The loot box ban will go into effect in March.
Said this elsewhere, but it seems to me a bigger story that it also mandates age verification for 18 plus content, including porn and at the platform level.
Steam needs to verify your age now if it wants to carry porn games, or indeed any 18+ games.
And I do have problems with the loot box regulation, in that it doesn’t qualify the boxes having to be paid, so technically Diablo II should be a 18+ game, along with every single RPG in existence. I have to assume courts or downstream definitions will do a sanity check on that, because the law they passed makes zero qualifiers, it just says “loot boxes”.So… maybe look into what they passed before being too celebratory about it?
They also mandate parental controls being present, which I do agree with and should have been enough. Of course that would not have changed anything, since they’re already present in pretty much all current platforms.
EDIT: To clarify, someone questioned the unpaid loot boxes definition and on double check, they do define them as paid, so scratch that part. The age verification requirement is present, though.
I had to translate the law but it does seem to define lootboxes as something you purchase. But legal texts are very specifically worded so I can’t be sure some nuance didn’t get lost in translation.
I wrote a first response referencing the one mention I had found of loot boxes, but you are correct, I missed that they did include one in the definitions section. They reference them slightly differently so the first time I looked I only found one of the two.
IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;
So yeah, you are right, they do define it as paid. Carry on.
Art. 20. São vedadas as caixas de recompensa (loot boxes) oferecidas em jogos eletrônicos direcionados a crianças e a adolescentes ou de acesso provável por eles, nos termos da respectiva classificação indicativa.
Not as far as I can tell. This translates to “Loot boxes offered in electronic games aimed at children and teenagers or likely to be accessed by them, in the terms of the corresponding age rating”.
You can argue that “offered” here specifically implies “offered for purchase”, but… I mean, my Brazilian Portuguese isn’t perfect, but I don’t think that’s explicitly the case, the word means what you think it means in English. It’d be a problem of hermeneutics at that point.
Is that the reasonable interpretation? Sure. Is that what the legislator probably intended? Almost certainly. It’s not what they wrote, though.
Fuck them kids. This entire business model is an abuse against people with credit cards.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Microtransactions should be illegal across the board. Only content with real creative gameplay value should be able to be purchased, like the usual DLC’s. Also pay2win should be fucking illegal too. Ruining the experience of other players should not be available as long as you’ve got too much money to spend.
The razor is: did you, the player, receive new content? Or did you get charged for permission?
Horse armor is fine. That’s how low the bar is. That’s how bad this abuse is. All microtransactions are “on-disc DLC,” where you’ve already been given the thing, inside the game you already paid for, but fuck you, pay us again. And again and again and again.
It’s the difference between Warhammer’s little plastic men being obscenely expensive, and Games Workshop expecting five actual dollars after every match to replace their imaginary bullets.
Is gambling literally the only thing holding the economy up at this point. Sports is all gambling games are all gambling. It is everywhere.
This doesn’t affect me (yet) as I don’t play any games with paid loot boxes (ew), but this is gonna be the age verification shit?! This sets a troubling standard for privacy and security. I guess it had to happen where I live as well.
The parents should be the ones that don’t let their kids to pay for stuff in video games without permission, or at least give them a budget they’re allowed to spend on video games, i guess.
Shit should be banned across the board not just for kids. Idk why the fuck authorities are obsessed with kids.
It’s so they can say “protect the children”
I guarantee it is.
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
–The Simpsons
Alternative clickbait title: Gaming industry in trouble
Common Brasil W
Good move. Loot box is gambling. Most have learned gambling is dangerous, especially for minors.
For those protections to have any effect in Brazil, however, they’ll necessitate the usage of age-verification mechanisms. Previously, Brazilian law had considered it sufficient for users of digital services to self-declare their age. The new law, however, requires the providers of those services to “take proportionate, auditable and technically secure measures to assess the age or age range of users.”
Seriously, read things before reacting to them.
It’s been decades of social media and centuries of press. How have we not learned about this as a society?
I mean, if you’re cool with this, then you’re cool with this and we disagree, but I’m gonna say you probably were going out of the headline alone.
