@WarpZone Man, I am not like The One Percent; I'm in that bottom income bracket too. And, I don't play CCGs, but I understand the appeal, and I know a shit-ton of people who buy those packs with pleasure. Wizards is selling them something they want to buy.
@Aurich And I'm saying if spending money IS the appeal, why don't they just spend extra on the games that deserve it? Why should we need to extort it out of them, since spending more IS the draw?
If you like the CCG, then it does deserve the money. You don't spend that money on a new game because you don't want a new game. You want to keep playing the game you like.
These people have the ability to spend money on literally anything. Okay? You can literally SAVE LIVES with a thousand bucks here or there. And instead they choose to spend it on a game that they can't actually succeed in buying. And now we're talking about scrapping all the other business models of games in favor of CCG, because it's more lucrative.
Am I seriously the only one here who thinks feeding the entire video game industry to the whales is a bad idea?
This would be well and good and all... except for the GLARING oversight that y'all blatantly ignore with the constant bringing up of MTG: third party/player trade/selling.
Randomized stuff is annoying... but ok...
But randomized stuff that you can't sell if it's worthless to you... that you can only just throw away... that you know you will NEVER use ever... Not even for proxies. (ha! Chimney Imps HAVE a use!)
Then that might as well just be stealing the player's money.
Companies complain about RMT in MMOs all the time... but when RMT becomes popular is usually the fault of the company in charge... Because they created a "random exclusive" drop that is a cash sink.
Does Wizards complain about card shops or online stores selling cards by the single?
No.
Because they understand that people will actually play the game MORE if they can get the stuff they need/want to play it.
If that means putting up with "RMT" (cause Card stores are the RMT of MTG) then that's good for the overall health of the game.
First of all, I don't see why everyone is so upset that Extra Credits is doing an episode about CCGs.
EC is about learning more about games and the industry around them, and the collectible style of games is a part of that.
Yes, they've mostly been talking about the ups of CCGs, but this is only the first half of the subject. Is it that impossible to believe that they just might not have had time to explore both sides of the subject yet?
@WarpZone
On-disc DLC is dishonest. You buy a game, and then you have to pay more to unlock things that are clearly already included in the game you bought.
A CCG will honestly tell you straight up that this game is about "wasting money" and wasting that money is your choice when you start playing the game. They will never keep anything from you, that should have been included, just to get a bit of extra money.
The equivalence to on-disc DLC for a collectible cardgame would be something like...
Say you buy a Magic starter deck, but you can't use the mechanic "trample" until you pay for it, even though the mechanic is clearly included in the deck.
Booster packs are more like content-DLC.
Say you buy Skyrim. Then you pay $5 for that sweet armor pack. And $5 for a dagger. And $5 for a cool bow...
Yes, okay, booster packs are randomized, so it's more like paying $5 for a chance to get that armor, or the dagger, or the bow, or a sword, or a new spell, and so on...
Sometimes you get something you already have, but you were already told that such things happen when you walked out of the store with the boxed game.
And the rest of the argument is getting a bit too strawy.
Buying 1000 copies of the same game is not the same as buying collectibles. Buy extra copies of a game and you still have the exact same game, only several times. Once you've played that game, all the other 999 copies are useless.
Spend that money on collectibles and you have a single game, but one that is so much more expansive than that single game. Sure, you'll probably have a lot of useless collectible pieces there too, but they're still "less useless" than 999 copies of a game that you only actually ever needed to buy once.
(For example: I used to organize home-made drafts with my old commons and uncommons in Magic. Grabbing semi-random cards and sorting them into "booster packs" and drafting with my friends. Even more card randomness than a regular draft, at no extra cost for anyone and suddenly all those "useless" cards weren't useless anymore. For that one night, they were more fun than the cards I actually wanted when I bought the boosters.)
And please tell me, who ever said that we should scrap all the other business models?
Collectible Games are one of many business models, with pros and cons just like everything else. I personally believe that there will always be "sell and forget" games, because they're probably the safest and easiest way of making money.
You sell a product, someone buys it. Boom. Now you have money and you don't have to spend that money on constantly expanding the product you just sold.
As for what people choose to spend their money on... As long as they know that the game they're wasting their money on is a collectible game and they're okay with that, what's the problem?
@thisbymaster
I've got some bad news for you. Even physical collectible games aren't randomized in a fair way. Magic the Gathering, for example, has a system for which cards end up where to prevent too many popular cards ending up in one store while another gets none. Some people have proven this by taking factory sealed boxes and accurately predicting which rare card is in the booster they're about to open based on the booster's position within the box. (As well as the box number or something, I don't know how the system works, but obviously they do...)
@Tairn79
I think Wizards does this with MtG Online. I know SOMEONE does at least...
There is no dystopian future where videogames are only for the fat cats (or even the average income cats). The entire premise of the microtransaction business model is that putting even a perfectly reasonable financial barrier between the customer and your game is less lucrative than letting the customer pay what they want/can afford even nothing. The whole industry saw that happen, everyone took that on board. Collectable games will always be one option for people who enjoy its traits.
You could, in principle, simply sell each set of Magic cards as a complete collection. You would buy four copies of each card in the set, so one set of cards would be somewhere between 600 and 1200 cards, for big/small sets, and be able to build literally every possible deck for constructed in this way.
Now, drafting is a different beast (though you could do it with boxed sets of cards; it is possible to "make your own" drafts, and indeed people do this), but the actual constructed format of the game would indeed benefit massively from such in the sense that all players would have to do is buy a set and run with it.
It is a strictly anti-consumer thing to do.
CCGs are just a form of gambling in the end.
@Aurich: This is actually false. F2P is a false god. A bunch of the companies which started the whole trend - the social gaming companies - have had severe problems.
It isn't to say that F2P can't make you money, but that F2P is not a good way to make money for a large swath of games.
I tend to agree with some of the other commenters regarding CCGs and their dishonesty. But I will give Extra Credits the benefit of the doubt. They know a lot more about game design than me. Ultimately, any game model has the potential to be worked in a non-exploitative, fun way. I'd like to see just how EC thinks it can be done.
I don't really know anything about social games, by which I assume you mean like facebook and mobile games, but (off the top of my head) DDO, LotRO, CO, Everquest 2, SWtOR, Team Fortress 2, RO, STO, DCUO, AoC, and Tera are all more profitable as F2P than they ever were when they had an entrance fee, and it makes sense.
@deworde: When is trading ever fun? It's just an expression of the frustration of not having what you want yet, coupled with the work required to achieve that goal. There's a Minecraft-like satisfaction at the end of the process, where you look at your wardrobe full of cards and can claim that you do now have them all despite the adversity faced. But unlike Minecraft, the goals are not your own, but are instead manufactured by the system you placed yourself in, so even this is not worth it as the next expansion comes out and all those cards become functionally useless.
It is never worth it to trade. It is always better to just be able to be satisfied with what you have or be able to procure the necessary resources with minimal cost/effort.
@Titanium Dragon:
Selling entire sets of cards as one package would make Magic better, but not great.
The thing that puts Dominion ahead of Magic is its differing approach to preventing the metagame from getting stale. Magic and all the other TCGs prevent a stale meta by introducing new mechanics each set whilst simultaneously scrapping previous sets, which forces players to move onto new strategies, or at least adapt their old ones to the new cards. This is ridiculously wasteful.
