Korea Serious About Loot Boxes

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
55,532
The Korea Herald is telling us that loot boxes and how those are dealt with in games is being taken extremely seriously in Korea. Nexon Korea, one of the country's biggest game developers, has been fined nearly $1,000,000US for selling loot boxes in its games. In other news, Nexon Korea has its most profitable year ever in 2017, and people are still stupid. Thanks cageymaru.


The FTC had taken issue with Nexon’s mode of promoting “loot boxes,” which can be purchased at a fixed price with real cash. The items obtainable through a box, including their type, effect and performance are determined randomly after a user buys and opens it.
 
Basically toy capsule machines, except much more expensive and the toy is randomized before you open it instead of when it's dumped into the machine.

I only get those when I know that I will get at least one thing I want...so usually never.
 
This is gambling.
Once the government figures out how to tax this, they will make it legal.
 
Someone should take a look at Blade n Soul if you wanna see how loot boxes are bad. Basically you grind to get a item that lets you spin a wheel. The wheel may give you a weapon chest or it may give you some other crap. Then to open the chest you need a special key you can get from more grinding or just buy a key from cash shop. So you grind to get a drop (that may or may not even be for your class) to maybe get a chest to maybe get what you want which is locked behind a key.

Honestly the game and story are quite fun up till the end when it becomes a "grind this endless tower dungeon" and you can do all that for free. But if you want to progress up the tower, get ready to pay.
 
What's actually illegal is the deceptive nature stated in the article, not the loot boxes themselves. For instance, you can get one of 16 puzzle pieces which you would think would give you equal chances of each piece but some of the pieces are as low as 0.5% so getting all 16 is practically impossible. The company would have been fine if they stated it but obviously, most customers are not that stupid and if they see a 0.5% chance (one example stated 0.0005% chance!) they would not play at all.
 
What's actually illegal is the deceptive nature stated in the article, not the loot boxes themselves. For instance, you can get one of 16 puzzle pieces which you would think would give you equal chances of each piece but some of the pieces are as low as 0.5% so getting all 16 is practically impossible. The company would have been fine if they stated it but obviously, most customers are not that stupid and if they see a 0.5% chance (one example stated 0.0005% chance!) they would not play at all.
Yeah, at least with capsule machines you can see if you even have a reasonable chance at getting what you want. With this, it's the same percentage every time--your chances don't improve with each attempt, unless they coded that into their algorithm (doubt it).
 
Before they fixed it in borderlands 2, the gold loot box keys could be used infinitely by saving your save game file, going into the game, using all your keys, and then restoring that save game file that still had all the keys.

Because of the stupidness of them being random loot boxes that you have to pay for with real money, I haven't played since they did that since it is pretty impossible to advance without opening those loot boxes.

LOOT BOXES need to DIAF.
 
Someone should take a look at Blade n Soul if you wanna see how loot boxes are bad. Basically you grind to get a item that lets you spin a wheel. The wheel may give you a weapon chest or it may give you some other crap. Then to open the chest you need a special key you can get from more grinding or just buy a key from cash shop. So you grind to get a drop (that may or may not even be for your class) to maybe get a chest to maybe get what you want which is locked behind a key.

Honestly the game and story are quite fun up till the end when it becomes a "grind this endless tower dungeon" and you can do all that for free. But if you want to progress up the tower, get ready to pay.
Same with War Robots on mobile. some item mini games like the card flip gives you the lowest item.
 
nexon probably had a hard time containinng a smug smirk as they handed the check over to korean authorities knowing that a mil is about what they make in a day on loot boxes.
 
Good! When are they going after PUBG, Battlefront 2, Overwatch, etc? These games need to adopt the League of Legends/Fortnite model of selling skins, instead of the current scamming systems they have that lets illegal gambling sites to form. #MakeGamingGreatAgain
 
Back
Top