Loot Boxes are 30 year old Problem

“Loot Boxes” have been a problem for so long that I’ve spoken to 20 year old kids who think it’s the only way to make games.

Back in the 70s and 80s we had a lot games that were designed with a lifespan of minutes to a few hours max. Dragons lair (one of the longer games) only had 12 minutes of playtime if done perfectly. Sure you could play Pac-Man forever, but wow does that ever get repetitive.

The Miyamoto games were a step up. They would run 10+ hours. And they had classical endings. Sure you got loot in those games too, but it wasn’t the point.

Compare that to movies and tv of the time that provided 30-120 minutes.

Later Nintendo type games took like 30-40 hours to complete (final fantasy). But we till had alot of popular fighting games that were very short session.

PC 1-up’s that with online gaming. Now you could play unique(for the time) competitive games against people for hours. Games like CnC:red alert and Quake introduced hours of gameplay. You could soak hundreds of hours into them cuz the players provided a fresh look every game.

But by around the mid 90’s games like Diablo had released. Let’s be honest about this, Diablo is just a huge looting game. Every creature is a slot machine.

It was ok for me for awhile, but it gets dull for quite a few people. But devs noticed how many people couldn’t stop accumulating garbage.

The first MMOs weren’t too bad about it. EQ was more about leveling and so was Asherons Call. But by WoW it was all about loot boxes of useless garbage. And it’s been that way ever since. And these games are designed to loot for years of gameplay..

Even fps games are just about loot boxes now. Arc Raiders is literally spawning in and running to loot boxes with other people.

Many of us lamented this back in the early 2000s. And it’s really just dominated now. Games can be made that revolve around other things.

But now nations are banning the games with loot boxes. They realized that they are taking advantage of certain kinds of people just like a casino. The only good thing about this is we might actually get better games made once it’s illegal to make looters.

We can do better