| >That just isn't true. Game publishers and developers these days use psychological tricks to keep people engaged and paying money into them. "Psychological tricks." Do you use that term to describe your restaurant experience as well? "The cook used psychological tricks to make the food more delicious." People have simply figured out what others like and made games more in line with that. Yes, they are psychological tricks, but almost everything humans create employ psychological tricks of some kind to make the experience better. >Lootboxes are gambling no matter how you try to justify them. Not according to the law. >You pay money for the chance to win a prize with no guarantee you will. There is a guarantee that you will get something every time. >There's 2 reasons games don't have marketplaces, neither are because these companies have a heart and want to stop gambling. A business is not supposed to "have a heart." It makes absolutely no sense to expect that. A free market doesn't actually work if you expect people "to have a heart." The reason why most games don't have marketplaces is that most games do not have a large amount of players or it does not fit into the theme of the game. It simply is not worth the effort to implement such a system for most games. >But they obviously don't care about the consumer when they're using the same tactics as slot machines to get them to spend as much money as possible. Do you know what else uses the same tactics as slot machines? Almost everything that involves people. Humans seem to enjoy getting rewarded in a semi-random manner more than consistently. This even includes people interacting with one another. We grow more attached to people who sometimes treat us coldly than people who always treat us nicely. I don't know if you use these terms on purpose or if it's simply an accident, but the way you refer to things such as "just like slot machines" or "this is gambling because xyz simplification" shows that you're trying to evoke an emotional reaction to paint something in a negative light. Those types of arguments don't work when the other person isn't emotionally invested in the same values as you. I loathe lootboxes. I think they're disgusting, but I also understand that this kind of demand for regulation will only hurt players. If other people don't like lootboxes as well, then the market will take care of it. If the market doesn't take care of it then it turns out that some people do like lootboxes. You can then have a niche for games that have and games that don't have lootboxes. |