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ESRB Introducing 'In-Game Purchases' Label in Response To Loot Box Controversy (polygon.com)
The Entertainment Software Rating Board will begin labeling video games that contain in-game purchases, a response to lawmakers who have noticed the outcry over so-called loot crate systems and have signaled a willingness to legislate them. From a report: The labeling will "be applied to games with in-game offers to purchase digital goods or premiums with real world currency," the ESRB said in a news release this morning, "including but not limited to bonus levels, skins, surprise items (such as item packs, loot boxes, mystery awards), music, virtual coins and other forms of in-game currency, subscriptions, season passes and upgrades (e.g., to disable ads)." The label will appear separate from the familiar ESRB rating label (T-for-Teen, M-for-Mature, etc.) and not inside it. Additionally, the ESRB has begun an awareness campaign meant to highlight the controls available to parents whose households have a video game console.
in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
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Should have just rated these titles as MA.
I much rather pay $20-$80 for a game and get all of its features. Then have a game where I can buy myself to victory.
I do like often the Free to play first chapter, or limited world just so I can determine if the game is worth my money or not. But after I pay for it, I kinda want access to everything, or at least access to a level where I can get it in game play. And if it is multi-player I want my chances to be just as good as the next guys.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Since this has basically been every AAA title for years now.
The verbiage of the label should say, "WARNING: The company that made this game is run by a bunch of greedy d-bags so you're only getting a partial, broken version of the game."
Will it be required, like many of the mobile walled gardens, to be easily disabled with a parental password?
Am I the only person left willing to pay for games
Yeap.
If people were willing to pay $20-$80 for a game, then EA and Ubisoft would simply treat that as license to charge $20-$80 AND add lootboxes and season passes.
There is no end to their greed.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Parents and grandparents will see the label and say "Oh, well I won't be giving the kids my credit card to make the payments, so no problem."
Except that the publishers will make the games nigh-unplayable without jumping in to the microtransactions.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
and we can talk. Otherwise you are still playing softball with psychopaths.
I do find that free to play games provide a greater openness to trying games out and engaging in them without fear of either making a heavy purchase up front or being nickle and dimed to death, and generally speaking do not engage in in-game purchases outside of what my wife and I deem "paying for what we got out of it".
In other words, we tend to play a lot of F2P games and while many are so=so or even poor games to us, if we really engage in the game, we hit a point where we way "these devs did a great job" and we decide how much we'd have paid for the game for the amount of time we've spent playing it. Then we set ourselves a commensurate budget and buy in game items, generally just cosmetic items, to support the devs. A few exceptions do occur. Warframe is a great example, where we chose to pick up a few frames from the store versus grinding for them as our way of supporting the game.
Over the past 20 years we've spent an awful lot of money buying two copies of up-front AAA games to find out that it was an awful lot of money for an awful game(in our opinion). But that does not stop us from still doing it, just we're more cautious these days and wait for 30, 60 or 90 days of feedback before we do it anymore. We like the ease of being able to test out a lot of games to see if they suit us. And as long as the F2P games are not selling WIN buttons, we're ok with it.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
This is not a hypothetical situation. I recommend Jim Sterling's (Jimquisition) YouTube channel. He covers all of this chicanery in depth.
It's such a commonplace "feature" these days that I really don't see the point. You can pretty much safely assume any new title is coming with in-game purchases.
While the warning is a step in the right direction, the problem was not with loot boxes in general but loot boxes that contain items of random value such that you have to keep buying to get the item you want. This is essentially gambling, thus deserving of the dreaded AO (Adults Only) rating.
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The simple fact is, if you pay money for a random result, that is gambling. Gambling is highly regulated and usually illegal. Poker is allowed because it is considered a game of skill, which is why loot boxes paid for with in-game currency (which can be earned by play that could be considered skill-related) are legal, but paying cash for a random result is gambling (and all that implies). Replacing "random" with non-random content would make them 100% legal. But they don't want people to pay $0.10 to get the skin they want, they want people to spend $100 to try to get the one $0.10 item they want.
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There's plenty of games out there that don't use lootboxes. Once again, capitalism's got your desired use case covered.
If people were willing to pay $20-$80 for a game, then EA and Ubisoft would simply treat that as license to charge $20-$80 AND add lootboxes and season passes.
That's what they're already doing. That's why I usually wait for the GOTY edition to come out that already has all of the "seasons" (or expansion packs as they used to be known). I don't mind a free game that has pay-to-win options, but I hate games that charge you AND have pay-to-win options.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It's funny, because this is precisely the reason I don't play modern games anymore, which means less income for them.
I like the consistent user experience of "retro" games, and knowing that as long as I have the disc/cartridge/whatever, I can play the same game. Or lend it out. It resell it. But clearly I'm a minority, as is the GP.