Dominion on the other hand prevents a stale meta by randomly selecting a small subset of the total card pool to play with each game. Admittedly this does restrict the total number of card interactions substantially, as the players have to be able to parse the new pool at the beginning of each game, but it completely removes the need for artificial card scarcity and forced obsolescence.
This is why drafting in Magic is so good. But I'm not sure how you'd extend the philosophy into constructed such that it would be easy to setup and play.
First, you'd have to nominate which sets are being played with (and stop splurging out new sets all the time).
Second, commons would have to include all the cards required to support all the main strategies and be accessible to all players.
Third, your rares and uncommons would then be limited to the players. Uncommons not randomly decided upon could not be used. And rares would be randomly determined and also limited in number for the entire player pool, so players would have to make trade-offs if they wished to build their decks around popular rares and could also build around unpopular rares for little cost if no-one else is interested in them. This would probably work around some sort of rare per deck auctioning system, where people willing to sacrifice rare spots in their decks would pick up the popular rares.
So the limitations on rares and uncommons in this format would guide and challenge player strategy, whilst the card list itself would be able to be known before the construction and players could still plan ahead, as opposed to drafting.
The card pool itself would have to contain disproportionate amounts of commons and uncommons to rares. But after that has been taken into account, a boxed pool of each set being used could be supplied for the players without having to gamble on the boosters and the set itself could be reused between different competitions. Also players could prebuild decks filled with their own commons and uncommons matching this set, and then fill out with rares on the day.
In this way, you could run a constructed tournament without needing everyone to shell out for different sets over and over whilst also preventing a stale metagame by changing the battlefield for each conflict.
I'm surprised that no one has yet pointed out that this episode was disappointing because it offered no insight. Every part of this monetization model is pretty obvious from the word go.
However, I believe in this episode James is promoting a Skinner box technique.
In operant and classical conditioning, there is something called Extinction. When a conditioned behavior no longer produces the desired stimulus, or no longer removes the noxious stimulus, that behavior becomes less and less common until it is no longer done. The trick is that when a reward is given every time a behavior is done, that behavior is easy to extinguish. When that reward is intermittently given, the behavior is not easily extinguished. (I am intentionally oversimplifying a bit for brevity.)
The classic example is to consider a soda machine and a slot machine as examples of these behaviors. (Neither technically fits the bill, but they are useful as teaching tools.) If a soda machine fails to give me the reward (my drink) one time, I am highly unlikely to give the machine another dollar. And if the machine fails to reward me with a soda twice, I'll probably never use it again. A slot machine, however, rewards a gambler intermittently. We see player after player dunk more and more of their money, hooked on a behavior which has become destructive by a machine that promises an occasional reward. Even knowledge that the machine is set to take more money than it puts out doesn't stop the gambler. And if the slot machine doesn't pay out this spin, it becomes just a little harder to quit.
Now, please, I am not stating that buying packs of MtG or Mass Effect Multiplayer packs is the same thing as having a gambling addiction. (And if you have a gambling addiction, please get help.) If the player knows your monetization model ahead of time and goes forward anyway, that's their decision to make.
What I want to point out is that it is an elegant behaviorist technique being applied to players, and it should be considered exactly that. This monetization model is no less a "Skinner box" technique than that which EC called out in their earlier shows, only now, it's not affecting a player's gaming time. It's hitting their wallet.
I tend to agree with some of the other commenters regarding CCGs and their dishonesty. But I will give Extra Credits the benefit of the doubt. They know a lot more about game design than me. Ultimately, any game model has the potential to be worked in a non-exploitative, fun way. I'd like to see just how EC thinks it can be done.
My confusion was just that they said next week they'd talk about the dangerous and exploitative ways this might be used, which seems like what this episode was about.
@Aurich: Sure, but that's because they weren't actually worth paying for, and lest we forget, there's some selection bias when you list off games like this - you remember the games that are still alive.
What about City of Heroes, which saw a boost in profitability but still wasn't leaving open?
And then there are games like The Secret World, which went buy to play ALA GW2.
@Discrider: Any game will, eventually, become "stale" to some extent. Dominion and Magic are no different; both have to release expansions to keep people shifting strategies. Dominion's "trick" for preventing staleness doesn't actually ultimately do so, and most of the time, there are at least a few dead cards on the table, meaning that you won't even have ten different cards every game for most intents and purposes. This isn't to say the game becomes bad, but I think once you've hit the "stale" point Magic is still a better game than Dominion, at least in a good play environment where no one deck dominates all others (there have been points in Magic history where there was a dominant deck which would have made a static environment very bad).
Drafting in Magic IS excellent, and is as fun as constructed play. Indeed, draft is a somewhat coincidental addition to Magic; it didn't exist at first, and it was only much later on that it became a real thing and was specifically designed for.
Magic would work just fine for constructed as boxed set type stuff, but a game that was designed soley for drafting would have a very different sort of card distribution and setup, I think. I could see designing a game around drafting, though; have a big deck of commons, a smaller deck of uncommons, and a smaller still deck of rares. Or, on the computer, it would be even simpler, as you could have the computer run packs to set them up in specific ways.
For constructed, it would work just fine for each individual player to just own their own set of cards and bring them to play with as a deck. As far as a game goes, at any rate.
I'm not calling WotC evil for doing things the way that they do, but frankly, Magic isn't worth the money you have to spend on it to play constructed.
@The Doc CC: The government has laws regulating gambling pretty strictly precisely because of this whole psychological aspect. Do you think that they should scrutinize things like this just as closely?
@TitaniumDragon No, I would not engage in the same level of regulation. Though both a slot machine and a booster pack of cards are using the same psychological tactic, there are times when a difference in degree can be a difference in kind. Additionally, since gambling is strictly a monetary bet, and buying these other products is a purchase, there is a second difference. (A lottery ticket is still just a bet disguised as a purchase.) I intended the analogy to show that collectibles use the same operant conditioning techniques that EC was saying gameplay should not use to keep you playing, but in this case, they're being used to keep you paying.
I am assuming, of course, that the company selling the randomized product is not engaging in other shady business that falls under other laws. For example, if the product which is randomized is being misrepresented, that's fraud, regardless of whether it's sold in randomized packs or not.
At all: Since everyone has to draw the MtG comparisons, I also want to add that Rich Garfield and his original crew way back when in the dark ages spoke about how they never expected MtG to do what it did. In short, everything we think -now- about how MtG is purchased was never envisioned by its creators. They expected to sell you maybe two starter decks (remember those?) and a couple of boosters. WotC originally severely underestimated both the power of its monetization scheme and the competitiveness of its player base.
Even other CCGs, most of which failed, found other fans. And those fans rarely bought a couple of starter decks and a couple of boosters. Ask anyone who played CCGs in the late 90's about the "game they never got anyone else to play but bought a bunch of cards for anyway." That monetization scheme is powerful.
@The Doc CC: Thing is though, while yes, you aren't using money directly, it is still the same thing, getting randomly rewarded with something with a high real world value based on directly purchasing something.
It is, of course, absolutely true that MTG was never expected to do what it did. WotC did not expect everyone and their dog to buy every Magic card they could get their hands on. But it is worth noting that Magic DID succeed while most failed, and that is partially because Magic was ridiculously fun - and it only got better over time as they actually learned how to properly build the game. It wasn't intended as an addictive scheme from the get go.
