"Valve responds to lootbox lawsuit: is 'disappointed'"

[kane_magus]

I was all set to respond to this with something like "Kane Magus responds to Valve's response to lootbox lawsuit: is 'derisive,'" but Valve isn't actually incorrect in what they're saying here. Shit like Pokemon/Magic: The Gathering/YuGiOh[1]/baseball cards are honestly just a bad as lootboxes in video games, in their own way. I've known people who have blown small fortunes on that dumbshit, too. Whales exist in the physical world just as much as they do in the digital. Obviously.

Valve is not actually helping their case by making this comparison, nor should the lawsuit be dropped, is what I'm saying. I guess the only problem here is that video game loot boxes are being hypocritically singled out here, and none of that other mentioned shit has been touched yet.

[1] - The article didn't even mention YuGiOh, but it's in that realm, too.

Comments

[owsf2000]

"Whales exist in the physical world just as much as they do in the digital. Obviously."

*looks up* O.O Hey man, leave me out of this!~ ;)

Granted I'm nowhere near the level of whale you're referring to, although I was ever so weak to collectors edition games and the like back in the day. (Compared to today where I'm more than content to leave even the best of collectors editions on the shelf.)

*hides his complete collection of Story Engine cards*

[kane_magus]

I wouldn't really consider buying CE versions[1] of games to be a whale-like tendency. That's pretty much just buying the "whole" game, as opposed to only whatever specific part of the game that the publishers arbitrarily decided to set aside to be the "base" game, with the rest of it stripped out and sold separately as DLC for additional cash money. When/if ever I finally crack and buy some AAA game that had a ton of DLC, I usually wait and buy the full/complete/collector's/goty/whatever version of that game with all DLC, if I see the whole thing on a really steep sale, assuming such a thing ever comes into existence at all.

But, yeah, similarly, extremely rare is the occasion that I buy any AAA game (whether it has a CE version or not) at all these days. Especially if the full game still costs multiple hundreds of dollars, even with a 75% off sale or whatever. And those kind of sales seem to be getting rarer and rarer with AAA games, regardless. Or else they'll just have the "base" game on such a sale, with all the DLC still at or near full price, up into the hundreds of dollars still for the complete game, in which case they can piss right off. And that's even when completely ignoring any useless cosmetic DLC bullshit that I never would have bought anyway, unless it was just rolled in with the full version of a game (and even then, I probably would never actually use it, even if I had access to it).

And the only ones I would consider to be "whales" when it comes to collecting physical stuff are those who spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on it, like someone who feels the need to "catch 'em all" for Pokemon cards and will go bankrupt trying to do so or whatever (or people who have way more money than they have sense, like certain "celebrities," e.g. shitbags like this).

[1] - Especially nowadays, compared to back when CE versions actually was the full game still, but with additional extra physical stuff like figurines and cloth maps and the like. But I wouldn't have considered that to be "whale-like" back then, either. With the modern video game industry, you're lucky to even get the "full game" in a CE version these days, since they still might have even more DLC that isn't actually included in the CE version (or the season pass or battle pass or whatever the fuck they call such things these days).