Go outside, kick a ball around, use stones nuts or dried Lima beans for counters, that kind of thing. Much easier and cheaper, less mentally taxing, and it gives you a chance to talk with real people in person, instead of grinding baddies and typing abbreviations and other dumb stuff. That's becoming a very important rare skill.
just like the apple app store. in game purchases are ok for dlc but i want to know if its dlc quality or just stupid shit. i try to avoid games that the only purchase is for virtual currency - so basically all mobile games ever.
Offer in-game item purchase via the DigiByte crypto-currency and bypass this new requirement.
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These purchases are mostly made by "whales". e.g. a small group of individuals who buy hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars worth of in game items; usually because they seek social standing and/or a circle of friends online. You can boycott them all you want. The point of these systems is to take advantage of psychologically vulnerable people and drain their bank accounts (or their parents bank accounts).
On a side note this is also why people describe these practices as predatory. The industry knows it too; which is why they didn't immediately self regulate. They're gonna get as much money in the door before the Feds come in and bust it all up.
What's infuriating about this isn't just that they're taking advantage of vulnerable nerds but that they're about to bring down the hammer on the entire industry and that hammer usually comes with a lot of collateral damage.
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The thing is: $80 may not be enough to cover the full costs and margins of some AAA titles. And only a small part of the benefits are here to make the top executives rich, most of it simply pay normal people who work there. Well there is the communication budget too, but the thing is, these games are ridiculously expensive to produce, and people are not ready to pay more than $80 up front. Loot boxes and paid DLC is how they get the money they need. Paying for cosmetics seems to be relatively well accepted, as opposed to pay-to-win.
You may want to reject the AAA industry as a whole, but IMHO, there is only so much indies can do. While they can do really awesome games, they are limited to relatively simple things : 2D platformers, rhythm games, roguelikes, VNs ... Things like the huge open world games we have now are simply out of reach, and it would be a shame to lose these.
It is a complex problem with no easy solution. If you have one, then you should start your business and become a billionaire.
Wasn't the problem, or at least part of the problem, that loot boxes amounted to gambling? You paid money for a loot box containing who knows what, and sometimes it was valuable, and sometimes it was crap. I thought it was the gambling aspect that various government agencies were indicating they would regulate, and I don't think printing this warning on the outside of the box scratches that itch.
On a related note, as a hardcore gamer, I've never been a fan of pay to win, but seem to have somehow survived in that world this long. But I found the pay to pay companies to maybe get once nice piece of gear to be particularly odious.
Meanwhile, there's a lovely huge gap between indie (which is a very far cry from simple "2D platforms") and AAA.
Warhorse just bent Bethesda over and fucked them so hard that Todd Howard's posterior looks like an Oblivion gate.
If you claim that the requirement of an electronic payment method ought to be enough to make a game rated AO, then why shouldn't all games on an online store (PlayStation Store, Itch, Steam, Apple App Store, Google Play Store, etc.) be rated AO? Parents are buying games for their minor children to play.
Consider "shareware" games, which are free to play the first few levels, then one payment for the rest, like Doom (1993) or Super Mario Run. Should these be AO because of the possibility to register them?
That's why I usually wait for the GOTY edition to come out that already has all of the "seasons" (or expansion packs as they used to be known).
But how are you sure that such an edition will come out at all before the game's publisher shuts down the official multiplayer matchmaking server and asserts copyright against unofficial ones?
Lotto tickets are "In-Liquor-Store purchases".
"There," he sniffed self-satisfiedly, and looked around. "That's good enough to make it not gambling."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And as long as the F2P games are not selling WIN buttons, we're ok with it.
Sometimes it's not a "win" button but a "play at all" button. In the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper, for instance, excavating past a certain distance from the starting point ends up taking 1 day per cell without consumable items purchased with real money, and a typical room is 25 cells. So much for Dungeon Keeper being "real-time" strategy.
Am I the only person left willing to pay for games
No, but fewer and fewer publishers are willing to accept your one-time payment when they could instead leech off "freemium" transactions for years, not to mention their hopes of catching a whale.
I do like often the Free to play first chapter, or limited world just so I can determine if the game is worth my money or not.
The free-to-play idea is what started the trip down this road to microtransaction hell. And determining the value of a game before buying it was something we solved decades ago with the game demo -- but that's pretty much been killed off by early access games, another horrible money grab.
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> The thing is: $80 may not be enough to cover the full costs and margins of some AAA titles.
And these will be called "unprofitable." Others will manage with more reasonable $40 per unit.
The label "In-Game Purchases", does not address the problem. Season passes and upgrades provide a fixed outcome to a buyer: A loot-box doesn't. This is putting a label on something (literally in this case) so they can pretend the problem has been regulated out of existence.
The ESRB members have noticed that Google labels both pay-to-upgrade and pay-to-play games with "in-app purchases", so they're thinking they can use the same 'you have been warned' disclaimer on their gambling products.
Valve proved it could make a truckload of cash by
1. creating a functional infrastructure for virtual items and updates
2. pricing additional content in such a way that users would fork cash over without a second thought
MMOs paved the way for creating a secondary market and selling items and in-game currency
Mobile gaming set the precedent for the pay-to-win model.
