this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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It is founded on the fact that Valve was one of if not the first companies introducing predatory loot boxes via TF2 and only changes the system to skirt regulations on gambling. They're just doing enough to pretend that all this isn't a virtual casino where they always take a cut. It is not only exploitative, but also dishonest.
Let's not forget that their argument that what they're doing isn't gambling was the exact same thing casinos did to skirt laws (showing you the prize of the next spin). You lose a lot of goodwill with such behavior.
There's no need to defend it, they're doing just don't, and they would even without these scummy systems
See I'm not defending lootboxes or the companies that use them. I'm seeing a criticism directed at one of the LEAST offending players in the industry as if they are some cabal of assholes, like its hilariously under informed and your fucking YouTube video preying on your desire to have a boogyman is being pushed as if that isn't the same level of bullshit.
They get paid to push bullshit. You don't. So you don't get that excuse here.
The point is the lootboxes are the canary and not the fucking toxic gas.
Yes, it is lame that they unwittingly legitimized it. Free to play isn't something that had been done successfully for games like that, large scale, hardware dependent. But they had no idea how that would go. How in the world were they to know what that would do to the industry at large? They fucking didn't that's how. League was still being openly mocked for its fiscally stupid "free-to-play strategy" and expected to fail just as so many games before them. Which became the free-to-play MODEL after the RESOUNDING successes of both League and Fortnite, and was seen as much more exploitative (locking characters and thus most of the game not just cosmetics) and though inevitably it became the literal industry standard after DayZ/UnknownPlayers: Battlegrounds came around and was FAR more influential at every conceivable level we still had no knowledge yet of it being a real problem (in psychology) That didn't come till well into Mobile Gaming coming up.
What exactly were they supposed to do instead? GoFundMe and Patreon? Barely existed and NO one smart would have trusted them at the inception. Especially for a big company.
So EA and Activision/Blizzard and dozens of other players make entire series of games built around taking advantage of every aspect of human weakness. Catalogues of max exploitative schite. Then you have Activision and Take-Two and now even Sony and Microsoft and a half dozen others who buys up every developer and game rights then produces the same underwhelming but palatable crap or strait exploitative slop while exploiting the workers to the extreme, in both pay and insane time crunches, while holding onto fantastic franchises because theyre not what boils down to easily exploitable and really just don't like risk and/or competition and you whine and complain about this? Seriously you moved past the low hanging fruit and strait into the branches for some reason.
I just want to hear more about how Hitler isnt bad because he didn't INVENT genocide or something its using your logic and its fucking ridiculous.
Don't care about fucking lootboxes with all the bullshit that's worse that I lined out being way more prevalent. I wasn't having a discussion till you showed up. Just pointed out that point. No one asked for your essay you got from a internet influencer masquerading as legitimately formed opinion coming about the place. Its attracting others doing just about the same thing, not thinking and upvoting common positions in leu of using their heads
The game wasn't free until 4 years after release in 2011. Loot boxes were introduced in 2010.
Also when it went F2P, it surely has been done before, for example by League, which went F2P about two years before TF2 in 2009. So that timeline doesn't track
The problem with their loot boxes isn't only the content, but the fact that it's designed to entice people to gamble on it while masquerading as something else. It's predatory, and while there are other predatory systems in other games, theirs is quite devious; this is an opinion I've held since the matter gained public attention with the Belgian regulation in 2018.
Nice history lesson, again, did not request that that's all you
I am aware of its history, it made a at the time dead game come back, sheerly due to the stupid colossal failure of a moral decision you claim they made. It made a bunch of hyper-competitive and underrepresented at the time, new, cosmetic focused collector-type YOLOFOMO gamers both shit and cream their goddamn pants.
This was a stunning stupid punt to make enough money to keep the game they, and many dedicated people, wanted to stay on, yet wouldn't or couldn't foot the bill, for. This was a morally just cause in many eyes. They INSPIRED bad companies. They didn't design it in a laboratory to mislead you you fucking dunce, it just happened to be, at the time the quintessentially invisible, psychological vulnerability of the time, that was, exploited for an, at the time, entirely morally justifiable cause. Because we literally didn't know that it was predatory, which was, SPECIFICALLY avoided by Valve all over the fucking highway but it was seriously what pays the bills and they're not fucking immune from competitive business practices working in a system of both exploitive labor and business practices so expecting them to suddenly foundationally change their funding and put them in an easy place to be taken over and corrupted by the same shareholders and executives that own companies that ACTUALLY do that shit just because its works and they just think if it works its their fault but let's try REALLY hard to exploit the shit outta them on purpose people must sit there and laugh, which is entirely against the fucking spirit and sentiment of the OP statement. So fuck off with that.
One, because fuck that, and two because fuck misdirecting that outrage and making things all around worse off. Well meant for sure, but destructive and undeserving of moral praise or claim IMNSHO
So yeah, back to the purpose of the entire essay, because that's what this fucking became.
Was that I gotcha supposed to save your shitty take or something? Because it does not.