As you may be aware, countries have started to ban lootboxes and it is only a matter of time before many other countries follow. Now, I am against paid lootboxes, they do encourage gambling and exploit children’s innocence to get money; however, I am all for free “lootboxes”. See, in my game, I plan on making levels and after beating a level you may get a common, rare, epic, or legendary key, which can be brought to a store, along with some in-game currency, to buy a box to get a random pet of the key’s rarity. The in-game currency can be bought using robux, but the player cannot open a box without a key (there is no way to get a key using real money), the in-game currency can also be earned fairly easy by simply just playing the game). I want to keep my game fair and I thought this method may do the trick, but if it is considered a ‘lootbox’, or may get kids addicted to gambling, then I guess I have to make some changes, do I need to make some changes?
Anything that has rare and common items.
This doesn’t sound right. Many games, other than Roblox, contain “rare and common” items:
- Clash Royale
- Diablo
- Fortnite
- ‘Call of Duty’ (not always called rare and common)
- Minecraft Dungeons
I mean the list goes on, these countries minus well just ban the internet.
Add the ‘free lootboxes’ all you want. If anyone has a problem with it, they can just blacklist your game. Or have the game be age restricted since thats a new thing now. Don’t punish the majority to appease the few. I agree with not having paid lootboxes unless you have ways to get the same lootbox for free. But if all you have is free lootboxes, nothing wrong with that. That ain’t gambling since currency isn’t involved. And if it is involved, you should be safe or safer if you remove that particular feature of your lootboxes.
Lootboxes are lootboxes regardless of whether or not they’re free or paid. Your specific example qualifies as a lootbox as it checks off all the boxes:
- Allows the user to obtain a randomly generated item from a consumed box
- Keys used to open boxes can be bought with in-experience currency
- In-experience currency can also be bought with Robux
Old post I made about the definition of gambling (and by extension, lootboxes) on Roblox:
If a country completely outlaws lootboxes, your case would be banned in those regions. Can’t have lootboxes whatsoever even if you remove the Robux aspect of it. So yeah, you need to make changes, that being not having them at all for users who don’t have the ArePaidRandomItemsRestricted policy off.
Well, the keys are earned by playing levels. There is no aspect of currency, real nor fake, at all.
But yeah, this is what I thought. Maybe if you can get a random item at the end of a level? Like as a reward? If I can’t do that, then not-to-self, never go to any country where lootboxes are banned, they don’t have any video games.
The involvement of currency is your in-experience currency. Keys may be earned by playing levels but boxes can be purchased with in-experience currency and your in-experience currency can be purchased with Robux, ergo, there’s Robux involvement by proxy in your lootbox system.
If you give a free random item out to players for completing a level and they aren’t required to use any currency (Robux or in-experience currency) then you’re in the clear, this is not considered a lootbox by policy. Policies and laws target paid random items, not random items altogether.