However, today that is a major part of their design. They added in mythic rares, foils, and changed the power distribution curve of cards, all things which resulted in rares becoming more important (and more expensive). In 2005, Umezawa's Jitte at $20 each was seen as utterly insane for a card which was still in/just left print. There were cards which were as much as $60-80 for a while per card in more recent times, which is absurd. Magic decks went from costing a couple hundred bucks to costing $350-600. Right now, for instance, just looking up Esper Control, it is a $600 deck. That's insane, and it is all standard cards. And that isn't the only dominant $600 standard deck. And that's ignoring the fact that sometimes it is better to metagame and switch decks, which can mean anywhere from shelling out an extra $150-350 or even more, depending on which deck you switch to.
@TitaniumDragon Yes, I know how much a tourney deck of MtG cards costs, and it is a part of the game I actively dislike. Now, you are by no means obligated to playing tourney decks, are you? Should your friends be willing to play a tightly controlled draft environment or a pauper's game, MtG can be cheaper than any game short of RPGs that put their ruleset online for free. Players -choose- to walk into that field. Don't want to shell out that much for MtG? Don't.
Heck, want to play "tourney" MtG with your friends for less than twenty dollars? Buy a bunch of lands and proxy everything. Why not? Every card is online.
You won't be playing at tournaments, but nothing stops your friends from gathering around the kitchen table and keeping it cheap.
By analogy, I fence. If I want to fence on the basketball court at the YMCA, my layout for equipment will be a tiny fraction of if I want to buy FIE legal tournament gear. I've convinced some of my friends to fence, and they own practice gear. A practice electrical weapon can be as cheap as $50 USD, compared to several hundred for a tournament legal weapon. The same costs are present in the rest of the gear. Do any of my friends -have- to shell out for FIE tournament gear to enjoy the sport? Categorically, no.
We are certainly in agreement that the same technique is being used, but I will repeat that a difference in scale can be a difference in kind. WotC is definitely doing what a slot machine does, but the compulsive gambler is suffering far more harm, and the MtG player who paid out for those tourney cards has something to show for it. He got to play a fun game, for one, and secondly he can at least recoup some of those losses because he can resell the cards. He has right of first sale, something a gambler does not have.
So two differences of kind: 1) right of first sale, and 2) purchase as opposed to bet.
Firstly, it is the big lie. "Oh, Magic can be affordable... if you don't actually play it." I mean, that's more or less what you're saying here; tourney decks are the game in constructed, and they're what the game was built with in mind (along with limited). You aren't playing the real, best version of the game doing it that way, and it is going to have odd imbalances because certain types of cards aren't found in pauper formats and other such things.
In the end, if you want to play Magic as the "build the deck you want to build and beat people with it" game, it is incredibly expensive.
And yes, there are other, dubious options, like, say, Magic Workstation, which basically amounts to proxying. And frankly pretty much everyone does it, because there's no other reasonable way to test decks. But a lot of the fun of Magic for many players is, you know, actually playing against other players who are trying to win. Casual magic is okay, if you never get too good... but tournament Magic is a huge thing, heavily pushed for, and is where everything really clicks into place. Everything from your local FNM to major tournaments.
And lest we forget, ti costs money to play in those as well, on top of your initial investment. Those, however, are not about addiction - payouts aren't random, and tournaments are going to cost money to run and play in. That is more than fair enough. But the actual game itself, the price is purely driven by artifical scarcity.
Shelling out for practice gear for fencing is fundamentally different from magic. Yeah, you don't, because you're still playing the same game. If you don't sell out for Magic, though, aside from some underground online Magic arenas (okay, they aren't that underground, but still), you're paying. A lot. Even drafting is expensive, though less so than constructed.
As for "difference in scale being a difference in kind": Not really. They're he same thing, more or less. Gambling is about entertainment as well ostensibly, after all, and many gamblers will tell you they had fun with the one armed bandit as it ate their money. And lest we forget you recoup some of your losses in gambling as well - you don't lose every game, but the house wins in the end - the same as with Magic.
And it is worth remembering, purchasing collectibles basically IS betting on their future value. You can't really consider paying for a collectible with an eye towards selling it anything else.
@TitaniumDragon: How is any of that a problem for my point of view? Yes, lots of players do -exactly- what you're describing, and if you -choose- to enter that world, so be it. So any declaration of "You're doing Magic wrong!" amounts to, "You're doing Magic in a way I disagree with!"
Also, I have to directly contradict where you've said that playing to win isn't done with proxies and all the other expedients of "not-paying-for-Magic." I've seen a healthy, viciously competitive tourney scene in Mexico, specifically in Jalisco, where the players rarely have US levels of disposable income. As a cultural more, they accept things like proxies and the like because of the lower level of free money. Does WotC pull out and stop selling MtG? Far from it - they sanction events and the like because they still make some sales, and making some sales is better than not. So the statement that Magic -has- to be the way you describe is clearly proven to be false, because at least in Jalisco, it is -not- that way.
In simplest terms, what you've described is your experience of the game, which is not what it MUST be, and at least within one locale I've seen, it is NOT how the game is played and purchased.
Frankly, we've talked past each other at the level of premise, so a discussion of the conclusions drawn from those premises is not going to go anywhere.
So, succinctly, there are two differences in kind between gambling and purchasing a CCG - because, really, it's not ALL about Magic. The first difference in kind is that one is a purchase - you BUY those cards, they're a durable good, and you retain your rights. Gamblers get a straight-up bet. Second, since the good is durable, the financial aspects are more akin to a speculation than an outright bet, plus at worst you -still own a physical product-, as opposed to a fleeting, one-time probability to win more money.
And as for dismissing "a difference in scale becomes a difference in kind," we see that commonly in many fields. In my own, it's often, "the poison is in the dose." Do we see large groups of people made homeless because they were addicted to opening MtG boosters? (There's always one or two idiots, but there's a massive difference from "Someone goes broke buying a CCG" and the levels of gambling addiction in the US or abroad.) Does organized crime get involved? Does the amount of money changing hands at a Pro MtG tourney come close to a casino's nightly take, let alone volume? Did multiple tribes and several major cities get built just on the small house take on games of MtG?
Free to play must be exterminated, it's the cancer of gaming... the absolute most disgusting thing that has ever been introduced to the digital market.
Some people may love F2P games and there may even be a few good games out there, but all I can see are greedy suits looking at the microtransactions while attempting to figure out how they can make people pay alot of money for something that has very little value.
I dislike F2P because I expect developers to get incredibly greedy and design their games specefically to milk the players.
@The Doc CC: No, we don't see massive numbers of homeless people from collectable games... but that's not especially meaningful, and we have all heard the horror stories about the people who spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on "free to play" games. The kids, especially, which makes you wonder what will happen when they get older and get credit cards of their own.
And yes, it is true that there are SOME differences. That being said, it is still a deliberately abusive system. Is it as abusive as gambling? It can be. I think there is certainly some space for regulation, and I know that there are games (Neverwinter, for instance) which sell boxes containing random items which don't explain the payout distribution of said items in any sort of obvious manner, which probably -should- be illegal.
I don't necessarily have all that much of an issue with it, but I think it is a dubious business practice which deserves closer scrutiny by the government than it presently recieves due to its vast potential for abuse.
