Netherlands is close to drawing similar conclusions.
And it makes sense. You can buy, using real money, a virtual ticket for a virtual item. Then that virtual item can in turn often be sold to others for real money. In other words, players can participate by gambling real money in return for less or more real money.
In short, it is gambling. Not all countries make gambling illegal, but those who do, should treat loot boxes the same. And virtually all countries make gambling illegal for minors, and there's currently no working mechanism in play for 15 year olds not to be able to play these games.
Currently in the Netherlands it's required for the proceeds of loot boxes to be tradeable in the real world, giving them economic value, for it to be considered gambling. If it's purely virtual, it's not gambling but just part of the game. (you can question this of course.) The problem is that it didn't matter for the Dutch government whether the items were traded on external platforms (which are often in violation of the games EULA itself), or on a platform of the game itself.
What would help stay legit is for the games to prevent loot box items from being traded between characters at all.
Here's the weird thing though. My entire childhood was filled with opaque plastic packs of cards, pokemon cards, football cards etc. You didn't know which 5 cards were in there. The cards were semi-randomly distributed in the packs in the factory, just like these loot boxes are semi-randomly generated by an algorithm. And you'd pay, not knowing what you'd get. And indeed, sometimes you paid $10 for a pack with a rare pokemon you could sell for $100. That was gambling too under this definition.
> "Here's the weird thing though. My entire childhood was filled with opaque plastic packs of cards, pokemon cards, football cards etc. You didn't know which 5 cards were in there. The cards were semi-randomly distributed in the packs in the factory, just like these loot boxes are semi-randomly generated by an algorithm. And you'd pay, not knowing what you'd get. And indeed, sometimes you paid $10 for a pack with a rare pokemon you could sell for $100. That was gambling too under this definition."
Is that so weird? I came to the conclusion that industry was gambling when I was a kid. I saw my friends spend their allowance on those packs of cards, open them up, then become disappointed because they only received "trash". Yet again and again they'd do it. It seemed totally irrational to me.
After my first 6 packets of trash I started printing copies of them and reselling them for 40¢ each (50¢ for more rare ones) making a little fortune (3€ a day).
It lasted a week before other parents were incredibly annoyed by this. Aaaaand they kept paying a lot of euros to buy real ones.
And indeed, sometimes you paid $10 for a pack with a rare pokemon you could sell for $100. That was gambling too under this definition.
Different jurisdictions feel differently about this, I'm sure. If the collectible's company plays dumb and never acknowledges the secondary market, they'll be more likely to stay clear of legal regulation.
After all, they're just selling piece of cardboard. What the people choose do with those pieces of cardboard is their prerogative, wink, wink.
Indeed, it seems the Netherlands study separates whether or not you can then further trade the items to determine if it's gambling or not. Therefore, some games like Overwatch don't fall into this category.
Regarding trading card games, they are indeed awfully closed to gambling; and they are in fact the main defense of the game publishers, arguing that this is just a "collect and play" type of game, and isn't gambling.
But isn't the interactivity, the bells and wistles, animations of the lootbox openings closer to addictive reward patterns than just opening a plastic card booster pack ?
> Then that virtual item can in turn often be sold to others for real money.
This, for the majority of IAP, is super untrue, unless you mean selling on a secondary market. If this is what you mean, then Wizards of the Coast better start worrying because anyone buying rares from the local gaming shop is now engaging in gambling and, by your logic, responsible by WotC.
In fact, the big problem here is precedence. How long do you think it will take before a litigious company starts targeting "physical" lootboxes like MtG or Pokemon or any physical variable reward package. The mechanics are the same, the reward rarity weight can be exactly the same, just the medium has changed.
This law is dangerous, because you could have gotten the same result (protect children/persons susceptible to skinner box mechanics) with a little more nuance.
Also, the big losers here are decent apps that don't have predatory IAP that are caught in the crossfire.
It's kind of shocking the lack of foresight being seen in this thread.
> This, for the majority of IAP, is super untrue, unless you mean selling on a secondary market. If this is what you mean, then Wizards of the Coast better start worrying because anyone buying rares from the local gaming shop is now engaging in gambling and, by your logic, responsible by WotC.
Yes, they do the same thing. Of course they should be hit just the same.
On (1) I don't believe there's any difference... a factory prints cards according to the company's desired distributed, and a game's algorithm generates loot boxes according to the same distribution. Lootboxes and trading cars both have predetermined and known (to the company) and unknown (to the players) probabilities.
(2/3) agreed there is a difference, although it was still magical as a child and there was definitely something calling me back. A lot of those packs were interesting only because I watched 100 episodes of the greatest adventurer known to me (Ash Ketchum) and my own adventures playing Pokemon on the gameboy for 100+ hours.
I was just about to comment on magic and pokemon cards! Maybe even baseball packs. All could be traded for real cash, and obviously were! It's such a grey line though, the original intent of the cards is to not be traded around for cash, but be used to play games or simply collect (without the intent to sell) and be enjoyed.
To be frank, I'm glad the world is cracking down on the digital forms of this, I think it's a bit corrupt-- explicitly targeting minors with considerably less self-control. In my opinion, it's right up there with apps that use in-game currency gems/coins that you can purchase with real money; because kids targeted by that game audience often don't understand the repercussions on such activities. I think there needs to be a very fine line drawn where a child cannot make a digital purchase, even if inadvertent. Regardless. It shouldn't be a "we suggest you set up parental controls", literally the device should be locked down from entirely preventing such behavior and must then be overrode by an adult.
The ESRB is a voluntary self-regulatory organization, not mandated by law. Most "legitimate" video game publishers and retailers (at least in the US) follow its guidelines and use its ratings because the industry has collectively agreed to police itself under those guidelines with those ratings. Same goes for PEGI, last I checked. This is in contrast with (for example) the ACB, which actually is mandated and controlled by the Australian government.
That said, an "AO" rating would indeed have a chilling effect on store shelves (since most retailers don't even want to carry AO games at all). It could be feasible to make loot boxes an automatic elevation to ESRB AO / PEGI 18 / etc. should those organizations want to do so (and hopefully they would indeed want to do so).
While the cards are semi-random, they're selling a pack with let's say, 3 cards. There's not much debate there, that's what it "says on the box" and you're getting that.
