Games

Just not buying something isn't a boycott. Don't buy bad games, and it's a good idea to include dark patterns in the criteria for what makes a game bad.

Already do.

Many of us have been doing this from the beginning, but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how gacha games work.

Most people do not pump loads of money into these. Many don’t pay anything at all. But those people are not the target audience. These companies are going after the whales. Basically gambling addicts who will destroy their entire lives to pump everything they have into it.

Which is exactly why these games either need to be illegal, or the law needs to put caps on how much individuals are permitted to spend on these.

You should not put your time or money into anything doing something that you don't like in the marketplace, because that's the only way it changes.

I've never bought or played one & have no plans to.

I've bought singleplayer games with loot boxes and no anticheat and just used cheat engine to get the ingame currency for them. I think I'm doing my part.

One of the reasons why Valheim is one of my favorite games these days... You buy it and then you play it... No loot boxes, no in game shop, Doesn't force you to be online and a minimal amount of RNG at all... But the grind is real though...

Do I have to start playing games with loot boxes before I can start boycotting them?

The only one I've ever played was overwatch, but overwatch 2 is garbage, so...

Just play "Team Fortress 2 Classic" or "Open Fortress" both are really cool community projects without crates, or any micro transactions as far as I know.

Yes.

I already do, but I'm also not as avid a gamer as I once was. Every FPS became borderline unplayable when loot crates became a thing. Call me old fashioned, but I liked when games had the same weapons for everyone, and there weren't random cards or whatever that made people's guns more powerful / reload /shoot faster, etc. It really brings an imbalance to the game, and enables these stupid gambling sites. The companies making the games are making money hand over fist, so they aren't going to stop any time soon barring regulation, and looking at this administration, good fucking luck with that. Boycott away.

I've been boycotting them for years yet we all can see how that turned out

Already boycott lootboxes and gacha games.

Sell me the game and give free updates or fuck off. I'm done paying you to be your beta tester.

Don't pre-order and don't buy games that have loot boxes or other in-app purchases.

Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?

Consumer boycotts very very rarely work. I've never heard of a single successful video game boycott.

How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?

Lobby for appropriate legislation with your government representatives. We could have legislation that forces companies to transparently show the chance of specific rewards, and even show the money you have to spend on average to get XY specific item. (I think there is already a law like this in the works in the EU?)

One of the major psychological tricks gambling games (including lootbox and gacha) employ is to obscure the true costs behind premium currencies. Once they are forced to remove this, and you are shown that yes, guaranteed acquisition of a single Genshin character will cost you ~300 USD, it might make you do a double-take before you pull out your bank card. (There are many more psychological dark patterns these developers employ, so it wouldn't be a single miracle solution, unless of course legislation altogether bans random chance rewards buyable with cash.)

No, if anything, we need to boycott games with battle passes. I'm not a fan of lootboxes but I'd take them any day over a battle pass. Don't pressure me to play specific ways, don't exploit FOMO to try to get me to grind or spend money. I find that a LOT more predatory than lootboxes, at least in games where they're optional.

Definitely boycott paying real money for lootboxes or games with real money lootboxes.

If you're not paying, then it's just a factor to consider, the companies won't care about you much

If you are not their target audience then you can‘t really boycott them in the first place. And in my opinion there is no harm in playing a game with loot boxes when you don‘t buy them. They aren’t really getting anything out of non-spenders. That’s not how their servers keep running. And most f2p games that I encounter nowadays do season passes without the random factor anyway, so I feel the loot box discussion is becoming a little outdated for the main stream. Thank goodness.

I‘ve also noticed multiple times that this community has a gripe with multiplayer games for some reason. It‘s better to take anything from online strangers with a grain of salt.

Imo, yes.

I pretty much can't play anything any more because I refuse to play anything with loot boxes or timers or in-game currency.

There are very few games on Android you can just buy and play casually to relax for a few hours.

Maybe I'm just an old man now, but it's been years since I was interested in a game with lootboxes. I think the last one I played was Overwatch, back when it originally came out

I'm still waiting for a reliable way to pirate games with micro transactions and lootboxes.

