The lobbyists will make sure that loot boxes stay legal.

Film studios make way less on movies without far bigger budgets to recoup to boot yet you don’t see them do shit like charging extra to see the ending, now do you? Because that’s essentially, no wait, that IS what game developers/publishers are doing with their games and a whole lot more. If companies in any other industry did this shit, they’d be in fucking jail, yet somehow they get a pass. No way should any gamer worth their salt just blindly take their scummy business practices lying down. If they don’t speak up, the terrorists have won.

No they didn't scale back loot boxes as they're still in every other game they were forced to make the two games playable with out them that is not self regulating that is a prime example of what I pointed out in seeing how far they can take it and getting caught another example is Destiny 2, fact is these 3 games highlight that the is no self regulating like you claim because it took a massive shit storm to have the underhanded practices that forced people to buy loot boxes removed.

This is why Governments are now stepping in because the industry has flat out shown they're more trying to see what they can get away with than regulate itself, the law doesn't have to state it has to regulate video games it regulates anything that can fall under a certain category regardless what the product is so loot boxes being a gambling mechanic can fall under gambling itself which is a category that requires regulation.

Well, you are all obviously entitled to your opinions. But, I'll continue to push government to stay out of it, so that developers and pubs can make and market their games however they want, and we can buy them if and when we want to.

I don't like loot boxes in games. They annoy me, and I think they're just pretty tacky. So, I've developed a two pronged approach to dealing with them. First, I don't buy games with annoying loot boxes. This keeps me from having to deal with loot boxes being thrown into my face all the time. Second, if I evaluate a game and decide "yeah, it has loot boxes, but I'm not pressured to buy them, and they're not thrown in my face all the time, so I'll go ahead and play it", I still protest loot boxes in the game. To pull this off, I've come up with an incredible technique - I don't buy the loot boxes.

By following this very complex, but very effective method, I accomplish some very important things. I'm able to enjoy gaming. I'm able to push back against things that I don't like - such as loot boxes in games. And, finally, I'm able to sleep well at night knowing that I've taken responsibility for myself, and stayed out of other people's business so that they can take responsibility for themselves (they, in this case, being game developers and publishers.) I advise everyone to take a similar approach, or otherwise figure out how to take responsibility for their own enjoyment of video games.

The worst case scenario is removing lootboxes and offering the players the real deal: buy the skin directly, but at a higher cost. But microtransactions will never be removed from online games because they exist today as a replacement of the old P2P-montly subscription based model. Players are less and less interested in paying subscriptions for online games. Then companies realized that offering access for free could work by adding microtransactions as a way to monetize the product.

The costs of mantaining the infrastructure of dedicated servers demand a steady income, without either a P2P (almost dead model) or F2P with MT, no online game business would survive.

Unlikely, local multiplayer doesn't work for MMOs, for example. Not to mention modern online games with focus on competitive/e-sport scene have a database system and algorithms that make sure players with low skill doesn't match against high skilled players. The matchmaking algorithms are responsible for providing even ranked competitve matches and are a huge deal. They make sure that newbies will likely match against newbies and top players will likely match agains top players, this is the biggest bennefit of dedicated servers.

I remember in the early 2000s when I played online games like via descentralized p2p connections, like CS and Quake 3, it was very frustating for you to manually enter a game and find out all players in that game were much better skilled than you, leaving you eating dust, being killed all the time. It just pull new low skill players away.

Local multiplayer restricts the possibilites of finding people to match and hone your skills, especially if you aim to be a pro player. You are simply isolated from the community, depending on your close friends to play with (witch is terrible because it could happen nobody you know like the game you want to play). Being online allows you to access the whole community worldwide, plus being able to find players with similar skills to you for more even, fair matchers.

Local multiplayer restricts the possibilites of finding people to match and hone your skills, especially if you aim to be a pro player. You are simply isolated from the community, depending on your close friends to play with (witch is terrible because it could happen that nobody within your circle likes the game you want to play). Being online allows you to access the whole community worldwide, plus being able to find players with similar skills to you for more even, fair matchers.