[mywaifuismeta]

I regularly play games with gambling (gacha) mechanics and I love them. The short bursts of fun are exactly what I'm looking for in my current busy life. I have nothing against this model of monetization. Gambling is fun. Casinos are fun. I am not a big spender by any means, but I've probably spent ~$2k on these kind of games over the past two years or so. I don't regret it, and for me the fun is in figuring out how to maximize the value of my spending by doing the math for different types of purchases, sometimes even coding up simulations.

The problem starts when it's unregulated and you are tricking kids, or people who are not educated about probability, into spending their money in casinos, and use dozens of psychological tricks to do so and obfuscate purchases. Just like it's easy for kids to get addicted to social media like Instagram, it's easy and dangerous to get addicted to gambling (especially when you see your friends or popular streamers doing it). I believe all of these games should be 18+, at the very least, and come with a big warning sign.

[BiteCode_dev]

Heroin is fun too, at least at first.

The problem with gambling is that it taps into the dopamine system in ways that people are not aware of, even if they know about probabilities.

The effect is cumulative, and the more the person gambles, the more they will gamble, take risks, create unbalance and spend money.

Now, just like with anything related to dopamine, many people will only have a mild effect. E.G: I've played dota for a while, and never went into full spending mode.

Like you, I think it's ok to gamble once in a while, to pay for the game. After all, it's fun, and the game provides pleasurable moments, but does cost a lot of resources to develop. It's fair to give money to the company making it: after all, other games may be paid up to $60, DLC not included, while free to play are always up to date.

Yet, it's very difficult to evaluate if the tactics used by the game for gambling are twisted or not, and if the game target is going to be abused or not.

For this reason, I do think they should be heavily regulated, not just about the age, but about the nature, and intensity, or the gambling mechanism in place.

[yuzugit]

I work on video games (not on the design side but programming) and had to implement some on those systems on several mobile games. I agree with the comment above that it’s hard to draw the line between gambling addiction and à faire amount of random that brings fun to a game. Diablo 2 has already those kinds of random behavior to retain your attention and trigger dopamine rushes but without trying to grab cash from you.

The only solution to me is legal regulation, companies won’t listen as it brings money and most people like to play them. Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.

I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally and that other big countries will follow (like Korea, Japan and USA) to stop this trend and force designer to find better mechanics.

Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy. Nowadays with all the free services, it’s harder to make users pay for something they can get for « free » elsewhere. So it’s a complicated issue.

[maccard]

> Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.

The problem with battle passes is that they rely on you having a massive player base, and require an incredible amount of effort to develop and keep running. For a game like diablo that's clearly not a problem but for anything that's not a top 10 game on their platform it is

> I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally

I don't think this (specific) categorization is necessarily the right approach. The problematic part with casino style games and gambling in general is that cashing out provides a real money incentive, which is not present here. Calling these games gambling is kind of like calling piracy theft - the intention is right but there's an important difference. We haven't got a category for them yet.

> Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy.

On one level yes. On the other, f2p games are popular for a reason. Excellent games providing a social experience has a network effect, and if your conversion rate is 2% you don't succeed as a game by monetising better, you succeed by increasing your audience. A f2p game could be a profitable game if the active playerbase all paid $2-3 each but the _second_ you introduce a barrier there you lose many players who won't pay, their friends who might pay etc etc.

> So it’s a complicated issue.

Amen to that.

[pezezin]

Japan has pachinko-like machines for kids (and I'm not kidding, I just saw one today and got extremely pissed off), I wouldn't count on them.

[erulabs]

How do you stack up this opinion (ban 'immoral' video games) with the idea that drug prohibition is widely considered a spectacular failure?

Banning games like this will only drive the whales into black markets, which are more expensive, more dangerous, and benefit criminal enterprises by definition.

Many of the deaths from heroin, for example, are due to contamination with fentanyl (which boosts the potency). A company who was liable to their customers (ie: not a criminal enterprise) would be much less incentivized to lace their product, and if they did, there would be someone to prosecute instead of an entire black market to wag a finger at.

Anyways, I agree, this is an extremely exploitative design. What I don't agree on is using legal regulation to shape society into something moral. Historically, that's only made things worse.

[mywaifuismeta]

I don't think you can compare these mechanics to heroin, which is physically addictive. A fairer comparison is social media and timelines/newsfeeds, which use very similar mechanics, including randomness, to give people their dopamine rush and make them come back. Hence all this social media addiction we have. The main difference is that no money is (directly) involved there, only indirectly through ads.

[still_grokking]

With $100 a month you can do a lot of things. (And I'm not even talking about the regions of the world where you could survive a month with that amount). Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!

Those gambling games are extremely overpriced in comparison!

But they still make that money. Guess how: By addiction, and other psychological tricks to make the price seem OKisch, even it's absolutely not.

Even the most expensive game productions could make a good revenue back than just by charging a one time fee of $40 to $60.

Now with those gambling games they made $100 a month on you… Continuously.

The whole business model is a ripoff, clearly immoral, and should get banned completely ASAP.

[mywaifuismeta]

> Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!

I don't see the difference. Whether I pay a "subscription fee" of $100 per month or I buy two new games per month, why does it matter? Why do you think that buying two games a month is necessarily more fun than paying a subscription fee for the same 2-3 games? For me it isn't, and there aren't even enough games I would be interested in buying in the first place.

[michaelmrose]

You can run the same kind of analysis on different game mechanics and strategies on games not designed to rip you off. They actually tend to be far more interesting because gambling games rarely have any meaningful degree of complexity and the singular strategy you are actually optimizing for is how much you have to sink into the game to succeed something you can probably figure out for a given game in about 30 seconds of analysis.

Basically you have a bad habit not that far off from smoking cigarettes that will probably eventually lead to dangerous overspending the first time you have an economic downturn at the same time as emotional stress. Despite such games being in general tasteless and boring you have convinced yourself its "fun" because you have trained your brain to release dopamine when you do it and can't tell the difference being joy and dopamine the same way a crack addict can't tell the difference between chemical stimulation and actual joy.

[scotty79]

I don't mind existence of those games. But I hate how this single mechanics floods the market and makes everything else harder to find.

I don't mind casinos in Vegas but I would mind if grocery store around the corner was replaced with small, low quality casino.

[Ekaros]

At least with actual gambling I have theoretical chance, at least momentarily to actually win money... With lootboxes outside Valve and maybe some others there is no chance to get it back.