Big assumption there Yoss.
Unfortunately many parents do not know about these things. There is no formal education on them, no government led media campaign about it, no leaflets at the doctors or letters home from school.
How would they know? They look at the box and it says it is suitable for kids, if card details are entered it often isn't clear how and when these things can be accessed again.

I don't know how to setup those controls, I would guess most parents wouldn't even know to do so.

Secondly "actual gambling" suggests you totally misunderstand what is addictive about gambling and the negative effects.
Loot crates use the same emotional exploits as fixed odds betting machines and cost the user real world money so the causes and effects are identical. If anything it is worse because the one in a million addicts that hits big just gets in game content rather than a lump sum of money.

Like I have said before, classify this as gambling and it can be tackled alongside issues like fixed odds betting and online casinos.

Liveinadive wrote:

They look at the box and it says it is suitable for kids,

In fairness, you're making a big assumption yourself, there.

@Andy
Depends on the game I guess.
Given Battlefront is at the heart of a lot of this my mind does tend to go there. That is "Teen" rated, so a reasonable assumption is 13+.
FIFA 18 is E for everyone, probably the best selling title that contains loot boxes. ( I say probably, it most certainly is).

Certainly not the 18 rating that gambling has.
I think all games with loot crates should have the 18 red circle with line through it printed on the cover.

However as Sterling pointed out this week, games are now live services so what is printed on the box means nothing anymore as content can be added later that bypasses this.

@Yoss

I think people should know better unfortunately I think the reality is that they don't and that is where we need regulation.

A different issue but certainly related. My cousin shared a facebook post the other day, it had 10k+ comments. It was about the poster's kid playing Fortnite and they walked in the room and could hear a guy masturbating. Worst nightmare.
Things is the poster was clueless to the fact this was not something unique to Fortnite, they were telling people not to buy the game for their kids.
Now this is a different issue with different solutions but it shows how little parents actually understand about this tech.

I do agree with your points about giving kids smart phones etc though. However that is just an additional issue.

Andy wrote:

Liveinadive wrote:

@Andy Depends on the game I guess.

I meant the assumption that they have looked at the box and made any determination as to it’s suitability for children.

OK, well, yeah, there is a limit to what can be done.

There are laws against buying alcohol for minors, not sure if this is the same for gambling, again chuck loot boxes in with gambling and make things easier.

If your kid ended up in hospital drunk as a skunk questions would be asked.

Yoss" wrote:

I’d say that knowing about setting up payment controls on things should be a pretty common part of parenting these days. I’m sure more can be done to educate parents, but if you’re going to put your card details in a device that you’re going to hand over to your child, you should by now at least have an inkling that maybe you should stop them from being able to access those payment options.

So my non dickhead response to this, as it's being made again. Should be is not the same as reality. Absolutely tons of parents have little to no idea what punching their card details in to their kids PS4 means.

You need to add a payment method to validate a pre-paid PS+ code for example. So parents may add this having no idea that this then means that as well as their kid being able to play FIFA online, they can also bankrupt their parent purchasing FUT packs. They might not realise it will auto renew either.

There are plenty of people who are utterly technophobic, and they actively don't want to learn. Assuming these people know what entering your card details into a console once means is daft.

An awful lot of people really do have a blind spot about technology which results in normally sensible people being idiots.

People can't see past the technology side when in actual fact what people need to understand is really quite simple. If they imagined writing down the card number and pin and then handing it to the kid (which is precisely what they have done) they wouldn't do it. But because there's tech involved they seem to think it will be OK.

A basic level of education is required - I have no idea how it can be addressed.  When I was a kid we had the Tufty Club in school that taught how to keep safe on the roads. We need the same thing for cyber security.

There are a few basic simple rules to adhere too but finding a way to drill it into people - especially non technical people who missed all this at the right age - is tricky.

The internet requires a strong, global method of authentication , and until  that is solved, and the population knows how to keep safe,  we are going to have to deal with fraud, bullying, extortion etc at an increasing rate.

Anonymity in certain situations can be retained as long as a secure trusted method of authentication exists. For now, that isn't there. I suspect blockchain technology will be part of a solution.

No. I'm not saying I have the answer, I'm saying that your belief in peoples level of understanding of technology is very much misplaced, and so the foundations of where your argument is coming from are not solid.

That isn't my argument at all. If it was, I wouldn't be concerned about adults who are caught up in this.

Diluted Dante wrote:

That isn't my argument at all. If it was, I wouldn't be concerned about adults who are caught up in this.

The last couple of pages seemed to be focused on children’s access, but w/e. As I said before, I can’t really be arsed with this, I was just answering Andy’s question.

Yossarian wrote:

Your argument is essentially ‘people may not understand X, and through that lack of understanding, may leave their children open to harm from X, therefore X should be banned’.

No, that's the plot of an X-Men film.

For the sole reason that Logan and Deadpool wouldn't have been made without them, proving that Sony can, once in a blue moon, do something decent with the licence.

Well, whoever it was, they made a lot of crap.

Yes, children's access is part of the issue. That doesn't mean it's all of the issue.

Ooooh