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The FTC Says It Will Investigate Loot Boxes (kotaku.com)
The Federal Trade Commission this week agreed to investigate video game loot boxes, accepting an official request by Senator Maggie Hassan. In a Congressional oversight committee hearing yesterday, FTC chairman Joe Simons affirmed Sen. Hassan's request that loot boxes be investigated. From a report: During her turn to ask questions at the hearing, Hassan cited a recent report by Great Britain's Gambling Commission that found 31% of children in the country had at one point or another paid money to open a loot box, a well as moves by Belgium (which prompted Square Enix to pull three mobile games from the country), Japan, and other countries to limit how loot boxes can be used in games. "Given the seriousness of this issue, I think it is in fact time for the FTC to investigate these mechanisms to ensure that children are being adequately protected and to educate parents about potential addiction or other negative impacts of these games," Hassan said. "Would you commit to undertaking this project and keeping this committee informed about it?" In response, Simons said "yes," but declined to go into any more detail about the FTC's current position on loot boxes and whether they constitute a form of gambling. Despite vocal criticism from Hassan and a few others on the topic, regulators have not been jumping to get involved in the debate.
Loot box is a euphemism for kleptocrat Trump's portly frame...
Maggie was an embarrassing governor (she opposed decrim many other sensible proposals) so we sent her away.
Nobody in NH cares about investigating loot boxes (other than the handful of ninnies with compulsive worrying problems).
Trump's FTC should have told her to pound sand. My goodness, if she knew the things I spent money on as a "child".
Anyway they say Congress has a 5% approval rating but everybody says "it's not my Senator" - nope, not here, she's an embarrassment.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
My brother didn't catch it until the credit card bill showed up. I laughed my ass off.
Why not investigate parents that have given little Billy or Susie the ability to spend money on anything without parental oversight. Letting their children buy loot boxes is probably the least harmful thing that could result from such carelessness.
I suspect that it isn't children doing most of the spending. Instead it's the same kind of people who would gladly plow hundreds or even thousands of dollars into a slot machine at the nearest casino or who would buy dozens of scratch tickets at a local gas station, but have been spared the inconvenience of traveling their with this digital crack.
I'm not sure if it's right just to ban something because a lot of adults can't behave responsibly. You'd pretty much have to get rid of everything a good size of the population enjoys on weekends if you wanted to have any form of moral consistency. Even if you want to approach it from the perspective of loot boxes being a form of gambling (it pretty much is) being done outside of a licensed casino, I think you'd have to also go after the insurance companies as well.
Every time some neckbeard edgelord or basement dwelling low UID grandpa uses the term SJW, take a drink.
$eriously, like $80 and the girls get some make up, dolls, and bath bombs. o.O
https://www.amazon.com/L-L-Sur...
***
Last year my daughter wanted one, I was like HELL NO, not at that price. So daddy went to Dollar Tree and bought a large Tupperware bowl. Stuffed it full of little things, bath bombs, etc, etc. Wrapped it in aluminum foil. Then wrote
"Daddy L.O.L.Z." on it....
Kids loved it.
Each breath you take, you never know if it will be your last.
So, here comes the atmosphere tax...
There is a market solution to the loot box problem: stop buying the stupid loot boxes. Better yet: Educate your kids not to buy the stupid loot boxes.
Every generation of kids has to face an addiction. When I was growing up, it was Magic: The Gathering AKA "cardboard crack." College students or graduates would spend significant their disposable income on randomized card packs, waiting to get that rare card so they could show-off to their friends. I remember one group of guys who had been in community college for several years, constantly skipping class to play Magic. They were stuck in time, just barely passing a few classes per semester due to their addiction.
Then it became video games. What was it before that? Baseball cards maybe? I think we need to teach our children to recognize this. Introduce them to the economics of it before the addiction can get a hold on them.
This game needs to be investigated bigtime. They may not have "loot boxes" per se, but they sell/market things in creative ways. It's still essentially loot boxes imho.
Maybe while they're at it they can investigate all the cash mom and dad are busy spending on in-app purchases in Candy Crush.
#DeleteChrome
And not all games treat loot boxes in the same way.
