As long as parents don’t give a fuck, this won’t change much.
Furthermore, this only theoretically protects kid, but fuck people with grambling addictions i guess…
addictions i guess…
Adults are generally on their own, and they should know that. Now I know 3 different gambling spots just here, and I could be betting on horses, football, sport, things, things that move. Drop a lot of money into the slot machine monster known as VLT, the one where there is no direct limit as to how much I can bet. It’s a damn maze but once you make it to the second layer you pass from the sport betting to the slot machine hellscape, entirey shrouded in darkness, and only lit up by these screens. These sounds are nauseating, to the core. If you, an adult, fall into that, nobody cares about you, really. Gaming addiction might be the same thing for young adults. But kids, kids are not going to be mentally prepared to that (neither adults)
Some things are preventative. There’s plenty of studies that show that the likelihood of developing a gambling addiction is higher for kids.
I think the problem is less that the legislation is targeted at children and more that it is very easy to circumvent. Unless they start enforcing mandatory age verification for every game / gaming service that is, but even then you could just buy an account or game keys.
I’d rather they blanket ban all lootboxes
Kids won’t be able to play without stealing their parents ID or pointing a camera at a low res model in a web browser
Good
Currently the new ratings will only apply to games released after June. “Without applying the rules to current games the policy will do little to protect the children who are already playing them,” Tofield said.
Overall I think the changes are positive but I think they definitely should apply to all and not just new releases.
Games lacking any way for users to report or block players online will receive a PEGI 18 rating.
Also this is interesting. I’m not sure how common it is to have no controls for this in a game but it should certainly make devs/publishers think seriously about it.
Overall I think the changes are positive but I think they definitely should apply to all and not just new releases.
Don’t worry… they’ll figure out how this somehow applies to Balatro.
I can see how it becomes difficult to implement for already-released games that already have boxed copies in stores.
I wonder if this loophole will make all games currently out MUCH more valuable to investors.
The UK government decided in 2022 not to amend the Gambling Act 2005 to include loot boxes, saying no evidence showed a “causative link” to harms.
Since when is that something that stopped the UK government from trying to regulate technology and curtail its citizens’ digital freedoms?
Money
This won’t affect Germany I think. We use the cursed USK bullshit…
Germany has enacted similar measures before the PEGI implemented theirs.
You can see the descriptors in the article you linked.
AFAIK the USK only gives them a 12+ rating, not 16
wasnt the idea to completely ban loot boxes and real money gambling like that?
Good
This is nonsensical. All this is doing is taking agency away from parents.
I don’t see how that would be the case.
PEGI is used as a way of informing buyers (parents) about the contents of the game.
It doesn’t prohibit them from allowing their kids to play, say, an R-18 game. The agency’s still there. It’s not like a mandatory age verification where your kids are disallowed from using the service completely even when you yourself allow them to.
Fair enough, I may have misunderstood.
Does this include ever mob in an RPG that drops random loot? Like all of World of Warcraft?
“Paid random items”.
I’ve played many RPGs. I don’t remember one making me pay for every random battle. No, using a random number gemerator in a game isn’t the same as lootboxes.
What about lootboxes you can optionally pay for, but the game constantly gives you free currency for it? Like, you can buy more currency, and one of the ways you can spend that currency is lootboxes, but you also get that same currency for free and that same currency can be used on lootboxes (and cosmetics, for example)?
I don’t know how that’ll fit in PEGI ratings, but, IMO, this is just a shady tactic to hide the same exploitation of gambling issues.
Then you just make it technically possible but completely impractical to get some stuff, and go hunt for whales while pretending it’s just about giving players choice. You know, for their convenience.
Just cosmetic is also not the defence game publishers want it to be.These are games. There is no vital need here, everything you do in these is to get some satisfaction from it. Including, yes, collecting cosmetic elements. They know this works, and they don!t want regulators to know that they know.
What’s wrong with just letting players know how much they!re spending and exactly what they are buying? Other than, you know, it would not be manipulative enough and thus probably makes less money.
I get what you’re saying, and agree that just showing the money prices is better, but I was just wondering if you knew how this would be considered by PEGI.
Also, deleting currency probably would make it harder to give players free currency, because it might look like the developers/publisher is giving money to the player account and people would demand a way to withdraw money from the account, which I believe should not be allowed. Maybe a hybrid where the currency is free and you can split the difference with a real world cost? IDK. Game devs and publishers gotta make money to pay their bills and the developers, and being Free2Play makes getting money pretty hard without mTX/MTX.
At the end of the day it doesnt really matter that much because parents don’t know or don’t care. Its the same in the US with ESRB. Sure, some stores would refuse to sell M rated games to minors, but most of the time parents would just buy GTA for little 8 year old Timmy and they didnt event know the game content, or didn’t care. So this isn’t really going to do much of anything to publishers in reality.
