Wednesday, September 5th 2018
2K Brazenly Asks Belgian Fans to Contact Local Government on Loot Box Ban
In a bold, bold move that is already backfiring on them, games publishes 2K put out a statement clarifying their stance on the Belgian Gaming Commission (BGC) ruling against the specific loot box implementations on multiple games. In particular, the gaming commission made it clear that loot boxes were against the gambling laws of the country and several game publishers quickly complied, including Valve with CS:GO. 2K's NBA 2Kxx series (where xx is the year of the current decade) was one of the affected titles, with the "MyTeam" packs using a loot box-based mechanism for microtransactions.
The statement put out says that 2K is working to comply with the ruling and have made changes to the MyTeam mode, but they also disagree with it and are going to be, and I quote, "continuing conversations with the BGC in order to explain our view" to get around the ruling. Furthermore, they are actually asking players to contact their local government representatives, assuming they share this view, to try and get BGC to allow the old loot box system to be placed back in. To no one's surprise, 2K is collecting a ton of flak for this and we can only hope that fans of the NBA 2K franchise vote with their wallet and let the publisher know exactly what they feel about all this.
Source:
2K Statement
The statement put out says that 2K is working to comply with the ruling and have made changes to the MyTeam mode, but they also disagree with it and are going to be, and I quote, "continuing conversations with the BGC in order to explain our view" to get around the ruling. Furthermore, they are actually asking players to contact their local government representatives, assuming they share this view, to try and get BGC to allow the old loot box system to be placed back in. To no one's surprise, 2K is collecting a ton of flak for this and we can only hope that fans of the NBA 2K franchise vote with their wallet and let the publisher know exactly what they feel about all this.
31 Comments on 2K Brazenly Asks Belgian Fans to Contact Local Government on Loot Box Ban
EDIT: Is it greedy of the devs/publishers? Oh yes. Immoral? Likely. Would the games be better off without them? Sure. And personally I still don't mind the practice.
But Grim Dawn is one game that is a great example of old school time-sink principles, with decent drop rates and no real hidden economy to make money off your ass by spoonfeeding nice things. Pay to win in that game just wouldn't work all too well because it rewards normal playtime too well. It CAN work that way because the focus of the game is on offline gameplay. Perhaps some co-op. But there is no open online community in-game.
The thing is, games that DO employ pay to win items don't have that balance. And, since we're on about ARPGs, look at how it can ALSO be done with Path of Exile: free to play, and anything you buy is never a direct gameplay advantage. The best you can get is stash space. And it just. Works. Great. Whether you pay or don't pay, the game is fun.
But yeah on the whole it's a bad thing, but I wouldn't say it's universally bad. Fallout Shelter, for example, works pretty fine imo.
The governments wouldn't have even known about it if there wasn't a stir amongst the players first.