Scumbag publishers and their pet developers are always looking for the next way to screw over consumers while they're continuing their business of pinching out unmitigated drek nobody with a functioning brain stem would ever want to waste their time on anyway.
The latest innovation in corporate dickery is the loot box. Gamers are being extremely vocal about this because we're well acquainted with the publishers motivations by now. We know what this is and we're trying to get out ahead of it and make it known that this thing is also not acceptable. If we give the corporate hacks any slack with this they'll take it to the furthest extreme imaginable because you know they will.
The European Union is considering whether or not to regulate this under the pretense of it being gambling. And there in lies the greatest danger of this boneheaded move. If it looks like gambling it will draw the attention of govt regulatory boards and that is something video games
DO NOT need. Once feds start hitting games up with legal restrictions they will
never go away.
This is how stupid and destructive these hack publishers are becoming in their desperation. It's bad enough they've pillaged and plundered a once thriving creative entertainment business to the brink of ruin like a hoard of vandals, but now they're flirting with getting everyone buried under bureaucratic red tape for all eternity just to make a few extra dollars. Video games have managed to avoid getting regulated under the same pretenses of casinos on two counts. A.) gamers fought against the notion that video games cause degenerate behavior, and B.) nobody made a game that so closely resembled gambling... until now.
The potential repercussions of this are wide ranging and potentially fatal if games can no longer be produced without government scrutiny. You can forget about user mods and indie games if regulatory agencies start enacting policies and restrictions and politicians start writing legislature.
Oh and the ESRB, North America's
corrupt internal video game ratings board has gone ahead and given publishers a free pass on this one. The ESRB has
one job: to protect this industry from government oversight and they've gone and sold us out.
Literally seconds after I post this, I find this:
https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2017/...watch-investigated-unlicensed-gambling/44284/