And I was not dismissing the principle in general; I am well aware of the dose makes the poison (indeed, I spoke with someone about it elsewhere earlier today) and have exchanged jokes about "the solution to pollution is dilution". The catch is, however, that the EPA actually DOES prevent people from merely diluting waste in vast quantities of water because it is wasteful, even though, technically speaking, it would put it below their guidelines and not be particularly harmful directly - it still IS harmful, though, because of the waste that it produces.
And the thing is, there's a scale here, too. A CCG like Magic, you get some sort of physical good. But with MTGO, for instance, you do not; you are getting cards credited to your account, but you aren't recieving any sort of tangible good, and if MTGO went under, you'd have nothing. The same is true of most video games which include collectables; there is no physical, real-world good linked to them in most cases.
You're saying that the fact that CCGs aren't as big as gambling makes them different, but just because not too many people buy, say, scam crystal products or penis pills doesn't mean we don't shut them down when they make false claims. And Magic makes billions of dollars per year, so it isn't exactly tiny; it is produced and distributed in a very different way than gambling is done, but that doesn't mean that the market isn't enormous. Most casinos make considerably less money than WotC does on a yearly basis from Magic alone.
@TitaniumDragon: So we're agreed eventually a big enough difference in scale is one in kind?
First point: the EPA does allow a company to produce a certain amount of air pollution and dilute it in the sky, where certain sinks can eventually negate it. To continue this example which has stopped being relevant to the original problem, in the climate change debate the problem is not that humanity produces methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases, but we produce them faster than the sinks for these gases can adjust. Again, scale makes a difference in kind.
It's impossible for Magic alone to make billions - Hasbro's net profits per year for all of its lines, which include all of Wizards of the Coast's lines, including D&D, Avalon Hill, Pokemon, and all Hasbro's lines including GI Joe, Tonka, Transformers, PlaySkool, Transformers, it's Star Wars toys, Milton Bradley's board games, and so on are around $300 M USD. WotC was sold - and came along with its Pokemon, D&D, MtG, SW RPG, and Avalon Hill licenses during the heydey of Magic, Pokemon, and the rewrite of D&D which would become 3rd Edition for $325 M USD. A company making *billions* would never be valued at such a price. Hasbro does not, to the best of my knowledge, release documents on how much each particular division makes.
The Bellagio alone - one casino - recorded $325 M USD in pre-tax profit alone in FY 2012.
One US casino made more profit than Wizards of the Coast's entire parent company. In short, one casino made more than the company that owns both MtG and Pokemon CCG's as a minor subdivision. To make sure it was a fair comparison, I compared profit to profit, not revenue to revenue, and to be fair, the Bellagio does more than just gambling. Now there are far more casinos than there are big-name CCGs, of which I could only namedrop about six: Netrunner, MtG, VtES, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh.
The difference in scale is not "Magic is bigger than some casinos." It's that Hasbro's entire business is dwarfed by just one of the major casinos. Foxwoods, which is going broke due to overambitious expansion but still could have been massively profitable had it not grown too wildly, rakes in more than fifty mil USD on slots alone. Given how many lines Hasbro have, I'd be very hesitant to think everything Wizards makes, combined, comes even close to that number.
By contrast, the lowball estimates in California of 0.5% of the population with a gambling problem losing $8k USD per year comes out to $844 M USD per year, about two and a half times Hasbro's entire profits and about one-fifth of the company's total revenues across all its non-game lines. This is California's lowest estimate - they also provide estimates as high as 3% and $15k USD per year, which would multiply the financial ruin by almost six. And that's just one state, about 11% of the US population.
So, no, the financials are not even close.
Last question: who bells the cat? Exactly -how- would you regulate these purchases? What possible method would their be of passing regulations to stop people from choosing to make these purchases?
Does Steam have to means-test me for disposable income if I buy a set number of packs of DLC? Does my local gaming store have to turn around and check to see whether I can afford that box of Warmachine minis? That's a strange-as-hell requisite at the POS which no other retail sales has to do. The supermarket doesn't have to check with the police and the MIB to see if I have any DUI's or a history of alcoholism before selling me a bottle of wine.
To head of an objection: Steam does not actually force me to submit proof that I am an adult. They can't. They can only ask me to state I am over 18. There is almost no way to stop a child from impersonating an adult and purchasing with that card if the adult has left that information available. How, exactly, would a company which sells a product for adults (say, a bottle of wine) be able to ensure the person hitting submit was in fact over 18 (21 for the wine)?
If the comments are limited to games which provide virtual goods, such as NWN and the method ME3 used in its in-game purchases for multiplayer, I'd go only so far as that full disclosure of the probabilities for each item should be released to the public and let them then make their choice. If the probabilities aren't known, we're in agreement. That's worse than what a casino does, since at least the casino tells you what the odds on that roulette wheel are and lets you take your chances. Other than that, how exactly is any of that supposed to be regulated?
Governments have long been stumped trying to find ways to avoid letting people purchase goods when their use has become problematic and have had no real headway. If you think you've cut Gordian's knot, I'm highly dubious.
Also, the healing crystals and penis pills line is a straw man argument.
@Dryden
While I agree with you that F2P often equates to pay-to-win, I don't think the model should be entirely eliminated. It's just been... massively exploited in smaller "throwaway" games where it's easier for companies to more or less get away with it without much complaint.
F2P works great for things like RuneScape - which as a generous amount of free-to-play content. Or pet sites like what Neopets used to be and what Subeta currently is (exemplary f2p/p2p model there - there are paid items and currency that can be bought, but once it's bought, it can be sold/traded/given away to ANYONE - so paid content isn't just limited to those with the extra money in their pockets.)
For casual games, like phone apps and FB games - the f2p model collapses from the player's perspective (and shines, from the company's perspective). All those "f2p" games we've been playing are just demos. Really, think about it. You've given a slice of content - enough to get you hooked, then "oop, if you REALLY want to play, cough up!" and many people (myself included, I will admit) have fallen into that trap of "well this is really fun, so sure here's $5 for some premium content" only to forget about the game a month or so later.
Now, I don't mind paying for quality content that I want.
I DO mind feeling like I'm being wrung out for cash (I'm looking at you, My Little Pony) - this is where most of these games stand. And people either don't bother complaining to the companies because eh, it was free to begin with and it's just a little game, or the companies just don't care because there's enough people already trapped in their skinner box that it's no biggie to lose a few people who just want more free stuff.
And that, right there, is the problem. I think players would be more eager to fork over their cash if they felt valued as players (imo, Subeta certainly does this. Supporting the site is a good chunk of the motivation for buying things from it.) and not sources of income.
tl;dr - F2P would work better if companies understood this:
Players want feel valued as players and as people, not as wallets.
People need to remember that F2P does not have to mean all the insidious (and frankly, easily avoided by discerning consumers) baggage that foolish devs have done with it. I could cite the numerous well-done F2P games, but most people know those, so I'll simply remind people that it exists, and has existed, for years outside of video games and people have completely adapted to it. Youtube is F2P. If we consider cable service like internet service, TV is F2P. People understand that they are paying the cost of being advertised to, and possibly buying said things if they want, in exchange for content, and they consider that entirely fair. That's not to excuse the bad F2P games though. The people who make those games should look at TV, Youtube, and the games that do it well (Okay, I'll just say them--League of Legends and Team Fortress 2) and realize you can make boatloads and money while actually pleasing your customers.
