558
European lawmakers will study a ban on 'loot boxes' and addictive features in video games
(www.euractiv.com)
Cool. Law when?
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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after the activion lobby gets tired
To learn why it matters Neuroexploitation by Design at 39c3 (with English dubbing) specifically 28min in.
And then I assume they'll study a large packet of banknotes each and forget all about it.
"Study" meaning put it in committee so it can die in the web of bureaucracy
Ah yes, because the EU has never done anything before
Study? What more study is needed, gambling is virtual heroin for kids. Just fucking kill it. Everyone and their mother is OK with causing millions in unployment due to "AI" because it's "progress" but to actually protect children we need to "study" even more! GTFO with that bullshit.
It's only a theory I came up with just now but EU was criticized for years for regulating too much. Stories about absurd regulations like classifying snails as fish or regulating the curvature of a banana were circulating everywhere. It was probably organized by corporations to slow down EU and now the process is so slow it's verging on being useless. They are thinking about banning sales of oversized US cars but maybe starting in 2035. I will be dead long before those cars are off the roads (hopefully not killed by one of them). Everything requires studies and drafts and transition periods and little gets done.
Fun fact! These cases, like the bananas, snails, or carrots being classified as fruit, were all being used as examples of "lol, dumb EU bureaucracy", but were actually examples of brilliant lawmaking.
The curvature of bananas was specifically aimed at making it harder for China to flood the EU market with their bananas, thus saving local production from going bust.
The snails were a similar case to the carrots. The EU has subsidies for jam makers, to make them more competitive with non-EU jam makers. As it turned out, in one region in France, people made jam from carrots, but "jam" was defined in legislature as "a product made from fruits". Which meant that the EU could spend a lot of time and money on re-writing the original law allowing the subsidies... or just redefine carrots as "fruits" for the specific purpose of that one law. As in: nobody in the EU considers carrots as fruits, it was only and specifically done to allow those French farmers to get subsidies for their jam making.
It's brilliant and efficient.
It was probably organized by corporations to slow down EU
Cries in red white and blue American tears
The owner class, their paid shills, and their useful idiots had half the population convinced decades ago that all regulation is bad and that government entities literally cannot do anything correctly.
I started believing some of that stuff when I was young and thought that people in the media argued in good faith. Plus I was more accepting of the cornerstone conservative axiom that money and "progress" are the marks of good people and good societies rather than silly nebulous concepts like "being alive is a positive experience for as many people as possible."
YuGiHo, MTG, Pokemon cards, Labubu, etc basically
ANYTHING that comes
- sealed (as opposed to transparent packaging) and is
- collectible (limited supplied of some specific items)
physical or not is prone to betting and thus addiction. We tend to ignore the thing we care about, because we are passionate or come up with explanations (not to say excuses or post-rationalization) but in practice it doesn't matter if your MTG deck is super "powerful" or that you see yourself as a great strategist, in fine if you do buy or promote those your are promoting gambling.
Do you mean like a physically opaque package or one where the exact contents are obscured by randomization? There are some card games that have no randomization whatsoever in their packaging, like Fantasy Flights LCGs.
Well I do mean physically opaque but true that implies, as few persons did comment regarding e.g. Poker, that the content itself or the rules do not change the distribution to introduce artificial scarcity.
The point is that purchasing a package in itself should not be a bet.
Yeah in the boardgame community everyone know tcgs are predatory, at least there are usually communities for alternative formats.
I see people cracking mtg packs on YouTube all the time, and pokemon ane Yu-Gi-Oh packs, heck i watched some people open the $100k mtg alpha box. 100% addictive. Heck back in the day they used to call it digital crack
You might enjoy Loot box content is associated with increased user engagement for YouTube gaming videos (2023) then.
😡
I don’t think loot boxes are a thing anymore but Battle Passes are predatory. You pay for access to items but you aren’t guaranteed those if the timer runs out.
Loot box are still a thing, in a big way. Look at CS2 or the yearly soccer games.
And gacha games on mobile are a plague.
Lootbox is the first step, battlepass close second.
Lootboxes are sooo 2010s though. It‘s all about season passes and general FOMO. I doubt they will correctly identify and properly regulate „addictive features“ in a way that puts an end to that but I guess we‘ll see.
The companies doing them have a few hundred million reasons to skirt around the laws, so they will no doubt find a few ways. But that doesn't mean we can't make laws
Season passes and FOMO aren't gambling, you get what you buy and although I don't like them they are not the issue.
Lootbox systems are designed to be addictive as it's paying money to recieve a prize with very bad odds. Glad my country banned them a while ago.
The problem with a battle pass is that you pay for the chance to maybe get something.
If you can’t play or don’t pay well enough, it’s wasted money
With a loot box you get something right now. It might be shit but at least it’s on your account
I'm drawing the line at paying for a thing that might be good or bad, mechanics like that are addictive especially to children
my nephews are all about the limited edition skins
Watch the end result be you can't find random chests in Minecraft dungeons or Terraria caves cause it falls under the category of "lootbox" in games...
(May seem hyperbolic, but we are talking about 70 year old boomers trying to make regulations for video games. I'm not sure I have the most positive view of the potential outcome)
uh, on one side of my family my 70 year old boomers were helping Ken and Dennis write UNIX. I listen when they talk.
What about the other side?
The ate paint chips and crayons
Close, they caused mine collapses
Money, gambling is (even if obfuscated via tokens) about money.
Monopoly is not gambling because there is no (real) money involved. Uno is not gambling because there is no money involved.
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the average age of elected leaders across the world is in the 45-50 range for most of the western world, US is the oldest at 60-70 range
I’m of the strong opinion that we control the media that we are exposed to and that the resolution for problematic or undesirable media is to simply turn it off.
However: advertising, LLM’s, social media, and the Internet have forced me to capitulate that certain forms of media constitute a legitimate memetic hazard, and are capable of fueling addiction, misinformation, and general misery on large enough scales. I hate this conclusion because while I still heavily err on the side of media liberty and self-control, I cannot square that value with the reality of poisonous, hostile mass media.
We should not be subjected to predatory practices to enjoy the products and services that we depend on, and the entertainment that is part of our shared experience and culture. Loot boxes, advertising, and financial scams are becoming nearly universal in popular gaming products, and even software in general. To me, this eventually constitutes a monopolistic behavior that becomes reasonably unavoidable and must be regulated.
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