The most important thing to remember about the loot box controversies of 2017 is that game publishers and developers are at a huge advantage when it comes to judging how much any of this noise actually matters.
That’s because business is about what people do, not what they say. Player behavior is more important than player speech. An angry comment attached to an account that has spent $80 on loot boxes for a particular game says something, but the $80 speaks much louder than the comment itself.
The industry knows much more about this issue than anyone else, because it has the data. We don’t know how many people are buying which games unless the publishers release that information, and conversion rates when it comes to microtransactions are almost never shared. Very few gaming companies cared if you complained publicly, as long as you kept buying or playing.
That was the case, at least, before Star Wars Battlefront 2.
Everything has changed
Star Wars Battlefront 2 feels like it was designed around its economy, and not the other way around. The progression system was tied to loot boxes and a grind that felt far too long, and much of the friction from these systems could be removed if you were willing to spend money. This wasn’t a system that was designed for fun as much as it was designed for profits.
At launch, players hated the progression system, and the feedback was so loud, constant and one-sided that their actual behavior might not have mattered as much as it might have in other circumstances. What the players said became just as important.
The player anger became the story to such a degree that Disney might have felt that EA was harming the Star Wars brand itself. Angering Disney is only slightly less scary than angering the mob, but may be slightly more dangerous when it comes to business.
“Disney’s name wasn’t mentioned in any of these announcements,” we wrote about the ongoing Battlefront 2 disaster. “It didn’t need to be: There’s already precedent for how the company exerts its control. Word that Disney Interactive Media chairman Jimmy Pitaro made a call to EA head Andrew Wilson about the Battlefront 2 situation only makes it seem more likely that this was as much Disney’s call as it was EA’s.”
Players are now having such an immediate and negative reaction to the very idea of loot boxes that systems and economies that have been in place for years are suddenly becoming controversial almost in retrospect. There have been situations where the presentation of loot boxes has become the story, even if what’s actually in them isn’t mentioned. The loot box economy of Shadow of War is part of the reason the game felt so bloated, even though you could game the system fairly easily.
There are legal angles to consider as well. The question of whether spending real money for random virtual objects should be considered gambling keeps coming up, and our recent analysis of the cost of playing Hearthstone used data from the game’s mandatory disclosures from China about your chances of finding certain cards.
Saying these are virtual items is only part of the story, as people are spending real money on randomized items that can then be bought or sold using even more real money. This year, we saw gambling-related controversies that center on loot boxes, and PUBG has allowed players to profit from selling the rarest items they find in loot boxes on the Steam marketplace. In the case of games like PUBG, where Valve takes a cut from the sale of the game while also operating the marketplace that sells both the boxes and the items found within them, the biggest winner is always going to be the house.
Expect the best systems to be invisible
But while these business practices are under more scrutiny, the best loot box or free-to-play economies continue to make an obscene amount of money for the company’s involved without raising much of a stink from players.
The interest in Overwatch skins and emotes has never been greater, and their lack of actual in-game impact outside of aesthetics has limited the controversies around them. No one seems to talk about the loot boxes in PUBG that much anymore, and trading card games have the real-world examples of Magic: The Gathering and even baseball cards behind them. Warframe offers randomized products, but is largely seen as a game that does free-to-play very well.
Most players don’t actually hate loot boxes enough to skip a game completely due to their inclusion, what they hate is the idea that other people may be buying an advantage they haven’t earned. Or maybe they get angry because, like Battlefront 2, the progression systems themselves seem designed to push them toward microtransactions. This year’s Need for Speed and Forza releases both felt like they were designed around a grind that can be relieved through spending money.
It’s possible, though unlikely, that legal action around loot boxes will be taken in the United States in 2018. Perhaps it won’t be necessary. Maybe this year’s failed loot box experiments will encourage the industry to rethink how these systems are implemented, or what players are willing to put up with. Blizzard has mastered the art of the loot box, and is rarely the object of sustained player anger. What EA has done for loot boxes is show just how high the stakes can be, and how much you can lose if you become greedy with your progression systems.
Loot boxes aren’t going anywhere, but how they’re used in the future is likely to favor Blizzard’s approach vs. EA’s. It’s what the data supports, after all. Even if we don’t see it.