PieFed.caBrazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law
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www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/brazils-preside…
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49748743
The loot box ban will go into effect in March.
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MudManSaid this elsewhere, but it seems to me a bigger story that it also mandates age verification for 18 plus content, including porn and at the platform level.
Steam needs to verify your age now if it wants to carry porn games, or indeed any 18+ games.
And I do have problems with the loot box regulation, in that it doesn't qualify the boxes having to be paid, so technically Diablo II should be a 18+ game, along with every single RPG in existence. I have to assume courts or downstream definitions will do a sanity check on that, because the law they passed makes zero qualifiers, it just says "loot boxes".
So... maybe look into what they passed before being too celebratory about it?
They also mandate parental controls being present, which I do agree with and should have been enough. Of course that would not have changed anything, since they're already present in pretty much all current platforms.
EDIT: To clarify, someone questioned the unpaid loot boxes definition and on double check, they do define them as paid, so scratch that part. The age verification requirement is present, though.
I had to translate the law but it does seem to define lootboxes as something you purchase. But legal texts are very specifically worded so I can't be sure some nuance didn't get lost in translation.
I wrote a first response referencing the one mention I had found of loot boxes, but you are correct, I missed that they did include one in the definitions section. They reference them slightly differently so the first time I looked I only found one of the two.
IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;
So yeah, you are right, they do define it as paid. Carry on.
Art. 20. São vedadas as caixas de recompensa (loot boxes) oferecidas em jogos eletrônicos direcionados a crianças e a adolescentes ou de acesso provável por eles, nos termos da respectiva classificação indicativa.
Not as far as I can tell. This translates to "Loot boxes offered in electronic games aimed at children and teenagers or likely to be accessed by them, in the terms of the corresponding age rating".
You can argue that "offered" here specifically implies "offered for purchase", but... I mean, my Brazilian Portuguese isn't perfect, but I don't think that's explicitly the case, the word means what you think it means in English. It'd be a problem of hermeneutics at that point.
Is that the reasonable interpretation? Sure. Is that what the legislator probably intended? Almost certainly. It's not what they wrote, though.
cally [he/they]This doesn't affect me (yet) as I don't play any games with paid loot boxes (ew), but this is gonna be the age verification shit?! This sets a troubling standard for privacy and security. I guess it had to happen where I live as well.
The parents should be the ones that don't let their kids to pay for stuff in video games without permission, or at least give them a budget they're allowed to spend on video games, i guess.
Shit should be banned across the board not just for kids. Idk why the fuck authorities are obsessed with kids.
It's so they can say "protect the children"
AceFuzzLordFuck them kids. This entire business model is an abuse against people with credit cards.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Microtransactions should be illegal across the board. Only content with real creative gameplay value should be able to be purchased, like the usual DLC's. Also pay2win should be fucking illegal too. Ruining the experience of other players should not be available as long as you've got too much money to spend.
The razor is: did you, the player, receive new content? Or did you get charged for permission?
Horse armor is fine. That's how low the bar is. That's how bad this abuse is. All microtransactions are "on-disc DLC," where you've already been given the thing, inside the game you already paid for, but fuck you, pay us again. And again and again and again.
It's the difference between Warhammer's little plastic men being obscenely expensive, and Games Workshop expecting five actual dollars after every match to replace their imaginary bullets.
Is gambling literally the only thing holding the economy up at this point. Sports is all gambling games are all gambling. It is everywhere.
thingsiplayGood move. Loot box is gambling. Most have learned gambling is dangerous, especially for minors.
For those protections to have any effect in Brazil, however, they'll necessitate the usage of age-verification mechanisms. Previously, Brazilian law had considered it sufficient for users of digital services to self-declare their age. The new law, however, requires the providers of those services to "take proportionate, auditable and technically secure measures to assess the age or age range of users."
Seriously, read things before reacting to them.
It's been decades of social media and centuries of press. How have we not learned about this as a society?