Depending on the case it might be gambling, it might be not - like for example a Picture Album, you can usually buy the missing cards for a flat fee (per missing card)
It also describes stocks, and anything non-tangible which you can sell for money. I'm not sure what your point is, unless it's just "cryptocurrencies are like money", which was the point your parent was making with that statement about tokens in games. The part that makes it gambling is that you gamble with them, which maybe you can argue you do with cryptocurrencies, but the fact that they're "virtual" isn't really relevant to the question of whether buying them is "gambling". You can of course buy physical items such as art in the hopes of selling them at a profit, and buy "virtual" items such as bonds which are not very risky at all.
I played MtG a bit in my teens through early twenties, and I think that one difference was that a pack of cards had positive expected value. The set of cards you got would generally cost more to buy individually than you'd pay for the pack.
Is this the case for these loot boxes?
As a side note, I remember MtG being called "cardboard crack" back in the day, including by those who played it.
That might have been the case at some points in the history of MtG but I don't think recent sets have had positive expected value. For the most part you pay less just getting the cards you need.
Or use the opening of packs for actual gaming with the various ways to play with them.
The entire mobile app store economy needs major regulation. The platform operators have shown they are willing to allow hugely profitable apps whose business models prey on gambling tendencies in children and they will look the other way, while bragging about their curation of their stores in some cases. It's shameful hypocrisy.
The entire industry knows this is going on. Parents have complained for years, but nothing's changed.
I believe adults are the real whales they're after. Most children have no way to pay for virtual goods. It's adults who even know they are gambling, but they enjoy it just like adults enjoy gambling in a casino.
I think you're right, but there's also a decent amount of stories involving a kid with their parents credit card and the parent not noticing the kid was running up a huge balance until their bill came. But yeah, those are realistically pro ably exceptional cases.
> apps whose business models prey on gambling tendencies in children
Then it should be the parents' responsibility to educate their children, and not give them a device with a credit/debit card attached to the logged account.
>Then it should be the parents' responsibility to educate their children, and not give them a device with a credit/debit card attached to the logged account.
That won't be enough for many, including the Belgian government, apparently. Even adults are not responsible enough, it would seem, to handle credit or debit cards.
So if we assume gambling should be regulated, and that pay-to-play loot boxes are gambling...
Why haven’t the licensed gambling venues (casinos, lotto, and what have you) pressured the regulators to stop the unlicensed gambling? Or have they and I’m not aware / the regulator is dragging its feet?
Do the licensed gambling entities not perceive this as a threat? Or has gambling revenue increase overall because these games / apps basically groom young people in to being habitual gamblers as they age?
> "Do the licensed gambling entities not perceive this as a threat? Or has gambling revenue increase overall because these games / apps basically groom young people in to being habitual gamblers as they age?"
Probably a little of column A, a little of column B. The kids gambling with these games aren't potential customers for casinos since they're underage, but the habits they form as children may translate into willingness to gamble as adults. Maybe those kids-turned-adults will continue to gamble with video games instead of casinos, but I'd wager those casinos expect it to be a net positive for them overall. After all casinos offer "perks" that video games can't; free drinks, buffets, etc..
I bet it's somehow not on their radar. Because they have done this in the past. They shut down online poker in the US in 2011 by paying off a couple Senators to attach the ban into a Port Security act, which most legislators didn't want to not pass as they don't want to appear weak on security (also they probably didn't read the whole act).
My Dad's a great poker player and his secondary source of income vanished overnight. He still complains about it.
it needs what is called a 'purge', most games are blatant ripoff's that should not even be allowed on the store. google doesn't even provide a way to locate the most recent additions of games, so how the heck do folks even have a 'fighting' chance of getting recognized or finding that 'treasure'. at minimum, they should allow viewing of all recently added games and start purging games from the app store. after 1 year, charge the developer money to retain their status, you just can't leave games on their 'foreever' especially when they are crappy knockoffs.
Mobile app stores are shovelware galore. Admission standards are in the toilet and they're flooded with thousands upon thousands of reskinned garbage "games" that frequently rely on superficial similarities to smash hit games in order to confuse users so they buy them, or at least launch to view ads. Reskinning is a whole industry, with people capable of launching several "games" every single day.
When Apple had long and thoightful review practices we treated them as the business murderers. And yet here we are asking exactly for their long and painful review process to have a comeback.
What is your suggestion? I am all for the Play store way of working; cheap to get your software out there. But indeed that made it a complete mess like you say, so my thinking is that there needs to be a more advanced way of sorting and searching (this is Google right?) to a) not only favor the most popular games b) to let the crapware sink to the bottom. For now this tagging is probably a human process which is why it will never happen as it needs to be humans employed by google not just users; users are not very good at this. Most I know do not see the difference between the real game and the knockoff so they vote positive. I would think some nlp/ml could pick up likely knockoffs fast and penalize them; they need something in the name and graphics to make users recognize it. I would be against barriers of admission, more for better filtering and search. Not sure why the search is so bad... I search google.com and then click to the play store for the best results; that seems so backwards...
I mostly agree with the idea. Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done.
That said I'm curious what happened and why these things are so addictive. As a kid I collected Wacky Packages. They were parody stickers that came in a pack of like 3 or 5 with a stick of gum just like Baseball Cards. While I probably owned 150 stickers or so I would never have considered myself addicted nor my friends. We were into them for a couple of months, probably spent no more than $20 total each.
Compare to my nephew who was into Pokemon Cards and spent hundreds of dollars. Of course I new a few kids that seriously into baseball cards but they were the exception. With Pokemon cards it seemed much much better. Also before that a large percentage of my adult friend spent hundreds on Magic the Gathering cards. Some spent thousands.
Now we have IAP in apps and some people are spending like crazy.
What happened? What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards? What made IAP so big? I can only guess 2 things about IAP. One that it's super each to buy being connected directly to your account. Two that being a video game they can more easily use psychological techniques to manipulate people. That might explain the IAP issues. Not sure it explains Pokemon + Magic the Gathering vs Baseball Cards.
> What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards?
I grew up with Pokemon and I might have some answer for that.
Before Pokemon I had a binder of basketball cards. I collected them but I never had a lot of them. Some of them were cool and shiny, some were split into three parts so they were three smaller cards in one and I liked those as well. Additionally I had a favorite team; the Chicago Bulls and of course those cards were special to me as well. Still though there wasn't much you could really do with the basketball cards and I think probably the same goes with baseball cards right? I had my binder, I'd sit down and flip through the binder, I'd trade cards with others now and then.
