The Jalter thread on FGO Reddit is proof why lootboxes and mobage need goverment over site and not to be allowed to be accessed by children :/
Wait, are there children that give the faintest shit about Fate/?
There probably are. But that doesn’t matter because it applies to all games with lootboxes or gacha.
Government overreach into the issue of loot boxes can only end poorly, because they’re never going to understand the difference between a cash loot box and a purely playtime-based random loot system. They’ll never care enough to understand, you get me? They’ve never been good with nuance.
As far as the issue of addiction, there are lots of perfectly legitimate systems that people with addictive tendencies shouldn’t be anywhere closer to than loot boxes. There’s a reason games like WoW developed what are known as Anti poop-socking measures, and even those legitimately don’t work all the time.
Government overreach is such a weak excuse for not doing thing about a system that’s clearly got problems. Obviously, lawmakers need to be more educated on how games work before putting the laws in place but that literally applies to every law.
And, the main dude (The Hawaiian senator I think?) who is proposing the changes to the system/laws is a gamer himself so I think he knows the difference between loot you earn through gameplay.
Obviously, you can’t stop people from being addicted to things by just passing a law. But, you sure can help it by y’know standardizing the % of getting x items across all games instead of one game being 3% and another being 0.01%, preventing access to them by children, and prevent companies from being able to flex change %s in order to milk more money out of customers. Y’know most of the reasons casinos are regulated by the government?
And seriously, right now is the best time to be regulating them. Y’know before little timmy steals his parents credit cards to feed his mobage addiction and then we get a bunch of reactionary laws because there is a whole hoard of pissed off moms screeching like banshees about the evils of video games.