
This Dumb Industry: Wilson Boxes - smacktoward
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=41164
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Already__Taken
> Disney have a fundamental, core company value of “No Gambling”

> For a concrete example: Every cruise line has an onboard casino – except for
> Disney cruise ships.

Wow that puts some teeth behind this debacle. I was under the impression this
would be a lot of noise and battlefront 3 would sell a billion copies.

~~~
wlkr
I was totally unaware that Disney so vehemently stuck to their "No Gambling"
value. Searching for further reading I found an interesting blog post [0]
which explains how new (Marvel, LucasFilm) Disney IP is (was) being removed
from slot machines and gambling games.

[0] [https://www.onlinecasinoselite.org/post/disney-claims-the-
ri...](https://www.onlinecasinoselite.org/post/disney-claims-the-rights-on-
star-wars-and-marvel-slots)

~~~
digi_owl
There was also a PC game, Marvel Heroes, that had their contract pulled
recently for no apparent reason.

Some in the player community has claimed that the CEO had a rap sheet and
Disney was pull out because of the whole Metoo thing, but pulling out over the
heavy use of loot box mechanics may make more sense.

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swivelmaster
It's astounding to me how these articles and videos get passed around without
some cursory fact-checking.

EA's revenue at the end of the last fiscal year was nearly five billion
dollars. I do believe the $800m quote about FIFA is correct, but that puts it
at around 20% of total revenue, not the 80% or so this article asserts.

Don't ever assume that Some Random Guy On Youtube has his numbers correct. If
CGP Grey (or someone as respected) does a video about this, he/they will
probably get it right, but I don't trust many others to do this kind of
analysis without getting the numbers wrong.

To further highlight the silliness of the original video, it includes some
assertions about the cost of game development - EA has claimed it's going up,
the author notes that EA's publicly available R&D expenses have gone down in
the last four years, therefore the cost of developing games has gone down.
This is a completely false claim, because the number of games EA has released
has gone from 20+ per year to less than 10. The cost per game has gone way,
way up.

(I'm not going to take a position on loot boxes here because I spent seven
years working on games that had them and I don't want to get into that debate
right now.)

~~~
QAPereo
_(I 'm not going to take a position on loot boxes here because I spent seven
years working on games that had them and I don't want to get into that debate
right now.)_

And yet, that's the core of the piece, and that core is pretty well
articulated and damning.

Edit: I just want to add that on a personal level, I avoid any game with these
manipulative elements in them. I love the _idea_ of for example, _For Honor_ ,
but the mechanics are perfectly tuned to abuse the player. Who has time in
their life for that nonsense?

I'll just play another CDPR game.

~~~
jasonlotito
CDPR mistreats it's employees to such a degree, I can't support a company like
that. I cannot comprehend how someone can be okay with abusing employees by
not okay with "abusing" a willing customer offering money for something.

~~~
watwut
Is it worst there then in other gameDev companis?

~~~
jasonlotito
Yes.

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partycoder
Loot boxes come from Japan, where they are extensively used in mobile games
and all sort of products. In there the concept is known as gacha.

[https://www.serkantoto.com/2012/02/21/gacha-social-
games/](https://www.serkantoto.com/2012/02/21/gacha-social-games/)

In Japan, gambling is illegal and the games industry looked for ways to bypass
this regulation. Gacha is what they found.

But after gacha was perfected into its ultimate addictive form, Kompu Gacha,
the government had to take action and regulate it. Now Kompu Gacha is illegal.
The legal alternative is Box Gacha, and that is what all westerners are
copying.

The idea is to not sell you what you want, but rather to sell you a low
probability of getting what you want for a lower value. This causes people to
underestimate and lose track of what they're spending.

But Box Gacha is not the only thing, there are millions of other ways in which
those guys have perfected the art of taking money from addicted gamers.

Pay to win is a race to the ground. Some players won't mind throwing $10,000
to win, you will never beat them. And if you do beat them, you are a chump.

~~~
Cyberdog
"They copied it from Japanese games!" is kind of a cop-out. It implies that
the loot box concept would not have developed in Western games in isolation,
which I don't believe at all, and this article, which highlights how EA was
developing the concept well before smartphones went supernova, lends more
weight to that non-belief.

~~~
partycoder
Before smartphones the Japanese still had feature phones, and games with
micropayments and gacha ("loot boxes") in them.

