I’ve seen some posts arguing about whether or not...
I wonder if people will change their mind on TCGs, because those are basically IRL lootboxes
I can see it, especially when you get into the world of sports cards, which more or less died because the bottom fell out and the cards lost their value. Obviously MTG is the elephant in the room, with speculation rampant and individual cards netting hundred dollar prices.
I will say at least with TCGs you’re generally guaranteed cards of a certain rarity in each pack, whereas with loot boxes it’s completely random. Like yeah you can open a magic booster and get a garbage rare, hell I took the plunge on an MTG fat pack once and walked away pretty disappointed, but I can’t say I didn’t get rares. There’s no guarantee of a skin in an Overwatch loot box, unless they’ve updated their system to include different types of boxes while I was away. I know some games do that, with loot boxes that are guaranteed to give you a character or weapon or somesuch of a certain value (I recall the ME3 packs did that, and boy did I spend more on those than I was proud of).
The difference there, and I promise I’ll end this soon, is that at least for TCGs the secondary market exists. I wanted to make a deck with four Phyrexian Dreadnaughts, so I just went out and bought them. Granted I couldn’t have found that old card in a current booster but you get my drift. You want a card, you can find a website that’ll sell it to you. Not so for loot boxes, since the entire system is driven by you buying more, and there’s no way to just get the thing you want and move on with your life. Now the way the prices of individual cards are calculated is a whole ‘nother ballgame I won’t even get into, but I do want to acknowledge that it’s largely terrible and can get way out of hand.
I got ahead of myself here but yeah TCGs can be pretty bad. IMO loot boxes are a bit worse, but for different reasons, especially since with a TCG that’s more or less driving the company’s income whereas a loot box is a scheme designed to just give the company additional cash on top of what they’re getting from a $60 game and its assorted DLC.