When Pokemon came, it took our school by storm. We were all watching the Pokemon anime on TV, we were playing Pokemon on our Gameboy Color units, and we played Pokemon the trading card game (TCG).
Pokemon the TV series told the story of a boy that was about our age. He went on a grand adventure, he was considerate towards his Pokemons and towards others. But most importantly, he was on a mission to catch them all and to become the very best. This idea; catch them all and become the very best is repeated pretty much non-stop throughout the whole TV series and the movies.
So Ash Ketchum (the main character of the first series) becomes an idol for us kids and we want to be like him. We want to become Pokemon masters.
We play the Gameboy game day out and day in when we are at home. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Battling. Grinding. Advancing in the game. The school did not allow us to bring our Gameboys though. However we played the Pokemon TCG a lot during recess. We also played the Pokemon TCG at home because it was fun -- it wasn't just a substitute for the Gameboy game, but nonetheless I think the fact that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school made us play the TCG even more at school than we would have otherwise. But I think it was good that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school. Playing the TCG was a much more social activity IMO.
So we play the TCG and we all want to be the very best. How do you become best? You build the best deck. But there is no single best deck. The strength of your deck depends on what your opponent has in his/her deck. Also the best cards are more rare than the others of course. Additionally the drawings on the cards were awesome and everyone wanted shiny cards which were also rare.
It was a perfect storm. Very very clever marketing.
I think Pokemon contributed a lot to my childhood though and I am happy that Nintendo made Pokemon.
F2P apps that use dark patterns and psychological tricks to extract money from their userbase might actually be closer in nature to Pokemon than I'd like to admit but still it feels fundamentally different. You might argue that in a way the Pokemon TCG was "pay to win" and in a way I would agree but at the same time the TCG still depended on being able to balance your deck correctly and there was always a strong element of randomness that no amount of money could get rid of for you.
In conclusion, with the Pokemon TCG you had both the prettiness of the cards (some kids collected only and never played even) but you also have the utility of the cards in playing a game combined with the best cards being rare, causing many of us to buy as many of them as we could get money for from our parents so that we could build better decks than our friends had and beat them and also so that we could show off our rarest cards to one-another.
Speaking of rarity; I know there are some baseball cards that are more rare than others. I don't know if the same goes for basketball cards but when we collected basketball cards there was never any talk about rarity. Perhaps likewise rarity of baseball cards was not something that kids "knew about"? With Pokemon cards you knew for example that shiny cards were rare because you could tell from the fact that you usually did not get any of them in the booster packs and the full decks contained like one of them or so, so it was immediately obvious that the shiny cards were "special". The Pokemon cards also had various markings that we attributed value to.
Furthermore, with Pokemon you knew the Pokemons from the show and everyone had their favorite Pokemon. For many of the Pokemons, multiple different cards existed, so there were more than just one card to collect for each of the Pokemons that you liked among the 151 Pokemons. Additionally, there were other types of cards that were needed for the game, including "trainer cards" that gave special powers or other advantages and there were "potions" and there were "energy colors" that you needed for attacks. The energy cards were the least valuable because they were so common. Some rare kinds of energy cards existed as well of course but everyone had way more energy cards than they needed. There were some trainers and potions that were very common as well, and some Pokemons that were too. But sometimes you'd find that other kids wanted the cards that you didn't want and you'd trade with them. For example I once traded a common Pikachu card with a kid that was obsessed with Pikachu and he gave me a card that in my eyes was much better, so we both ended up very happy from that trade.
I also remember there was a series of Pokemon cards that were not the TCG type cards. Neither me nor anyone I knew liked those cards, exactly because you couldn't do anything with them other than to just look at them whereas with the TCG cards you could both look at them and play with them. So definitely the being able to play with them aspect was hugely important.
A lot of the "rarity" with baseball cards was that they weren't inherently rare on release, but that the player on the card became a standout for the team afterwards, and therefore, owning the "rookie" card for them (when they were relatively unknown) was a game of patience and luck.
Also, baseball has a avid fanbase that is focused on statistics, and the back of the cards would have the player's stats. I don't doubt that the statistics were available in published manuals back then, but having them on a card made straight comparisons across players easier than flipping across multiple pages.
I see this as a result of the evolution of data-driven optimisation (as a methodology) in concert with data becoming increasingly more available.
Back in the day of stickers/baseball cards your data granularity was probably down to state/city-level sales by month.
Now in the world of F2P gaming, you have per-minute per-user level of data. You're able to A/B the uplift in sales:
- for introducing slot-machine like sound effects when opening the loot box
- adding flashes when you open the loot box
- giving out fewer lootboxes per hour
- introducing more rare and powerful things in the lootbox
You have "engagement" people who's sole job is to make stuff addictive nowadays, no longer is it a few people's job to dream up something fun to use and collect. It's now a cynical and scientific exercise to ruthlessly optimise IAP.
Many F2P apps prey on people and something should be done.
I was on the train the other day, the girl sitting next to me was playing one of those games where you have to watch an ad to get to the next level.
Just as she was about to level up the train went into a tunnel so the ad wouldn’t play. Within seconds literally she was frantic, eyes staring, pounding the screen with her finger, I almost thought she would crack the glass.
If that’s not addiction I don’t know what is. Makers of these games need to take a good hard look at themselves in the mirror.
I've had a regular end-user who is not in the industry plain-face defend this as an inevitable progression of the improvement of content rather than shady dark-patterns and cynical psychological manipulation. "And what's the big deal that X wants to play candy crush all the time cos it's fun."
"And what's the problem in putting heroin in Coca-Cola if it makes everyone feel good?" is my usual stance on that matter, unfortunately not everyone shares my view of the link between UX dark-patterns and addictive substances.
It’s a pretty well understood psychological system of variable rewards.
It’s the same reason people open up Facebook or Reddit or Hacker News every day: you don’t know what interesting content you’ll see and that keeps you coming back.
Except games aren’t social network filled with user generated content. Developers make the content (items, skins etc) and have figured out that presenting in a randomised way drives better engagement.
Never into Pokémon or MtG, but aren’t they a ToTALLY different thing from baseball cards?
The purpose of Pokémon and MtG cards are to use them in games/competitions, where the more desirable/expensive cards yield a game advantage.
But baseball cards were(are) primarily used for fans of the players/game, to learn about players (stats),not a game in itself. Sure some cards were more desirable than others, but more for bragging than game advantage.
I think the more comparable to Pokémon and MtG, is fantasy sports leagues where the addiction is rampant.
