Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: GuestIf you don't want to gamble to get something good just go to the market and buy the item you're after.

You do realize that the overwhelming majority of these lootbox-driven games makes these desirable items available ONLY through gambling, yes?

Yes, I have no problem with gambling. The way I see it is everything Valve sells is completely unneeded to have a full experience in the game. If you want to play your chances to get a skin I have zero issues with that any more than I have zero issues with going to your local convenience store to buy a lottery ticket. If it was required to have a full experience in the game I would feel otherwise.

I don't have a problem with gambling, either. But any game containing gambling mechanics would need to get an automatic NC17 rating to bring it in line with real-life gambling laws. Also the developers would need to publish the drop lists including the chances for any item to drop, just as casinos are required to tell you your chances to win.

Why people here defend the continued desire of Valve and other developers to lure minors into gambling is beyond me, really. Can't have the cake and eat it. If developers want to cash in on human weakness, they need to accept that the cannot sell such a game to minors, period.

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Quoting: einherjarPut the skins in the Community market and sell them for money to the gamers.
Why is that so difficult?

Lootboxes are more profitable. People want this awesome shiny weapon skin that drops only from these silly boxes, so they open box, after box, after box. Just. One. More. Box. It. Must. Drop. Eventually.... MUST!!! And with every mouse-click, 3-5 bucks go down the drain and more of the useless junk that makes up 99.999% of the drop-table fills the player's inventory...

When they finally get it, they have not realized that they spent $300 on that awesome shiny weapon skin.

If they'd sell that weapon skin in the store with a $300 pricetag, players would (rightfully so) call them clinically insane.

Yes, it's essentially fraud, but since it's not (yet) illegal, I guess the term being used by them is "ingenious business model"

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Quoting: GuestIf you don't want to gamble to get something good just go to the market and buy the item you're after.

You do realize that the overwhelming majority of these lootbox-driven games makes these desirable items available ONLY through gambling, yes?

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Quoting: PatolaGame developers/publishers might not be the most honest people, but giving power to politicians to rule over the gaming market is the worst possible thing to do. Just give time for the market to go where users want. More regulation causes less competition, which slows or even prevents that process.

I have NO idea why people in this time and age still believe in the "free markets will solve it all" paradigm, when it clearly doesn't and all it has ever done was creating a small group of people having obscene power and even more obscene wealth, while the large rest works double-income and double-jobs and STILL struggle to pay their bills.

Honestly, people need to start reading a few beginner's economics textbooks. Even the god of free-market believers, Adam Smith, stated back then that free markets only work if no market participant has any power to influence EITHER the supply or demand side of the market. Which is CLEARLY not the case in pretty much any real-life market, which is why our only hope to get halfway fair results is regulating them. Humans are by nature greedy, egoistic and selfish, which is why every sufficiently large (read: powerful) business is evil. That's the entire reason why our society needs laws to begin with. If we'd all be nice and altruistic, we wouldn't need a criminal code, no? I fail super hard to understand why people think we wouldn't need regulations for the economy, when we CLEARLY need them for anything else.

Valve is the sheer embodiment of a company having waaaaaay too much power and influence. And while I otherwise will credit them for supporting our platform, this lootbox thing is an absolute jerk move to circumvent the spiirt of an attempt to curb disgusting, nasty and evil business practices that are designed to screw over customers for fun and profit.

Seriously, do people like you cry foul that we came up with regulation for real-life gambling, too?

/rant

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Yeah, since EA chose to f-up Origin again to the degree that it currently doesn't run in Linux, and people can't play Sims 4 for that reason, maybe it's time to dust the older Sims titles!

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Anyone knows if the newer Origin versions are expected to work again, anytime soon?

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I guess this list points out nicely why we need Proton so badly, and people need to stop bashing it. I don't think we can sell Linux as a viable gaming platform to interested users, if we have to tell them that only 25% of best-selling games work on it. In an ideal world, all games would work on all platforms, but alas, that's not the case. And with our 1% market share, it's not that we'd exactly be in a strong position to tell devs to release native ports.

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Quoting: fagnerlnIs hypocrisy that a defensor of freedom want a intervention from state.

Preventing people from abusing their freedoms is one of the most basic reasons for governments (and thus, laws) to exist in the first place. If we wouldn't have laws preventing you, it would be in your "freedom" to murder somebody because you don't like their face. Humans are by nature greedy and egoistic. They one thing that can guarantee a stable society is a strong government that steps in when people abuse their power and makes some laws telling them not to.

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I can understand some of the points made in the OP, but this doesn't change the fact that preventing people from re-selling goods they legally BOUGHT is fundamentally wrong. It's just businesses abusing technology (DRM in this case) to enforce despicable business practices that wouldn't stand for 5 mins in court if we were talking about physical goods. Why it took the courts so long to toss out that ridiculous claim that buying games on Steam would be a "subscription" when it's clearly not, is beyond me.

Btw., economic theory demands prices going DOWN when a used-goods market is enabled, not up. Because used goods increase supply. If they'd try to enforce higher prices when there is a functioning used games market, people would buy less on Steam and more used games. That mechanic is the entire reason why Steam and other stores prevented a used games market from happening in the first place.

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Works fine for me on Ubuntu 18.04. Love the new features! :)

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