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russelgtoday at 2:19 PM1 replyview on HN

>Japan disallows many forms of such loot boxes due to addictive nature.

Crazy to say this when they've basically pioneered and perfected gacha games.


Replies

rincebraintoday at 8:36 PM

Both things are true, though.

The fact that gacha games are so popular is _why_ they had enough attention to explicitly ban the most toxic patterns at the time. [1]

There's an interesting question of how far to push the bans, though - "in theory" your goals should probably be "don't let people prey on addictive behaviors" and "minimize people impulse buying more than they can afford", but the latter especially is...very hard to make an empirical rule for, and then you get into logistics like people just making additional accounts to get around it...

[1] - http://www.vg247.com/2012/05/18/kompu-gacha-freemium-systems...