Belgian website VTM is reporting that the country’s Gaming Commission is currently taking a look at loot boxes in video games, with particular focus on EA’s inclusion of them in Star Wars: Battlefront II and Blizzard’s use in Overwatch.
Peter Naessens, General Director of the commission, says that the practice of buying the add-on boxes—where you don’t know what you’re paying for until you open it—may constitute gambling.
It’s a particular concern for the Commission when the game is available for and marketed towards children, like Overwatch and Battlefront II are (in Europe both titles have a PEGI rating of 12).This isn't the first regulatory or legislative attention the loot boxes have received, but it is the first time I've seen that any country is looking to regulate gacha in much the same way that they regulate casinos. And with videogame consumers' reactions to gacha becoming increasingly negative and increasingly intense, it's starting to look as it AAA game publishers' "gold rush" mentality towards free-to-play gacha systems in full-priced videogame releases may be as short-lived as it was short-sighted... however lucrative it may have been in the near term.
The biggest lightning rod for criticism and discontent? EA, of course, as reported by Mirror.co.uk:
The latest Star Wars video game is set to launch tomorrow but fans are outraged over the decision to put a controversial "Credits" system into the sci-fi shooter.
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Ahead of the games release, members of the development team at DICE took to Reddit for an "ask me anything" (AMA) segment that quickly turned sour.
Although the discussion was civil, the developers were unable to stray much from the party line. Of the hundreds of questions posed, only 30 were answered and the topic of pay-to-win in a competitive multiplayer title were skillfully evaded.
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One of the highest-rated questions in the AMA, from user Jimquisition, went unanswered:
"Do you not feel loot box design is inherently predatory by nature? They exploit addiction and encourage at least the simulated feel of gambling, despite the lack of legal definition. Is this not a concern for the industry going forward?
"What exactly prompted you to take Battlefront II on a path that was inevitably going to be slammed as a “pay to win” experience, did you not feel it was particularly insulting to try and make so much money from this game after the first Battlefront was admittedly rushed and incomplete?
"They say games are too expensive to make and that’s why they need season passes, DLC, deluxe editions, microtransactions, and loot boxes (to say nothing of merchandise, tax breaks, and sponsorship deals). Can you honestly tell me that a Star Wars game was too expensive to make? That you couldn’t have made a Star Wars game, as in a game about Star Wars, and that it would not conceivably sell enough to make its money back without all these additional monetization strategies? Should you be in this business if you cannot affordably conduct business?"Thank God for Jim Fucking Sterling Son. Also, I'll just add that the whole point of a Reddit Ask Me Anything is that Redditors get to ask you anything... and get answers. If you're going to duck and ignore questions, then there's no point to adopting the AMA format, is there?
But I digress. The point is that this sort of shit is... well, shit, and potentially very harmful to anyone with poor impulse control skills, including the children at whom the gacha-laden games are obviously aimed. And people outside of videogame fandom and punditry really are taking notice.
Want another mainstream example? Ask, and you shall receive, from Fortune:
The concern is over how Battlefront II rewards players with loot crates filled with randomized items. In addition to earning these crates, players can also buy them via microtransactions that convert real world dollars into in-game currency. But since the items are random, players don’t know what they’re buying, and that could be a problem for both Electronic Arts (ea, -0.67%) which developed the game, and Disney (dis, +0.51%), which owns Star Wars.
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In order for a game to be legally considered gambling, three elements must be involved: consideration, prize, and chance. Money that a person pays to participate in a game is the consideration. The game’s rewards are the prize. And chance is any random element that can effect winning. So, if you’ve got a game of chance (like rolling dice) that’s pay-to-play and has a prize—like street craps—it’s gambling because it has all three of the necessary elements.
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Battlefront II’s gameplay aside—which is definitely skill-based—EA’s decision to provide random prizes in exchange for money pushes against the legal definition of gambling. The singular act of buying loot crates itself is similar to playing scratch cards, because there consideration (the money they have paid paid for crystals), chance, and a prize. It could be argued that the items in the loot crates have no monetary value, but it’s also reasonable to prescribe value to the rewards—the game itself does so by making players buy its heroes via credits.So, while DICE and EA continue to search for the minimum viable change which will make the PR bleeding stop (“I think this concern has come through loud and clear,” [John Wasilczyk, the game’s executive producer] said), it looks like they've also managed to overstep the bounds of propriety badly enough to bring down the regulators already, just a year and a half after Activision Blizzard launched the AAA-gacha age with their restrained-by-comparison loot-box-laden game Overwatch. Yes, EA, life comes at you fast.