Gaming Concepts - Loot Boxes

Hey this is Sven,
today we want to take a closer look at how the concept of Loot Boxes is used in modern games. Keep in mind that this is just may opinion based on my experiences and the resulting feelings and thoughts about Loot Boxes.

Although Loot Boxes have never been a gamers favorite way of obtaining items in games, the last year has shown greedy examples of using the system to milk players for every last dollar they own. But is the concept in itself bad, or is it just the way it is presented to us in recent times, that gives the impression of Loot Boxes being those evil entities?
That said, let us take a closer look at Loot Boxes and how different games use them.

What are Loot Boxes?

For everybody who luckily never encountered Loot Boxes while playing their favorite games, I will shortly explain what we are talking about here. Feel free to skip to the next section if you are familiar with some of the gamble simulators out there.
So as one could have guessed a Loot Box is a box full of loot. You basically pay a certain amount of money, often enough it is a real currency you pay with not ingame money, and you get a box which you can then open to obtain a variety of ingame goodies. Items range from purely optional accessories or costumes to actual advantages in game. Sometimes even some of the games content is locked behind those key eating wooden chests. That is the most basic description of a loot box. There are a couple of variations, in some games you may get a lot of chests for free, but need to buy the keys to open them. Some Loot Boxes will hide and pretend to be a card pack, but at the end of the day you will pay for some kind of pack or box that will then reveal its contents to you afterwards.

Good examples

So now that you know about those boxes, let us see some examples of how they are used in games.
Even though all your friends may have told you that Loot Boxes are really bad and no one should ever buy them, you might want to take a look at Loot Boxes from a neutral point of view. There are games out there that included Loot Boxes where people actually like them and do not feel the urge to write mean comments everywhere about how bad everything is. One of those example is League of Legends.
While you can love or hate the game, or both at the same time, you can not really argue about theirway of implementing the Loot Box system. In their game you can buy nearly everything for ingame currency. The only things that are not obtainable in that way are skins. Skins are "outfits" for the different characters, depending on how fancy you want your champion to be, you can pay between 5$* and 20$ for one skin. With that in mind, let us look at the loot box which can contain any skin, except for some exceptions, and costs about 5$. That means you can get anything, even the 20$ ones for mere 5 bucks. Even in the worst case you only get a skin that is worth a little bit less than the 5$ the box did cost. That means if you do not like spending much or you have some leftover money you can buy a Loot Box and may get something good, but you will definitely get something
you not already own, so basically no trash.
So that sounds good right? You do not need to buy them at all because they are completely optional, you can unlock all of the stuff without the gambleing aspect by just buying whatever skin you like directly and even if you gamble you will get something that is nearly always worth the money you invested.

Not so good examples

After thinking this through Loot Boxes do not sound all that bad right? Well that is were some of the publishers (yes EA, we are talking mostly about you) and game developers come into play.

I will ask you some questions and you can answer them for yourself with yes or no.

1. Do you like to pay a lot of money, after you already bought the game for the full price of 60$,
   just to get game content you thought you already paid for?
2. Do you like to be in a huge disadvantage in a competitive game because you did not spend
   another 100 dollars on items like your opponent?
3. Do you love to buy boxes over and over again because you always seem to get the same bad
   things out of those boxes and not the one thing you are looking for?
4. Do you like grinding for 200 hours or to pay 20$ to reach the maximum level?

Hopefully most players will answer all those questions with no, but someone in charge of
developing games must have thought that the answer to all those questions is "hell yes!". Either that or this phenomena is explained by greed. The greed to get as much money as possible with the least possible effort. Publisher cut out games content or make it nearly unreachable to force players to spend additional money on their games. An example for that would be Star Wars Battlefront 2 where you need grind a tremendous amount of time just to unlock your favorite character, or you just buy a bunch of boxes and pray.
Or they give you a huge advantage in a competitive game like in FIFA 18, where you want to buy a lot of those packs to get some of the good players. The worst thing about that is, that it is not like the good old DLC scam, where they say "You want to have fun? For the price of 14.99$ you can have some fun", it is more like "You want to have fun? For the price of 3.99$ you have a 2% chance to have some fun". Because most of the time, you get utter trash or items you already have 5 times. This is the reason why Loot Boxes are even worse than fraud DLC and why they are loved even more by greedy game publishers.

Why we are part of the problem

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is just the most recent and most known example but there are a lot more. The problem here is that we are not innocent. For a long time we have excepted to be milked by game publishers. We complain that there is paid DLCs that obviously should be part of the main game, but still there are people that buy all the Sims 4 DLC. We complain that games like CoD have about 100 micro transaction packs which are just mere cash grabs, but I still see people with weird 5$ camos. We complain that games are sold unfinished or are sold in early access, still DayZ sold great. We complain that games like FIFA or CoD are the same every year, but still there are thousands of pre-orders for those games shortly after announcement. Finally we now complain about Loot Boxes being scam and although EA got the kick in the face they deserved, we will probably still buy those boxes.
For years all we do is basically say "I know you only want my money and you do not care about my game experience at all, but I will still give you my money."

That means...?

So after reading all of this , we can conclude that Loot Boxes are not really bad, they can be a nice feature in a game. The problem is that Game publishers abuse the system to milk every little bit of money and we kind of accept it. So try to use Loot Boxes for purely optional features only. Fill them with stuff people actually want. Make sure they never get doubles and get something that they at least have some use for. Like that Loot Boxes do work really well.
Of course that is something game publisher and developer need to think of, since most of you are probably consumers, the only advice I can give you is: do not buy any game that makes you feel like you need to pay additional money, paying additional money should always be completely optional and it should not influence your game experience in a negative way if you do not pay extra.
Obviously this is the common advice for everything "If you don't like it don't buy it." and as always, it is not that easy. Actually some of the games are pretty fun even with the pay to win aspect. I love Archeage but the game has huge problems with people getting advantages, by paying a lot of money but still I love playing the game. So even I can not really do, what would be the best way of dealing with the problem but maybe just try to avoid those games if possible.
The question what the consumer can do to "protest" and influence companies to improve, is a really broad topic and not only applicable to Gaming alone, so maybe lets save that one for another time.

With that said, what are your opinions on Loot Boxes? Do you know examples of really good or really poor implementations, or do you have your very own idea to implement them?
Feel free to add your thoughts in the comment section.

*All the following numbers are not 100% exact and are only used to explain the conecept.