God-Mayor of Sim-Kind
Yeah, it's completely outlawed in China because...It's China, just look at everything else they regulate. As for Japan, they've outlawed the "combine your loot-boxed tokens for an chance to win something incredibly rare" mechanic if Wikipedia is anything to go by.
Answer no master, never the slave Carry your dreams down into the grave Every heart, like every soul, equal to break
I'm currently playing a Chinese (in origin) mobile game and it still has a gacha system with "premium money". And, well, Fate Grand Order is still going strong despite also being a gacha game.
So...?
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza
God-Mayor of Sim-Kind
Well, it kinda depends on where you live and how often that law is enforced. Since if an product is illegal in only one country, then it should be sensible to move to an country where it's legal and well outside the first country's jurisdiction.
As for the actual enforcement, the exact wording, and penalties over this, I haven't really looked that up yet.
Answer no master, never the slave Carry your dreams down into the grave Every heart, like every soul, equal to break
insert commentary here
IIRC, a lot of games like Hearthstone and F/GO get around China's regulations by bundling in-game currency/other items to premium items and claiming that players are just buying the in-game currency and the premium items are just stapled on it as a "bonus".
In Japan, it really depends on how much of an outrage is created, for example F/GO has only a 1% chance of rolling the prized SSR units and despite people spending over tens of thousands of dollars and in some infamous cases, borrowing loans from the Yakuza, it hasn't sparked a huge backlash at all, with only Apple's edict that individual rate-ups be made public or they would be pulled from the App Store having any effect at all.
But with Granblue Fantasy, there was an infamous incident
referred to as "Monkeygate" where several dozen players spent hundreds of thousands of yen on a limited character, resulting in people doxxing her voice actress because she rolled the character and they started accusing the company of rigging it in her favor, calls for Cygames to rework the gacha, and accusations that the rate-up wasn't what they claimed it to be (and yeah that turned out to actually be true), this pressure led to a minor government investigation and the company handing out refunds to players, and a complete overhaul of their gacha where they revealed the precise chances of rolling every individual item and introduced a bunch of safeguards to stop players from overspending which they then gradually introduced in all their other games.
edited 22nd Apr '18 2:54:00 AM by Nouct
Yep.
For Hearthstone in China you will buy 1 dust and get a pack of 5 cards thrown in for 'free', and as an example it takes 40 dust to craft a single common card yet that card can become 5 dust if you disenchant it.
No, the other one.
It feels so honest when the "for free" part is worth 25 times as much as what you're "actually" buying, and that's worst case scenario.
Check out my fanfiction!
I really find loot boxes to be comparable to card games and in that sense a fair way to make an income. That said, I believe they should only be tacked onto free games. With those that are justifiable, I'm worried for them.
Loot Boxes page says that (paraphrased) China and Japan's laws consider loot boxes as gambling.
Is that really true? (Source?) And if it is, then why are gacha games from those countries still going strong now?
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza