It’s not the loot boxes, it’s the greed

I first started playing Magic: the Gathering (M:tG) in 1994. The set “Fallen Empires” had just released, and I was so excited every time I finally saved up enough money to open a fresh booster pack. This is because even though “Fallen Empires’ was widely considered one of the worst Magic sets of all time, I was a stupid kid.

For those of you who don’t know, a pack of M:tG is called a booster pack that contains a random assortment of cards, with different odds of finding specific rarities. All modern packs guarantee at least one rare per pack. For “Fallen Empires” packs had 8 cards, 6 six of which were always common, 1 that was always uncommon, and one the was either a rare or an uncommon. That’s right, young Dale wasn’t even guaranteed a rare when opening a pack but I was thrilled when I got one because I knew it was something special. I would buy packs of Fallen Empires for $2 in a vending machine at the mall. Malls were these places where… I’m just kidding. Based on the 50% chance to get a rare, I knew I had a 1 in 72 chance of getting a specific rare card that I was looking for. In theory, the least amount of money I statistically could have spent to collect a full set was $144, or 72 packs. However, I was able to complete my set for much less because I could trade unwanted cards to friends for cards I was missing. Once I had my set I could move on to the next as M:tG releases an average of 4 sets a year, or around 1,000 unique cards each year.

I bring all of this up because a pack of M:tG cards is a pretty good analog for a loot box in video games. If you aren’t aware, a “loot box” is a catch-all name for digital packs that are sold as microtransactions in free-to-play or full price games. They vary widely in price, contents, and offerings, but all have one thing in common: the contents are random. Loot boxes have faced a lot of criticism recently as a gambling mechanic, so let’s take a look at some of the reasons why.

The most popular game to feature loot boxes is FIFA 2021. They call their loot boxes “packs” (just like Magic). These packs contain soccer players for the wildly popular online mode FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) 2021. In this mode you use the players you’ve obtained to build a team that competes against other players who’ve done the same. All of this sounds pretty simple until you look at the pack store.

There are 37 different packs that can be purchased containing players. It is $1 for 100 FIFA Ultimate Team points (the proprietary store currency used to purchase said packs), but that ratio changes the more you buy. How convenient! Each of the 37 packs has a different cost, anywhere from 75 FUT points to 2,500 FUT points, and they each offer different players, consumables, and other resources all at wildly different probabilities of obtaining them. All of this is to try to make the best team of the over 10,000 different player cards that are available. Obviously there aren’t 10,000 unique professional soccer players, so EA had to make multiple versions of certain players. In fact, there are 4 different versions of Messi that are rated in the top 50 FUT players. I wanted to explain all of this just so you can understand how unbelievably confusing this all is. In reality it’s actually even more complicated than all this, but I hope I’ve proved my point. EA doesn’t want you to understand how the loot boxes in FIFA work.

The very reasonable and easily understood FIFA points store

Here's an example of why that might be. In order to get the current best player (N’Golo Kanté from Chelsea) you have to spend at least $20 on a “Jumbo Rare Players” pack. Even then, you only have a 2.5% chance of getting a player with a rating of rating 90 or above (of which there are 687). Assuming even odds for all players (which is not a given, especially considering EA’s desire to obfuscate information), this means you’ll need to buy around 27,480 packs or $549,600 worth of FUT points to statistically guarantee receiving Kanté. It’s a good thing they offer that discount for buying more at once, huh?

EA doesn't want you to understand how the loot boxes in FIFA work.

Reading all of that, you must be thinking about how predatory this all sounds and that you’d be amazed if anyone actually participated. Unfortunately, opening packs and chasing rare cards is exhilarating and it always has been. Tiny Dale™ knew this while cracking Magic packs in the mall food court, and EA certainly knows this now. Last year alone EA made 1.62 billion dollars off of all the Ultimate Team modes in their various games last year, with FIFA making up a majority of that. That’s “Billion”, with a “B”. It’s an astronomical amount of money. If EA were a country, and its ultimate team revenue were its GDP, it would rank 11th in the world, nestled in between Canada and Russia. I wish this were surprising. I wish I were shocked by both this number and by the predatory practices EA has been using against FIFA fans eager to build the best team with their favorite players.

Speaking of FIFA players, I want to make it abundantly clear that if they want to play a soccer video game they are essentially trapped in this system. Other than the terribly named eFootball (formerly Pro Evolution Soccer), Soccer fans don’t really have another game to play. If players want to have any luck winning online, they’d better get to cracking packs. Otherwise some 12 year-old with daddy’s credit card and a 99 ranked Ronaldo will mop the floor with them.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are obviously a ton of changes EA could implement to make this less predatory but I’m not going to talk about any of those. EA doesn’t want to make the system easier to understand, or reduce card and pack counts, or to increase the odds of getting a specific player. I’m instead going to talk about my favorite waffle producer: Belgium. While Belgium wasn’t the first country to implement laws around loot boxes (they were the 4th), they are without question the strictest. They’ve gone so far as to declare loot boxes a form of illegal gambling. Any Belgian who purchases a loot box is considered in violation of this law.

It doesn't have to be this way.

I think this is a great first step, but we can do better in the United States. There is a proposed bill (S.1629) in the U.S. Senate to “regulate certain pay-to-win microtransactions and sales of loot boxes in interactive digital entertainment products, and for other purposes”. However, these provisions only apply if a game is targeted towards minors. We could go further and outlaw this as an anti-consumer practice. If we don’t want to go that far, we could legally require the implementation of “pity timers” where you’re guaranteed to get a specific game piece after buying some number of loot boxes. We could also go the same route as Japan, where companies must publish the odds and average amount you’ll need to spend to get a specific game piece. Any or all of these practices would go a long way towards making loot boxes, digital card packs, and other pay-to-win mechanics less predatory and more consumer friendly.

All of these practices could go a long way towards making sure that the Tiny Dales (or Liams, or Emmas, or whatever people are naming kids these days) still get that sense of joy every time they open a digital pack for their favorite games. And I hope some of them are implemented, because as much as I know EA doesn’t deserve $1.62B a year, I know even more that every gamer deserves that special feeling when they pull the exact card or player they were hoping for. And it shouldn’t cost them $549k to get it.

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If you feel passionately about this topic and live in the US, you can find contact info for your state representative here: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative