If you are familiar with the gaming world, you must have heard of the loot boxes. If not, a brief introduction: loot boxes they are kinds of boxes scattered around the environment of certain games that offer random items to players, revealed only after their capture, which can range from small aesthetic elements for the character to good advantages in the game experience itself, such as a superpowered weapon.
In the second half of 2017, however, some games began to abuse these elements to take money from players, charging real money for easy access to boxes or keys to open them. In a particular case, that of Star Wars: Battlefront II, Electronic Arts (EA) came to the decision to cancel all microtransactions of the game after being compared to a game of chance.
Now, Apple is anticipating future controversies and making a small change to App Store guidelines, as noted by Polygon. Ma demand that all game producers make explicit the odds that the player will receive each item from all those offered in the loot boxes, reinforcing transparency and preventing applications from making abusive charges to users.
As the new rule notes:
Apps offering Loot boxes or other mechanisms that offer random virtual items for purchase must reveal the likelihood of receiving each type of item to consumers before purchase.
With this, a series of popular games from the iOS world will have to make this change, the boxes are, after all, particularly popular in free titles, which earn money precisely with the internal microtransactions. Games like Hearthstone and Clash Royale, stamped stickers from the most downloaded list on the App Store, will have to adapt to a new guideline.
All of this, of course, extremely positive, after all it offers a more concrete perspective to the player and prevents developers maybe a little too greedy exploit their users with excessive elements or that do not return. If you create games for the iOS world, stay tuned!
via The Loop