You cram all this shit together and you get your Day 1 DLC on "Distro Platform / Company Store" of choice
It's almost alien to get a fully complete game without a massive day 1 patch, no in-game transactions or season passes these days, hell Bethesda figured out a way to charge us for modding...
I mean I'd love to see this "trend" die but I think it has fully evolved into the new normal
expansion packs / mission packs / should not be listed the same way as loot boxes or in game cash that you can buy.
but you can't take rake in a Poker game.
Are the card rooms Really Legal in Texas? They don't take rake but they are members only (any one can be an member) and you have to rent your seat.
Changes to art work?
Every part of a plot has to be SJW pre approved before publication?
Type of characters? Number of characters?
More languages and faiths in every game?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
that's not what addiction is.
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Then they need to quit throwing so much money at the suits and let the devs dev.
because they couldn't finish with the original sentence.. "in game purchases for simulated gambling using real money for a low chance at a highly desirable item or game enhancement... " but don't worry.. it's "simulated"
Poker in your own home with friends, playing with real money is 100% legal. Betting on a foot race (that you are participating in, and betting onlly on yourself) is legal. A business selling gambling services is different than whether the gambling itself is legal.
Sales of gambling and gambling services are regulated, and differently than betting on a game of skill you are participating in.
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this wont save gamers from greedy publishers. more and more games become just a medium to sell ads and other things, just like many websites and even print magazines, consumers are fucked.
just fuck the fuck off
it's just fucking greed full stop.
With respect you're talking complete rubbish, first off, you haven't been following AAA news because if you did you'd know that they spend as much as 2x as much on marketing as they do on actual game development. They're not introducing loot boxes because they need to, they're introducing them because of the massive profits they get from this gambling mechanism which is cheap to implement. And secondly Indie game companies have been releasing some great 3d games and also some AAA companies have still been releasing games without lootboxes, day-one dlcs, platinum editions and all of the rest of it.
You sound like an industry shill.
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Random Loot Boxes for Real Money is Gambling. It is really that simple.
Therefore these "games" should be rated as 18+ (or 21+ in your jurisdiction). Adults only!
what is an AAA game?
it sure as shit does not become AAA just because a shit spent lots of money designing it to be a money pit
surly a game cannot become AAA until it proves itself to be excellent.
Mobile/Facebook/F2P/lootbox gaming is no longer about games, gamers or even game creators.
Game design has been coopted by sociopaths and twisted into a perversion of the craft; a way of understanding how to make something fun and rewarding not so you can give that experience to others but so that you can withhold it from them. Make them pay, over and over, in ever-greater amounts for the next imaginary advance. Trick their lower brain functions into desiring, missing, needing constant interaction, validation, and then make them wait or pay for it each time. Allow them the illusion of risk and reward through lootbox/lottery mechanics, safe in the knowledge that even the ideal outcome for them, that once-in-a-lifetime chance, costs you nothing and chasing it will cost them everything. All the control of being a crimelord without the legal woes; all the profits of being a casino without having to ever pay out.
Sure they should. Parents are only concerned about whether there is a risk that there are additional costs beyond the initial price tag. You're wrongfully assuming that parents understand or care to understand the difference between DLC and loot boxes when they don't.
If, at some point, a legal gaming board determines that loot boxes are gambling then the ESRB will begin labeling games with loot boxes as containing gambling. If they contain loot boxes and DLC then they would be labeled with gambling and in game purchases.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I am basically quoting him in my reply.
His idea is that if Triple-Hey games want to act like a mobile freeminum game, they should be free. EA, Ubisoft, and others want to have their cake of $60 games and eat it too with required DLC and microtransactions.
The lootboxes are just a shit icing on that cake.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
That is easy, then I don't buy the game at all. And if the game is crippled beyond belief without microtransactions, people will talk about it online before I buy. People that buy on day one not only pay more, but get fucked over by stuff like this.
At this point I never see a reason to buy a game on day one again. And I sure-as-shit will never pre-order a game again. I will do an occasional kickstarter for an indie dev that I like, and has proven to be able to deliver, though.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Yep, there have been so many games released over the last few years that I haven't had the time to finish, that I don't feel the need to buy a game on release-day ever again.
Though I am going to buy Into The Breach this weekend, the new game from the devs of FTL. An indie game that did not go the kickstarter route to try to milk money out of people, since they knew they would be making truckloads of cash for this game anyhow? Double respect there.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
What's a "take rake"? I don't know your gambling lingo.
But how are you sure that such an edition will come out at all before the game's publisher shuts down the official multiplayer matchmaking server and asserts copyright against unofficial ones?
I don't usually play multiplayer because I don't have time, so that's not a concern for me.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Because the "goods in kind" has been taken to turn non-criminal and non-illegal file sharing into a criminal attempt by turning the ability to get shares of stuff rather than cash has been treated the same by courts as having a cash payment.
So, no, playing the game would be equivalent to cash, and therefore it's still gambling.