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Casinos tend to make a lot of money.
I would honestly trust csgo cases more than actually casinos.
Why? Casinos are incredibly regulated, loot boxes aren’t.
Ah, lootboxes, not merchandise
Deranged to spend the money on a case where you don’t even know what you get. I chose to pay a much more reasonable $50 for a Valorant knife. Elden Ring’s production value is great, but have you seen these 5 animations?
Only legislation will stop this.
This is the dominant strategy. You were never going to shop your way out of it. It’s in every genre, every price point, every platform. It’s in single-player games. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
You do realize csgo cases are optional, right?
“Nobody put a gun to your head” will never excuse exploiting people for money.
This business model is inherently abusive, and spreading. I don’t fucking care how little you think anyone needs what it offers. I am explaining why it’s a scam. Nobody should be offered this. They are victims.
So is
- sugar
- savoury snacks
- instant food
- fast food
- porn
- alcohol
Which is why many of these things are regulated, especially if they include addictive substances.
You mean alcohol?
What else is regulated?
As of 2022, 54 countries had implemented special taxes on sugary drinks and/or sugar in general: https://www.obesityevidencehub.org.au/collections/prevention/countries-that-have-implemented-taxes-on-sugar-sweetened-beverages-ssbs
In many cases that covers sweets, snacks, etc. as well. Food is usually quite heavily regulated (in the sense that there’s lots of regulation, not that it’s actually strict or as much as it should be), even if it’s not immediately obvious to us as consumers. E.g. there are ingredients that get banned because of being addictive or having certain harmful effects.
Porn is age gated worldwide, and in some cases censored. I’d class that as regulated pretty much all over the world, regardless of how hard/easy it is to circumvent the regulations (e.g. for a 17-year-old to access a porn website).
I think that actually covers all of the items in the list!
Legislation to stop gambling for children when?
Fuck them kids. This is a scam perpetrated against adults. They’re the ones with fat wallets ready to be siphoned.
Games making you value arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to that fiction.
Id rather not because anytime the children argument is used it feels like government officials see it as an opportunity to further infringe upon privacy. Would probably push for real ids online and having to give identification cards to companies to play games. And not like companies are known for the best security practices.
There is a middle-ground though: require a credit card. You can’t legally get a credit card under 18, so either your parents gave it to you (i.e. you have their permission), you stole it (they’ll probably catch the charges), or you’re old enough.
Don’t allow this nonsense to be purchased with gift cards, require credit cards. Do the same for adult sites, gambling sites, etc. Maybe require a second factor for every new website a credit card is used at (a text/app notification should be enough) if you’re worried a kid will lie and use the card at an adult website instead of their stupid F2P game.
And on top of that, anything purchase with an element of chance should be regulated as gambling, and the items should be tradable with other players if the customer doesn’t want the item.
Kids aren’t really the ones spending so much on games, but they are being used to help market those products. People wouldn’t buy cosmetics if there wasn’t someone to show off to, so thin the field a bit and hopefully we’ll see less of it.
Add enough hoops like that and you’ll nudge the industry to stop making so many of these games.
Assuming you’re including debit cards here (as most people do when they say “credit card”): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for “Revolut <18”.
I’m not sure what could be a better solution though.
I’m not including debit cards.
I’m also not a fan of going cashless. I’m just saying that, in the absence of a better way of verifying age that doesn’t violate privacy, credit cards work pretty well.
Perhaps we can come up with a token-based system where you can verify your age without either the game knowing your identity or the age verification service knowing what’s requesting it. I don’t trust politicians to make such a system properly, so I think the credit card option is a reasonable approach.
But then also many people don’t have credit cards - they’re frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.
Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we’d need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.
There are not many kids playing CS. Most of this is adults.
That is simply not true, why would you think that? Lots of young teans and kids play cs. My entire friends group were into cs and the genre starting at around 12.
When I use to play many years ago anytime I smurfed my matches were full of kids.
You mean the one and only corporation that truly cares about its users? /s
How anyone doesn’t think they’re as shitty as any other company of similar size is beyond me.
Amazing, they deleted CSGO from the universe, then released the worst possible followup they could have made, and yet still made money. Amazing.