You are right there are differences, but I don't think they are so huge.
Collecting something, having a binder with your collection, showing it to people... is an attractive activity for many, and may not be that different from playing against said people.
I was deep into MtG (playing in tournaments, wining a few small ones, throwing a few hundred bucks at it), although I've never gotten into any other collection hobby.
To me, playing was the best part and what gave meaning to the rest of it. I loved the competitiveness, and coming up with strategies... but also the social aspects of it, of seeing others do the same activities. Many of these social aspects can still be there for "collecting without playing"-alternatives right? I enjoyed greatly seeing rare cards in other peoples collection, and getting a few of my own (rare editions, customized units, misprints...)
So yeah, for people that only care about the competitive aspects, MTG is totally different from baseball cards; for others, both hobbies may share many aspects.
Imagine if you could get your Wacky Packages or Pokemon cards instantly at any time? When I was younger I would have to travel to a shop (which requires begging my parents to take me) just to buy some pokemon cards.
Nowadays, the parent's card is on their app store account and the kid can press a button to receive their instant gratification. It's just too easy...
Combine that with the fact the collecting aspect is attached to an addictive video game.
Pokemon have had the games and 20 years worth of TV series that are pretty much extended ads.
For IAP: Instant gratification coupled with tons of analytics. Being able to tweak the balance until you get just enough valuable items to continue even if you don't get the item you really badly want. Making it into a weapons race or status race with other players (I once used about $200 on buying boosts in a niche online strategy game because another player pissed me off enough that I "bankrolled" an entire alliance just to see him lose; I subsequently closed my account and never played the game again, as I realized how easy it'd be to keep throwing money at it - it felt worth it for the satisfaction that once, but it'd have been a really bad habit to get into).
Magic the Gathering cards have a use beyond collecting. Its an actual game people play, and card prices are driven not only by their rarity, but their utility. Usually when a card spikes in price it is because someone somewhere has made a successful deck archetype that utilizes the card.
That's why most decks played in competitive Magic only have 75 cards, but usually average several hundred dollars, sometimes pushing 1000 in some formats.
When playing physical card games like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, you are constrained in who can play against due to the physical nature of the cards. The "best" decks you play against are your friends and other players around you, unless you are at the point where you are specifically entering tournaments.
I know when I played for a bit back during my school days it was just me and a couple friends who did it fairly casually, so there was very little pressure to spend lots of money to build a great deck. And if someone did try to spend tons of money we probably would have harassed them about it anyways.
The problem is nowadays, due to the online nature of these games, is that you aren't just playing with friends and other people near you, you are playing with anyone who happens to be online. That means you are much more likely to play against people with good decks who spent lots of money building that deck. So the pressure is much greater to also spend money.
People have a better understanding of how much they're spending when they use hard currency instead of an electronic charge. IAP just don't feel like spending money the same way handing bills to a retail clerk for some cards does.
> Baseball cards became a thing because Americans already had too much money.
This reminded me that I should start collecting the Panini stickers for the upcoming football World Cup. The only issue is that I've read recently that they doubled in price and I had a hard-time convincing myself to throw money their way even they were cheaper, much less now, with the current price. Which is a shame, because I first collected World Cup Panini stickers 25 years ago, when I was a kid.
I agree - the fact that MT:G is actually an extremely good game seems to be underestimated here. I spent a fair amount of money on that game when I played it but almost exclusively the (at the time) $10 fee to play in a draft. So that was a social and gaming thing more than a get-cards thing. Since I was pretty bad I never got first pick of the good cards anyway.
Same thing is true of football cards here in Europe, to complete 1 sticker book, like for the forthcoming world cup someone calculated will cost something like £1500.
I can't remember the numbers, but there's 32 teams of 11 players (not including subs), there's 8 cards in a pack, of which there are typically 2-3 duplicates, so you need to buy multiples of the same team just to complete one team and then swap with friends at school to complete the others.
And that's the hook that gets ~~kids~~ parents buying, it's the element of peer pressure. My boy is not into football and isn't collecting the cards, he's currently a social outcast as a result. Fortunately, he has a strong character and isn't bothered by it, but peer pressure is the answer to your question IMO.
I'm all for seeing items with random distribution inside as gambling too. I recall the monetary value of some pokemon cards caused my school to ban them. This didn't really have any effect other than to allow the school to say, "well, they are banned," if there was any fights or thefts relating to them. I think they probably had a net social negative amongst my friends at the time. In fact the only social positive I saw from them was in getting people, who wouldn't otherwise interact, interacting -- which wasn't always a good thing.
But I do see a few tiny differences in general between loot boxes and physical items like trading cards:
1. the packet does contain physical items which cost money to produce, whereas a duplication of a virtual item is effectively the distribution cost.
2. Retailers made a profit on physical items too. With virtual items sold by developer-publishers like EA and Valve, it's really just one party.
3. There is typically no limit on the number of loot boxes you can purchase. With physical items there is the stock of the shop.
4. Loot boxes can in some cases be purchased with other people's (usually parents) cards by default and without their immediate knowledge.
5. It isn't routine for somebody to give you a pack of physical tradable items for free to go and feel what they are like. If you go and buy them, there is a small amount of honesty in terms of what you are getting. With loot boxes, you are presented with them through in game events and then provided with the opportunity to buy more.
6. With physical items, you don't know how things are distributed but you can be reasonably certain that they can't be targeted at you. If you're looking for card X, the shopkeeper usually has no way of knowing what pack contains that and withholding that pack from you to maximise profit. You have no idea how the loot boxes are distributed. It is entirely possible for developers to detect when somebody is "hooked", work out what they are after, and attempt to maximise profit by withholding the desired item.
The only thing that could prevent such abuses is to regulate loot boxes as gambling as several countries have now done and respond with immense penalties where regulations are violated (a multiple of what would be made * estimated chance of being caught or a fraction of published turnover).
>If you're looking for card X, the shopkeeper usually has no way of knowing what pack contains that and withholding that pack from you to maximise profit.
Although I believe they do weigh Pokemon booster packs to find the ones with more valuable shiny cards.
Most physical things also has some amount of virtual value if you compare the production cost. Especially Pokemon cards et.al cost almost nothing to produce and has a high virtual value. Or some expensive brands.
With the Lego minifigs, collectors often try to get their hands on an unopened box of 60 packs, since each box has the same mix of figures. Open packs and then sell on unwanted ones.
