I personally don't know if "banning loot boxes" is a good way to stop "exploiting children", there are PLENTY other ways of exploiting children if you care to look around.
I just know USUALLY when gubmint gets their hands on something, it usually have 'unforeseen consequences', that needs even more gubmint effort to solve.
In any case, I think this should be up to the parents of said children to decide/regulate their child's behavior.
Fire away.... /ducking my head
Agree, maybe if the parents don’t either give the kid a credit card or a huge amount of in game cash, their wouldn’t be an issue.
Why is a republican in the business of ‘Banning things’.
Seems to me parents just shouldn’t have their kids’ phones hooked to a payment system. These things aren’t really taking advantage of kids, they’re taking advantage of lazy parents.
Oh God, when our daughter was 6 she racked up $800 in “micro-transactions” (my a$$) because her Mom had enabled it once then forgot to disable it. Got all the money back but learned a big lesson about all these games targeting kids. Disable the auto pay and lock it down.
They are worried about this? They won’t protect the country but they’re worried about video games? ‘Look what I did for you’.
Can we ban Bill Clinton to protect the children?
Does that mean in all the iPhone apps as well?
If they really want to protect children they should be Banning the NEA and Dept of Education
I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants to know: What’s a loot box?
Someone needs to edit that meme picture with inspector whatsis from Casablanca to say something about “Gambling going on in my video game, I’m shocked, SHOCKED”... Or the like.
A game that I’ve enjoyed playing (something warships) uses loot boxes to promote/profit from some of their ‘rare’ and (of course) overpowered ships. It would not surprise me if roleplaying games do the same with the ‘sword of infinite pwnage’ or ‘armor of infinite desire’, if you get my drift.
Either way, I’ve become convinced that the practice is predatory, and would prefer that the game companies just offer the sword of pwnage for $50, or whatever.
But that’s the thing, the gimmick. If they offer it for $50, there are a lot of people who will say ‘no way!’.
Offer it as a potential reward, loot box only $5 each, chance at other prizes inside, people will pay $100 for the dang thing and convince themselves it was a bargain, because they got some gems, a spare shield and some in game gold/trinkets on the side.
Not sure I want the gubmint muscling in on it either, but whatevs.
It is gambling, though, and any game company that tries to tell you otherwise is lying through their teeth.
This doesn’t need to be banned entirely, but it damn well should be made that any game with MTX automatically gets an “adult” rating for gambling.
This bill is a total waste of time.
Republicans should not be dictating what rewards exist in a video game.
$#!+heads.
Senator Josh should team up with Tipper Gore (wherever she is now...)and write a really restricting law to protect everyone from everything in games.
Maybe he should also ban casinos - from my psych class, one of the best ways to instill a habit is to provide rewards of varying amounts at random intervals....exactly what a slot machine does.