Loot boxes gaming’s version of gambling
What are Loot boxes? Loot boxes are a system in which gamers get in game rewards using real money — anything from rare, difficult to acquire loot worth some real money to something common as dirt, worth pennies on the dollar — and the odds are never in your favor. Most of the time these games that have hidden percentages that determine what kind of loot you can get in the game, and the best loot will most likely have the lowest percent rate of dropping. This kind of system has many similarities with gambling in casinos you put money down not knowing what you are going to get out of it. A couple of years ago this system used to work in the players favor since many games allowed players to straight up buy the loot that they wanted and if they wanted to try to get the loot for a lower price they can roll randomly for loot. A perfect example of this strategy is the game League of Legends where a player can buy a legendary skin from there store instead of buying multiple boxes in hope of the chance of getting the same skin for a much higher price.
Yet many other gaming companies have shied away from this tactic and have moved towards the more popular gambling tactic. You can see this in very popular games like Overwatch and to many the game that popularized the idea of loot boxes. In this game the only way to get skins and cosmetic items is through the loot box system where they have quarterly events with limited timed skins for that specific event. You can see this through the anniversary event that happened in Overwatch in this event they added multiple legendary skins for characters and if you wanted to collect all of them the estimated time that would take would be around 267 hours in total according to Forbes.
If you really want to know the drop rates you must go through China recently they passed a law that forced gaming companies to show the percentages for every loot-box system they implement into a game, and for Overwatch the percentages drops were released as such
· Rare: 100%
· Epic: 18.2%
· Legendary: 7.4%
This information and other game like Hearthstone and Heroes of the storm can be found from this article here.
The true evil of this system is that many loot box systems allows re-rolls , re-rolls is a concept in which the player can obtain an item or skin they already have so the game gives them in game currency instead. However the currency you obtained is drastically lower than the amount you need to spend for the same item. It is a very corrupt system since it punishes players that want to collect everything in a game but instead pads length time for video games that includes. A good game that does re-rolls is the game Destiny in which every re-roll of the same item is actually different and can fit your play-style better than the item you have currently equipped. If re-rolls are to be a common occurrence in video-games this is the kind of system that should be implemented so games have more content instead of padding to allow the player more things to do inside the game.
So as a community of gamers what can we do to stop this, it is a very simple solution that will never happen, don’t buy loot boxes. It is the simplest way to voice that loot boxes are not the way to sell in game items to gamers. Yet statistics show that loot box sales are on the rise which in turn we can see loot boxes to be included in other games of different genres to make a quick buck.