Thread by @metasynthie

This
a) is a genuinely interesting development
b) will likely take years to go anywhere
c) could lead to all sorts of loophole exploiting/plugging shenanigans
pcgamer.com/belgium-says-l…

The not-so-fine print suggests that this minister seeks to ban any purchase of randomized rewards, which would include card packs, cosmetic items, etc. But what counts as “a purchase?”

If every Diablo player pays $50 to get the game but only one gets Ultra-Rare Legendary Loot Drop: gambling? What if Collector’s Edition gets you an extra chest open?

Go down this road far enough and you reach the regulation of games which (in US) let you cash $ out but are not considered gambling: no RNG of any kind allowed.

In the US this is currently the domain of real-money skill games (cf. usonlinebetting.com/skill/ ) which tend to be limited because bots & AI are often better at skill games than humans!

It’s funny to see the anti-EA gamer crowd crowing about victory in Belgium while mostly not considering how regulation across the EU could massively warp the kinds of games that get made at large scale.

To articulate this further for those of you eagerly anticipating the Belgian Lootboxalypse, let’s project what’d happen if this regulation went into effect next month.

EA+others could comply by splitting off an EU version that worked differently, but this is unlikely due to ongoing, centralized, data-driven design.

Instead, if “no cash purchase for uncertain reward” goes into effect they can just make a few tweaks and move on. Loot boxes stay, but obtained solely through grinding, never via cash.

Instead, they sell you items (or worse, consumable powerups) that reduce grind time and shorten your wait for the next random lootbox. Regulation circumvented.

You can continue to regress on this until you regulate all in-game purchase with “effect on gameplay” somehow, getting broader and less politically viable as it targets more games, etc.