Btw you are talking with someone who worked in the games industry so unless
you've got certain credible source to refute what I am mentioning here just
concede the point.

~~~
Cyberdog
> Btw you are talking with someone who worked in the games industry so unless
> you've got certain credible source to refute what I am mentioning here just
> concede the point.

Wow.

Well, I'll turn it back on you. What evidence do you have that loot boxes
would not have come about in something very close to their current form if the
Japanese game industry did not exist? And "because I work in the games
industry" is not an answer.

I mean, this is a ridiculous hypothetical in the first place. But the broader
point is that the fault for the current condition cannot be blamed solely or
even primarily on the Japanese industry alone. "The merchants and the traders
have come; their profits are pre-ordained."

~~~
partycoder
The gacha formats are very specific (e.g: how the probabilities are
distributed).

In many countries it is required by law to specify to the user what is being
purchased. Because of this, it is very easy to track / verify that one system
is equivalent to a specific form of gacha.

Then, it is widely accepted that loot boxes are based on gacha. The Wikipedia
article for loot box has more context in this regard.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#History)

------
mattmanser
Bad title for great article, it's an excellent analysis about EA's commercial
missteps in implementing loot boxes in new games threatening their golden
goose of FIFA.

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scotty79
Loot boxes are amazingly well done in Clash Royale despite being totally
linked to the core progression system.

It's a PVP game that all players get points for winning and loose points for
loosing. Power of your deck comes from lootboxes you get at decent pace for
playing or can buy for real money.

The great thing is that thanks to the ranking people are matched with players
of the same strengh (either skill or money/time investment) so you are always
facing challenging but not impossible opponents.

Getting higher in ranking just makes few new cards available when you are
above respective ranking thresholds. Those cards are not obviously stronger
than others because units are well balanced.

All this makes the game fun for all players no matter what is their time/money
investment.

My take is that it's not worth spending money on this game but I recently
found out that TotalBiscuit came to that conclusion only after he spent few
thousand dolars on this game. So it's a great game for everybody, rich, poor
and the game developers themselves.

~~~
swivelmaster
Clash Royale's system is set up so that the more money you spend to progress,
the more money you need to spend to progress. That's because the cost to
upgrade cards increases as they level up, so [purely as example because I
don't know the actual numbers behind this] a dollar can get you to level 3 but
it'll cost a thousand to get to level 10.

Most loot box games have this as a general concept because pure randomness
ensures that the chance of getting a new unique item from a finite set
decreases for each new item you get, but Clash Royale compounds this by
geometrically increasing the number of each thing you need to get to upgrade
it.

~~~
cavanasm
They also don't use pure randomness. They very finely tune the way the drops
come out. If there's a card you don't have (or that you don't have much of),
there's a MUCH higher chance of finding it than a card you've maxed out, or
that is at similar level to the rest of your cards.

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onychomys
The mention of Mass Effect 3's loot boxes (...which were also in Andromeda,
for the twelve people who bought that game) is a little different, and I think
the difference is important. In both ME games, it's a co-op player team
against computer-controlled enemies. Yes, you could pay real-world money to
buy loot boxes to gamble and hopefully get better gear, but doing so doesn't
hurt any other player. If player A has amazing gear while player B doesn't,
it's pretty much a non-issue, because they're always on the same team. That's
very different than the PvP modes of both FIFA and the Star Wars game.

~~~
jasonlotito
The argument is that loot boxes are gambling. The contents are not important.
Either loot boxes are gambling, or they are not.

~~~
reificator
The contents are important. For years I've been hearing about how people hate
these kinds of systems but put up with it because "at least it's only
cosmetic".

If Battlefront hadn't made it pay to win, the gambling conversation wouldn't
be happening yet.

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slavik81
> The loot boxes of Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 came after this point, and
> their designs were much more friendly. They were focused on cosmetic
> items[...]

The cosmetic items were the rarest and most valuable items in TF2 crates, but
gameplay-affecting weapons and equipment were the bread and butter.

> Once in power he announces his vision for the future: Marshmallows in
> everything, without regard to flavor or the intended market.

It was before my time, but didn't this actually happen? In the 1950s, the
industrial process for the modern marshmallow was developed and recipes put
marshmallow in all sorts of inappropriate dishes.

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whywhywhywhy
>A clever CEO would have rolled out an optional new game mode built around
Wilson Boxes, waited until players were used to the idea, and then tried to
encourage players to engage with this new mode of play by quietly neglecting
the original mode and focusing their free content updates on the mode driven
by Wilson Boxes. That would be scummy and money-grubbing, but it would at
least be the cunning form of scummy money-grubbing.

GTA 5 comes to mind, single player has nothing to do once the main quest is
over and unless they fixed in the car spawning uses a seed based on mission
completion (I suspect) so it gets stuck spawning the same 3 bad cars over and
over. No DLCs no extra missions no nothing but cosmetics and events for GTA:O

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egypturnash
A friend who works at PopCap (now an EA subsidiary) once told me that the
Plants Vs Zombies slot machine has made more money for EA than the entire rest
of that franchise. Yay gambling.

