Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law
Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law
The loot box ban will go into effect in March.
Said this elsewhere, but it seems to me a bigger story that it also mandates age verification for 18 plus content, including porn and at the platform level.
Steam needs to verify your age now if it wants to carry porn games, or indeed any 18+ games.
And I do have problems with the loot box regulation, in that it doesn't qualify the boxes having to be paid, so technically Diablo II should be a 18+ game, along with every single RPG in existence. I have to assume courts or downstream definitions will do a sanity check on that, because the law they passed makes zero qualifiers, it just says "loot boxes".
So... maybe look into what they passed before being too celebratory about it?
They also mandate parental controls being present, which I do agree with and should have been enough. Of course that would not have changed anything, since they're already present in pretty much all current platforms.
EDIT: To clarify, someone questioned the unpaid loot boxes definition and on double check, they do define them as paid, so scratch that part. The age verification requirement is present, though.
I had to translate the law but it does seem to define lootboxes as something you purchase. But legal texts are very specifically worded so I can't be sure some nuance didn't get lost in translation.
I wrote a first response referencing the one mention I had found of loot boxes, but you are correct, I missed that they did include one in the definitions section. They reference them slightly differently so the first time I looked I only found one of the two.
IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;
So yeah, you are right, they do define it as paid. Carry on.
Art. 20. São vedadas as caixas de recompensa (loot boxes) oferecidas em jogos eletrônicos direcionados a crianças e a adolescentes ou de acesso provável por eles, nos termos da respectiva classificação indicativa.
Not as far as I can tell. This translates to "Loot boxes offered in electronic games aimed at children and teenagers or likely to be accessed by them, in the terms of the corresponding age rating".
You can argue that "offered" here specifically implies "offered for purchase", but... I mean, my Brazilian Portuguese isn't perfect, but I don't think that's explicitly the case, the word means what you think it means in English. It'd be a problem of hermeneutics at that point.
Is that the reasonable interpretation? Sure. Is that what the legislator probably intended? Almost certainly. It's not what they wrote, though.
Alternative clickbait title: Gaming industry in trouble
This doesn't affect me (yet) as I don't play any games with paid loot boxes (ew), but this is gonna be the age verification shit?! This sets a troubling standard for privacy and security. I guess it had to happen where I live as well.
The parents should be the ones that don't let their kids to pay for stuff in video games without permission, or at least give them a budget they're allowed to spend on video games, i guess.
Good move. Loot box is gambling. Most have learned gambling is dangerous, especially for minors.
For those protections to have any effect in Brazil, however, they'll necessitate the usage of age-verification mechanisms. Previously, Brazilian law had considered it sufficient for users of digital services to self-declare their age. The new law, however, requires the providers of those services to "take proportionate, auditable and technically secure measures to assess the age or age range of users."
Seriously, read things before reacting to them.
It's been decades of social media and centuries of press. How have we not learned about this as a society?
I mean, if you're cool with this, then you're cool with this and we disagree, but I'm gonna say you probably were going out of the headline alone.
Either that or we ban loot boxes for everyone — which is the better choice, IMO.
I'm happy with loot boxes being categorized as gambling when money is involved, and regulated as gambling.
By "cool with this" are you refering to age verification? That wasn't a comment on age verification. You're putting words in my mouth, or I was ambiguous in the above comment, or both.
Let's talk about this. Online age verification is not trivial to do right, ie balance effectiveness and privacy. That's true of any age restriction, whether it's for loot booxes, other kind of gamblings. Existing age verification has bad effectiveness, bad privacy, or both. That not a reason to give up on regulating gambling, or give up on improving age verification.
Common Brasil W
Fuck them kids. This entire business model is an abuse against people with credit cards.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Microtransactions should be illegal across the board. Only content with real creative gameplay value should be able to be purchased, like the usual DLC's. Also pay2win should be fucking illegal too. Ruining the experience of other players should not be available as long as you've got too much money to spend.
The razor is: did you, the player, receive new content? Or did you get charged for permission?
Horse armor is fine. That's how low the bar is. That's how bad this abuse is. All microtransactions are "on-disc DLC," where you've already been given the thing, inside the game you already paid for, but fuck you, pay us again. And again and again and again.
It's the difference between Warhammer's little plastic men being obscenely expensive, and Games Workshop expecting five actual dollars after every match to replace their imaginary bullets.
Is gambling literally the only thing holding the economy up at this point. Sports is all gambling games are all gambling. It is everywhere.