Here’s one: Trading cards are something you own. Skins are limited to a game you’re licensing.
Here’s another: trading cards are portable; they can be put in a collection for display, put in a safety deposit box, etc. When CS goes, all the skins go with it.
Another minor one: baseball cards are informational, the skins are cosmetic only.
Mind you, I think both are forms of unregulated gambling and trading cards as well as loot boxes should have better societal scrutiny, but they aren’t identical.
No one buys baseball cards for the informational side of it. They buy them as a collectors item. The same as these skins. The only difference is that one is digital and one is physical.
Sports cards have been around for ages and no one gave a shit. People care about the loot boxes in games because it’s easy for a kid to get their parents credit card and rack up a ton of charges.
I would say yes, they are unregulated gambling. People also spend ludicrous amounts of money on cards. Though I don’t think that should factor into whether or not something is or isn’t unregulated gambling. It’s the chance product, not the money spent on it.
So those cards have been around forever, and no one complained about them.
People care about these loot boxes because it’s easy for a young kid to get their parents credit card and rack up a ton of charges because they see a cool skin and don’t realize that ultra rare or 1/1000 chance to drop means that they won’t get t without spending a ton of money.
By definition gambling can be defined as playing games of chance for money. Well they aren’t going to win money, their reward is a collectable item.
Or to take risky action in hope of desired result. I don’t really see how this fits that definition either. There’s no risky action.
I would prefer if there were no loot boxes because I’d rather know what I’m getting, but people are focusing on the wrong thing here.
Trading cards and gambling addiction have been studied for years. TCGs may not function the same as a slot machine, but it does trigger the same thing in your brain.
You're right. TCGs with blind draw boosters are also bad. I didn't complain about Pokemon cards back in 2000 because I was a child and didn't comprehend that that was what I was doing. I definitely stopped partaking in Magic: The Gathering as an adult though when I realized it was a neverending gambling treadmill. Today I frequent fighting game locals that are kept afloat by Yu Gi Oh gambling addicts who fill the trash cans with booster wrappers as they go back to the counter over and over again to buy more packs.
So those cards have been around forever, and no one complained about them.
There have definitely been complaints about gambling in relation to collectible cards. I don’t think anything has come of them in legal terms, but many complaints have been voiced.
Many would say so. Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic the Gathering, have worked very hard at balancing the two sides of the coin. On one side, they design cards such that power levels determine the demand (and thus price) for rarer cards on the resale market, and on the other they argue that the cards have no intrinsic value so that buying packs can’t count as gambling since there’s technically no expected profit for the buyers.
Should we also have a ban on all sports memorabilia then? It’s a gamble for me to go to my local team and have the players sign things and then at some point in the future it could be worth a ton of money?
Would this conversation be any different if they sold the cards for what they think the expected value is? Then you’d have people complaining about how they’re charging hundreds for a card and that’s not fair because little Timmy can’t afford it.
Edit: those tumblers that people drink out of have “rarer” colors and designs, better ban those two because of gambling.
Because society has deemed gambling a problem requiring regulation. These things exist outside that regulation while being psychology the same.
Also, gambling addiction has the highest rate of suicide of all addictions. And I think we should be trying to lower the amount of people that kill themselves.
I’ve never given two shits about what society has decided about my psychology. It’s nobody’s place to decide for me. If someone wants to kill themselves, let them. Help them even.
Gaben has the best PR of any billionaire. People think he and his company aren’t just as shitty as any other multi yacht owning billionaire and profit machine company out there.
Apart from exploiting gambling addicts and you not really owning most games, Valve are rather consumer friendly. Or at least they appear to be because their competitors are even worse.
Given human nature I find it hard to blame rich people for using their money on themselves. We need laws to change (aka much, much higher taxes)
Someone’s perspective on what’s an appropriate standard of living changes with what they’re used to. That’s just how the human brain works. I constantly hear people that make the same or more than me, that live in the same country as me in an area with similar cost of living, complain about how little money they have, while I feel like I have all I really need and more. They just consider different things as “necessary”.
Is it incredibly disconnected to consider owning even one yacht as anything close to necessary? Absolutely. But anything you want, your brain will take it for granted once you get it and make you want even more.
I don’t thinks that is greed actually, Gabe gaining more and more money is greed but spend that wealth in random shit is just like people do, if you have billions the random shit you can buy is more pricy.
Is that not greed? He holds on to his money and puts them in places that can’t be taxed. Speaking of taxes, he doesn’t pay his fair share by far. Are these not examples of greed? People are poor. Social systems are failing. These billionaires, even the ones people seem to like such as Gaben and Taylor Swift, are just holding wealth. They’re like dragons lording over piles of gold.
Billionares creating politics and buying politicians so they can continue to be rich is greed totally, but unless yatch is a scheme to avoid taxes that I don’t know they buying it is like me buying toys to put on my desk in a large scale.
I’m somewhere between sad for the people whose talents are being directed to this, and feeling so profoundly unexcited about this game that I keep having to re-read the post title to remind myself what it was about.
(This was not a complaint on the post btw - upvoted)
My hope, though I'm keeping my expectations low, is that since these supposed live-service games will be supposedly releasing alongside remakes of the original games the IP is based on, that if the remakes sell significantly better than the live service games it might hopefully inform better decision-making around them.
While they haven't been controversy-free in terms of their monetization practices, Sega has released a slew of back-to-back AAA games: Persona 3 Reload, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Sonic Frontiers, that have generally been complete, single-purchase packages (with a few questionable omissions from base game moved to DLC that I'd consider "regular bad", but not anywhere near the level of egregious monetization seen in most live-service games).
Meh who needs this just go play Motor Town, stick a v12 in a tiny shit stick little car that absolutely can’t handle all the torque and do urgent taxi jobs. Yeah it is a realistic racing game with a good physics engine and well modeled tire drifting mechanics not an arcade game but when you are struggling to keep your taxi pointed straight because you are still burning out at 80mph in 5th gear while your taxi customers scream at you to slow down just try to tell me you are playing “Normal” Taxi.
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