Lately there has been a discussion about loot boxes and the associated "lottery", Middle-earth: Shadow of War was just the latest example of this. Completely unimpressed by this, the developers of Call of Duty: WWII declared in the September issue of Game Informer that you can even win prizes for watching the boxes open.
The whole thing works in so-called headquarters areas, a kind of lobby in which up to 48 players can pass the time between matches. In addition to chatting and friendly skirmishes with friends, players will be able to open their loot boxes with random cosmetic items there. If you watch other players opening their boxes, you can win prizes.
Call of Duty: WWII is just one of many games with money sinks
Such a function will of course boost sales of the loot boxes tremendously, who can not imagine the actions ala "We each open 20 boxes and then watch the others and everyone wins !!" Sure, Call of Duty: WWII is 18+ and whoever is that old should know how to handle his money, but realistically, a lot of people under the age of eighteen play such games and on the other hand such marketing is aimed directly at people who are susceptible to them. Game companies now have sophisticated logarithms with which they can control the probability of winning. Thus they create an extreme danger for addicts.
It is not for nothing that normal 6 out of 49 Saturday Lotto and the like are now warned about the risk of addiction. The lottery companies are obliged to do this and also provide information on hotlines for addiction counseling. The fact that similar business behavior is now spreading in the area of computers / video games is worrying. The younger ones in particular are addressed and systematically deprived of their money. The discussion on social media platforms like Reddit are fraught with concerns on this issue. If something like this spreads, at some point politicians will become aware of the problem and intervene with regulations or laws. And if we have seen and learned one thing in the past, politicians have no relation to computer games, they only know the "keyword" killer games and complete bans.
In the end, however, it always depends on us, the end customer, if the sales figures for games with such rip-off systems collapse, the developers are forced to change directions.