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otakucode
Looking at the situation from the point of view of the business angle is the
correct way to understand the actions of large publishers, and it's refreshing
to see someone doing so. I'm not sure that the numbers are interpreted in the
same way by the author and by the executives at EA, though. When they see $800
million from loot boxes in FIFA, they don't see just 'hey this can work, lets
try to make it work elsewhere.' They see 'hey, this is what gamers actually
want.'

Also, I'm a little unsure about some of the things said because I don't have a
ton of knowledge about the performance of the different games discussed. Like
at one point the author mentions "The SimCity backlash."... I do know a bit
about that one. That SimCity game that got all the backlash? It immediately
became the best-selling game of all time on the Origin service right after its
launch. There is simply no way to classify that as anything except a
resounding success from a business perspective. It is a fundamental mistake to
listen to online talk from gamers as the audience has proven themselves to be
their own worst enemy. They shovel mountains of money at the things they claim
to hate, and withhold money from anything that deviates.

It's not like there aren't games that don't follow these predatory practices.
There are tons of them. And they don't make very much money. How can you back
up a claim that gamers actually do want those different practices followed if
every game which follows them languishes miles behind the titles which don't?
If the public pronouncements of gamers actually mirrored their actions,
listening to backlash might make sense for a company. But as it is, when the
gaming community lights up with anger and "boycotts", that is the most
reliable indicator of stellar sales. There really isn't a solution to this
problem outside of gamers doing the one thing they seem constitutionally
incapable of - not playing the games. Not preordering them, not buying them
after release, not even pirating them, straight up not playing the games.
(Buying the game and then stopping playing it shortly after release is
actually the ideal situation for any publisher, it enables them to more
rapidly reduce their spending on server resources and even piracy drives other
sales.)

I'm not sure why videogames have such a different audience compared to all
other forms of media. In other forms of media, the audience vehemently defends
their chosen medium, combatting censorship, responding to exploitative
practices with substantial actions to back up their complaints, fighting for
the rights of the audience over those of the publishers, etc. But we see no
significant amount of any of that when it comes to videogames.

~~~
majewsky
> That SimCity game that got all the backlash? It immediately became the best-
> selling game of all time on the Origin service right after its launch. There
> is simply no way to classify that as anything except a resounding success
> from a business perspective.

I heard a second-hand account that Paradox Interactive (the publisher of
Cities: Skylines) only greenlit Cities _because_ of the Sim City debacle. And
Cities went on to become a big success, which probably wouldn't have happened
without the Sim City debacle. So if this is true, then it cost EA their
monopoly in that particular genre.

~~~
dannyw
A monopoly in a periodically spaced genre isn’t that lucrative. In fact,
Cities: Skylines probably will increase sales of the next SimCity due to more
attention to this genre.

There’s a point where saturation occurs, like away FPSes today, but city
builders aren’t there.

~~~
AlexandrB
> Skylines probably will increase sales of the next SimCity due to more
> attention to this genre.

Maxis is gone, I'm not sure I care to play another city sim made by EA without
the creative team that made SimCity 1-4 such a joy.

It bugs me that the video games industry (both production and consumption
side) seems to have a looser relationship with creative talent than, for
example, the movie industry. A Quentin Tarantino or Guillermo Del Toro can get
all kind of pet projects greenlit within the movie industry and on the
consumer side fans of these directors will show up to anything with their name
on it (I know I will). That doesn't happen as much in games where even a hit-
maker like Kojima gets treated pretty poorly by his studio meanwhile the
franchise he's known for shambles on like a zombie after his departure - still
making money. See also: Call of Duty after Vince Zampella and Jason West.

~~~
eppsilon
It's interesting that movies put their stars'/creators' names everywhere,
while many gamers only see that info on a credits screen after finishing a
game. Is that because actors/producers/etc have such powerful unions?

I'd like games to be more like movies in this respect. I can imagine spending
a lot of time browsing an IMDb for games....

~~~
digi_owl
EA got started with the idea of creating stars out of game devs, it flopped
spectacularly.

[http://www.filfre.net/2013/01/seeing-
farther/](http://www.filfre.net/2013/01/seeing-farther/)

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Dreami
Thanks to the author for transcribing the video! He made an important point
and I likely wouldn't have read the article if I had to watch a video for
that.

~~~
stefs
he mentions that this is _not_ a transcript.

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byron_fast
The impact of these things on in-game cheating is eventually going to make
them not worth the trouble in my opinion. They make cheating profitable in the
real world, destroying the fun for regular players which at some point will
impact the value of the game.

The simple fix - other than eliminating them - is to eliminate the possibility
of rare items that become valuable.

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new2424141
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