Many of us have been doing this from the beginning, but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how gacha games work.
Most people do not pump loads of money into these. Many don’t pay anything at all. But those people are not the target audience. These companies are going after the whales. Basically gambling addicts who will destroy their entire lives to pump everything they have into it.
Which is exactly why these games either need to be illegal, or the law needs to put caps on how much individuals are permitted to spend on these.
If one wants to play F2P games I would like to recommend the no gatcha challenge. Meaning no gatcha or any in-game purchases. Rewards from forced tutorial pulls can often be sold / deleted or if the first pull isnt random then that doesnt count.
For battle pass games with only cosmetics I encourage to only use default skins, emotes, avatars, frames or etc. It probably annoys a lot of people to get owned by someone wearing “noob” skins.
If the games are still good / enjoyable after these restrictions then they just might be actually good f2p games.
Pretty much any game with gatcha like the Hoyoverse games. These often have some sort of endgame paywall but it could take hours to reach it. If the game is bad or simply unplayable without gatcha its a bad game. Free premium currency can often be used for non-rng non-gatcha stuff.
Competitive games usually only have cosmetics so you can just use default skin, ignore battle pass and focus on getting good and having fun. Some people could even get salty for getting their ass handed to them by someome using default costume.
I already do, but I’m also not as avid a gamer as I once was. Every FPS became borderline unplayable when loot crates became a thing. Call me old fashioned, but I liked when games had the same weapons for everyone, and there weren’t random cards or whatever that made people’s guns more powerful / reload /shoot faster, etc. It really brings an imbalance to the game, and enables these stupid gambling sites. The companies making the games are making money hand over fist, so they aren’t going to stop any time soon barring regulation, and looking at this administration, good fucking luck with that. Boycott away.
I’ve been boycotting CS2 (née CSGO) since November 2019 when they introduced Fortnite skins with annoying voices that you couldn’t turn off or disable.
I don’t think it has worked but I’m definitely never playing another Valve multiplayer game, they always turn out the same way.
Video game boycotts are an absolute fucking joke. Especially if organized here. I mean what % of consumers are on Lemmy? Like 0.00000000000000001%? For fuck sake.
Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?
Consumer boycotts very very rarely work. I’ve never heard of a single successful video game boycott.
How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?
Lobby for appropriate legislation with your government representatives. We could have legislation that forces companies to transparently show the chance of specific rewards, and even show the money you have to spend on average to get XY specific item. (I think there is already a law like this in the works in the EU?)
One of the major psychological tricks gambling games (including lootbox and gacha) employ is to obscure the true costs behind premium currencies. Once they are forced to remove this, and you are shown that yes, guaranteed acquisition of a single Genshin character will cost you ~300 USD, it might make you do a double-take before you pull out your bank card. (There are many more psychological dark patterns these developers employ, so it wouldn’t be a single miracle solution, unless of course legislation altogether bans random chance rewards buyable with cash.)
Do what you think is right, but spend some time to consider whether you want to reward someone or some organization with your hard earned money if you consider what they are doing immoral or bad.
Maybe I’m just an old man now, but it’s been years since I was interested in a game with lootboxes. I think the last one I played was Overwatch, back when it originally came out
If you are not their target audience then you can‘t really boycott them in the first place. And in my opinion there is no harm in playing a game with loot boxes when you don‘t buy them. They aren’t really getting anything out of non-spenders. That’s not how their servers keep running. And most f2p games that I encounter nowadays do season passes without the random factor anyway, so I feel the loot box discussion is becoming a little outdated for the main stream. Thank goodness.
I‘ve also noticed multiple times that this community has a gripe with multiplayer games for some reason. It‘s better to take anything from online strangers with a grain of salt.
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