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Cardfight!! Vanguard Wiki

Today, the UK Gambling Commission has said that loot boxes are not gambling. That is a shame but not a surprise. Their reasoning was (paraphrasing here) “the products do not have any inherent monetary value. Sometimes there is a secondary market that attaches monetary value to these products but that is not something the seller themselves are doing.”

This is alarming for a few reasons:

  • It’s clear that gaming companies lobbied for this distinction despite Belgium declaring that it is gambling. The hearing was clearing going in the direction that it was going to be declared as such by the people looking at this. Why else did they rule this way?
  • Remember that hearing where the EA legal rep was routinely and deservingly mocked for calling loot boxes “surprise mechanics”? Yeah, that was over this. The people asking the questions were politicians on the UK gambling commission to see if loot boxes were gambling. They declared them ethical while almost the entire gaming community mocked all the hoops she jumped through for justifying loot boxes in an ethical way. That’s a disturbing dissonance right there.
  • The past couple of weeks had the BBC report on several stories where people with addiction problems, adults with mental disorders (think “can hold a job but should never live alone” levels of mental disorders here), and children emptying life savings over loot boxes and other forms of microtransactions in all sorts of games like random mobile games, Fortnite, and FIFA (which is an EA game, FYI). Many of these games are rated suitable for children.
    • By the way, before you argue “their parents should have kept a better eye on them!” These are games. For children. Do you need to supervise your kids when they play Monopoly? Does there need to be articles warning when they read a children’s book? Do you need parental controls so your kids don’t empty your life savings when watching a Pixar movie? And how many parents even know this is an issue? So many only played games when they were kids themselves and back then, this would have been a laughable thing to say would even happen in the future. To them, a game is just something to buy and then play. There was never a need to spend further for any other features.

So then, why does this matter? Why should you, the person who avoid paying for loot boxes (unlikely especially as gacha games are loot boxes) even care? Very simple. Look at the reasoning the commission used when they declared why loot boxes are not gambling. Does that not also apply to certain other things? Like maybe related to this very site?

Now, I’m not saying TCGs are loot boxes. They are not. It’s just that it’s clear people are getting wise to the insidious nature of loot boxes and there would be a demand for action. And many politicians may not actually see the difference between loot boxes, TCGs, and stuff like Kinder Eggs and hit all of them, especially as EA and these other companies keep justifying the existence of loot boxes by declaring them to be the same thing as stuff like Kinder Eggs! Ask yourself: “do I trust my politicians to even know the difference between loot boxes and TCGs, let alone care about the differences?”

Basically, keep an eye on these things, because as these gaming companies get greedier and greedier as they exploit a glitch in our lizard brains to get some of us addicted to giving them money, TCGs may become collateral damage.

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