Lootboxes are sooo 2010s though. It‘s all about season passes and general FOMO. I doubt they will correctly identify and properly regulate „addictive features“ in a way that puts an end to that but I guess we‘ll see.
EU lawmakers to study ban 'loot boxes' and other addictive features in video games
Submitted 2 weeks ago by Valiane@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.euractiv.com/news/hard-to-hit-pause-excessive-gaming-lands-on-the-eus-radar/
Comments
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Tanoh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The companies doing them have a few hundred million reasons to skirt around the laws, so they will no doubt find a few ways. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make laws
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
my nephews are all about the limited edition skins
kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Season passes and FOMO aren’t gambling, you get what you buy and although I don’t like them they are not the issue.
Lootbox systems are designed to be addictive as it’s paying money to recieve a prize with very bad odds. Glad my country banned them a while ago.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The problem with a battle pass is that you pay for the chance to maybe get something.
If you can’t play or don’t pay well enough, it’s wasted money
With a loot box you get something right now. It might be shit but at least it’s on your account
verdi@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Study? What more study is needed, gambling is virtual heroin for kids. Just fucking kill it. Everyone and their mother is OK with causing millions in unployment due to “AI” because it’s “progress” but to actually protect children we need to “study” even more! GTFO with that bullshit.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 weeks ago
It’s only a theory I came up with just now but EU was criticized for years for regulating too much. Stories about absurd regulations like classifying snails as fish or regulating the curvature of a banana were circulating everywhere. It was probably organized by corporations to slow down EU and now the process is so slow it’s verging on being useless. They are thinking about banning sales of oversized US cars but maybe starting in 2035. I will be dead long before those cars are off the roads (hopefully not killed by one of them). Everything requires studies and drafts and transition periods and little gets done.
Zink@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
It was probably organized by corporations to slow down EU
Cries in red white and blue American tears
The owner class, their paid shills, and their useful idiots had half the population convinced decades ago that all regulation is bad and that government entities literally cannot do anything correctly.
I started believing some of that stuff when I was young and thought that people in the media argued in good faith. Plus I was more accepting of the cornerstone conservative axiom that money and “progress” are the marks of good people and good societies rather than silly nebulous concepts like “being alive is a positive experience for as many people as possible.”
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Fun fact! These cases, like the bananas, snails, or carrots being classified as fruit, were all being used as examples of “lol, dumb EU bureaucracy”, but were actually examples of brilliant lawmaking.
The curvature of bananas was specifically aimed at making it harder for China to flood the EU market with their bananas, thus saving local production from going bust.
The snails were a similar case to the carrots. The EU has subsidies for jam makers, to make them more competitive with non-EU jam makers. As it turned out, in one region in France, people made jam from carrots, but “jam” was defined in legislature as “a product made from fruits”. Which meant that the EU could spend a lot of time and money on re-writing the original law allowing the subsidies… or just redefine carrots as “fruits” for the specific purpose of that one law. As in: nobody in the EU considers carrots as fruits, it was only and specifically done to allow those French farmers to get subsidies for their jam making.
It’s brilliant and efficient.
southernwolf@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Watch the end result be you can’t find random chests in Minecraft dungeons or Terraria caves cause it falls under the category of “lootbox” in games…
(May seem hyperbolic, but we are talking about 70 year old boomers trying to make regulations for video games. I’m not sure I have the most positive view of the potential outcome)
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
uh, on one side of my family my 70 year old boomers were helping Ken and Dennis write UNIX. I listen when they talk.
IronBird@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
the average age of elected leaders across the world is in the 45-50 range for most of the western world, US is the oldest at 60-70 range
freeman@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Money, gambling is (even if obfuscated via tokens) about money.
Monopoly is not gambling because there is no (real) money involved. Uno is not gambling because there is no money involved.
utopiah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Uno is not gambling because there is no money involved.
Uno is not gambling because all decks are the same. There is no artificial scarcity to monetize, it’s literally just a game and that’s good.
wuffah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m of the strong opinion that we control the media that we are exposed to and that the resolution for problematic or undesirable media is to simply turn it off.
However: advertising, LLM’s, social media, and the Internet have forced me to capitulate that certain forms of media constitute a legitimate memetic hazard, and are capable of fueling addiction, misinformation, and general misery in large enough scales. I hate this conclusion because while I still heavily err on the side of media liberty and self-control, I cannot square that value with the reality of poisonous, hostile media.
