It’s the year 2006. It’s summer and the whole world is enjoying the World Cup in Germany. In addition to the blazing sun, round balls and cool beer, one thing is the main focus: the football collection cards from the Italian manufacturer Panini. The stickers are sold in packs of €0.50 each and stuck in an album that you could buy in any supermarket for €1 at the time. All over Europe, across all age groups, bartering with stickers is booming. Rare cards and completed albums sometimes fetch astronomical prices – the famous Mexico 70 albums, for example, sold for €500 back then and now fetch prices of up to €3,000. Anyone who only takes part in the collecting mania on the side buys three to four packages, pulls a lot of duplicates out of the bags and is happy about one or the other rare sticker. Pros buy entire display cases of 500 cards for a whopping €50, drastically reducing the chance of duplicate cards.
In schoolyards, packets of cards are even opened together and the jubilation is almost deafening when a “Prisma Oliver Kahn” glittering in the sunshine is pulled out of the packaging.
The general opinion: Panini cards are a great hobby and provide pastime and harmless fun for young and old.
According to EA, the collection pictures are the great model for the FUT packs. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar will also come with its own Panini pictures.
Source: Panini
Two years later, FIFA 09 appears on the western video game market and brings with it an optional downloadable expansion: The “Ultimate Team Mode” allows players to set up their dream team by opening card packs, swapping players and all this optionally too can pay with real money currency.
The feature is so incredibly popular that by this point, FIFA has practically become synonymous with “FUT”: “FIFA Ultimate Team” is THE de facto game mode for soccer fans. And why not? After all, in the end it’s just a further development of the popular Panini pictures, isn’t it?
The theme is the same, the concept is the same, and even the surprise component works exactly the same – only instead of going to the store to buy a physical product, players simply press a button on their controller and the packages appear in their account. The timing is perfect and the gameplay seems beyond reproach… with the exception of a few voices that talk about console gaming.
Source: Electronic Arts
Jump back in time and we’re in 2022. It’s September 27th, 2022 and this year’s FIFA flavor, as always, is exploding into the video game market. FIFA 23 also brings the now notorious FUT packs, which optionally offer the player the thrill of a panini pack for real money currency.
In the meantime, however, the supposedly harmless hobby is referred to in the media as “gambling for children”, there are twitch channels that specialize exclusively in opening FUT packs and various European countries are examining whether the monetization concept for the football series is a should entail a ban on minors.
All this just because of digital Panini cards? An absolute overreaction. After all, no one is forced to buy the tickets and you can earn everything in the regular way without ever spending a single euro. Once again, much ado about nothing being inflated into drama by the outrage-crazed media. At least that’s what the statement by the officials of Electronic Arts, who have had to justify themselves in hearings since 2017, reads like this.
The business of greed
In this report, we examine very closely what the buzzword “gambling in video games” is all about and focus on the latest developments on FIFA 23. First, we examine the history of the loot box itself, like this one Mechanics affect the basic game design and the developers’ psychological tricks.
We then explain what consequences this type of monetization has already had on the international legal situation in the video game sector and then draw a bow to the FIFA series again. As always, we proceed in great detail and this time also cite various long-term studies, because gambling addiction is an extremely hot patch from a psychological and legal point of view.
So sorry if we get very technical in parts of this article, but the subject calls for a thorough approach. Incidentally, anyone who suffers from gambling addiction or is a relative of someone suffering from it can get free emergency help all day long from the Federal Center for Health Education on 0800 1372700.
Sufferers or relatives can find help with gambling addiction at the Federal Center for Health Education and Help. We strongly encourage anyone affected to seek help. Nobody has to deal with their addiction alone.
Source: BZgA
Gachagames: The birth of the loot box
If you carefully dissect the history of the loot box, you can actually determine the birthday of the mechanism quite precisely: On April 29, 2003, the 2D MMORPG Maple Story was released in Korea. Since the game was designed as a Free2Play title, it naturally had to be financed somehow and in this context relied on the so-called “Gacha machines”.
To explain: Gacha or gachapon machines represent an ancient Japanese system from Bandai from the 1960s, in which the shopper puts some loose change into a machine and then receives a small plastic capsule containing toys or candy.
The system was even so popular that some of the machines in Japan were equipped with high-quality collectible toys or electronic devices. If the whole thing now reminds you of classic bubble gum machines, only for adults, you are of course absolutely right; the principle is the same.
Accordingly, publisher Nexon made a decision that made Maple Story a cultural phenomenon throughout Asia: he did not offer his microtransactions in the game itself, but as so-called “Gacha tickets” in the machines of the same name.
The result was that players could meet at the vending machine fronts that were everywhere, open the small plastic balls together and enjoy a rare in-game item. The corresponding ticket could then be redeemed in-game using a code at one of the aptly named “Gachapon Kiosks”.
So the first loot box was not born digitally, but as a real world item that the player had to obtain and open in real life. And yes: The gachapon machines and Maple Story are of course the origin of the word “Gacha Game”, which has since been used for games that are largely based on collecting and loot box mechanics.
Incidentally, Maple Story had over 180 million registered users worldwide in 2020 alone and is now also making massive profits in the Western market.
Maple Story represented the birth of the loot box as we know it today. Interesting: At the beginning, the player wandered to gachapon machines and opened his loot boxes in real life.
Source: Nexon
In 2007, Chinese MMORPG Zhengtu Online followed suit. The online role-playing game was one of the first major games to be built entirely around in-game purchases and gambling mechanics.
The reason: At that time, the average income of a Chinese gamer was not so high that he could put a PC in his study or even pay the fixed price of the equivalent of 70 € for video games common in this country. The solution was Internet cafes and games that were offered free of charge, along with small investments that usually carried no more weight than a bar of chocolate.
Due to the enormous success of this business model, the entire Asian market followed suit and finally set a sales record in 2011 with Puzzle & Dragons as the first smartphone game, breaking the magical profit barrier of more than one billion euros. The triumph of the loot box seemed unstoppable.
Electronic Arts leads the gambling offensive
As far as western developers are concerned, none other than Electronic Arts is responsible for introducing the loot box. As you could already see from our intro, EA landed a legendary hit in terms of marketing, timing and monetization with FIFA 09 and the then optionally downloadable Ultimate Team mode.
While the mode itself made its debut with the 2006-2007 UEFA Champions League game on the Xbox 360, there was no online marketplace back then and packs could only be opened with the in-game currency coins, rather than the now infamous real money points use.
In contrast, the concept of the loot box in FIFA 09 was immediately adapted to its full extent and introduced in the same way it still exists in the FIFA series today: The card packs can certainly be bought with in-game currency, but this has to be earned first.
Add to that the time it takes, the extreme rarity of high-level footballers and the ability to field your team online, and the pressure on the player is quite high. After all, the packs cost the equivalent of 0.50 to 0.60 cents, no more than a panini packet.
In 2010, Team Fortress 2 introduced a loot box variant, which was initially intended to provide a small additional income. However, the “Crates” were so popular that a year later TF2 switched to a Free2play model with Lootbox monetization and practically doubled its number of players overnight.