I mean, if you're cool with this, then you're cool with this and we disagree, but I'm gonna say you probably were going out of the headline alone.
Either that or we ban loot boxes for everyone — which is the better choice, IMO.
Super hard disagree. I do like me some Magic the Gathering and CCGs in general. If anything I'm say more concerned with the increasing trend of real world blind pack collectibles aimed exclusively at kids than I am with online loot boxes, which is something most of the industry has abandoned anyway after the panic went viral.
But nope, absolutely not. Loot boxes aren't worth forcing online age verification any more than porn was a few months ago when we were all mad because the UK did it. Parental controls? Absolutely. Mandatory identification? Not at all.
And absolutely not, I am an adult and if I want to gamble online, let alone buy loot boxes in a videogame, I absolutely should be able to do that.
I don’t care. Loot boxes are gambling, which is addictive and frankly evil.
So is alcohol and I will have a beer regardless of what you or anybody else thinks about it. Screw you, you don't get to monitor my addictions, I'm a big boy.
I'm happy with loot boxes being categorized as gambling when money is involved, and regulated as gambling.
By "cool with this" are you refering to age verification? That wasn't a comment on age verification. You're putting words in my mouth, or I was ambiguous in the above comment, or both.
Let's talk about this. Online age verification is not trivial to do right, ie balance effectiveness and privacy. That's true of any age restriction, whether it's for loot booxes, other kind of gamblings. Existing age verification has bad effectiveness, bad privacy, or both. That not a reason to give up on regulating gambling, or give up on improving age verification.
Yeeeeah, you're way less down on age verification on principle than I do.
You're also more down on loot boxes than I am, in that I still dispute the equivalence to gambling. It's not absurd, but it requires ignoring a lot of nuance.
Still, the problem I have with this situation in general is that the loot box element (which isn't that heavy, it mostly establishes by law that loot boxes will make a game be automatically listed as 18 and up) is masking the mandatory age verification element. And the mandatory age verification is baaaad. It effectively does the magical wishful tech thinking thing we've been seeing recently elsewhere where it just... says it should be private and comply with privacy regulations but doesn't explain how that's possible, while at the same time demanding that every single store and service provider both design a perfect age verification system AND somehow magic up an API to share that information with each game while remaining entirely private. Which is pretty much impossible.
But nobody is talking about that, everybody just wants to dunk on loot boxes. Like four years too late, because most of the industry saw the writing on the wall and moved on to battle passes instead on the PR hit alone.
Good point, it's a bit late, and may hit hard on some games that already implemented loot boxes. But it's never too late, assuming it's indeed a kind of gambling.
Hopefully it'll lead to less games integrating loot boxes, so that going forward people of all ages can play games with neither loot boxes, nor the age verification that comes with it.
Update: I just remembered, most games can get updates nowadays, both on PC and console. Game editors can chose to remove loot boxes even for existing games if the regulation is too heavy for them.
Less than what?
Who is still doing loot boxes? Valve, for sure, they still have them on CounterStrike, sports games and then... what? Hearthstone/Magic and that type of CCG stuff and... I guess mobile gacha RPGs?
Everybody else is doing battle passes now.
Who is still doing loot boxes
A majority of Android and IOS games, and 36% of PC games according to a recent study.
If you haven't encountered loot boxes recently that's great. It means you already managed to avoid games with loot boxes, and shouldn't be negatively affected by this regulation.
HarkMahlberg
Looking into this it seems that lootboxes aren't banned in the sense that would benefit the industry and players as a whole and will instead incentivize game developers and platforms to create age verification systems.
Brazil had the chance to outright ban lootboxes full stop and the fact that they didn't take it is really disappointing.
Lootboxes arent even the problem they used to be because developers have realised people will just pay $30 straight up for 1 skin anyway. On top of a subscription disguised as a battlepass, they dont need lootboxes anymore.
Even if you took the hardcore view that loot boxes are outright gambling, gambling isn't illegal for adults. Why would loot boxes be treated more stringently than online casinos, even in your scenario?
