Lootboxes and pay-to-win microtransactions might be banned

[Starry Windy]

The U.S. Senator Josh Hawley has announced that he will introduce the legislation act that will make loot boxes illegal. This bill, named "The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act", will ban loot boxes and pay-to-win microtransaction stuffs if it gets passed, especially if the game in question is designed for kids to begin with.

What do you think on this upcoming billing? Discuss away.

 

[Artisan]

It may protect children but does it protect parents? No. Do children use their parents phones? Yes. So how is this bill gonna work for said case? For games like Pokémon Shuffle you need eShop codes or a credit card and even then there's still parental controls. Phone games don't have that for some reason so if this bill to work there would have to be parental controls on the game or else that game would need to be banned from the app store somehow. Sure if you pay you won't lose as much but this bill and it's intention doesn't make sense. The games aren't abusive, it's the PvP and level difference combined and once that's there it cannot be stopped. There's always someone who has invested more time than you. If it's a puzzle or 1-player game then the game was intentionally hard so in that case just uninstall the game and if the kid wants to play it then give them a non-phone puzzle game. I'm not sure how popular phone games are but I'd say it's better to start with banning that with eSport games than niche games that impact a smaller faction simply because it takes more effort to ban one game than multiple games as well as new ones coming in. Loot boxes can just give you useless skins in the future to get rid of the "harmful" effects that come from them and still promote the product but then you'd see this more in the game where chests still give you randomized gear and then the "balance" is still broken between players. It takes more than getting rid of one element in a game to stop whatever this problem is that's why this is dumb and a failed attempt.

 

[Starry Windy]

I have mixed opinions on this. While I do agree that microtransaction shouldn't be getting carried away to the point it's pay-to-win, some of the games that I enjoy happened to have microtransaction as well. If the bill would only forbid pay-to-win aspect of the game so they won't force any players to buy to progress, I would be fine by that.

 

[Samster]

Look, I hate pay to win scenarios as much as the next guy, but hold the phone. Taking away loot boxes altogether isn’t going to solve anything. Also, protecting kids? Give me a break. Kids already do stupid stuff. Hell, some kids play rated M games, and I don’t see anyone commenting on that at all. Plus, has anyone heard of Parental Controls? Yeah, it’s a thing to stop kids from doing crap like micro transactions.

People should be able to have the freedom and the choice to purchase micro transactions or loot boxes if they wish. And if you’ve got a problem with it, deal with it.