I think candy should be outlawed too. I'd actually be OK with make this illegal. Kids are obviously just addicted to the stuff, it is clearly no good for them, and there is a massive industry both virtual (candy crush) and non (physical candy) that preys, sorry, PREYS on humans sweet tooth instinct. Nestle makes a lot of money in convenience stores via this.
There are Lego 'blind bags' for mini figurines, which do not let you see the content of the bag before opening it. The bag contains one mini figure from a predefined set, and some characters in the set are more rare than others.
All blind bags cost the same amount, but the rarity aspect could encourage kids to buy more bags in an effort get lucky and find the rare figure. This could be construed as gambling.
I don't honestly know if lootboxes are gambling or not, but it's time to be honest with the mechanisms behind them, and follow Chinese and Japanese regulations: be transparent and open about the probabilities behind them. Yes, even if it includes pity counters, etc.
But Steam, Google Play, PlayStation, XBox, and smaller platforms all need to follow suite, very quickly. Or they'll face even harsher legislations around the world.
On the one side I am glad that they banned such in-app purchases because sometimes it can get ridiculous on how much people (especially young children without realizing the cost) spend on them but I can't help but feel the irony because many "more legacy" things offer similar system. I remember spending far more then $100 for soccer stickers. You would basically buy a pack of maybe 10 stickers and you didn't know if you needed them or not. There were also stickers that were less common so in the end you ended up with over 300 excess stickers just to complete a book and you ended up doing that every other year for the euro and world championship.
I don't think there is much of a difference and both cases should be more regulated (especially those catering to children who do not know any better).
I was thinking exactly this - I'm not massively clear on where loot boxes and blind-pack card games/sticker collectables differ. Both are fixed price products where you don't know the contents, with the value of said contents varying massively from the invested cost, along with the ability to trade/sell the contents on secondary markets.
Trading Pokemon cards, I reckon I spent more on booster packs trying to get a Charizard than I've spent on all of the chests, loot boxes and packs in games, for nothing more than a piece of card that (sadly) eventually gets water damaged...
> I'm not massively clear on where loot boxes and blind-pack card games/sticker collectables differ. Both are fixed price products where you don't know the contents, with the value of said contents varying massively from the invested cost, along with the ability to trade/sell the contents on secondary markets.
I'm also not clear how this differs from an MMO where you kill monsters over and over hoping for piece of random loot that can then be virtually sold.
The issue with lootboxes specifically is twofold; one, lootboxes generally hold much less content than a pack of cards or stickers. Overwatch, for example, has four items a pack.
The second issue is that a physical object, like cards or stickers, does at least feel like a physical object, in that it's very easy to tell if you start having an excessive amount of them. On the other hand, on a lootbox, there isn't really a innate difference in response to buying one vs buying one hundred. So it eases some of the friction as well.
But the difference between 10 cards and a virtual object is very small. At least for small children. They can understand that a big object (a bike, a big Lego building, etc) must be expensive but I believe children are not really able to understand that a few cards are so expensive. Even rational people can't understand the physical value of a very small pack of cards -- they can only appreciate the virtual or artificial value, so the difference between a few cards (which hold a virtual value) and virtual loot boxes is very tiny.
But where are children getting the money to spend on this? Shouldn't their parent know better than to let them spend $100 on stickers or loot boxes. Passing the regulation on to the governments seems like an unnecessary measure to me.
Like with much in law things exist in an context. In order to compare physical card packs to loot boxes one has to first figure out the market size of each.
So I took a glance doing a few Google searches and it seems that physical card packs has a global market of a few billions. The number varies a lot since some of the data include card trade as well as pack sells. One data point argued a 450 million from news packs and 3 billions from card trade, specific for sport cards. For loot boxes I would estimate the number to be around 100x of that, give or take. For every $10 in the past there is $1000 dollar being spent on virtual packs.
It seems reasonable to me that a government body might not care too much about a $450 million industry, but do care a lot when it is a $100 billion industry.
I did say that I took a glance at google search. This is not a academic paper with careful study with tight citations from the last 100 years. If you want that, go and do the work yourself.
Here is a few new random google glances:
https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/28/newzoo-game-industry-grow...
$116 billion in total video game market, $50 billion for just the mobile market. How much of that is micro transaction? Don't know. How much is loot boxes. Don't know.
I understand the idea but what apply to loot boxes may apply to a lot of things.
The first ones are trading cards, including games like "Magic: the Gathering". If you are lucky, you can sell a card you got from a booster pack for way more than what you originally paid. And chances that you can don't even have to leave the shop to do it.
What makes gambling is that you get money for money, not worthless prizes like in the case of most loot boxes. It is an additional risk because there is always hope that you will be able to recover your losses and you may spend more than you can afford. With loot boxes and most other random prizes, it is clear that while you may get something nice, that money will be gone for good.
As for game developers, they don't lack options for Skinner box schemes. Loot boxes are just one among others, there are things like energy systems that are popular on mobile games that don't involve chance but have the same effect of making you spend more money than originally intended.
It is just that loot boxes look more like gambling, even though it isn't really, and are disliked by the majority. The rest is politics.
Readit News
And it makes sense. You can buy, using real money, a virtual ticket for a virtual item. Then that virtual item can in turn often be sold to others for real money. In other words, players can participate by gambling real money in return for less or more real money.
In short, it is gambling. Not all countries make gambling illegal, but those who do, should treat loot boxes the same. And virtually all countries make gambling illegal for minors, and there's currently no working mechanism in play for 15 year olds not to be able to play these games.
Currently in the Netherlands it's required for the proceeds of loot boxes to be tradeable in the real world, giving them economic value, for it to be considered gambling. If it's purely virtual, it's not gambling but just part of the game. (you can question this of course.) The problem is that it didn't matter for the Dutch government whether the items were traded on external platforms (which are often in violation of the games EULA itself), or on a platform of the game itself.
What would help stay legit is for the games to prevent loot box items from being traded between characters at all.
Here's the weird thing though. My entire childhood was filled with opaque plastic packs of cards, pokemon cards, football cards etc. You didn't know which 5 cards were in there. The cards were semi-randomly distributed in the packs in the factory, just like these loot boxes are semi-randomly generated by an algorithm. And you'd pay, not knowing what you'd get. And indeed, sometimes you paid $10 for a pack with a rare pokemon you could sell for $100. That was gambling too under this definition.
Is that so weird? I came to the conclusion that industry was gambling when I was a kid. I saw my friends spend their allowance on those packs of cards, open them up, then become disappointed because they only received "trash". Yet again and again they'd do it. It seemed totally irrational to me.