You could, in principle, simply sell each set of Magic cards as a complete collection. You would buy four copies of each card in the set, so one set of cards would be somewhere between 600 and 1200 cards, for big/small sets, and be able to build literally every possible deck for constructed in this way.
Now, drafting is a different beast (though you could do it with boxed sets of cards; it is possible to "make your own" drafts, and indeed people do this), but the actual constructed format of the game would indeed benefit massively from such in the sense that all players would have to do is buy a set and run with it.
It is a strictly anti-consumer thing to do.
CCGs are just a form of gambling in the end.
Yeah, anti-consumer doesn't mean what you think it means. But if you're basically just repurposing the term to mean "something that makes an experience cost more and become less reliable", I can see what you're aiming for. But suggesting I don't understand is incorrect.
I absolutely do understand your point, but I'd argue that game you describe is actually *less* fun at a casual level, and would never have had a tournament level, which from your other responses appears to be the only medium you consider "valid". Specifically, you say "I mean, that's more or less what you're saying here; tourney decks are the game in constructed, and they're what the game was built with in mind (along with limited)." This is wildly inaccurate on both counts, the ProTour wasn't even considered until Magic was a hit, the original idea being that someone would buy a starter deck and 3 boosters; and the number of people who play Magic at tourney level is dwarfed by the number of people who play Magic casually with a couple of decks at Kitchen Table or Schoolyard. Granted, official FNM stuff is higher now than it used to be, but the invested player is still a significantly small percentage of Magic's audience.
And regarding the casual level, opening a booster pack is fun. It has an innate sense of excitement that "grinding" out the best deck from the pool of 600 cards simply wouldn't have. It limits the amount of variables you have to consider initially. You might not enjoy it because you don't enjoy that feel, which I'll admit is the same one that gambling trades on, but that doesn't mean that it's not an enjoyable experience, or that trading on it is essentially a bad thing. We simply enjoy different things. I do understand that the aspect of Magic that you enjoy is compromised by the aspect of Magic that you don't enjoy, but that is inevitably what you get with a non-bespoke product. I personally hate it when I have to sink hours of my precious time into tedious scenario-building in order to set up a role-playing game, but I accept that that's part of the experience that some GM's love more than actually running the game.
@deworde: When is trading ever fun? It's just an expression of the frustration of not having what you want yet, coupled with the work required to achieve that goal. There's a Minecraft-like satisfaction at the end of the process, where you look at your wardrobe full of cards and can claim that you do now have them all despite the adversity faced. But unlike Minecraft, the goals are not your own, but are instead manufactured by the system you placed yourself in, so even this is not worth it as the next expansion comes out and all those cards become functionally useless.
It is never worth it to trade. It is always better to just be able to be satisfied with what you have or be able to procure the necessary resources with minimal cost/effort.
"If I don't enjoy it, how could anyone?". Trading Card systems where there *is no game* exist and do remarkably well. I'm not saying you have to enjoy it, but to say "This can't be fun for anyone because I feel like this about it" seems narcissitic. There are plenty of people, myself among them, who *enjoy the random experience* and swapping/sharing cards, just as there are people who would rather pay money to skip grinding for loot.
Posts
Am I seriously the only one here who thinks feeding the entire video game industry to the whales is a bad idea?
Randomized stuff is annoying... but ok...
But randomized stuff that you can't sell if it's worthless to you... that you can only just throw away... that you know you will NEVER use ever... Not even for proxies. (ha! Chimney Imps HAVE a use!)
Then that might as well just be stealing the player's money.
Companies complain about RMT in MMOs all the time... but when RMT becomes popular is usually the fault of the company in charge... Because they created a "random exclusive" drop that is a cash sink.
Does Wizards complain about card shops or online stores selling cards by the single?
No.
Because they understand that people will actually play the game MORE if they can get the stuff they need/want to play it.
If that means putting up with "RMT" (cause Card stores are the RMT of MTG) then that's good for the overall health of the game.
EC is about learning more about games and the industry around them, and the collectible style of games is a part of that.
Yes, they've mostly been talking about the ups of CCGs, but this is only the first half of the subject. Is it that impossible to believe that they just might not have had time to explore both sides of the subject yet?
@WarpZone
On-disc DLC is dishonest. You buy a game, and then you have to pay more to unlock things that are clearly already included in the game you bought.
A CCG will honestly tell you straight up that this game is about "wasting money" and wasting that money is your choice when you start playing the game. They will never keep anything from you, that should have been included, just to get a bit of extra money.
The equivalence to on-disc DLC for a collectible cardgame would be something like...
Say you buy a Magic starter deck, but you can't use the mechanic "trample" until you pay for it, even though the mechanic is clearly included in the deck.
Booster packs are more like content-DLC.
Say you buy Skyrim. Then you pay $5 for that sweet armor pack. And $5 for a dagger. And $5 for a cool bow...
Yes, okay, booster packs are randomized, so it's more like paying $5 for a chance to get that armor, or the dagger, or the bow, or a sword, or a new spell, and so on...
Sometimes you get something you already have, but you were already told that such things happen when you walked out of the store with the boxed game.
And the rest of the argument is getting a bit too strawy.
Buying 1000 copies of the same game is not the same as buying collectibles. Buy extra copies of a game and you still have the exact same game, only several times. Once you've played that game, all the other 999 copies are useless.
Spend that money on collectibles and you have a single game, but one that is so much more expansive than that single game. Sure, you'll probably have a lot of useless collectible pieces there too, but they're still "less useless" than 999 copies of a game that you only actually ever needed to buy once.
(For example: I used to organize home-made drafts with my old commons and uncommons in Magic. Grabbing semi-random cards and sorting them into "booster packs" and drafting with my friends. Even more card randomness than a regular draft, at no extra cost for anyone and suddenly all those "useless" cards weren't useless anymore. For that one night, they were more fun than the cards I actually wanted when I bought the boosters.)
And please tell me, who ever said that we should scrap all the other business models?
Collectible Games are one of many business models, with pros and cons just like everything else. I personally believe that there will always be "sell and forget" games, because they're probably the safest and easiest way of making money.
You sell a product, someone buys it. Boom. Now you have money and you don't have to spend that money on constantly expanding the product you just sold.
As for what people choose to spend their money on... As long as they know that the game they're wasting their money on is a collectible game and they're okay with that, what's the problem?
@thisbymaster
I've got some bad news for you. Even physical collectible games aren't randomized in a fair way. Magic the Gathering, for example, has a system for which cards end up where to prevent too many popular cards ending up in one store while another gets none. Some people have proven this by taking factory sealed boxes and accurately predicting which rare card is in the booster they're about to open based on the booster's position within the box. (As well as the box number or something, I don't know how the system works, but obviously they do...)
@Tairn79
I think Wizards does this with MtG Online. I know SOMEONE does at least...
You could, in principle, simply sell each set of Magic cards as a complete collection. You would buy four copies of each card in the set, so one set of cards would be somewhere between 600 and 1200 cards, for big/small sets, and be able to build literally every possible deck for constructed in this way.
Now, drafting is a different beast (though you could do it with boxed sets of cards; it is possible to "make your own" drafts, and indeed people do this), but the actual constructed format of the game would indeed benefit massively from such in the sense that all players would have to do is buy a set and run with it.
