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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.