Square Enix Pulls Three Games from Belgium after Loot Box Ban

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In order to comply with legislation banning loot boxes, which lawmakers now consider a form of gambling, Square Enix has pulled three mobile games from Belgium storefronts: Mobius Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts Union X, and Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia. There was little reason to rework these free-to-play mobile titles, as their existence hinged entirely on monetization through loot boxes.

Belgium first took action against “loot boxes”, digital reward packs which can be be bought with real or virtual money and contain a semi-random array of in-game items, back in April. The country’s gaming commission ruled that the mechanics, as implemented in three popular games – Overwatch, Fifa 18 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – were in violation of gambling legislation.
 
Go further. Tax any company that uses lootboxes anywhere as a gambling entity.
Go even further, tax companies that sell their own in game currency for real money. As they are engaged in money exchange and banking.

When you buy in game credits you're not buying a product, you're exchanging your money into an unsanctioned illegal currency.
 
Isn't hockey cards gambling too then? I do hate loot boxes with passion but the logic is slightly flawed.
 
If they are exchanging money for digital currency they it should regulated just like bitcoin is slowly becoming regulated.

Imo.
 
Isn't hockey cards gambling too then? I do hate loot boxes with passion but the logic is slightly flawed.

Yes it is. That's my opinion and I'm a collector of those. It's still a different angle when games are implied. It often becomes P2W or you hit a paywall and need to grind for years or pay $$$.
Anyway, this needs to stop !
 
Just loot boxes? The whole gacha system many of these games use is literally gambling
 
Isn't hockey cards gambling too then? I do hate loot boxes with passion but the logic is slightly flawed.

Your not wrong.... random pull card packs should be 18+.

Teaching children early to feed the monkey and we wonder why we have a society full of hopeless problem gamblers. :)

(to be clear I'm not joking... yes they should be regulated as well)
 
Your not wrong.... random pull card packs should be 18+.

Teaching children early to feed the monkey and we wonder why we have a society full of hopeless problem gamblers. :)

(to be clear I'm not joking... yes they should be regulated as well)

Sure. Magic The Gathering, and the Pokemon card game can go right along with it. I'm not joking either. Those games rely on packs of cards as loot boxes, or an absurd secondary market where you can just p2w if you didn't feel like buying hundreds of booster packs, in addition to that secondary market being a source of income due to the gambling nature of getting a card worth $40 from a $4 pack. That new keyforge game isn't any better either, no deck building but it's still blind pack opening for entire decks that in the span of a couple weeks have shot up to a couple hundred on ebay in some instances, and the game itself being p2w due to the general possibility of opening a shit deck.

The gatcha "games" also need to go the way of the dodo. I've got actual friends(as in not facebook friends) who spend actual money on that crap because they're so damn weeby that they want the waifus or whatever the fuck. It seriously drives me nuts that I can be sitting at a table with 4 other grown men, discussing whatever, then out of the blue 4 of them gather around a phone because someone's doing a "10 pull" or whatever the fuck.. really? And I watch as much or more anime than they do. Can be just having a conversation with a couple of them at a time then all of a sudden "hey did you get the new waifu in the roll blah blah blah". The idiotic gambling aspect pisses me off, the weird ultra-weaboo crap that surrounds it is just weird, and these same guys will complain about p2w loot boxes in any other game that doesn't have "muh anime waifu". I can't even imagine kids getting hooked on this crap and thinking that's what gaming is supposed to be.
 
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the in game currency purchases should not be taxed, as you cant buy real world goods with the in game cash, while you can with bit-coin type digital currency, so no its not money trading. yes loot boxes suck and need to go, but going overboard with it just sounds kinda jackbootish.
everybody enjoys different things, and just because you may or may not agree with them doesn't mean we should belittle their choices. as for children(i have 5) i personally do not allow them to engage in those types of games, and they all get banned from the pc/ps4/xbox1 for weeks at a time if they dont follow the rules, i find that good parenting goes a long way.

p2w is a mixed bag, i enjoy the "grind", but every now and then i say fk it and buy something to advance, i dont feel that anyone has the right to remove that choice, if you do not enjoy that type of game then do not play it.........fairly simple concept.
any type of regulation has a long history of going from one extreme to another, very few have hit the sweet spot that needs to be taken.
 