It is a strictly anti-consumer thing to do.
CCGs are just a form of gambling in the end.
@Aurich: This is actually false. F2P is a false god. A bunch of the companies which started the whole trend - the social gaming companies - have had severe problems.
It isn't to say that F2P can't make you money, but that F2P is not a good way to make money for a large swath of games.
It is never worth it to trade. It is always better to just be able to be satisfied with what you have or be able to procure the necessary resources with minimal cost/effort.
@Titanium Dragon:
Selling entire sets of cards as one package would make Magic better, but not great.
The thing that puts Dominion ahead of Magic is its differing approach to preventing the metagame from getting stale. Magic and all the other TCGs prevent a stale meta by introducing new mechanics each set whilst simultaneously scrapping previous sets, which forces players to move onto new strategies, or at least adapt their old ones to the new cards. This is ridiculously wasteful.
Dominion on the other hand prevents a stale meta by randomly selecting a small subset of the total card pool to play with each game. Admittedly this does restrict the total number of card interactions substantially, as the players have to be able to parse the new pool at the beginning of each game, but it completely removes the need for artificial card scarcity and forced obsolescence.
This is why drafting in Magic is so good. But I'm not sure how you'd extend the philosophy into constructed such that it would be easy to setup and play.
First, you'd have to nominate which sets are being played with (and stop splurging out new sets all the time).
Second, commons would have to include all the cards required to support all the main strategies and be accessible to all players.
Third, your rares and uncommons would then be limited to the players. Uncommons not randomly decided upon could not be used. And rares would be randomly determined and also limited in number for the entire player pool, so players would have to make trade-offs if they wished to build their decks around popular rares and could also build around unpopular rares for little cost if no-one else is interested in them. This would probably work around some sort of rare per deck auctioning system, where people willing to sacrifice rare spots in their decks would pick up the popular rares.
So the limitations on rares and uncommons in this format would guide and challenge player strategy, whilst the card list itself would be able to be known before the construction and players could still plan ahead, as opposed to drafting.
The card pool itself would have to contain disproportionate amounts of commons and uncommons to rares. But after that has been taken into account, a boxed pool of each set being used could be supplied for the players without having to gamble on the boosters and the set itself could be reused between different competitions. Also players could prebuild decks filled with their own commons and uncommons matching this set, and then fill out with rares on the day.
In this way, you could run a constructed tournament without needing everyone to shell out for different sets over and over whilst also preventing a stale metagame by changing the battlefield for each conflict.
However, I believe in this episode James is promoting a Skinner box technique.
In operant and classical conditioning, there is something called Extinction. When a conditioned behavior no longer produces the desired stimulus, or no longer removes the noxious stimulus, that behavior becomes less and less common until it is no longer done. The trick is that when a reward is given every time a behavior is done, that behavior is easy to extinguish. When that reward is intermittently given, the behavior is not easily extinguished. (I am intentionally oversimplifying a bit for brevity.)
The classic example is to consider a soda machine and a slot machine as examples of these behaviors. (Neither technically fits the bill, but they are useful as teaching tools.) If a soda machine fails to give me the reward (my drink) one time, I am highly unlikely to give the machine another dollar. And if the machine fails to reward me with a soda twice, I'll probably never use it again. A slot machine, however, rewards a gambler intermittently. We see player after player dunk more and more of their money, hooked on a behavior which has become destructive by a machine that promises an occasional reward. Even knowledge that the machine is set to take more money than it puts out doesn't stop the gambler. And if the slot machine doesn't pay out this spin, it becomes just a little harder to quit.
Now, please, I am not stating that buying packs of MtG or Mass Effect Multiplayer packs is the same thing as having a gambling addiction. (And if you have a gambling addiction, please get help.) If the player knows your monetization model ahead of time and goes forward anyway, that's their decision to make.
What I want to point out is that it is an elegant behaviorist technique being applied to players, and it should be considered exactly that. This monetization model is no less a "Skinner box" technique than that which EC called out in their earlier shows, only now, it's not affecting a player's gaming time. It's hitting their wallet.
My confusion was just that they said next week they'd talk about the dangerous and exploitative ways this might be used, which seems like what this episode was about.
What about City of Heroes, which saw a boost in profitability but still wasn't leaving open?
And then there are games like The Secret World, which went buy to play ALA GW2.
@Discrider: Any game will, eventually, become "stale" to some extent. Dominion and Magic are no different; both have to release expansions to keep people shifting strategies. Dominion's "trick" for preventing staleness doesn't actually ultimately do so, and most of the time, there are at least a few dead cards on the table, meaning that you won't even have ten different cards every game for most intents and purposes. This isn't to say the game becomes bad, but I think once you've hit the "stale" point Magic is still a better game than Dominion, at least in a good play environment where no one deck dominates all others (there have been points in Magic history where there was a dominant deck which would have made a static environment very bad).
Drafting in Magic IS excellent, and is as fun as constructed play. Indeed, draft is a somewhat coincidental addition to Magic; it didn't exist at first, and it was only much later on that it became a real thing and was specifically designed for.
Magic would work just fine for constructed as boxed set type stuff, but a game that was designed soley for drafting would have a very different sort of card distribution and setup, I think. I could see designing a game around drafting, though; have a big deck of commons, a smaller deck of uncommons, and a smaller still deck of rares. Or, on the computer, it would be even simpler, as you could have the computer run packs to set them up in specific ways.
For constructed, it would work just fine for each individual player to just own their own set of cards and bring them to play with as a deck. As far as a game goes, at any rate.
I'm not calling WotC evil for doing things the way that they do, but frankly, Magic isn't worth the money you have to spend on it to play constructed.
@The Doc CC: The government has laws regulating gambling pretty strictly precisely because of this whole psychological aspect. Do you think that they should scrutinize things like this just as closely?
I am assuming, of course, that the company selling the randomized product is not engaging in other shady business that falls under other laws. For example, if the product which is randomized is being misrepresented, that's fraud, regardless of whether it's sold in randomized packs or not.
At all: Since everyone has to draw the MtG comparisons, I also want to add that Rich Garfield and his original crew way back when in the dark ages spoke about how they never expected MtG to do what it did. In short, everything we think -now- about how MtG is purchased was never envisioned by its creators. They expected to sell you maybe two starter decks (remember those?) and a couple of boosters. WotC originally severely underestimated both the power of its monetization scheme and the competitiveness of its player base.
Even other CCGs, most of which failed, found other fans. And those fans rarely bought a couple of starter decks and a couple of boosters. Ask anyone who played CCGs in the late 90's about the "game they never got anyone else to play but bought a bunch of cards for anyway." That monetization scheme is powerful.
It is, of course, absolutely true that MTG was never expected to do what it did. WotC did not expect everyone and their dog to buy every Magic card they could get their hands on. But it is worth noting that Magic DID succeed while most failed, and that is partially because Magic was ridiculously fun - and it only got better over time as they actually learned how to properly build the game. It wasn't intended as an addictive scheme from the get go.
However, today that is a major part of their design. They added in mythic rares, foils, and changed the power distribution curve of cards, all things which resulted in rares becoming more important (and more expensive). In 2005, Umezawa's Jitte at $20 each was seen as utterly insane for a card which was still in/just left print. There were cards which were as much as $60-80 for a while per card in more recent times, which is absurd. Magic decks went from costing a couple hundred bucks to costing $350-600. Right now, for instance, just looking up Esper Control, it is a $600 deck. That's insane, and it is all standard cards. And that isn't the only dominant $600 standard deck. And that's ignoring the fact that sometimes it is better to metagame and switch decks, which can mean anywhere from shelling out an extra $150-350 or even more, depending on which deck you switch to.
