Random Roar: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised At This Point (Summer Flame Day 2019)

You’ve got to hand it to EA. They take desperation tactics to a whole new level. Ever since loot boxes were examined by various governments and labelled as gambling, EA has been fighting tooth and nail to not have to give up their favourite revenue stream.

They know full well that loot boxes are gambling, since that’s how they’ve been designed. They operate very similar to gambling, where there’s a very small chance of getting something valuable that the player would want, but usually the player will hit a Whammy and have to buy another one. The problem is that there isn’t a finite supply of loot boxes, and the low odds of getting the +5 Loot of Awesome which will boost your character above all other characters in the game isn’t a guarantee that one of those is absolutely going to be generated.

I have seen loot boxes being compared to trading cards or blind bags or Panini sticker albums, but that’s deceptive. There are a finite supply of trading cards and every card in a set exists in some quantity. Several copies of the Wayne Gretzky card are usually present in a box of 1993-94 Upper Deck hockey card packs, for example. It’s not even a rare card, it’s just one of the cards that people want. The actual rare cards, the special insert series, are also present in each box, but in lower numbers. There’ll be a few of them in each box, guaranteed. A loot box, though, is potentially infinite in supply and may never generate the special insert items. There is nothing compelling EA to fairly distribute the rarest of items. They don’t have to generate them for anyone, just demonstrate that it’s possible to get them. The fact that these items do generate occasionally is just a courtesy on their part.

Even the sticker album comparison is misrepresentative of reality. Back when I was collecting Panini stickers, you could send away for any stickers you might’ve been missing from your set. As far as I can tell, players can’t just buy rare items that they’re trying to get from loot boxes, they must pay for potentially hundreds of them in order to get that one item they’re looking for.

If anything, a loot box has more in common with a slot machine than it does a pack of trading cards. Each pull at the slot usually returns nothing but very occasionally, something valuable will be earned. It’s an exceedingly rare event, though.

Let me tell you a story about slot machines. A decade ago, I went to Las Vegas with a friend. We made a day trip of it before heading back to Utah. We took in the sights. We saw Penn & Teller and I got to see one of my favourite illusions performed by them on stage. In the evening, we were hanging out in the casino and I decided to see how long it took to lose some money in a video slot machine. So I put in ten dollars. The machine gave me a small win early on, adding some money to my bank to put me above ten dollars. I probably could’ve taken my money there and come out ahead, but I decided to press my luck. I figured I’d stop when I had tripled my money or lost it all. Sure enough, I began losing at a steady pace until I was almost out of money, but then the machine awarded me almost all of my money back. I began to steadily lose it again until I was almost out of money, but the machine had other ideas and gave me almost all of it back again. At this point, my friend was tired and so was I and the music was loud and the atmosphere was bright and garish and I was beginning to develop a headache and we both just wanted to go, but I had a mission and so I persevered. This slot machine was playing a lot like the Malroth fight at the end of Dragon Quest II, casting Fullheal right before his HP would’ve been depleted, but eventually the machine gave up and finally stopped giving me back my money. It took over an hour to lose ten measly dollars in a video slot machine.

That ten dollars granted me valuable insight into how these machines work. They get you hooked with an early win and then tempt and tease you by constantly winning you back what you’ve lost until finally taking your money completely. At that point, you’d likely put more money in because that jackpot just has to be around the corner, right? The machine clearly has winning conditions, for it was giving you back money, so it stands to reason that you’ll be able to win some if you just keep playing, right?

Yet video slot machines don’t have to let players win. Gamblers playing at reputable casinos do win at video slots from time to time, since if no one ever won, there wouldn’t be a reason to play. It’s the same with loot boxes. A publisher doesn’t have to let players win anything good, but they do in order to keep encouraging people to buy them. Maybe the prize is just good enough that players are encouraged to sink more money into them. Maybe they’re the lucky one in a million who gets the best prize. Likely, though, they only get things of little value along with the promise that there could be better stuff in the next box.

The worst of this is, thanks to games rated E for Everyone like FIFA 18, loot boxes are indeed being marketed towards children. It’s literally child’s first gambling simulator, and here EA is, arguing in front of the governments of the world that what they’re doing is ethical and fun and that they should be allowed to keep doing it!

A representative for EA recently tried to weasel out of even calling them loot boxes by claiming that they are actually “surprise mechanics” and are like Kinder Eggs. Uh… EA, you’re an American company. If you’re so desperate to prevent them from being made illegal, maybe you shouldn’t compare them to something else that’s illegal in America (albeit for an unrelated reason). Also, they don’t suddenly become ethical and fun just because you try to tell the House of Commons in the United Kingdom that they are. What did you expect was going to happen, that the MPs would say “Oh. Oh, you’re right. I guess they are ethical and fun, we should’ve seen that earlier. We simply didn’t see it until you told us that they were. We withdraw all our complaints about them, keep selling surprise mechanics to your customers. We won’t stand in your way.” Life doesn’t work that way. You can’t do something illegal and then say “This is ethical and fun” and the other person says “Oh, okay” and lets you go on with your day.

In fact, how can you even claim that something is ethical when it’s deliberately designed to prey upon someone’s fear of missing out? How can you call loot boxes fun when they’re literally just someone sitting there throwing money into the void and getting useless skins in return? How can you call them surprise mechanics when there isn’t even a legitimate surprise upon opening them?

EA knows that they’re on the ropes, that loot boxes are about to be rendered illegal in their biggest markets. That they keep trying to defend them is desperation at this point. But there’s always good news for EA’s bottom line: they could just lay off more of their staff to balance their books!