The gatcha "games" also need to go the way of the dodo. I've got actual friends(as in not facebook friends) who spend actual money on that crap because they're so damn weeby that they want the waifus or whatever the fuck.
Yeah just find any particular gacha game and you'll find at least one person who does youtube videos of them drawing packs/cards/whatever, and they don't even do videos of them playing the game because the game very often is a super long grind fest of a game solely for getting some "currency" for those who don't want to spend money. They literally do twitch or youtube streams, they make money from that revenue (although probably very little) but then they have people donate money (these are the people I really don't fucking get... "hey here's $10 get some more chances") and all they do is "lets see what we get!".

The thing is these types of games are not a secret to what they do, just about everyone who plays knows that "whales" are what keep the game going, and are the sole reason why they made the game in the first place. But the masses still go along with the games. I used to play one Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, used to be my "rocking my baby to sleep" type of game just to pass the time in the nursery, but after a while I just asked myself "WTF am I doing? Ok, let me ask this question, can I reduce the amount of time I played and just go at my own pace?" And the answer to that question was no I couldn't, because events had limited time, "stamina" regenerated at a particular rate so to actually get anything you had to put in the grinding time, and I don't care if it was an hour a day. I wanted to play the game but at a slower rate but I would literally miss out on most everything the game puts in there, and then one day I just said ok... cold turkey time, and stopped playing. I'm not going to lie there was a part of me that felt regret like a day later "OMG all my grinding hours were wasted!!!" and I'm sure that's the psychological response these developers rely on, but after a couple weeks I just didn't care anymore. Don't get me wrong part of me just wants to play and see what's in it, but not under those circumstances, like I wish I could hack the game to get unlimited (whatever) so grinding is not necessary... but server based game... nope.
 
Isn't hockey cards gambling too then? I do hate loot boxes with passion but the logic is slightly flawed.
Sports cards aren't part of the game itself, just a collectible that can be enjoyable for some fans. Yes, it's a dumb monetization system all the same, but I don't think I've ever heard a sports fan in my life say they enjoyed watching ESPN more when they had the complete set of the team's roster. Cards you need to actually play a game are an entirely different story as they directly influence your ability to win and/or enjoy the experience.
 
Don't get me wrong part of me just wants to play and see what's in it, but not under those circumstances, like I wish I could hack the game to get unlimited (whatever) so grinding is not necessary... but server based game... nope.

That's the thing though,there's nothing to most of those games at all once you get past the grind and gatcha mechanic. It'll either just be an incredibly repetitive gameplay loop that relies on some overglorified rock/paper/scissors mechanic, and maybe some little dialogue bits here and there with some still art frames. I looked up that FF Brave Exvius game, at least it has some dungeons and stuff kinda like FF games, but F:GO(the big one my friends are stuck on) doesn't even have that. At one point one of them was playing some weeb gatcha game where they were just letting the AI auto-battle for them(I think it involved boats) and most of the time they were spending playing the game was just leaving it to auto run on the table between doing a couple inputs every couple of minutes. At least the people pumping money into penny slots at the casino to see crap animated on a screen have an incredibly low chance of getting a payout.

And yeah, I've seen 'em mention the streamers playing these things also. That's just even more strange to me that people are throwing money at someone else to basically just play a slot machine for... nothing.

Good on you for being able to quit that crap.
 
Loot boxes being gambling? That has to be the most asinine thing I've ever heard (although these days that standard gets reset quite frequently...). Gambling has a chance of loosing your investment. With a loot box, you are GUARANTEED to get a box with stuff pertaining to your interests in it but you'll never outright lose your money. What the hell, people...
 
Loot boxes being gambling? That has to be the most asinine thing I've ever heard (although these days that standard gets reset quite frequently...). Gambling has a chance of loosing your investment. With a loot box, you are GUARANTEED to get a box with stuff pertaining to your interests in it but you'll never outright lose your money. What the hell, people...
You want X, you're not guaranteed that the lootbox will contain X, so you keep buying them until you get X. Now replace X with winning. It is gambling alright.
 
Loot boxes being gambling? That has to be the most asinine thing I've ever heard (although these days that standard gets reset quite frequently...). Gambling has a chance of loosing your investment. With a loot box, you are GUARANTEED to get a box with stuff pertaining to your interests in it but you'll never outright lose your money. What the hell, people...

Oh, so casinos just have to be sure to hand back a penny for every dollar and get out of betting considered gambling?

Naw, that isn't how it works, and it has been proven on multiple studies that lootboxes activate the exact same parts of the brain as gambling.
 
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