Heck, want to play "tourney" MtG with your friends for less than twenty dollars? Buy a bunch of lands and proxy everything. Why not? Every card is online.
You won't be playing at tournaments, but nothing stops your friends from gathering around the kitchen table and keeping it cheap.
By analogy, I fence. If I want to fence on the basketball court at the YMCA, my layout for equipment will be a tiny fraction of if I want to buy FIE legal tournament gear. I've convinced some of my friends to fence, and they own practice gear. A practice electrical weapon can be as cheap as $50 USD, compared to several hundred for a tournament legal weapon. The same costs are present in the rest of the gear. Do any of my friends -have- to shell out for FIE tournament gear to enjoy the sport? Categorically, no.
We are certainly in agreement that the same technique is being used, but I will repeat that a difference in scale can be a difference in kind. WotC is definitely doing what a slot machine does, but the compulsive gambler is suffering far more harm, and the MtG player who paid out for those tourney cards has something to show for it. He got to play a fun game, for one, and secondly he can at least recoup some of those losses because he can resell the cards. He has right of first sale, something a gambler does not have.
So two differences of kind: 1) right of first sale, and 2) purchase as opposed to bet.
Firstly, it is the big lie. "Oh, Magic can be affordable... if you don't actually play it." I mean, that's more or less what you're saying here; tourney decks are the game in constructed, and they're what the game was built with in mind (along with limited). You aren't playing the real, best version of the game doing it that way, and it is going to have odd imbalances because certain types of cards aren't found in pauper formats and other such things.
In the end, if you want to play Magic as the "build the deck you want to build and beat people with it" game, it is incredibly expensive.
And yes, there are other, dubious options, like, say, Magic Workstation, which basically amounts to proxying. And frankly pretty much everyone does it, because there's no other reasonable way to test decks. But a lot of the fun of Magic for many players is, you know, actually playing against other players who are trying to win. Casual magic is okay, if you never get too good... but tournament Magic is a huge thing, heavily pushed for, and is where everything really clicks into place. Everything from your local FNM to major tournaments.
And lest we forget, ti costs money to play in those as well, on top of your initial investment. Those, however, are not about addiction - payouts aren't random, and tournaments are going to cost money to run and play in. That is more than fair enough. But the actual game itself, the price is purely driven by artifical scarcity.
Shelling out for practice gear for fencing is fundamentally different from magic. Yeah, you don't, because you're still playing the same game. If you don't sell out for Magic, though, aside from some underground online Magic arenas (okay, they aren't that underground, but still), you're paying. A lot. Even drafting is expensive, though less so than constructed.
As for "difference in scale being a difference in kind": Not really. They're he same thing, more or less. Gambling is about entertainment as well ostensibly, after all, and many gamblers will tell you they had fun with the one armed bandit as it ate their money. And lest we forget you recoup some of your losses in gambling as well - you don't lose every game, but the house wins in the end - the same as with Magic.
And it is worth remembering, purchasing collectibles basically IS betting on their future value. You can't really consider paying for a collectible with an eye towards selling it anything else.
Also, I have to directly contradict where you've said that playing to win isn't done with proxies and all the other expedients of "not-paying-for-Magic." I've seen a healthy, viciously competitive tourney scene in Mexico, specifically in Jalisco, where the players rarely have US levels of disposable income. As a cultural more, they accept things like proxies and the like because of the lower level of free money. Does WotC pull out and stop selling MtG? Far from it - they sanction events and the like because they still make some sales, and making some sales is better than not. So the statement that Magic -has- to be the way you describe is clearly proven to be false, because at least in Jalisco, it is -not- that way.
In simplest terms, what you've described is your experience of the game, which is not what it MUST be, and at least within one locale I've seen, it is NOT how the game is played and purchased.
Frankly, we've talked past each other at the level of premise, so a discussion of the conclusions drawn from those premises is not going to go anywhere.
So, succinctly, there are two differences in kind between gambling and purchasing a CCG - because, really, it's not ALL about Magic. The first difference in kind is that one is a purchase - you BUY those cards, they're a durable good, and you retain your rights. Gamblers get a straight-up bet. Second, since the good is durable, the financial aspects are more akin to a speculation than an outright bet, plus at worst you -still own a physical product-, as opposed to a fleeting, one-time probability to win more money.
And as for dismissing "a difference in scale becomes a difference in kind," we see that commonly in many fields. In my own, it's often, "the poison is in the dose." Do we see large groups of people made homeless because they were addicted to opening MtG boosters? (There's always one or two idiots, but there's a massive difference from "Someone goes broke buying a CCG" and the levels of gambling addiction in the US or abroad.) Does organized crime get involved? Does the amount of money changing hands at a Pro MtG tourney come close to a casino's nightly take, let alone volume? Did multiple tribes and several major cities get built just on the small house take on games of MtG?
No?
There's a difference in kind there.
Free to play must be exterminated, it's the cancer of gaming... the absolute most disgusting thing that has ever been introduced to the digital market.
Some people may love F2P games and there may even be a few good games out there, but all I can see are greedy suits looking at the microtransactions while attempting to figure out how they can make people pay alot of money for something that has very little value.
I dislike F2P because I expect developers to get incredibly greedy and design their games specefically to milk the players.
And yes, it is true that there are SOME differences. That being said, it is still a deliberately abusive system. Is it as abusive as gambling? It can be. I think there is certainly some space for regulation, and I know that there are games (Neverwinter, for instance) which sell boxes containing random items which don't explain the payout distribution of said items in any sort of obvious manner, which probably -should- be illegal.
I don't necessarily have all that much of an issue with it, but I think it is a dubious business practice which deserves closer scrutiny by the government than it presently recieves due to its vast potential for abuse.
And I was not dismissing the principle in general; I am well aware of the dose makes the poison (indeed, I spoke with someone about it elsewhere earlier today) and have exchanged jokes about "the solution to pollution is dilution". The catch is, however, that the EPA actually DOES prevent people from merely diluting waste in vast quantities of water because it is wasteful, even though, technically speaking, it would put it below their guidelines and not be particularly harmful directly - it still IS harmful, though, because of the waste that it produces.
And the thing is, there's a scale here, too. A CCG like Magic, you get some sort of physical good. But with MTGO, for instance, you do not; you are getting cards credited to your account, but you aren't recieving any sort of tangible good, and if MTGO went under, you'd have nothing. The same is true of most video games which include collectables; there is no physical, real-world good linked to them in most cases.
You're saying that the fact that CCGs aren't as big as gambling makes them different, but just because not too many people buy, say, scam crystal products or penis pills doesn't mean we don't shut them down when they make false claims. And Magic makes billions of dollars per year, so it isn't exactly tiny; it is produced and distributed in a very different way than gambling is done, but that doesn't mean that the market isn't enormous. Most casinos make considerably less money than WotC does on a yearly basis from Magic alone.