Gambling is a chance to win back more money than you spent on the gamble, which is impossible to do when the money is converted into a loot box that is guaranteed not to contain more money than you spent on the box in the first place.
Loot boxes are a way for gaming companies to make money via microtransactions from people that know that the contents of the boxes are random, and may contain something they want, or may contain something they don't want, and are frequently irrelevant to the outcome of the game as they are only cosmetic.
The politicians are acting like this is betting on horses or going to an online casino of some sort.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
FFS, if you don't want games with lootboxes, don't buy games with lootboxes. Works for me.
If it's kids, they shouldn't have the ability to charge things on mummy and daddy's CC anyway.
This is a total non-problem and doesn't need wasteful spending from a society already in debt up to its nostrils.
Have we totally abandoned the concept of personal responsibility?
the app stores had the auto buy with card on file (needed even for free apps) and the game cash to make it look like it's not real cash.
I mean Drug war? What Drug war?
Loot boxes take advantage of well known defects in human thought and personality. They're very well known because they're the same defects that make gambling work. That's because loot boxes === gambling (using 3 equal signs to indicate exact match here).
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I used to collect Spider-Man trading cards as a child. There was a fairly good probability of scoring a hologram card in a pack. The pack cost three dollars and I'd resell the card to the shop. The shop would re-sell the card for thirty dollars. I'd compulsively buy cards until I was broke. I did cash out one time for eighty bucks. Not bad for a twenty dollar investment. Don't even get me started on Magic: The Gathering. My buddy could probably use his Black Lotus as equity on a loan. This is probably an example of government waste due to bad parenting
The filth that own and control the AAA game publishing companies have the longest history of criminality- their original crimes being of the standard 'Hollywood' type
1) false accounting (so game devs do NOT get their due rewards)
2) owners take all profits in the form of FAKE loans, mega-bonuses, and giant salaries when possible.
For the longest time the criminals that run AAA game publishing were satisfied with the above. Then came 'mobile', microtransactions and 'legal' gabling aimed at kids.
The filth that run AAA game publsihing consider the biz to be a cross between Hollywood and the Wild West, where the law not only has yet to show its face, but seems to have little interest to do so in the future, especially if the filth continue to pay off the 'right' politicians.
Take the UK- the most bent nation on Earth. The vile psychopath who runs Britain, May, was about to throw new laws regulating gambling machines in the bin after her and her husband got a massive pay-off from gambling bosses. Only a revolt by old school 'socially aware' Tory grandees foiled her plan- and the new laws went ahead because the old cow is only hanging on to power by her fingertips and couldn't take the risk of losing further support in her party.
You'll see a LOT of paid filty shills in this discussion defending loot boxes. The big bent players (Valve, EA, Activision, Ubisoft and Zenimax) have a ton of horses in this race, and between them have the ability to post the majority of responses to any and all internet discussions on this subject.
Loot boxes were advocated, then designed by psychologists specialising in HUMAN WEAKNESS. The gamblng aspects and sites were created by people outside of the traditional gaming industry, because that industry has been effectively regulated for so long the people in it don't even try to work major new cons any more. The new gambling outrages are all by people new to the industry.
Loot boxers MURDER the innocent. Literally. The filth advocating their use here hope you have never heard the story of McSkillet- the CHILD fake owner of one of Valve's gigantic gambling sites who killed himself when the owner of Valve, having been warned of imminent legal action by the US goverment,. shut down the gambling operations, leaving agents like McSkillet blowing in the wind. Many of these kids went crazy when their 'easy money' revenue streams vanished overnight. McSkillet took his valve-paid-for super car for one last drive, and purposely smashed himself into an oncoming car, murdering the occupants of that vehicle. .
Loot boxes have CHILD influencers paid by the filthy AAA game publishers boosting the loot box concept on thousands of Youtube channels.
Even so, most informed people were prepared to accept the satanic idea of loot boxes and microtransactions in FREE to play mobile games, IF the owners of said games were forced to make the games "adult only" and reimburse funds discovered to have been spent by children. Of course, for ther AAA game publisher filth, this was never going to be acceptable.