It lasted a week before other parents were incredibly annoyed by this. Aaaaand they kept paying a lot of euros to buy real ones.
:shrug:
The article says they already did: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-04-19-the-netherland...
Different jurisdictions feel differently about this, I'm sure. If the collectible's company plays dumb and never acknowledges the secondary market, they'll be more likely to stay clear of legal regulation.
After all, they're just selling piece of cardboard. What the people choose do with those pieces of cardboard is their prerogative, wink, wink.
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Regarding trading card games, they are indeed awfully closed to gambling; and they are in fact the main defense of the game publishers, arguing that this is just a "collect and play" type of game, and isn't gambling.
But isn't the interactivity, the bells and wistles, animations of the lootbox openings closer to addictive reward patterns than just opening a plastic card booster pack ?
This, for the majority of IAP, is super untrue, unless you mean selling on a secondary market. If this is what you mean, then Wizards of the Coast better start worrying because anyone buying rares from the local gaming shop is now engaging in gambling and, by your logic, responsible by WotC.
In fact, the big problem here is precedence. How long do you think it will take before a litigious company starts targeting "physical" lootboxes like MtG or Pokemon or any physical variable reward package. The mechanics are the same, the reward rarity weight can be exactly the same, just the medium has changed.
This law is dangerous, because you could have gotten the same result (protect children/persons susceptible to skinner box mechanics) with a little more nuance.
Also, the big losers here are decent apps that don't have predatory IAP that are caught in the crossfire.
It's kind of shocking the lack of foresight being seen in this thread.
Yes, they do the same thing. Of course they should be hit just the same.
- The physical card packs have predetermined and known probabilities.
- The 'opening' ceremony is rather benign and not designed to stimulate
- Once printed and distributed no further psychological tweaking mechanisms can be employed to 'hook' the player
(2/3) agreed there is a difference, although it was still magical as a child and there was definitely something calling me back. A lot of those packs were interesting only because I watched 100 episodes of the greatest adventurer known to me (Ash Ketchum) and my own adventures playing Pokemon on the gameboy for 100+ hours.
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ERSB seems like a good mechanism.
That said, an "AO" rating would indeed have a chilling effect on store shelves (since most retailers don't even want to carry AO games at all). It could be feasible to make loot boxes an automatic elevation to ESRB AO / PEGI 18 / etc. should those organizations want to do so (and hopefully they would indeed want to do so).
Depending on the case it might be gambling, it might be not - like for example a Picture Album, you can usually buy the missing cards for a flat fee (per missing card)
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This exactly describes cryptocurrency.
Is this the case for these loot boxes?
As a side note, I remember MtG being called "cardboard crack" back in the day, including by those who played it.
Or use the opening of packs for actual gaming with the various ways to play with them.
The entire industry knows this is going on. Parents have complained for years, but nothing's changed.
I believe adults are the real whales they're after. Most children have no way to pay for virtual goods. It's adults who even know they are gambling, but they enjoy it just like adults enjoy gambling in a casino.
Then it should be the parents' responsibility to educate their children, and not give them a device with a credit/debit card attached to the logged account.
That won't be enough for many, including the Belgian government, apparently. Even adults are not responsible enough, it would seem, to handle credit or debit cards.
Why haven’t the licensed gambling venues (casinos, lotto, and what have you) pressured the regulators to stop the unlicensed gambling? Or have they and I’m not aware / the regulator is dragging its feet?
Do the licensed gambling entities not perceive this as a threat? Or has gambling revenue increase overall because these games / apps basically groom young people in to being habitual gamblers as they age?
Probably a little of column A, a little of column B. The kids gambling with these games aren't potential customers for casinos since they're underage, but the habits they form as children may translate into willingness to gamble as adults. Maybe those kids-turned-adults will continue to gamble with video games instead of casinos, but I'd wager those casinos expect it to be a net positive for them overall. After all casinos offer "perks" that video games can't; free drinks, buffets, etc..
My Dad's a great poker player and his secondary source of income vanished overnight. He still complains about it.
https://medium.com/@bostonirishblog/the-simple-science-behin...
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When Apple had long and thoightful review practices we treated them as the business murderers. And yet here we are asking exactly for their long and painful review process to have a comeback.
That said I'm curious what happened and why these things are so addictive. As a kid I collected Wacky Packages. They were parody stickers that came in a pack of like 3 or 5 with a stick of gum just like Baseball Cards. While I probably owned 150 stickers or so I would never have considered myself addicted nor my friends. We were into them for a couple of months, probably spent no more than $20 total each.
Compare to my nephew who was into Pokemon Cards and spent hundreds of dollars. Of course I new a few kids that seriously into baseball cards but they were the exception. With Pokemon cards it seemed much much better. Also before that a large percentage of my adult friend spent hundreds on Magic the Gathering cards. Some spent thousands.
Now we have IAP in apps and some people are spending like crazy.
What happened? What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards? What made IAP so big? I can only guess 2 things about IAP. One that it's super each to buy being connected directly to your account. Two that being a video game they can more easily use psychological techniques to manipulate people. That might explain the IAP issues. Not sure it explains Pokemon + Magic the Gathering vs Baseball Cards.
Any ideas?
I grew up with Pokemon and I might have some answer for that.
Before Pokemon I had a binder of basketball cards. I collected them but I never had a lot of them. Some of them were cool and shiny, some were split into three parts so they were three smaller cards in one and I liked those as well. Additionally I had a favorite team; the Chicago Bulls and of course those cards were special to me as well. Still though there wasn't much you could really do with the basketball cards and I think probably the same goes with baseball cards right? I had my binder, I'd sit down and flip through the binder, I'd trade cards with others now and then.
When Pokemon came, it took our school by storm. We were all watching the Pokemon anime on TV, we were playing Pokemon on our Gameboy Color units, and we played Pokemon the trading card game (TCG).
Pokemon the TV series told the story of a boy that was about our age. He went on a grand adventure, he was considerate towards his Pokemons and towards others. But most importantly, he was on a mission to catch them all and to become the very best. This idea; catch them all and become the very best is repeated pretty much non-stop throughout the whole TV series and the movies.
So Ash Ketchum (the main character of the first series) becomes an idol for us kids and we want to be like him. We want to become Pokemon masters.
