Thanks! I try to remember that I’m also guilty of not making my comments entirely clear, so a decent amount of the time I’m actually in agreement with the other person.

Keep trying.

“-has lead developers to chiefly concern themselves with maximizing profit based SOLELY (and that word is important here) on these additional revenue streams, instead of increasing sales based on the game’s content at launch.”

Smoking is legal in plenty of spaces, or I wouldn’t be walking through it. But we’re not here to talk about smoking, anyway.

No, I just don’t want to inhale other people’s smoke. That’s them enforcing their shit on me. And in terms of lootboxes, look at the uproar from Star Wars Battlefront II and Shadow of Mordor; why do you think people got so angry about the lootboxes in those games? Because the games themselves suffered from a design…

I think you’re a little confused; I think loot boxes are predatory, and also think they typically make games worse. I’m not asking the gov’t to step in and save the dude with addiction issues (although it’d be nice if he got help), that’s just one of the reasons I don’t like them in videogames. 

Your wrong.  They still take advantage of people with gambling addictions and they do this on purpose.  They know people won't complain "because it's cosmetic".  They have made it so bad that now your willing to except this garbage.  They should be awarded to you as you play and not offered for sale.  If they want to…

Game prices are subject to supply and demand and have the benefit of being totally transparent. If developers are willing to risk reduced sales by raising prices, they should do it. That is preferable to offering games at one price while baking in predatory micro-transactions.

I don’t get where people get this idea in their head that congressmen can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. There’s absolutely no reason why they’d have to focus on only one issue at a time, if they did that then even less would get done in Congress than does now.

People like him are threatened by book learning. I wouldn’t be too concerned. He’ll accidentally drink a bottle of bleach one day (mistaking it for a can of Natural Ice) and we won’t have to worry about him anymore.

loot boxes do not constitute gambling

“It’s not predatory”

He’s targeting pay-to-win microtransactions. There are plenty of non-pay-to-win varieties of microtransactions for developers to choose from.

Honestly, maybe games SHOULD go up in price, or studios should spend less money developing them. Not every game needs to be a gigantic AAA open world cinematic “experience.” Especially when the games industry is as unstable and close to the verge of collapse as it is.

Well, I don’t; I wish I did, but I don’t. And maybe the senator won’t, either. But I’m not a fan of gambling of this sort in videogames (and I don’t buy the argument that it’s not gambling, because that’s what random loot boxes literally are), because it’s 1) predatory and 2) a lot of the time is a cover-up for a…

I’m particularly wary of the scary language around developers monetizing addiction in children.

That’s a fair point. I think the main disconnect is that a kid can’t just go buy $300 of Magic cards on a whim, they actually have to get the money and go to a store and interact with a real person.

“ABD” means “all but dissertation.” I’ll be a psychologist right after I’ve defended in early June, my chair willing. I’m just not about to come call myself a psychologist when I still have one degree requirement left (although per NYS law I was a psychologist for 12 months last year during my doctoral internship,…

Personally, while I don’t like the guy, I never try and engage in “will they stop at” arguments. They are too reminiscent of the dumb “Gay marriage? What’s next, allowing someone to marry their goat?” arguments. They shift the conversation away from the topic into nebulous, fear-inducing dissembling.

Loot boxes are definitely predatory, but this bill really sounds like it’s targeting a wide swath of DLC and microtransactions without regard for what parents are already able to do. I’m particularly wary of the scary language around developers monetizing addiction in children. That’s... well, that language is not…