If anyone wants a recent decent video on how MTG has been using FOMO tactics with their direct-sale products, see here.

Valid point. Still I think that there's a notable difference between the physical vs digital aspects though that makes digital much worse.

There's seems to be more effort involved with cards because they're physical, more ritual maybe of going to the store to pick up a pack of cards or having to wait for the delivery giving it that cool down time vs digital where access is instant gratification and gambling dopamine hit.

Another thing I've noticed is that those companies that have tried physical loot boxes haven't faired well either and haven't taken off like their digital counterparts. Maybe it's that mix of seeing physical items vs value and waiting for the next hit kind of dampens the gambling addition effect.

And then there's the whole money into currency with the whole 1000 gems for 99 bucks to buy a 950 gem item psychological predation that you don't have in physical collectibles, at least not that I'm aware of.

I guess overall I find the digital loot box just on another level of predatory, exploitation of addiction much worse than physical collectibles.

But hey I'm all for regulating physical items for gambling too. It would be interesting to see a actual study on them like they've done with loot boxes.

Valve I think are the most "ethical" implementations of loot boxes that just straight up charges cash.

I'm a bit of a privacy advocate/cypherpunk and I agree with you.

The problem is companies should never need know this information except what is absolutely necessary for business. Like if they ship you something, they need to know your name and address (and that could even go away with Japan's model where you just give a code and the post office only knows your address, but I digress).

Another thing is that age verification technologies already exist in such a way that the government doesn't know what you're accessing, and the company only knows you're above 18 and nothing else. These are called Zero Knowledge Proofs.

But since the technology exists, the government isn't utilising it, and instead doing some moral panic "Think of the children!!!1" and setting up mass surveillance and data harvesting, I watch what they do, not what they say.

You're right, you will definitely get downvoted with that opinion. The corpos sucking up data to track and advertise and whatever else is annoying, and i don't want to make it even easier for them. And i definitely don't want to help my shitass government round up undesirables any easier than they already can (including from those corpos...). There are no positives that i care about from an actual digital id. Privacy is harder and harder to come by everywhere in life, i don't want to give an ID to use discord, steam, lemmy, or anything else.

Nah, fuck the AG for tying these 2 issues together. They don't give a fuck about gambling, they just see a huge marketplace ripe for online ID and are snaking their way into it if they can.

I feel like you reacted to part of what I wrote without reading the whole thing.

I'm also going to point out that I've been carded while buying a game rated M on more than one occasion.

So. Regardless of what the ratings mean, in practice, there's a lot of things that go into how people perceived them.

How does Steam or Valve market these games to children exactly? In order for me to buy Halflife 2 on disc I literally had to show ID.

My older brother had to buy the first game because I was too young. My parents knew about and did not care about the ratings. My father in particular played the games with us.

While these are the only two Valve titles I've played and they aren't online competitive games, I really would love to hear why you think the games are marketed to kids.