EA killed for "Surprise Mechanics", TencentGGG slides on "Mystery Box". How?

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girng wrote:

GGG is bound to UK laws?

If they want to have their product legal to use in the UK they are. Essentially since there's a London server they need to follow those laws.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

If you're going to use small size as any kind of defense for any kind of behavior (an already dodgy premise, but meh), then at least use a fair comparison. GGG (owned by Tencent) is analogous to Bioware (owned by EA). EA is analogous to Tencent.

Tencent's total equity is approximately ten times that of EA. They've got their fingers in pies you've eaten without even knowing it.

They epitomize "big fish in the pond."

But do all of Tencent's investments involve mystery boxes? They own 40% of Epic, yet Fortnite - one of the biggest user bases on the planet - does not have these mystery boxes. Plus they're a Chinese entity; is US Congress or EU Parliament going to have a lot of success demanding answers from them?

But just talking about size, Team Fortress 2 has almost double the average concurrent steam users as PoE, let alone the monster numbers from CS:GO - both of these games have all sorts of lootboxes and gambling associated with them, yet Valve seems pretty unencumbered.

FIFA, Battlefront II...these are the types of all-ages games with mass appeal that drew the eye to EA. If Fortnite was doing this same stuff they would be a target as well. But PoE? It may be majority owned by Tencent but it's really not making the kind of waves that the whales above are capable of making in society.

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Gulch wrote:

I don't get how EA is "aggressively targeting" a young audience.
Granted I haven't played every EA game that has boxes. Do you have examples?

Now if you want to talk about Microtransactions being toxic, I ask you to look at The Sims franchise. While that's not "gambling", that is still a shitty way to design a game that initially costs you $60+ for the core game.

The way GGG does it is 100% fine. And I really wish people would stop calling it gambling. It's not gambling, at all.

Fifa is a 3+ rated game where you can spend (Potentially very large quantities of) money to get something of a random result which directly impacts gameplay. Sometimes you get something good and most of the time you get trash.

In other words gambling.

And more on that point, you brought up the sims too, which is rated 12+ and is equally aggressive in marketing towards younger audiences. The gambling is whatever you make of it, Korean mmos with gacha boxes have been available to western audiences (Including younger people) for going on decades now, and its never been a problem before. The root of the issue is that the insane greed of EA and their scummy business practices which also encompass minors has grown to such a scale that actual governments are getting involved in the matter.

I maintain, as I have in the past, that this is an EA issue, NOT a gaming issue as a whole. If other companies stoop to the same level as EA then they should face the same criticism, but not until that point.

As I originally posted, GGGs mtx boxes are both completely benign (offering no ingame advantage), and are only available to 18+ audiences anyway, so even if the ridiculous "gambling" issue fell on PoE, it wouldn't even matter because there are no minors involved.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

This is completely fucking absurd.

Thanks for the insight bub, you really broadened my perspective with that statement.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

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girng wrote:

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putblug wrote:

They are the same thing. The only thing that makes loot boxes NOT gambling is that you cannot profit from it. Earnings have no real world value. Other than that, they are basically a digital slot machine.

Please read junyamint's post on the first page. He outlined the differences

there aren't any, the difference is perspective but they trigger all the same mental responses.

The fact that professional poker players don't experience the same mental connections that somebody on the casino floor playing slots does doesn't mean that poker isn't gambling.

Loot boxes are a pull on the slot machine, the fact that some of us can deal with them responsibly doesn't change that.

Why should a game company have to conform to someone's irresponsibility?

The player has free will to buy it or not, it's not forced.

10 op makes a post about gambling in ggg being like ea's gambling
20 people state reasons why ggg != ea
30 op responds it's still gambling, ea = ggg
40 goto 20

what is the point of this thread?

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girng wrote:

Why should a game company have to conform to someone's irresponsibility?

The player has free will to buy it or not, it's not forced.

Because gambling specifically exists to short-circuit people's rational thinking. Doesn't matter that it's "not forced"; nobody's "forcing" people to play slot machines either, but that's still, quite rightly, an activity that attracts all sorts of regulation.

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girng wrote:

Why should a game company have to conform to someone's irresponsibility?

The player has free will to buy it or not, it's not forced.

Good question.

Virtually all exploitative relationships and mechanics are based upon free-will behaviors to some extent. Even heroin consumption, to use an extreme example.

So what you are really digging at is whether regulatory bodies should be addressing exploitation per se.

Perhaps you think they should not, and you are welcome to make that argument if so. But the entire body of legal and sociological history indicates that your ideological battle will be an uphill one.

Good luck with that.

you always can...wait for the mtx mystery boxes to hit in store for direct purchase.

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Molochmane wrote:

you always can...wait for the mtx mystery boxes to hit in store for direct purchase.

sure their price is accessible right? hmmm not really

but hey it's cosmetic and I'm sure people is pleased to buy anything tencentGGG throws at them hell look at the 2 leg deformed goat for $15

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Xystre wrote:

sure their price is accessible right? hmmm not really

but hey it's cosmetic and I'm sure people is pleased to buy anything tencentGGG throws at them hell look at the 2 leg deformed goat for $15

A lot of posts from you where you show your hate for the prices. You know it's a F2P game, right? You know you don't need any cosmetic micro transactions, right? You know they're only cosmetics, right?

Why hate so much on things you absolutely do not need?