why not just get 3 or 4 and be happy with them? but noooo, you need more and more and more and more, of course /s
I think the arguments about direct psychological harm are a bit overblown. A bipolar person, like the one interviewed, who’s buying a bunch of these blind boxes because they’re manic likely isn’t experiencing suicidal ideation because of the blind boxes but the bipolar depression on the other side. Sure you’ll see correlation there, but not causation. That said, a business making big profits on poor decisions made by manic folks is intrinsically exploitative.
Everyone saying loot box toys should be illegal should ask themselves if Magic: The Gathering should be illegal too. Or baseball cards. “Blind box”/“blind packs” have existed for decades. It’s only a problem now because they’re toys instead of cards? Or were they always a problem? Please clarify.
I personally think Labubus are fucking ugly as hell. But we have blind bags in the anime fandom, pretty much any big franchise gets them. SPYxFAMILY, My Hero Academia, Chainsaw Man… probably Dandadan and Demon Slayer, though I haven’t seen those yet. Anyway, you buy a bag and there’s a figure inside. The one you probably want is rare. It’s nice with SPYxFAMILY because Yor (the mother) is the rare one, not Anya (sort of the mascot of the show, the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks four-year-old telepath with the pink hair and horns who is just so friggin’ cute). If they made Anya rare, the fans might be in trouble, but it’s just the ones horny for Yor that end up wading through a pile of Loid (the dad), Anya, and Becky (the friend) to get to the one hot chick they want. And that’s what it seems to be, the hot chick the horny young guys are after is the rare one. If you like the cute character or one of the guys, you’ll probably get your figure or you can trade for it, or buy it off someone who doesn’t want it. Then again, if you’re horny and not dumb, you can spend the money you’re spending on blind bags on a figure that has more detail.
But again: baseball cards have existed for decades. Where was the outrage then? And baseball is just as dumb to a lot of Labubu fans as Labubu is to jocks. What’s the diff?
I’m with you, let people have fun. Just like with anything else it’s all about moderation and self control.
I bought way too man Pokemon cards, Crazy Bones, and Pogs back in my day to talk shit now, and I had fun doing it too.
To me, it is a false equivalence. Sport cards are based on people. Though I’d give you, they could just be bound by team and year instead of being random. But like, when Ken Griffey Jr.'s rookie card came out, no one could have guessed what would happen there.
And MTG is a game that’s constantly evolving. Here, I think the randomness was a planned mechanic that helps keep the game balanced and interesting (or it did like 30 years ago when I played). Might be a different story now, but doing a broken meta deck just was far less likely. Getting an assortment of colors encourages, especially new players, to try different approaches since each color (again, at least in my day) plays very differently.
But these blind box things are largely made to just be a fad. They’re created, hoping they’ll catch on with a demographic, to generate money… and landfill waste. You can go into a card shop and buy/trade/sell sports cards, or game cards (MTG/Pokemon). After the hype for these blind box toys, there’s no more demand. They create scarcity for the sake of driving sales. They employ psychologists for this type of stuff. These aren’t like the coin machines back in the day, where you could actually see the toys. They know that if you could see what was there, sales would tank.
Sports cards are a piece of history, a physical note of what was for a given player at a specific time. MTG/Pokemon are games. In both cases, you could just collect, but there’s more to them. But with the blind box toys, they’re just physical loot boxes. They exist only to be collected. Much like Beanie Babies back in the day. Or literally anything that’s ever called it’s a collector’s item or an investment… It’s just garbage. But now, they add in a known addiction mechanic to it, and target kids and AGGRESSIVELY advertise. You can call them all dumb, sure, that’s fine, I haven’t collected MTG or baseball cards in 30 years because I share a similar sentiment. And I’m not ignoring the tactics, the card games, or sports cards also employ… I do think they could change, and should change, but they won’t. But I believe they are less predatory, but not above criticism or review themselves.
In 5 years, is anyone going to care about a Lububu? No. Does anyone care about the crap my mom collected in her youth, no. But the things she liked to collect, when she walked into a shop, she could see what they had and buy exactly what she wanted. No tactics, just dumb things she liked. Same when I collected Amiibo. I could see what I was buying.
I’m hoping I’m making sense. Just because one thing is kinda sketchy, doesn’t mean it’s fine for another thing to be completely sketchy because “people are just having fun”. It’s not fun when someone goes into financial ruin and you pivot to “well, that was your choice,” because that’s now how addiction works.
idk, I’d say it’s more of a problem now because people have easier ways to liquidate their wallets for those sorts of trash purchases, without realising it on a physical / rational level at the time. Like when you had to go in to a store to buy those blind-box card games, it took effort to be an addict, so much that it was more a hobby.
Now, someone’s kid can accidentally wrack up thousands on a credit card online buying lootbox shit.
