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[–] MrPim 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

The game mechanic of buying something that you’re not sure what’s inside is as old as baseball cards,” he told Bloomberg. '

'Nintendo’s Pokemon TCG essentially operates the same way, selling booster packs with unknown contents.“What we believe at Nintendo is that a gameplay mechanic that offers the consumer something to buy that they’re not sure what’s inside can be interesting as long as that’s not the only way you can get those items.“And that’s where some developers have made some mistakes. '

For us, its one of many mechanics we can use to drive on-going engagement in the game.”Whether this means that loot boxes or a similar mechanic will find their way into upcoming Switch titles is something we’ll see, but Nintendo isn’t certainly isn’t averse to the idea. '

See, here's the thing about Pavlov, he found that the conditioning was most powerful if the reward was intermittent. If the reward is given at random, the conditioning is strongest. This is why this will continue. They are literally training their audience to want more of this.

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[–] Diathorus 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

The part about baseball cards or TCGs having always been this way is not wrong. The problem might be that developers nowadays "supposedly" hire specialists to make this shit as addictive as possible. And really besides Valve who offer their marketplace where you can buy and sell that stuff everywhere else you can almost never attain the rewards except by continually rolling on lootboxes. Even then you run into the speculator problem in which people now try to game the system (CSGO fiasco) so it's not even about the rewards anymore but what profits you can make from them.

On another note, maybe the reason TCGs never had the same impact as lootboxes is that they are in comparison to gaming quite niche and are also both multiplayer thus social but are played in the physical world so the amount of fun you can potentially have is limited to the numbers of people around you that also play. Since few people would keep buying just for collecting all the possible cards and few would also go out of their way to compete at a serious level since that involves a lot of travel maybe it's really the internet offering 24/7 available players online with which you can compete and interact with that causes this to be more of a issue.