Over the years, game developers have tried a ton of combinations to milk up as much revenue as they possibly can from their video games.
It’s not something new but micro-transactions have been up and around for as long as I can remember.
Back in the days of dvds, it used to be way less annoying, all you had to do was head out and grab a copy of the game and call it a day.
But with the advancement in technology, video game developers have come up with a number of crazy ideas or traps to fill up their banks as quickly as they can and the worst of them all are loot boxes!
The gaming industry has been defending the existence of loot boxes and random item crates in video games for a long time.
While people all around the world including governments are trying their very best to get them banned or atleast under some control.
The concept of loot boxes has lately been getting a lot of stick for various reasons and we just can’t help but wonder why?
The Loot Box Epidemic
There are various reasons why people want to ban loot boxes forever and for good. In-game spending has hiked up to billions of dollars just in days.
Shops in most of the competitive games allow players to spend money for getting sexier cosmetics and performance upgrades as well to level up faster and be better than the rest.
The race to the top and all the competition involved on the way is compelling players all around the world to spend their hard earned cash in a virtual universe where it isn’t of much significant use, I mean it’s their cash who are we to judge but lately it’s been getting out of control, especially with minors involved in gaming.
Loot boxes basically hold random items that you can otherwise get from the store but at a lower price and people tend to go for them not knowing that it might take a hundred crates/chests to get to their favorite costume in the game.
Children are the most affected players by all this and kids seem to be so involved in gaming these days that it’s scary even to wonder how a massive number of children are spending so much money and learning to spend at a risk, with a very low probability of getting the item they want or just wasting their money away.
This leads to a future of extensive spending as studies show and kids like this have a hard time turning into sensible adults who know how to manage their pocket money.
The whole concept of loot boxes is coined as the gacha system which is a way for all the free games to squeeze money out of their players. Giving out randomized rewards has many negative impacts on the gamers who tend to spend money in the game.
Another major problem is how it kills the competitiveness of a game even though most of the competitive games have shops with expensive items that are up to thousands of dollars, such as skins in CSGO.
It creates a monopoly of money-spending players over the non-spending ones. I would personally be horrified if a player with no skills comes off swinging his bigger and better guns and puts me down just because he spent his cash in the game. That surely earns the developers a lot of money but it leaves no room for wits and skills as a consequence.
The worst part is, many modern games nowadays are designed in a way that they present to you problems that can be solved in two ways. The easiest and the fastest way is to spend some cash and poof, problem solved and the other one is playing the game and completing absurdly tedious tasks for months to achieve the same.
And so, many players are literally pushed to spend some cash if they really want to make progress in the game and not get left behind by other players.
It is ACTUALLY a Severe Problem
Loot Boxes exhibit a lot of other psychologically negative impacts that develop an inclination in players for randomized rewards in turn for money which leads to players wanting to give the whole concept a go in the real world which is more than just problematic to be practical.
They get used to looking for shortcuts in real life as well and many recent studies suggest that it is only getting more problematic.
Many welfare organizations are trying their very best to put down this gacha system that is stripping parents of their hard earned money just because their kids are happy spending their money on randomized rewards not knowing what disasters it could lead to in their near future when they are about to hit their teenage years.