Loot boxes and microtransactions were, instead, moved to full price AAA games like Fallout:76, where the majority of NEW content was moved behind the paywalls. To convince the dribblers (like slashdot regulars), these games have grind mechanisms where normal play can 'earn' TINY amounts of ingame currency so a MINISCULE fraction of microtransaction store items can be 'bought' for 'free'. The trick usually used (like in Assassin's Creed games) is the 'earnt' currency always needs to be spent 'upgrading' the players weapons to simply allow the next level of the game to be playable. Thus if the player wants new clothes etc, he'll need to spend real cash.
Loot boxes exist fro the plain gambling and trading mechanisms. 'rare' items have real value on the gambling and trading sites- all of which are owned by shell companies for the AAA publishers. Valve spent well over 100 million dollars creating the trade and gambling sites that deal with items produce
I feel like this has happened before...
A game usually has you grind out a "key." That key takes like 24 hours of time spent playing to unlock. However, instead you can just pay $2 and get a key. Consider the key as an in game currency. It may also be an out of game currency because many games and steam allow you to trade items and actually put values on the items. So you spend $2 on a key, and you can open up a box that either has a 1 cent item or a $2000 item. We know the exact values of those items because they are traded or sold on marketplaces for that amount. So, in particular with items that can be traded, it is 100% a form of gambling. I know people who spent hundreds and maybe thousands of dollars on items specifically trying to win and sell the items they won. If that isn't gambling I don't know what is. Now if a game has a loot box item that you can't trade, then is it really gambling because there is no inherent value in the item won? Hard to say, of course you could sell your account but that is typically against a games terms of service.
the insurance industry, for example, is heavily regulated to ensure people get value out of it.
The reason the industry won't self-regulate is they know damn well that gambling mechanics with real money being exchanged means an AO rating.
As for preventing terrible life decisions, those people's decisions effect you too. The most obvious is you get worse games. The less obvious is that people turn to crime to feed their addictions. You don't live life in a vacuum. No man is an island. And you can't just put your fingers in your ears and chant "freedom" and make out alright.
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That highlights how little effect investigating loot boxes will have - because fundamentally, the problem is more with games really having it down to a science as to how to tempt people to buy.
In Fortnight, there are no loot boxes - if you are spending money you know exactly what you get. And in theory, there is zero play advantage at all from any of the items you can buy, they are appearance only (there are a handful of examples of using things like dance moves to hide in ways you could not otherwise, but mostly that is true).
So if you say loot boxes are illegal games will just move to the Fortnite model and nothing will change.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I see what you are saying -I've had friends to had to discipline kids around Fortnite usage.
However I disagree that this will condition kids into thinking the lottery is a good idea. Doesn't the constant disappointment of loot boxes act as an early lesson that gambling kind of sucks and you can find way cooler uses for money?
Also I would add that the lottery REALLY sucks compared to loot boxes, because at least with loot boxes you get something. With lottery tickets you mostly get a worthless ticket, so why would kids ever move onto doing that?
You can generalize that to most gambling... the only gambling I can think of kind of like loot boxes is slot machines. But even they pale to the glittering rewards that video games offer.
Maybe all we are doing is trading people being addicted to slot machines for people being addicted to video games. On a lot of levels I feel like that is healthier.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Disclaimer, I'm a fairly heavy gambler with actual money, often seeing 5-digit swings in a single day.
I've played a fair amount of games with loot boxes, some more hostile and overt than others, and have to say that I definitely do not consider them gambling in any kind of formal or legal sense. One of the key distinguishing elements is the ability to officially extract real world value out of the resultant product. This fails in almost every game: Once you spend currency on the game, whether you buy extra lives, boosters, or the random loot box, there is no way to get any kind of money out of it; money has entered a closed system. (While there are grey/black markets available for some games, those I'm discounting since they're unregulated by the game company and are almost always a violation of the ToS.) For games where you can officially sell the resultant product for cash, or a direct cash equivalency, this point is moot. (The only one I know of off-hand is Armello, though I'm lead to believe some more recent games allow for it.)
