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Want to sail against the tide? (Photo/Xiao Luo)
In the past two days, EA's "FIFA" series of games broke the short news, and a court in Austria's Hermagor region ruled against a player suing Sony. The cause of the lawsuit is related to the card opening system in the game: several Austrian players – including a minor – claimed to have participated in "gambling" in "FIFA" and spent more than 400 euros. They believe that Sony, as a trading platform, should take responsibility and refund the money they opened in the game.
The "Ultimate Team" mode in the "FIFA" series of games is a competitive mode that supports in-app purchases, where players can buy card packs with in-game coins, open various rare player cards (at least expected), or spend money directly to buy tokens to open in-game packs - essentially money and opening boxes.
These players sued Sony in 2020, and the lawsuit has been going on for more than 2 years. In the end, the court found that the opening of cards in "FIFA" violated local gambling laws and ordered Sony to compensate players 338.26 euros (about 2492 yuan). The amount of money is small, and the decision of a district court can hardly be said to have had a particularly large impact on the "open-box gambling theory" in Austria and even the rest of Europe, so Sony did not respond.
Although EA is the developer and publisher and Sony is the platform, several players' lawsuits against Sony have been upheld by local courts
In fact, the question of whether unpacking counts as gambling or not has been debated in the gaming industry for a long time. From time to time, we see news of unboxing as gambling in a country or region, or there are constant proposals to do so, most notably the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, where the Benelux-affected region has actually treated unboxing as gambling and regulates it. In 2020, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB, the organization that rates games in North America) also added an additional note to the rating, reminding consumers whether the game contains in-app purchases of random items.
In the ESRB rating rules, in-game purchases also have a distinction of "whether they contain random items"
However, although the general "unboxing" is considered gambling in some countries and regions, the definition of the specific unboxing design in a certain game is debatable. For example, also in the Netherlands, in 2020, the Supreme Administrative Court rejected a high fine imposed on EA by the Gaming Authority on the grounds that Dutch law stipulates that only "unboxing" becomes a standalone product (such as a slot machine) can be counted as gambling, and if it is part of a larger game, it can not be counted - according to this logic, the unboxing in "FIFA" cannot really exist independently of the game, and the Dutch court's decision is also excusable.
But in addition, we should also see that although different countries and regions and various institutions often propose that unpacking should be regarded as gambling, in fact, unpacking and the in-app purchase system to which it belongs have become the norm in more and more games, and even more and more countries and regions in the game industry. To put it bluntly, no manufacturer can resist the temptation to make a lot of money in the long run, and the in-house purchase really works, so it becomes a trend - and an irresistible trend - is simply doomed. As for how the in-app purchase system affects manufacturers, the industry and players, considering the length of the night talk, I will not expand here.
Not only in-app purchases, but also from the perspective of games, there are quite a lot of "irresistible trends" we have experienced over the years: digital games and digital game sales platforms, subscription systems and ownership of player accounts, overlord clauses of large manufacturers and platforms for user rights... They often appear in front of players as "services" and consumption upgrades, and look like a bright future, but only when their vital interests are damaged can players realize the real problem.
Currently, most platforms are subscription-and-buyout parallels
If you buy a game and feel that it is not fun, and want to refund or sell second-hand, the terms of the digital version of the game and platform will impose various restrictions on players; There are more and more subscriptions, season passes, etc., and many players do not realize that they have only purchased the service and not the product itself when they click "Understand and agree to the User Agreement"; What happens to players after the game ceases to operate, and what kind of compensation is reasonable, to this day there is no standard that satisfies all parties.
Importantly, players don't have much choice in the process. Games on smartphones have not been around for a long time, and many manufacturers have removed buyout games from a few years ago and replaced them with "remakes" with in-app purchases. Correspondingly, what if one day Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo change all games on the platform to a subscription system at the same time, and no longer provide buyouts, what can players do? At this point, although I often think that XGP is really fragrant, but overall it is still more pessimistic about the future: our consumption habits, orientations and even aesthetics have been wrapped up in something, and for a long time, we can only continue to follow the trend. As for what it will become in the future, no one can say well.