CCP is now selling loot boxes in the store with randomized rewards?
That’s a pretty controversial move.
Until now CCP has been transparent about the items they sell for real money. Is this the first time they sell random rewards?
I’m pretty sure such things aren’t legal in some countries, like mine:
I can only imagine that CCP’s defence is “we do not directly sell you loot boxes but we give one free for every 10 USD spent” but I’m not sure how many people will believe that excuse.
Oh nice, someone should show this to the gambling watch dogs in Belgium. Would be a shame if CCP had to pay a fine.
Where’s the item to buy this crate?
When the promotion has a gift bag for buying the product, they’re not selling the gift bags.
Ah yes, we’re not selling drugs because selling drugs is illegal.
Instead we sell plastic bags and if you spend enough on the plastic bag it comes with a free gift of drugs.
Purchase any item in the EVE Store worth $10 or more and get a Historic Sisters of EVE SKIN Crate
That’s a stupid analogy.
If you were able to attract the female gender, you’d see stuff like this whenever they go buy make-up. You go in Sephora or Ulta, and there’s signs that if you pay X dollars you get a tote bag of useless merch from a brand.
This is a tote bag, not a loot box.
Assuming that there are 24 skins total from those skin series, the odds of getting one particular skin equals about 4,16%.
It would not mean your odds of getting a skin is 4,16%.
I understand that.
The problem is that the rewards are random. This makes it a loot box, which they sell for real money.
Except you are not paying for an unknown skin. You’re purchasing a specific pack and its advertised contents. There is nothing gambling related to that. Instead you get an extra randomn skin for free.
This makes it fundamentally different from a loot box.
These ‘advertised contents’ are not a guarantee.
You only get a chance on one of the advertised contents. It’s completely random which skin you get from the list. This is gambling.
Until now CCP sold packs in which they specified the skins they included. Every advertised skin was part of the pack. No random rewards, thus no gambling.
Again, you’re not buying the loot box, you’re buying the regularly priced item and getting the loot box added to the purchase.
Why is this difficult for you to understand?
I see the distinction and find it a very thin excuse. I’ve already said so in the opening post.
They give you loot boxes for spending enough money. If loot boxes are banned in certain countries, do you really think that this construction would be legal?
So? Remember those make-up tote bags I mentioned earlier? You only get those for spending a certain amount of money. Just like this loot box, you usually don’t know what’s in it until you open it and find out it wasn’t worth being free.
Yes, because once again, THEY ARE NOT SELLING THE LOOT BOX, THEY ARE ADDING IT TO EXISTING PURCHASES. A couple months ago, I went to the dispensary at the right time, spent $60, and got a box of random brand merch from the store. By your logic, my dispensary sold me a loot box. 
A major difference is that the random brand merch you got was not worth much.
The rare skins in this loot box are valuable to some people:
With some skins currently in Jita for sale for 11B ISK, far more than the $10 spent to obtain one of these loot boxes. In fact, that’s worth close to $100 in PLEX.
Even a skin like this one EVE Tycoon sold cheapest for 2.7 billion ISK is already far exceeds the value of the amount of PLEX you can buy for $10, which is 200 PLEX worth about 1 billion ISK:
It’s as if you purchase $60 of clothes and they give you a random bag of goodies that sometimes contain another $500 of clothes. It’s gambling.
It’s a free gift to incentivize the purchase of another (main) product ergo Not a loot box as it is Not a stand alone product nor is it gambling. Therefore, Belgium can go P up a rope.
By your logic “Buy 1 get 1 free” is also gambling O.o
Why would it be?
It tells you exactly what you get when you buy it. There’s no randomness, no gambling.
I’m with Belgium on this one.
Game companies should come up with something better than predatory practices that prey on people with gambling addictions.
CCP in the past has been better than this, they even allow players to disable the hypernet on their accounts upon request to help people with gambling addictions. Then why does the market department add loot boxes?
Also CCP is like 8 years late with this particular practice. Loot boxes were hot in 2017.
I hope it ends soon. I wanted to buy some Omega, but i also find loot-box gambling utterly moral questionable and i strongly reject it.
So in effect this holds me off of purchasing anything from the store until this “incentive” is gone again.
Additionally I am not from a european country where lootboxes are rightous illegal, but in from a european country where if loot boxes are offered, then the game is required to have a minimum age for players of 18 years. Currently i see EVE is rated for an age of 13.
This is a direct case for market supervision. CCP should act fast to remove this before they get burned too much.
I hope you all are this way with all the other games that offer free items for sales during the upcoming holiday season. Many games (even those based in the EU) do this and don’t get fines. The key here is that the loot box is free, you only paid for the store item. Giving away loot boxes is not illegal, otherwise lootboxes that are earnable in games would also be banned.
What if someone buys those 10+ EUR items now not because they want the item, but they want the loot box. Then the loot box has become the primary thing and the item is the gift.
Just like recently where McDonalds at Japan had to instantly stop their Pokemon Card offering with menus, where people went there, bought the menu to get the cards and directly after dumped all food in the trash. The cards became the primary thing as you could sell them for i.d.k. 10-20 times as much as what the menu was worth.
Right now some of the rewards of this loot box are sold for 10 times as much as you’d get when you buy PLEX with $10.
Some of these random rewards already far exceed the thing you buy in the shop.
Most other games (and EVE too!) offer free stuff as bonus during sales. That’s fine.
What isn’t fine is to offer random stuff. Random rewards that are potentially worth far more than the initial item you buy. That’s gambling.
