Yes… they are random, no?
if a consumer if paying for something it should exactly know what it is buying and not a random.
They are random, like the Magic cards or the mini toys in the Kinder chocolate eggs.
I think these types of gambling in games should not be allowed even for over 18.
I and other people who worked with me making top F2P games researched about it and saw many, many studies and internal numbers from different top F2P companies.
Gambling is when you bet and can earn real money as reward. The psychological implications of earning real money are totally different to earning non-real money rewards such as a random Magic Card, a random mini toy or unlocking game loot.
This is the reason of why real gambling games, such as online poker, slots or casino games have a totally different and super strict and compicated regulation compared to non-gambling games.
In terms of psychology of earning a random reward in a videogame (to pay an open a loot box, to open a free loot box, to break a Super Mario loot box during gameplay or possibly getting loot after killing an enemy) doesn't cause any issues at all.
That's what all serious studies said and what we saw in our in-game metrics and statistics. Around 80-90%+ of the players of a F2P never pay anything, around 80-90%+ of the ones who pay only pay $10-$20, and when the game is very successful on average the players who pay (not counting the ones who pay) spend an average of $50-60.
Then there's a tiny portion of the tiny portion of the players who pay who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars. Part of my job there was to talk with these folks to give them a VIP treatment and to verify everything was ok. In some cases were rich people or executives who paid with their company's card, in the other cases were average people who spended the average monthly/yearly average of a console gamer but in this case they were super fans of that game and mostly only played it back then during years. They had hundreds or in a few cases thousands of hour played on that game, and instead of spreading their time & money budget time of the month/year in many games they spent it on basically a single game.
In I think around 8 years, across over half a dozen games, a handful of them with over 50M users, we only spotted 4 or 5 cases of issues: they were parents who accidentally kept their card there and the kid spent hundreds or thousands of dollars, and then we had I think were 4 or 5 cases more of stolen cards. Detected a few days later, back then Facebook (some where browser games) / Apple / Google were able to solve it by filling themselves or ourselves a simple refund form. Or they were able to contact their bank, in most cases. But that was for transactions made a few days ago, for the ones made months ago I don't remember if the banks or the platform holders didn't want or weren't able to make the refund or chargeback.
It's weird that for some reason recently there has been a handful courts or regulations calling these games gambing when they are not gambling and there isn't a singe decent study that proves they cause ludopathy or that they have the same effect than gambling. And in any case, looking at the in-game metrics and statistics it can be seen that statically they don't cause it.
Fun fact: at least some years ago, as you may know when the player pays something the developer gets 70% of the payment, Apple gets 30%. But when the player makes a refund or chargeback, the game developer returns 100% of that money. So in cases of a refund or chargaback, Apple still keeps the 30% for Apple and the developer after the refund/chargeback doesn't have the same money they had before the refund and the original purchase: the developer losed 30% of the transaction.
And in the specific case of iOS, Apple didn't provide us the player id of the refunds or chargebacks, meaning that we weren't able to remove from the player what they refunded, or even ban the account if they (we had some cases) purchased and refunded many times in a row something for a total amount of several thousands of dollars.
Why doesn’t Microsoft or Nintendo have to pay anything back if fifa is also on their console?
I assume because this player -like most of the ones who play FIFA- played it and paid the money on PS.
I think the question should be why Sony and not EA.
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