Like, I know Assassin's Creed Odyssey has daily quests and a rotating cash shop, and that must be talking to some sort of server that isn't guaranteed to be there. Surely there's a way to mock that server?

Wasn't playing them in the first place. Also a Linux gamer, if you want a shooter. Isonzo. Easy Red 2 is alright too, not quite as polished as Isonzo but it does have vehicles in it and is more single player/coop focused than PvP.

Will me not buying lootbox microtransaction bullshit games make any difference to the industry? Almost certainly not. But it really doesn't matter much either. I can buy the few good games instead and just ignore what the rest of the industry is doing.

Yes but loot boxes is gambling and is an addiction and gaming companies know this and exploit this.

It is important to question what you think a boycott will do.

Do you think you are going to make a giant movement that changes the world? If so... you should stop eating those lead paint chips. Consumers, historically, will only engage in a boycott if there are alternatives. Shop at Walmart instead of Target. VERY short term you might get someone to boycott Amazon for a few days but... just check "leftist" forums like resetera for everyone immediately losing their shit over how a few older activision games they will never play are on sale.

Video games, contrary to what people will say, don't really have alternatives. We'll joke that The Last Descendent was "waifu frame" but the people who love Warframe very much have reasons for not wanting to play TLD and vice versa. Let alone games like Call of Duty where there really is nothing close to an alternative.

So "boycott to fix the world" (and I am gonna expand on what THAT would be shortly...) ain't a thing.

So... now it is up to why? Personally, I "boycott" Ubisoft and have for the better part of a decade at this point. I think the last game I bought "from them" was GR Breakpoint and I got that years after the game was basically dead and on a hefty discount (see: lack of alternatives). I am under no illusion that my wallet is going to lead to yves et al leaving their own company out of shame for their role in enabling a culture of sexual harassment (and allegedly more). But I do know that I feel a lot better when I look at myself in the mirror and most games I am interested in DO have alternatives.

So do you think you are going to change the world? Cue Nelson Muntz. Do you just not want to contribute to the culture of loot boxes personally? Go for it. And it doesn't matter what people on not-reddit tell you.

As for what you think will happen: I think we can all agree that Nintendo upping the... Err, let me rephrase that. I think we can all agree that any company other than Nintendo upping the base price of a game to 80 USD (pre-tariffs...) is REALLY bad for the industry. But... inflation IS a thing and while game sales have skyrocketed... game dev has too. Money has to come from somewhere. And RMTs (lootboxes, cosmetics, etc) and constant flows of DLC have actually been great for the industry. It, for two decades or so, stopped the endless "ramp up, ramp down" model where people would be hired to work on a game, fired when it went gold, and then hired again 6 months down the line if it got green lit for an expansion. Get rid of RMTs and we go back to that for all but the largest studios because you don't need artists when you are fixing a bug in Batman's cape and so forth.

So, personally? I buy and play games that I like. And a lot of that does have to do with the monetization model. Something like Warframe is RMT based and has some sketchy purchases but also is (mostly) playable as a free game and is built around "free" content. Whereas something like Genshin Impact is marketed as "you never have to spend a dime" but... yeah. So the games that "do it wrong"? I am... kind of already "boycotting" them because I am just not interested in them.

Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?

Yes, but not if you don't convince others to join you.

How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?

Educate people on the dangers. Show them why it's gambling, because there's a lot of apologetics out there to trick people into thinking it's not. Point out the same slot-machine-tactics they use to get people hooked.

And then convince them to boycott. The CEOs that put this shit in games know how to read sales numbers, and if sales start dropping (or player counts), they'll soon figure out that it's because of their lootbox/gacha systems.

Lastly, give people alternatives. I usually point people to Deep Rock Galactic, but there may be others that are better suited to people's tastes. "Just leave" isn't really effective if they don't know where to go.

While I agree with the spirit of moat answers, I don't think that the few of us boycotting such popular games will harm or affecg them at all. We are a very small minority.

However, I do think we can support a sustainable niche market of good and sensible games.

So I think a it's a better use of anyone's time to try and support good games than spend your energy on bad games.

Do what you think is right, but spend some time to consider whether you want to reward someone or some organization with your hard earned money if you consider what they are doing immoral or bad.