[Insanity]

When playing Battlefield 5 beta last weekend, I was actually thinking about this. I'm wondering how they'll approach it in that game.

I have a bit of a double feeling about this as a Belgian - on the one hand I think it's a good direction for the industry. We didn't have that crap a decade ago and I'll be happy to see it removed. OTOH, I hope they don't just remove content for the Belgian market as it'd potentially create an unfair system.

It is EA after all, a company I don't have a lot of faith in.

[Confiks]

EA has publicly stated that there will not be lootboxes [1] or even DLCs [2]. I'm especially content about there not being DLCs that divide the player base so much that there are only enough players available to play the base maps.

If only they'd bring back a usable server browser, or (god forbid) release the server software for community game servers.

[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/23/17386912/battlefield-5-loo...

[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/battlefield-5-will-have-no-premium-p...

[Insanity]

Oh that's nice :) The server browser was both nice and annoying. Nice to see it have a server browser which apperantly you can't take for granted anymore. But the server browser was buggy..

[chinathrow]

> It is EA after all, a company I don't have a lot of faith in.

Why are you playing their games then?

[xg15]

Arguments like this is what I find entertaining about (pure) free-market advocates.

They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it - and when the consumers inexplicably fail to do so, the advocates get mad and blame the consumers instead of adjusting their theory.

[pitaj]

Gaming is one of the most competitive industries I can think of. It's very easily accessible by new developers and there's an entire industry of indie games.

> They argue that regulation is not needed because, if there is a problem, consumers would vote with their wallets to remove it

Loots boxes exist because they aren't actually a problem. A consumer has a choice between games with varying degrees of loot boxes and games without them.

Obviously if people buy games with loot boxes, they don't oppose them strongly. Personally, I don't have a big problem with loot boxes because I like cheaper games. Loot boxes are a way for game makers to milk more money out of whales while leaving the rest of us better off with a cheaper game. Banning or regulating loot boxes will only take away options from consumers, increase prices, or both.

People don't need to be babied by the government whenever a small minority of people make bad decisions. It just allows people to be lazier and less skeptical than they already are.

[xg15]

That assumes all consumers are connoisseur gamers who are well-informed about the verious upcoming indie games and not just kids who want to play Battlefront because they like Star Wars.

In other words, this assumes, as the efficient market hypothesis requires, that consumers are perfectly rational and have perfect information about the market. And I hold that, as always, this is not actually the case in the real world.

Moreoever, loot boxes aren't just some random game design feature. They are currently the best way to make money with a game. (And I believe they are well-known to the vast majority of developers). So there are actual economic forces pushing developers to implement loot boxes unless they explicitly reject the idea and have enough resources to do so.

> Obviously if people buy games with loot boxes, they don't oppose them strongly.

This is exactly the circular reasoning I'm talking about in the parent post. If that were the case, then people wouldn't at the same time complain about them so much.

[swebs]

Who specifically? You're just building a strawman to attack, while framing it as us-vs-them.

Comments like these lower the quality of discussion by removing nuance and pushing people into tribalism.

[s73v3r_]

I don't think it counts as a "strawman" if it's reflecting the way reality actually is, and shows a huge hole in their philosophy.

[xg15]

How would a more nuanced counter-argument look?

[smhost]

It's also pretty funny that the thing that is finally shifting the typical reddit/youtube hardcore gamer-atheist demographic away from their ancap ideology is lootcrates.

[ionised]

What's atheism got to do with any of this?

[Shorel]

I would say it is the rhetoric argument that all comments in Reddit are written by a single group of people with shared beliefs.

Taken to the extreme, all comments are written by a very dedicated Redditor.

[smhost]

i don't know, you'll have to ask them.

[Insanity]

It was a free beta weekend, and it seemed like an interesting thing to try.

Now, it's not that DICE is per se a bad developer, but the deadlines pushed on by EA give rise to lots of bugs on release.(But, I've not played an EA/DICE game since BF3 so I could be wrong there, things might've changed.)

The games are usually playable some time after release.

And things like this: https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-... don't exactly make me warm up to actually buying an EA game.

[chupasaurus]

The first year of BF4 after release was pretty much a very long open beta.

[Flow]

And another thing I hate about the yearly releases of CoD and BF: The previous versions more or less die when the new ones are released.

As someone who play games on macOS, the delay before the Mac/Linux versions are released makes it so when you get to play the games, most of your friends play the next version or something else. I've stopped buying games like CoD and BF because of this.

It seems only Blizzard and Valve understand they can keep people playing the same games for decades with little investment.

[chupasaurus]

Name a single Blizzard game with official support of Linux. They are also had banned accounts for playing their games through Wine, but they've stopped 5 or so years ago.

[Flow]

I don't think there are any native Linux games from Blizzard.

I mentioned Linux in the "Mac/Linux" because Linux too suffers from the sometimes more than a year late releases of these games.

[dawnerd]

BF3 was pretty painful too if I remember correctly. Horrible hitboxes and lag.

[Insanity]

The horrible hitboxes are one of the main issues I remember with bf3 as well. It was bad enough to make me quit the game for some months.

[pjc50]

The world is full of great-to-acceptable products (especially media) with no exact substitutes produced by shitty companies.

[chottocharaii]

Because EA has most of the marketshare, and can afford to make big budget titles.

If a more regulated producer had similar marketshare, I could play the big budget titles of that regulated corporation.

[matwood]

Exactly. After the crap they pulled with NBA2k18 [1], I refuse to buy another ~EA~ 2K game. Apparently they made it ever so slightly better this year, but that's not enough.

[1] Up through 2k17 (that was on the edge though) you could make your custom player good just by playing the game. It might take some time, but it could be done. With 2k18, you needed to buy the game for $60 and then spend ~$100 to have anything near a playable character.

EDIT

Whoops, my micro transaction hate got ahead of my coffee drinking :) My point still stands though. If you don't like the way a company is doing something, don't buy their product.

[blueagle7]

NBA 2K18 isn't made by EA. It's made my 2K Sports. EA's NBA game is NBA Live.

[Totoradio]

NBA 2k is not an EA game

[_ea1k]

Because they are fun? I mean, I hate a lot of things that EA does, but I still enjoy BF1 and Madden.

[curiousgal]

Exactly. People like to complain about how awful a company is and yet proceed to keep them in business.