Official statement from Valve.
We shared with the NYAG that these types of boxes in our games are widely used, not just in video games but in the tangible world as well, where generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive.
You’re right! We should stop that too!
How Valve sounds right now: “It’s totally cool to rip off kids with blind box stuff and get them addicted to gambling mechanics!”
I’m with you OP, we need to stop it in physical games as well. Just because Magic the Gathering does is and Labubu does it doesn’t make it okay. It actually just creates artificial scarcity and pushes children and the families providing them the money to gamble ever harder to get the rare drops, on the off chance that those are valuable.
Even Beanie Babies never stooped that low.
I think the connection to physical cards is pretty weak really - the crucial difference being that if you want to get some physical cards, you go out and buy them (or stay in and buy them I guess). You start with nothing except some cash, and you end up with some random cards, which may or may not be valuable.
Loot boxes in F2P games are not like that - you play a free game, have fun and then end up with this “loot box” without having done anything to ask for it. It’s just there in your inventory, and it stays there until you fork over some cash and see what’s inside.
It’s way more of a temptation than physical cards that you won’t encounter until you buy them.
I’m not a psychologist or any sort of expert who can properly evaluate something as “gambling” or “not gambling”, but I’ve seen kids going through pack after pack of Magic cards at the shop and I’ve seen people going through scratch-off after scratch-off at the corner store, and to my eye, it’s the same picture.
granniesTappingSlotMachines.avi
I agree in theory with these kinds of rules, but I don’t trust legislators to do it properly.
For an example, I remember back in my rs2 days, RWT (real world trading) was relatively common and things like loot dropped from certain monsters was randomized, you might have to kill it 100 times to get that one drop or pay $5 or whatever to get it now.
Where would a legistlator fall on that? Is that gambling? Does RNG and the ability to transfer goods on a game then become illegal just by way of interpretation?