compliance (bad), or exclude a specific country as a market, reducing revenue (bad), or maintain an entirely separate version of the game to service those countries (bad).
I'd point out the example of Steam refunds, starting here in Australia. Now, our consumer protection watchdog's court case subpoenaed some VERY interesting details about just how many subscribers Steam has and how many of them are Australian, and it appears off the bat that for a small country, we spend a disproportionate amount on Steam compared to other countries, even before the consideration for the 'Australia Tax' - the imaginary non-tax mark-up that publishers apply to Oz pricing because they can, which doesn't go anywhere except their pockets. The up-shot of these results was that you could reasonably speculate on napkin math that the Australian market is probably worth 10% (or likely more) of Valve's revenue.
So when our government took them to court over their non-compliance with our consumer protections around the right to a refund, they implemented the functionality. You can argue that this was already in the works before the court case, but the ACCC case was already rumbling at starting as well, with the complaints and enquiries made, so the timing lines up conveniently. Kind of like saying you always keep your apartment clean, when you only time you actually clean for six months is the day before rental inspection.
And Valve didn't implement refunds just for Australia, or the European countries who have similar consumer protections but hadn't yet lodged court cases... they did it for everyone. Even the US, where 'caveat emptor, bitches' is the first and last word on consumer rights.
My theory: enough countries start threatening the bottom line of the lootbox model - either through reduced audiences or increased compliance overheads - the big boys will just shift away from it altogether.
(Mobile's not in the picture here, that's a lawless fucking wild west. An immortal swarm of endless-replaced entities such that nothing major exists to form a big enough target to hit. Picture a whack-a-mole game that takes up the space of a football stadium, and only one person with a mallet. The only hope lawmakers have of regulating that space is targeting the storefronts directly and putting the onus of compliance on them... which is an epic shitfight in the making.)
In many jurisdictions, gambling is notoriously expensive, complicated, and high-stakes for large enterprises to maintain compliance with, even if you ignore the PR/lost-audience components. And there's a tonne of downsides to even trying.
Whether you decide to make your game include gambling or not, when you operate in a country that considers you to fall under their jurisdiction, you will need to spend a significant overhead on compliance (bad), or exclude a specific country as a market, reducing revenue (bad), or maintain an entirely separate version of the game to service those countries (bad).
I'd point out the example of Steam refunds, starting here in Australia. Now, our consumer protection watchdog's court case subpoenaed some VERY interesting details about just how many subscribers Steam has and how many of them are Australian, and it appears off the bat that for a small country, we spend a disproportionate amount on Steam compared to other countries, even before the consideration for the 'Australia Tax' - the imaginary non-tax mark-up that publishers apply to Oz pricing because they can, which doesn't go anywhere except their pockets. The up-shot of these results was that you could reasonably speculate on napkin math that the Australian market is probably worth 10% (or likely more) of Valve's revenue.
So when our government took them to court over their non-compliance with our consumer protections around the right to a refund, they implemented the functionality. You can argue that this was already in the works before the court case, but the ACCC case was already rumbling at starting as well, with the complaints and enquiries made, so the timing lines up conveniently. Kind of like saying you always keep your apartment clean, when you only time you actually clean for six months is the day before rental inspection.
And Valve didn't implement refunds just for Australia, or the European countries who have similar consumer protections but hadn't yet lodged court cases... they did it for everyone. Even the US, where 'caveat emptor, bitches' is the first and last word on consumer rights.
My theory: enough countries start threatening the bottom line of the lootbox model - either through reduced audiences or increased compliance overheads - the big boys will just shift away from it altogether.
(Mobile's not in the picture here, that's a lawless fucking wild west. An immortal swarm of endless-replaced entities such that nothing major exists to form a big enough target to hit. Picture a whack-a-mole game that takes up the space of a football stadium, and only one person with a mallet. The only hope lawmakers have of regulating that space is targeting the storefronts directly and putting the onus of compliance on them... which is an epic shitfight in the making.)
@Gerry Quin: that's not taking the argument to the extreme, the case that card boosters are gambling is already on the table and it's actually more solid than the lootboxes, since the items you find in the card booster are physical and they have real-world market value.
I wasn't talking about card booster packs, though of course it applies to them. But just consider straight-up draft tournaments as in TESL where you buy a ticket and draft cards to make a deck for a limited series of games. You don't keep any of the cards afterwards, but you win prizes based on your results. Your chances in the tournament are obviously affected by the cards you see, as well as your deck-building and playing skills.
And indeed, many games depend on some form of randomness. If you can't pay for random things at all, it could cut a huge swathe through the space of games that are legal.
If *some* random things can be legally bought, how do you define the borderline?
Post a Comment
And indeed, many games depend on some form of randomness. If you can't pay for random things at all, it could cut a huge swathe through the space of games that are legal.
If *some* random things can be legally bought, how do you define the borderline?
<< Home