We play the Gameboy game day out and day in when we are at home. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Battling. Grinding. Advancing in the game. The school did not allow us to bring our Gameboys though. However we played the Pokemon TCG a lot during recess. We also played the Pokemon TCG at home because it was fun -- it wasn't just a substitute for the Gameboy game, but nonetheless I think the fact that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school made us play the TCG even more at school than we would have otherwise. But I think it was good that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school. Playing the TCG was a much more social activity IMO.
So we play the TCG and we all want to be the very best. How do you become best? You build the best deck. But there is no single best deck. The strength of your deck depends on what your opponent has in his/her deck. Also the best cards are more rare than the others of course. Additionally the drawings on the cards were awesome and everyone wanted shiny cards which were also rare.
It was a perfect storm. Very very clever marketing.
I think Pokemon contributed a lot to my childhood though and I am happy that Nintendo made Pokemon.
F2P apps that use dark patterns and psychological tricks to extract money from their userbase might actually be closer in nature to Pokemon than I'd like to admit but still it feels fundamentally different. You might argue that in a way the Pokemon TCG was "pay to win" and in a way I would agree but at the same time the TCG still depended on being able to balance your deck correctly and there was always a strong element of randomness that no amount of money could get rid of for you.
In conclusion, with the Pokemon TCG you had both the prettiness of the cards (some kids collected only and never played even) but you also have the utility of the cards in playing a game combined with the best cards being rare, causing many of us to buy as many of them as we could get money for from our parents so that we could build better decks than our friends had and beat them and also so that we could show off our rarest cards to one-another.
Speaking of rarity; I know there are some baseball cards that are more rare than others. I don't know if the same goes for basketball cards but when we collected basketball cards there was never any talk about rarity. Perhaps likewise rarity of baseball cards was not something that kids "knew about"? With Pokemon cards you knew for example that shiny cards were rare because you could tell from the fact that you usually did not get any of them in the booster packs and the full decks contained like one of them or so, so it was immediately obvious that the shiny cards were "special". The Pokemon cards also had various markings that we attributed value to.
Furthermore, with Pokemon you knew the Pokemons from the show and everyone had their favorite Pokemon. For many of the Pokemons, multiple different cards existed, so there were more than just one card to collect for each of the Pokemons that you liked among the 151 Pokemons. Additionally, there were other types of cards that were needed for the game, including "trainer cards" that gave special powers or other advantages and there were "potions" and there were "energy colors" that you needed for attacks. The energy cards were the least valuable because they were so common. Some rare kinds of energy cards existed as well of course but everyone had way more energy cards than they needed. There were some trainers and potions that were very common as well, and some Pokemons that were too. But sometimes you'd find that other kids wanted the cards that you didn't want and you'd trade with them. For example I once traded a common Pikachu card with a kid that was obsessed with Pikachu and he gave me a card that in my eyes was much better, so we both ended up very happy from that trade.
I also remember there was a series of Pokemon cards that were not the TCG type cards. Neither me nor anyone I knew liked those cards, exactly because you couldn't do anything with them other than to just look at them whereas with the TCG cards you could both look at them and play with them. So definitely the being able to play with them aspect was hugely important.
Back in the day of stickers/baseball cards your data granularity was probably down to state/city-level sales by month.
Now in the world of F2P gaming, you have per-minute per-user level of data. You're able to A/B the uplift in sales: - for introducing slot-machine like sound effects when opening the loot box - adding flashes when you open the loot box - giving out fewer lootboxes per hour - introducing more rare and powerful things in the lootbox
You have "engagement" people who's sole job is to make stuff addictive nowadays, no longer is it a few people's job to dream up something fun to use and collect. It's now a cynical and scientific exercise to ruthlessly optimise IAP.
I was on the train the other day, the girl sitting next to me was playing one of those games where you have to watch an ad to get to the next level.
Just as she was about to level up the train went into a tunnel so the ad wouldn’t play. Within seconds literally she was frantic, eyes staring, pounding the screen with her finger, I almost thought she would crack the glass.
If that’s not addiction I don’t know what is. Makers of these games need to take a good hard look at themselves in the mirror.
"And what's the problem in putting heroin in Coca-Cola if it makes everyone feel good?" is my usual stance on that matter, unfortunately not everyone shares my view of the link between UX dark-patterns and addictive substances.
It’s the same reason people open up Facebook or Reddit or Hacker News every day: you don’t know what interesting content you’ll see and that keeps you coming back.
Except games aren’t social network filled with user generated content. Developers make the content (items, skins etc) and have figured out that presenting in a randomised way drives better engagement.
The purpose of Pokémon and MtG cards are to use them in games/competitions, where the more desirable/expensive cards yield a game advantage.
But baseball cards were(are) primarily used for fans of the players/game, to learn about players (stats),not a game in itself. Sure some cards were more desirable than others, but more for bragging than game advantage.
I think the more comparable to Pokémon and MtG, is fantasy sports leagues where the addiction is rampant.
Collecting something, having a binder with your collection, showing it to people... is an attractive activity for many, and may not be that different from playing against said people.
I was deep into MtG (playing in tournaments, wining a few small ones, throwing a few hundred bucks at it), although I've never gotten into any other collection hobby.
To me, playing was the best part and what gave meaning to the rest of it. I loved the competitiveness, and coming up with strategies... but also the social aspects of it, of seeing others do the same activities. Many of these social aspects can still be there for "collecting without playing"-alternatives right? I enjoyed greatly seeing rare cards in other peoples collection, and getting a few of my own (rare editions, customized units, misprints...)
So yeah, for people that only care about the competitive aspects, MTG is totally different from baseball cards; for others, both hobbies may share many aspects.
Nowadays, the parent's card is on their app store account and the kid can press a button to receive their instant gratification. It's just too easy...
Combine that with the fact the collecting aspect is attached to an addictive video game.
For IAP: Instant gratification coupled with tons of analytics. Being able to tweak the balance until you get just enough valuable items to continue even if you don't get the item you really badly want. Making it into a weapons race or status race with other players (I once used about $200 on buying boosts in a niche online strategy game because another player pissed me off enough that I "bankrolled" an entire alliance just to see him lose; I subsequently closed my account and never played the game again, as I realized how easy it'd be to keep throwing money at it - it felt worth it for the satisfaction that once, but it'd have been a really bad habit to get into).
That's why most decks played in competitive Magic only have 75 cards, but usually average several hundred dollars, sometimes pushing 1000 in some formats.