We should not be subjected to predatory practices to enjoy the products, services, and entertainment that we depend on, and that are part of our shared experience and culture. Loot boxes, advertising, and financial scams are near universal in popular gaming products, and even software in general. To me, this eventually constitutes a monopolistic behavior that becomes reasonably unavoidable and must be regulated.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To be fair, much of the memetic hazard posed by various technologies is not actually the fault of the technologies, but a fault of the person having no self-control, no accountability for their own actions, or having some form of undiagnosed medical issue they are unaware of.
Its like saying video games cause school shootings: the problem isnt the video games, its the person. The video games are an excuse to shift blame and accountability away from the person.
ngdev@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
what you say has merit, however its akin to saying that the memetic hazard posed by heroin isnt the fault of heroin. like, sure. heroin is just a substance. certain software is similar, but its made to be a certain way (dark patterns in gaming etc) and should be regulated for harm reduction just like addictive substances
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I don’t think loot boxes are a thing anymore but Battle Passes are predatory. You pay for access to items but you aren’t guaranteed those if the timer runs out.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Loot box are still a thing, in a big way. Look at CS2 or the yearly soccer games.
And gacha games on mobile are a plague.
Lootbox is the first step, battlepass close second.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Cool. Law when?
kepix@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
after the activion lobby gets tired
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
And then I assume they’ll study a large packet of banknotes each and forget all about it.
utopiah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
YuGiHo, MTG, Pokemon cards, Labubu, etc basically
ANYTHING that comes
- sealed (as opposed to transparent packaging) and is
- collectible (limited supplied of some specific items)
physical or not is prone to betting and thus addiction. We tend to ignore the thing we care about, because we are passionate or come up with explanations (not to say excuses or post-rationalization) but in practice it doesn’t matter if your MTG deck is super “powerful” or that you see yourself as a great strategist, in fine if you do buy or promote those your are promoting gambling.
Jeremyward@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I see people cracking mtg packs on YouTube all the time, and pokemon ane Yu-Gi-Oh packs, heck i watched some people open the $100k mtg alpha box. 100% addictive. Heck back in the day they used to call it digital crack
utopiah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You might enjoy Loot box content is associated with increased user engagement for YouTube gaming videos (2023) then.
Squirrelanna@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Do you mean like a physically opaque package or one where the exact contents are obscured by randomization? There are some card games that have no randomization whatsoever in their packaging, like Fantasy Flights LCGs.
utopiah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well I do mean physically opaque but true that implies, as few persons did comment regarding e.g. Poker, that the content itself or the rules do not change the distribution to introduce artificial scarcity.
The point is that purchasing a package in itself should not be a monetary bet.
SolarPunker@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Yeah in the boardgame community everyone know tcgs are predatory, at least there are usually communities for alternative formats.
utopiah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To learn why it matters Neuroexploitation by Design at 39c3 (with English dubbing) specifically 28min in.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“Study” meaning put it in committee so it can die in the web of bureaucracy
xor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Ah yes, because the EU has never done anything before
msokiovt@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
They won’t do it, and here’s why: AAA will lobby for the continuation because it will hurt their bottom line of that gets banned. They love to implement dark patterns galore, and modern games will certainly do that.
Don’t be surprised if this fails, as it will likely be more consumerism, considering the fact that the USD and bond bubble just burst recently.
Cruxifux@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Loot boxes and microtransactions made me hate playing videogames.
Feyd@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Even the benign psychological manipulation away from just starting a game and enjoying it that is achievements is annoying
doublah@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Luckily for you, there’s more games without any loot boxes or micro transactions than you can play in your lifetime.
Kirp123@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Some European countries have banned them already. Belgium and the Netherlands as an example.
SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
There are still loot boxes in Belgium, they just work differently. You get to see what is inside before you start the transaction, allowing a person to only open the ones with contents they want.
msokiovt@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
That’s good news, but will the EU make it law for the entirety of it? I’d say no, but this is for sure promising. Us Americans need to get clocked for our dark pattern usage.
Deathray5@lemmynsfw.com 2 weeks ago
The EU is one of the few institutions that will stand up to large companies. Not quickly and not enough but they have
ulterno@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Aren’t there already regulations for casinos and the like?
Might as well apply the same to these. Then all lootbox games will become adult only.
Zwiebel@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Hey nice, finally regulating gambling for children