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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.

We already have an endless horde of pissed off moms screeching like banshes about every permutation of the evils of gaming, so…

The tools to keep kids away from these systems already exist in spades, a lack of education and attention paid by parents coupled with a lax stance on the topic by the existing regulatory bodies (Greased palms, I suspect…) seem to be entirely at fault in that regard.

“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%“

Elaborate, please?  I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

I’m not sure what tools your talking about when kids can download those games easily and freely. Most of these games don’t even need to get proper age ratings from the ESRB (mainly on the google playstore). And, even with credit card alerts doesn’t prevent the issue of even if they aren’t spending 1000$ now they might be more likely to get gambling addictions in the future.

There isn’t any government regulation on video games at all. That’s why the ESRB exists so they’re wouldn’t be. But, it’s clear when it comes to lootboxes/mobage that the ESRB isn’t interested in actually doing anything except the absolute base amount when more clearly needs to be done.

As far as my last statement, to give an example: In Granblue Fantasy the rate to get an SSR is 3% while in F/GO it’s only 1% and I’ve heard in some other games it goes even lower. And, those are just the rates to get an SSR not even to get a specific SSR (for reference: GBFs rate-up is 0.2%/FGO’s is 0.07%).

I’m talking about parental controls, content controls, baked into media stores.  They do exist, after all, and they fail because they’re not locked well enough.  Between the ESRB, Google Play and the Apple Store, there are more than enough people who could regulate this, that the government shouldn’t need to directly regulate a fundamentally different industry full of people who are already underpaid by mindlessly profit-driven publishers just to get the mobile game market under control.

Yes, I think microtransactions in general, not just random ones, should immediately flag an obvious and unavoidable notification or rating, and an app-store wide regulation that lets people specifically lock themselves or their kids out of these purchases, if not the games themselves.  

As far as whether or not these should be Government Mandated, they’d never see the issue as nuanced enough to warrent such a specific regulation.  They’d go directly after the “apparent” problem without addressing the greater issues, like they tend to do with every issue.

For the topic of Timmy stealing Mommy’s credit card and plunging the family into debt, gacha doesn’t create gambling addictions, it just finds them in people who otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to such a vector for addiction otherwise.  That kid will almost definitely find a way to destroy his college fund anyway, and far more importantly, without the right support, addicts will always find a way to “whale”, because it’s in their brain chemistry.

And that’s to say nothing about how such legislation could be misused to ignorantly target games that aren’t even on the distant fringes of the issue, like Monster Hunter, Borderlands or Path of Exile.  We won’t always have gamers in office to defend these things, after all.

As far as rarity-specific regulation, that’s…  So fundamentally unrelated to the issue I don’t even know where you got the idea that it’d help.  The most realistic results would be vastly increased price costs on high-rarity rolls or games making LOTS of SSRs with only a few of them actually being SSR-quality in terms of gameplay impact or fanbase affection (Imagine how much worse they’d hate themselves on reddit if their bargain basement edgy waifu were one of sixty SSRs that shared 3%, and only about five of them were worth anything as consolation.  Imagine if Kanetsugu Naoe were SSR.)

(I’m not saying I think Delightworks specifically would sink to such lows as to flood the servant pool with generic units to match a regulation like that, I’m just saying it’s not beneath the kind of people who rely on whales to get rich in a general sense.)

I’m absolutely not saying I think Lootboxes should go unregulated, but I also don’t trust the government with any more power than it absolutely needs to do it’s most fundamental job.  Such as, say, facilitating class-action lawsuits against negligent regulatory bodies who could and should do something about these abhorrent practices but refuse to.

Parental controls only work for young kids. As those kids become teenagers they’ll either get around them or they’re parents will let them have more freedom. I should state when I say kids I mean anyone under 18.

And the ESRB WON’T regulate gacha/lootboxes because it was made by the industry and works for the industry. It’ll do the least amount of regulation possible to ensure that these companies can milk people dry. Apple, and Google won’t either for the exact same reason.

Addiction is just one facet of lootboxes. People with anxiety and depression also roll on the gacha because it releases dopamine and that makes them feel happy so they keep rolling to keep feeling happy. And then there is the suck-cost fallacy that wraps it’s hands around the legs of unsuspecting customers and shakes the cash outta their pockets. Gambling addiction is just the absolute worst case scenario.

You keep saying the government will mishandle the issue and you don’t have any proof of that other then it might happen. Chris Lee, the Hawaiian rep, who is more or less leading the charge seems to understand the difference between lootboxes and loot in games. Seriously, it’s not that hard to put into law “all games featuring randomized loot that can be purchased for real money, or a premium currency must follow x regulations”.

Rarity-specific regulation is related, though. So games don’t make they’re rates so low you’re basically throwing money into a hole. Legally Casinos have to do this too. They have to return x% of money spent to the player.

  The example is something that already happens in games, either by accident or intention and that’s why rate-up exists so you have a higher chance of getting x character. But, ignoring that because that’s only 1 part of what I said there still needs to be an outside body that ensures companies aren’t changing the rates and not telling people either banner-to-banner or player-to-player.

A class action lawsuit by the government would require them (the ESRB, Game Makers) to have done something wrong, or at least strong actual proof of abuse. Right now, lootboxes are 100% legal and it’s almost near impossible to prove they’ve done anything negligent because you need such a large sample size in order to see if anything is fishy. So, only citizens could file a class action lawsuit but you’d need to get enough people who think they’ve been scammed and get proof/history of all their rolls (most games don’t save this) so then you could legally get access to the code and hope and pray the company didn’t change it before you got it in order to prove that they’ve been scamming people.

The government has to do something about them because the games industry won’t. They’re making too much money from them to stop.