I know when I played for a bit back during my school days it was just me and a couple friends who did it fairly casually, so there was very little pressure to spend lots of money to build a great deck. And if someone did try to spend tons of money we probably would have harassed them about it anyways.
The problem is nowadays, due to the online nature of these games, is that you aren't just playing with friends and other people near you, you are playing with anyone who happens to be online. That means you are much more likely to play against people with good decks who spent lots of money building that deck. So the pressure is much greater to also spend money.
Baseball cards became a thing because Americans already had too much money. Other countries that got hit by world wars didn't have baseball cards.
New milenium came and now money is more useless than ever and people have much eadier time to gamble it away.
This reminded me that I should start collecting the Panini stickers for the upcoming football World Cup. The only issue is that I've read recently that they doubled in price and I had a hard-time convincing myself to throw money their way even they were cheaper, much less now, with the current price. Which is a shame, because I first collected World Cup Panini stickers 25 years ago, when I was a kid.
Don't play the games then.
I can't remember the numbers, but there's 32 teams of 11 players (not including subs), there's 8 cards in a pack, of which there are typically 2-3 duplicates, so you need to buy multiples of the same team just to complete one team and then swap with friends at school to complete the others.
And that's the hook that gets ~~kids~~ parents buying, it's the element of peer pressure. My boy is not into football and isn't collecting the cards, he's currently a social outcast as a result. Fortunately, he has a strong character and isn't bothered by it, but peer pressure is the answer to your question IMO.
Edit: typos.
There are you tube videos my kids liked to watch of people just literally opening pokemon packs. I'd actually be OK with making this illegal.
Especially considered the frenzied buying and selling of pokemon cards at their school..
This is actually pretty huge. There is a very massive industry both virtual and non that relies on preying on kids and their gambling instinct.
Steam makes a lot of money on Counter Strike via this.
But I do see a few tiny differences in general between loot boxes and physical items like trading cards:
1. the packet does contain physical items which cost money to produce, whereas a duplication of a virtual item is effectively the distribution cost.
2. Retailers made a profit on physical items too. With virtual items sold by developer-publishers like EA and Valve, it's really just one party.
3. There is typically no limit on the number of loot boxes you can purchase. With physical items there is the stock of the shop.
4. Loot boxes can in some cases be purchased with other people's (usually parents) cards by default and without their immediate knowledge.
5. It isn't routine for somebody to give you a pack of physical tradable items for free to go and feel what they are like. If you go and buy them, there is a small amount of honesty in terms of what you are getting. With loot boxes, you are presented with them through in game events and then provided with the opportunity to buy more.
6. With physical items, you don't know how things are distributed but you can be reasonably certain that they can't be targeted at you. If you're looking for card X, the shopkeeper usually has no way of knowing what pack contains that and withholding that pack from you to maximise profit. You have no idea how the loot boxes are distributed. It is entirely possible for developers to detect when somebody is "hooked", work out what they are after, and attempt to maximise profit by withholding the desired item.
The only thing that could prevent such abuses is to regulate loot boxes as gambling as several countries have now done and respond with immense penalties where regulations are violated (a multiple of what would be made * estimated chance of being caught or a fraction of published turnover).
Although I believe they do weigh Pokemon booster packs to find the ones with more valuable shiny cards.
You want to make something illegal because you don't like it, because you can't be bothered to parent your children.
For a set of 16 Lego figures (ignoring attempts to squidge the packet before buying, but also ignoring swaps) you'd expect to buy over 50 packs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector's_problem
It can cost hundreds of dollars to complete a panini book, and that's with vigorous swapping.
I agree with you about Pokémon cards and Lego minifig packs. They should be regulated.
All blind bags cost the same amount, but the rarity aspect could encourage kids to buy more bags in an effort get lucky and find the rare figure. This could be construed as gambling.
Apple has started mandating this: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/21/16805392/loot-box-odds-ru...
But Steam, Google Play, PlayStation, XBox, and smaller platforms all need to follow suite, very quickly. Or they'll face even harsher legislations around the world.
I don't think there is much of a difference and both cases should be more regulated (especially those catering to children who do not know any better).
Trading Pokemon cards, I reckon I spent more on booster packs trying to get a Charizard than I've spent on all of the chests, loot boxes and packs in games, for nothing more than a piece of card that (sadly) eventually gets water damaged...
I'm also not clear how this differs from an MMO where you kill monsters over and over hoping for piece of random loot that can then be virtually sold.
The second issue is that a physical object, like cards or stickers, does at least feel like a physical object, in that it's very easy to tell if you start having an excessive amount of them. On the other hand, on a lootbox, there isn't really a innate difference in response to buying one vs buying one hundred. So it eases some of the friction as well.
So I took a glance doing a few Google searches and it seems that physical card packs has a global market of a few billions. The number varies a lot since some of the data include card trade as well as pack sells. One data point argued a 450 million from news packs and 3 billions from card trade, specific for sport cards. For loot boxes I would estimate the number to be around 100x of that, give or take. For every $10 in the past there is $1000 dollar being spent on virtual packs.
It seems reasonable to me that a government body might not care too much about a $450 million industry, but do care a lot when it is a $100 billion industry.
Here is a few new random google glances: https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/28/newzoo-game-industry-grow... $116 billion in total video game market, $50 billion for just the mobile market. How much of that is micro transaction? Don't know. How much is loot boxes. Don't know.
Blizzard reported more than half their revenue, $4 billion, was from micro-transactions. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/activision-blizzard-made-4...
EA reported similar $2 billion, almost half of their revenue, from micro-transactions. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/57475/ea-earns-1-68-billion-m...
According to this random article, loot boxes are around $30 billion this year and expected to reach $50 billions in 4 years. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-04-17-loot-boxes...)
The first ones are trading cards, including games like "Magic: the Gathering". If you are lucky, you can sell a card you got from a booster pack for way more than what you originally paid. And chances that you can don't even have to leave the shop to do it.
What makes gambling is that you get money for money, not worthless prizes like in the case of most loot boxes. It is an additional risk because there is always hope that you will be able to recover your losses and you may spend more than you can afford. With loot boxes and most other random prizes, it is clear that while you may get something nice, that money will be gone for good.
As for game developers, they don't lack options for Skinner box schemes. Loot boxes are just one among others, there are things like energy systems that are popular on mobile games that don't involve chance but have the same effect of making you spend more money than originally intended.
It is just that loot boxes look more like gambling, even though it isn't really, and are disliked by the majority. The rest is politics.