Also, it doesn't incentivize age verification systems, age verification systems are now mandatory. They are needed to be able to sell any games marketed at adults, including porn games, games with loot boxes and presumably any other game with an 18 and up rating by their official ratings board.
The loot box panic has mostly been another variant of the "will someone thing of the children" violence panic of the 90s. Just like then, age ratings and parental controls should have been the solution, but because gamers were too busy being angry and self righteous online they went with it to this point.
Gambling involves the opportunity to win something that actually exists. The fundamental issue with loot boxes is your gambling for code that can't be sold, traded, or preserved past the lifetime of the game.
It's a disgusting practice that preys upon people's psychological reward centers and has been normalized by our obsessive consumption. It should absolutely be illegal.
Yeeeah, I've encountered this argument a few times, particularly when this issue was more salient and, I'm not gonna lie, it's absolutely baffling.
As in, it seems to imply that gambling is better because there's a chance of winning something of genuine monetary value.
Which, let me be clear, is the exact opposite of how this works. The possibility of recouping losses or winning money is the actual problem with gambling. The potential monetary reward is a major component of gambling and one of the meaningful reasons why loot boxes are... nowhere near as bad?
Digital loot boxes are typically not allowed to be translated into actual money by design, both as a security measure and because that's how actual gambling works. Betting for real money is way worse than buying some digital thing that only has value inside a game. Because, you know, in that scenario you know you're spending that money and it's not coming back, it's just a matter of spending it on what. You're not getting enticed with the fiction that you're investing money or not actually spending it because you could potentially get it back. That's why kids aren't typically allowed to bet in a casino but they still get to buy Magic the Gathering packs (and let's be clear, the fact that Magic has a thriving gray market around it makes it worse than digital loot boxes as well).
I try to keep this conversation respectful but, honestly, hearing this argument is one of the surefire ways to know the person talking about this has no idea what they're talking about.
Gambling is at least ok in my book because it's only legal for adults and in specific, regulated locations. It's still fucking idiotic behavior to engage in, but whatever, adults can waste their money, I don't really care. It's easy to avoid unless you live in Vegas.
I'm sure I'll alienate most of the user base here, but anything that involves turning money into 'pulls' should be illegal for minors, and honestly probably just entirely. Magic, Pokemon cards, blind boxes, the stupid Lego minifigs I love to collect. Ban all of it, it's bad for our psyche, it's wasteful, it's anti-consumer bullshit that should never be allowed. If you can't make money selling your product directly, then you don't deserve to run a business.
You're right though, the gambling analogy perfect. I doubt paid loot boxes are significantly worse than letting children gamble. But still, there's a reason we don't let children gamble, and loot boxes certainly aren't any better.
It's not easy to avoid unless you live in Vegas. I live right above a gambling establishment. Nobody bats an eye and it's fully government-sanctioned.
Not every country is the US, friend. Including, you know... Brazil.
But hey, at least you have the intellectual honesty to include all the IRL blind boxes people actually like in your assessment. You still have this pretty much backwards, but at least it's consistently backwards.
That's not sarcasm, I do think that's better than the baseline of "make the game mechanic I don't like illegal, but keep all this 100% analogous stuff I do like" vibes-based approach to demanding regulation.
I still disagree super hard that "bad for our psyche" is the bar for banning stuff. Age ratings, sure. But I would very much prefer to keep tobacco, pot, alcohol, porn and yes, Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone available for anybody mature enough to make that choice by themselves.
It's definitely appropriate that every other item on your list is illegal for minors in almost every country on earth. If I thought we could reasonably keep 'blind boxes' an adult indulgence I wouldn't be opposed. But they are so deeply tied to children's toys, I don't think you could ever have them available for adults in a form that isn't just begging for children to figure out ways to buy them anyway. It'd be incredibly hard to justify banning them only for children, especially on the admittedly abstract basis of psychological harm.