It's similar to arcades-- use cash to buy tokens, put tokens into a game (Wheel of Fortune, where a wheel spins and you get a random amount of tickets depending on where it stops, maybe?), get tickets, exchange tickets for an item. Most people wouldn't call this gambling, despite how this very process has been used to circumvent gambling laws in numerous jurisdictions around the world (cracked down upon in some cases).
In common parlance? Sure, it's gambling. So's skeeball, or whoever wins the coin flip gets the fries at the bottom of the bag.
I'll let the military know that camouflage doesnt offer an advantage,
Yes, I actually brought that up in a previous article talking about Fortnite outfit purchases... I kind of agree with you there, as some suits are mostly dark and you would think make you harder to see.
However in practice, that doesn't really end up being what happens. You end up being able to see or not see other players pretty much equally, not sure how but I think they balance that out or highlight things in some way in the game engine, even very dark outfits you can see from a long ways off.... you can also tell it doesn't matter much in the people that make it to the end and are the ultimate victors. often they have neon colored suits that you'd think would get them lit up like a Christmas tree.
I think the reason it does not matter for good players is they want you to attack them, at the first hint of damage they throw up a barrier so they hardly get hurt, then they track you down and destroy you. So in the end it's the brightly colored ones you should probably fear most as they are luring you to your doom. :-)
I don't claim to be a Fortnite expert though as I'm not very good at it, and lack the time to put into it to build up the skill I would need to be good. I like the dynamics though and think they've generally thought out balance pretty well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
will they outlaw baseball cards?
it's a common mistake by Americans. The problem is that healthcare delivery is fundamentally not insurable. That stopped being the case when medicine became more advanced than a few pills and the occasional operation. We're past the "disaster recovery" stage of medicine and well into maintenance mode.
I have life insurance. About $500k total. Why? Because if I get in a car wreck and die I don't leave a lifetime of poverty for my family behind me. This way the kids have money to finish college and get set up in life. That's insurance: something to protect against a very rare disaster. It's also cheap. I pay $15/mo all told and I'm probably overpaying.
Now, healthcare "insurance" is a scam. I pay for it and unless I hit a pretty high out of pocket max they don't pay a dime. But I use it regularly for various maintenance activities. It's no longer a slot machine if I need the chips from the machine to live...
We know the solution: stop having my company hand a portion of my check to a private company and just give it to the gov't. Then let the gov't pay the doctors. Single Payer works in every country it's been tried in.
tl;dr: You're mixing up the value of actual insurance with the scam that is the US healthcare system, causing some confusion with the points I made above.
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Since they are going to go after all these games that prey on people's poor impulse control, are they going to go after CCGs, like Magic the Gathering and Pokimon? You know, the original loot box games that have been played by children for the past twenty years?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Please regulate loot boxes, I want better drops.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The video games industry is making a lot of cash and some people have a problem with some of the means they are using to extract that cash from players, particularly children. The politicians won't have a problem with that in itself however they probably do have a problem with how much of that cash is ending up as "campaign contributions".
So this announcement will be nothing more than a warning shot to the games industry that they had better start increasing their "campaign contributions".
And the lego minifigure mystery packs. And collectible card games. And baseball cards. I'm sure they can find all sorts of fun things to investigate!
Congress has failed to pass budgets, failed to finish investigations of election tampering, and we are going to spend time on this? And they wonder why we have no respect for them.
I might not have explained it well, I'm not a professional orator.
It's not that Home owners, car or rental insurance covers 100%. That's not the point. The point is they kick in when disaster strikes and help you deal with the worst of the financial hits.
Healthcare is no longer about the aftermath of a disaster. It's about adverting the disaster in the first place. aka Maintenance. Not a lot of folks buy maintenance contracts on their homes because they're not a good value. You can't pick the guy that fixes stuff. That guy often just jury rigs things because he's paid a flat rate for the job. Etc, etc.
You're right about one thing, the crusade is personal. I've got several friends & family born with illnesses (a cancer survivor and one with Type 1 Diabetes comes to mind). The current system would have killed them all. They're alive today because of a patchwork of single payer systems in the US.
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