Either that or we ban loot boxes for everyone — which is the better choice, IMO.
Super hard disagree. I do like me some Magic the Gathering and CCGs in general. If anything I’m say more concerned with the increasing trend of real world blind pack collectibles aimed exclusively at kids than I am with online loot boxes, which is something most of the industry has abandoned anyway after the panic went viral.
But nope, absolutely not. Loot boxes aren’t worth forcing online age verification any more than porn was a few months ago when we were all mad because the UK did it. Parental controls? Absolutely. Mandatory identification? Not at all.
And absolutely not, I am an adult and if I want to gamble online, let alone buy loot boxes in a videogame, I absolutely should be able to do that.
I don’t care. Loot boxes are gambling, which is addictive and frankly evil.
So is alcohol and I will have a beer regardless of what you or anybody else thinks about it. Screw you, you don’t get to monitor my addictions, I’m a big boy.
And guess what: you need to show ID to purchase alcohol. Great analogy.
And we do if you try to buy porn in a bookstore. We still don’t like upending the entire framework of the Internet for the sake of replicating that online. Which is exactly what’s happening here. The loot box thing is an afterthought that mandates a specific age rating for games that include them and nothing else. Porn is the main focus of the legislation.
And I disagree on implementing internet-wide ID checks for the sake of keeping kids away from porn. Hard.
The UK has challenge 25 laws that mean that you only need to show ID if you look like you’re under 25. So no you don’t always need to provide ID to purchase alcohol, at least not in puritan shitholes.
I’m happy with loot boxes being categorized as gambling when money is involved, and regulated as gambling.
By “cool with this” are you refering to age verification? That wasn’t a comment on age verification. You’re putting words in my mouth, or I was ambiguous in the above comment, or both.
Let’s talk about this. Online age verification is not trivial to do right, ie balance effectiveness and privacy. That’s true of any age restriction, whether it’s for loot booxes, other kind of gamblings. Existing age verification has bad effectiveness, bad privacy, or both. That not a reason to give up on regulating gambling, or give up on improving age verification.
Yeeeeah, you’re way less down on age verification on principle than I do.
You’re also more down on loot boxes than I am, in that I still dispute the equivalence to gambling. It’s not absurd, but it requires ignoring a lot of nuance.
Still, the problem I have with this situation in general is that the loot box element (which isn’t that heavy, it mostly establishes by law that loot boxes will make a game be automatically listed as 18 and up) is masking the mandatory age verification element. And the mandatory age verification is baaaad. It effectively does the magical wishful tech thinking thing we’ve been seeing recently elsewhere where it just… says it should be private and comply with privacy regulations but doesn’t explain how that’s possible, while at the same time demanding that every single store and service provider both design a perfect age verification system AND somehow magic up an API to share that information with each game while remaining entirely private. Which is pretty much impossible.
But nobody is talking about that, everybody just wants to dunk on loot boxes. Like four years too late, because most of the industry saw the writing on the wall and moved on to battle passes instead on the PR hit alone.
Good point, it’s a bit late, and may hit hard on some games that already implemented loot boxes. But it’s never too late, assuming it’s indeed a kind of gambling.
Hopefully it’ll lead to less games integrating loot boxes, so that going forward people of all ages can play games with neither loot boxes, nor the age verification that comes with it.
Update: I just remembered, most games can get updates nowadays, both on PC and console. Game editors can chose to remove loot boxes even for existing games if the regulation is too heavy for them.
Less than what?
Who is still doing loot boxes? Valve, for sure, they still have them on CounterStrike, sports games and then… what? Hearthstone/Magic and that type of CCG stuff and… I guess mobile gacha RPGs?
Everybody else is doing battle passes now.
Who is still doing loot boxes
A majority of Android and IOS games, and 36% of PC games according to a recent study.
If you haven’t encountered loot boxes recently that’s great. It means you already managed to avoid games with loot boxes, and shouldn’t be negatively affected by this regulation.
That site raises so many flags on my online security, but I went ahead and opened it elsewhere and… can’t find a source. What is “a recent study”? 2024? 2020? Do you have a primary source?
