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> there's nothing ethical about marketing and profiting from children gambling It's not "gambling". Using the in-game currency (which you get for free by playing), you purchase items directly. The mere existence of uncertainty somewhere in the process doesn't make it "gambling" Ironically, the randomness serves to decrease the pressure to spend money on the game. If you just purchased the items directly for real-world money, as most other games do, you'd end up in a situation where people would feel pressured to spend money on the game, because obtaining skins actually would be a direct function of money spent. Additionally, framing this as "children gambling" is pretty suspect. Blizzard doesn't publish official demographic data, but all players have to be over 13 by law, and according to third-party data, the majority of the player base is over 18. Given that teenagers already have less easy access to digital transactions than people over 18, and that they already form the minority of the player base, the burden is on critics to provide concrete data that teenagers are actually being negatively affected by lootboxes. (Which I doubt anyone will, because I'm skeptical that it's even true. Of course, the reason that this issue is continuously framed as "children gambling" is because talking about anything affecting children is a great way to pander in politics, and this whole issue isn't about loot boxes in games anyway.) > Blizzard and Valve don't get a free pass for being slightly less evil than the competition. On the flipside, by focusing on loot boxes at the expense of actual, actively predatory business models, you are giving the companies that engage in those other business models a free pass. You might think, "well, the answer is that we should go after both". Except, that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen not only because people's attention for games-related issues is pretty limited, but also because this isn't about ethical business models at all; politicians like Hassan don't actually care about that. They care about scoring political points, and it's much easier to score political points off lootboxes than pay-to-win or abandonware. |