First point: the EPA does allow a company to produce a certain amount of air pollution and dilute it in the sky, where certain sinks can eventually negate it. To continue this example which has stopped being relevant to the original problem, in the climate change debate the problem is not that humanity produces methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases, but we produce them faster than the sinks for these gases can adjust. Again, scale makes a difference in kind.
It's impossible for Magic alone to make billions - Hasbro's net profits per year for all of its lines, which include all of Wizards of the Coast's lines, including D&D, Avalon Hill, Pokemon, and all Hasbro's lines including GI Joe, Tonka, Transformers, PlaySkool, Transformers, it's Star Wars toys, Milton Bradley's board games, and so on are around $300 M USD. WotC was sold - and came along with its Pokemon, D&D, MtG, SW RPG, and Avalon Hill licenses during the heydey of Magic, Pokemon, and the rewrite of D&D which would become 3rd Edition for $325 M USD. A company making *billions* would never be valued at such a price. Hasbro does not, to the best of my knowledge, release documents on how much each particular division makes.
The Bellagio alone - one casino - recorded $325 M USD in pre-tax profit alone in FY 2012.
One US casino made more profit than Wizards of the Coast's entire parent company. In short, one casino made more than the company that owns both MtG and Pokemon CCG's as a minor subdivision. To make sure it was a fair comparison, I compared profit to profit, not revenue to revenue, and to be fair, the Bellagio does more than just gambling. Now there are far more casinos than there are big-name CCGs, of which I could only namedrop about six: Netrunner, MtG, VtES, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh.
The difference in scale is not "Magic is bigger than some casinos." It's that Hasbro's entire business is dwarfed by just one of the major casinos. Foxwoods, which is going broke due to overambitious expansion but still could have been massively profitable had it not grown too wildly, rakes in more than fifty mil USD on slots alone. Given how many lines Hasbro have, I'd be very hesitant to think everything Wizards makes, combined, comes even close to that number.
By contrast, the lowball estimates in California of 0.5% of the population with a gambling problem losing $8k USD per year comes out to $844 M USD per year, about two and a half times Hasbro's entire profits and about one-fifth of the company's total revenues across all its non-game lines. This is California's lowest estimate - they also provide estimates as high as 3% and $15k USD per year, which would multiply the financial ruin by almost six. And that's just one state, about 11% of the US population.
So, no, the financials are not even close.
Last question: who bells the cat? Exactly -how- would you regulate these purchases? What possible method would their be of passing regulations to stop people from choosing to make these purchases?
Does Steam have to means-test me for disposable income if I buy a set number of packs of DLC? Does my local gaming store have to turn around and check to see whether I can afford that box of Warmachine minis? That's a strange-as-hell requisite at the POS which no other retail sales has to do. The supermarket doesn't have to check with the police and the MIB to see if I have any DUI's or a history of alcoholism before selling me a bottle of wine.
To head of an objection: Steam does not actually force me to submit proof that I am an adult. They can't. They can only ask me to state I am over 18. There is almost no way to stop a child from impersonating an adult and purchasing with that card if the adult has left that information available. How, exactly, would a company which sells a product for adults (say, a bottle of wine) be able to ensure the person hitting submit was in fact over 18 (21 for the wine)?
If the comments are limited to games which provide virtual goods, such as NWN and the method ME3 used in its in-game purchases for multiplayer, I'd go only so far as that full disclosure of the probabilities for each item should be released to the public and let them then make their choice. If the probabilities aren't known, we're in agreement. That's worse than what a casino does, since at least the casino tells you what the odds on that roulette wheel are and lets you take your chances. Other than that, how exactly is any of that supposed to be regulated?
Governments have long been stumped trying to find ways to avoid letting people purchase goods when their use has become problematic and have had no real headway. If you think you've cut Gordian's knot, I'm highly dubious.
Also, the healing crystals and penis pills line is a straw man argument.
While I agree with you that F2P often equates to pay-to-win, I don't think the model should be entirely eliminated. It's just been... massively exploited in smaller "throwaway" games where it's easier for companies to more or less get away with it without much complaint.
F2P works great for things like RuneScape - which as a generous amount of free-to-play content. Or pet sites like what Neopets used to be and what Subeta currently is (exemplary f2p/p2p model there - there are paid items and currency that can be bought, but once it's bought, it can be sold/traded/given away to ANYONE - so paid content isn't just limited to those with the extra money in their pockets.)
For casual games, like phone apps and FB games - the f2p model collapses from the player's perspective (and shines, from the company's perspective). All those "f2p" games we've been playing are just demos. Really, think about it. You've given a slice of content - enough to get you hooked, then "oop, if you REALLY want to play, cough up!" and many people (myself included, I will admit) have fallen into that trap of "well this is really fun, so sure here's $5 for some premium content" only to forget about the game a month or so later.
Now, I don't mind paying for quality content that I want.
I DO mind feeling like I'm being wrung out for cash (I'm looking at you, My Little Pony) - this is where most of these games stand. And people either don't bother complaining to the companies because eh, it was free to begin with and it's just a little game, or the companies just don't care because there's enough people already trapped in their skinner box that it's no biggie to lose a few people who just want more free stuff.
And that, right there, is the problem. I think players would be more eager to fork over their cash if they felt valued as players (imo, Subeta certainly does this. Supporting the site is a good chunk of the motivation for buying things from it.) and not sources of income.
tl;dr - F2P would work better if companies understood this:
Players want feel valued as players and as people, not as wallets.
Yeah, anti-consumer doesn't mean what you think it means. But if you're basically just repurposing the term to mean "something that makes an experience cost more and become less reliable", I can see what you're aiming for. But suggesting I don't understand is incorrect.
I absolutely do understand your point, but I'd argue that game you describe is actually *less* fun at a casual level, and would never have had a tournament level, which from your other responses appears to be the only medium you consider "valid". Specifically, you say "I mean, that's more or less what you're saying here; tourney decks are the game in constructed, and they're what the game was built with in mind (along with limited)." This is wildly inaccurate on both counts, the ProTour wasn't even considered until Magic was a hit, the original idea being that someone would buy a starter deck and 3 boosters; and the number of people who play Magic at tourney level is dwarfed by the number of people who play Magic casually with a couple of decks at Kitchen Table or Schoolyard. Granted, official FNM stuff is higher now than it used to be, but the invested player is still a significantly small percentage of Magic's audience.
And regarding the casual level, opening a booster pack is fun. It has an innate sense of excitement that "grinding" out the best deck from the pool of 600 cards simply wouldn't have. It limits the amount of variables you have to consider initially. You might not enjoy it because you don't enjoy that feel, which I'll admit is the same one that gambling trades on, but that doesn't mean that it's not an enjoyable experience, or that trading on it is essentially a bad thing. We simply enjoy different things. I do understand that the aspect of Magic that you enjoy is compromised by the aspect of Magic that you don't enjoy, but that is inevitably what you get with a non-bespoke product. I personally hate it when I have to sink hours of my precious time into tedious scenario-building in order to set up a role-playing game, but I accept that that's part of the experience that some GM's love more than actually running the game.
"If I don't enjoy it, how could anyone?". Trading Card systems where there *is no game* exist and do remarkably well. I'm not saying you have to enjoy it, but to say "This can't be fun for anyone because I feel like this about it" seems narcissitic. There are plenty of people, myself among them, who *enjoy the random experience* and swapping/sharing cards, just as there are people who would rather pay money to skip grinding for loot.