Setting aside that, I believe they should be fully illegal simply on a consumer protection basis. A business should not be allowed to sell a mystery product. There's no justification for it IMO. There is no reason we should allow businesses to sell us useless bullshit and hope we get something we actually want. You can still have MTG, you can still have mobile games. But let people buy the shit they want, or don't. If the business model can't work, somebody else will figure it out.
But of course, there's no fucking chance of that happening here in the US, so I keep hoping somebody else will tackle it (though Brazil's attempt here wildly misses the bar unfortunately).
From what I tracked in one game the odds were wrong, so it goes against legal gambling laws where even if it is electronic it has to have payout odds that match the presented method.
I.e. if its 5 cards, odd should be 1:5 in flipping the reward card. But some games it could be double or quadruple that.
Did you respond to the right thing? This seems like a non sequitur, so maybe the threading got messed up?
The comment of why would loot boxes be different than online gambling. The loot boxes I have seen in games are often chance based and the chances aren't legal probability, so technically illegal
All loot boxes are chance based, but first of all, I don't know which laws you're talking about. Brazil's? Guessing the US because when somebody has a case of the default human it's typically an American, but who knows.
But also, I'm not a US lawyer, but I seriously doubt US gambling laws requires all games to have a flat probability, mostly because... that's not how games of chance work anywhere, and definitely not how blind boxes work anywhere and blind box products are not gambling anyway, which is the entire point.
It's still a non sequitur and I still have no idea what you're trying to say.
(Im in Canada many other countries are the same) When a chance of game becomes electronic probability rules still apply. Those screen based jackpot machines in casinos have to follow actual mechanical jackpot game probability payouts.
So a six sided dice role in a game that involves a monetary system to purchase still has to have a 1:6 payout, or it is illegal because you are fooling the person.
I have played several games where they have say 3 loot boxes and you pay to open one. There is a known prize and generic stuff. The payout odds do not match over a large number of tries, meaning the back end probably has been coded to only payout 1% or something super low, or maybe not at all. In many countries this type of gambling (even for adults ) is illegal because it simulates a chance game but is fundamentally not as presented.
I was responding to the loot boxes and the gambling comment.
Lootboxes require a gambling license in my country. Because it's fucking gambling.
Do pokemon cards require a gambling license?
They should, and I'm not even joking.
So... does anything you pay for money that results in a random 'prize' even if the prize is equal value everytime... should require a gambling license?
You make a good point.
But some games just really need to stop the addictive gamba.
No, specifically not if the prize is equal value every time. The prize not having equal value every time is exactly what makes it gambling.
That said, what the Tulip Mania taught us is that the prizes never have equal value so long as they're different enough and/or have different rarities.
Selling loot boxes to miners is still ok, right?
Only minors of age. Miners who are minors are banned.
Societies with minor miners† have bigger problems than lootboxes tbh
† IRL, not Minecraft players.
Minecraft is proof that our children crave the mines!
minecraft is proof that colorful computer screens are attractive to many people. I'm not sure whether it proves anything else. the reason why people don't like to do these things IRL is mostly because it's physically exhausting, i guess, which it is not in-game.
I see what you did there
Brazil wants to protect the children so they ban online gambling for them. I wonder how Brazil will verify identities to sell loot boxes to adults.
U.S wants to protect the children so they scan and read chat messages of every citizen. Great.
For once something done "in the name of child safety" that i can get behind, since it actually aims at protecting children and isn't just a disguise to achieve a different goal.
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Uuh i hope this won't backfire into a "leftists are trying to take our fun away" drama. Like, that's literally what happens in Germany a lot. Greens (center-left) want to outlaw selling combustion engine cars from 2035, lots of people say "boohoo they're ruining our way of life".
I think it would be better to make as little as possible rules for the individual people, because after all, if it helps, nobody thanks you, but if it hurts, you're going to make a lot of enemies.
Better focus on the big things. (economy, geopolitics)
edit: but yes also lootboxes are gambling and should be disencouraged.