I think this is the overlooked answer. I play both Injustice 2 and Overwatch and so far they are the best way to use Lootboxes. It's optional if you want to buy Lootboxes. Heck you can't buy Lootboxes in Injustice 2 with real money only in game currency. 

I also believe mobile gaming is influencing companies on how they can make more money.

Yes they popularized lootboxes and now good games are shit and Square perfers multiplayer over single player

Did Kinder Suprise get banned for gambling reasons or for a choking hazard?

It definitely seems to be growing into an unfavorable practice in the modern industry, though I don't know if I would put all the blame on Blizzard. I think any other companies and development teams adapting this practice into their games all share the blame for standardizing yet another awful practice as a means to get more money out of consumers. It is a matter of preference for the consumer, but there will be people who buy these things. Still sad to see things that were usually rewards for playing the game are now being used to get more money out of people. Luckily the games I play don't have any of these stuff in them.

Also, I don't think loot boxes should be a reason to harshly criticize the game. From what I hear, it's a very solid game overall.

I've just played a single game with lootboxes (Overwatch), so, in my ignorance, I thought that loot boxes were not that common. But it seems that a lot of articles about these loot boxes are coming out lately. Did I miss something?

And I honestly haven't thought about Overwatch loot boxes. I'm not a lot into skins.

Ka-pi96 said: Ultrashroomz said: Now I'm thoroughly convinced Blizzard outright murdered your entire family. Not just his family, the cat too!

Nah, the cat died when a PC fell on it. And his dog died when Gaben sat on it.

The problem isn't just the exploitative manner in which they are implemented. A loot box system is not something that just goes on top of everything. A game is shaped around them to entice people to spend real money. That means even if you don't care about loot boxes or simply ignore them you will still play a game that's worse than what it would be without loot boxes. That's the simple truth, to make loot boxes enticing you have to make the game as a whole worse so that people spend money to make it worth playing again. If loot boxes were actually fair or inconsequential they wouldn't exist because nobody would buy them.

Customization is a huge part of online gaming because it is very much a social experience and everyone wants to look their best or unique. Greedy publishers hide behind that fact because there are still people defending micro transactions  and loot boxes as "just cosmetic". While they are hiding more and more content behind paywalls. And not just normal paywalls, but huge ones. Thanks to loot boxes you nowadays pay 10 or 20 or even more bucks just for a single item. Imagine public reactions if those were direct ingame purchases.

Loot boxes are way more insidious than just micro transactions. Remember how we hated those? And that's not even accounting for the fact that these companies are specifically targeting individuals with addictive personalities. At this point it stops being innocent and starts being just evil.

Not protesting it now means it's gonna get only worse.

Nintendo still make AAA games with no microtransactions, no massive day 1 patches, no day 1 DLC and no rushed to market games full of glitches.
Just saying....

You say that because youre only playing overwatch as your main game, its a fact that getting DLC now takes way more money with these lootboxes than just buying costumes. Do you have a contratc something that Blizzard will continue to give you free DLC? They can just bring it out an expansion the next day, or doing it for their future games.

Starcraft 2 had 2 expansions, 1 story DLC and countless DLC commanders added to it and guess what? Blizzard implenenent the same lootboxes like from overwatch recentley. So you see youre wrong, you give them a little bit and they keep demanding more. They gonna still do DLC, expansionpacks and on top of that lootboxes microtransactions.

luckily i am not playing this game

The correlation between the release and sucess of overwatch and the recent games implmenting it is obvious