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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.