The reason Magic is different is for 2 major reasons:

1) You can sell your cards and get money from them (could be less, could be more) and they have some tangible value to other people.

2) You don't have to acquire magic cards through booster packs (aka loot boxes) only. If you want a particular card then you can go to the store and buy it. This was the major concern from the parent in the top comment of this post, that you couldn't just buy the skin directly but had to gamble for it.

Additionally if you just want to play with your friends and experiment there's no reason you can't just use proxy cards or fakes and have fun playing a deck. Though that's not for tournaments or anything serious.

>1) You can sell your cards and get money from them (could be less, could be more) and they have some tangible value to other people.

Shouldn't this make it a bigger problem, not a smaller one?

>2) You don't have to acquire magic cards through booster packs (aka loot boxes) only. If you want a particular card then you can go to the store and buy it. This was the major concern from the parent in the top comment of this post, that you couldn't just buy the skin directly but had to gamble for it.

I wonder if the skins were priced per their rarity values, would people still be okay with it. Some mtg cards costs $1,000s. I wonder what people would say if some game added loot boxes containing rare items that were worth similar that players could then trade for money. My guess is people would respond far more negative to this.

To be able to have point #2 you have to have point #1. Someone has to take the risk to open the booster packs and get those cards out onto the market. Sometimes business oriented people do that, other times a group of friends buy a booster box to play with at the time. At least in these circumstances the people opening the packs know what could happen.

I think if you could buy all of the items that were included in these loot boxes then it wouldn't be as bad. You want skin X, just go ahead and buy it. However there would still be a problem as people might pay way too much trying to get that expensive item in a loot box than just paying for it.

> To be able to have point #2 you have to have point #1.

Well, no. You can require (on pain of jail time) that the producer provide all N possible skins for individual sale at prices that add up to less than or equal[0] the cost of N 1-skin loot boxes.

0: To preempt the obvious "make individual skins so expensive noone can actually buy them" strategy.

The magic cards that cost thousands only cost so much because they aren't in print anymore. Ones with that kind of price point are collector's items and aren't even legal to use in the formats that are commonly played

But the booster packs that contains those cards are still available for sell. So why WotC isn't the one profiting off of it, private businesses still are selling them and some people do open them hoping for one of those rare cards. While it isn't a price point a normal child can afford, I don't see why it is different given that the items are still being actively sold.

Well the randomization is actually part of the product for a lot of people, boosters are typically used for sealed/draft games for example.

Secondly the booster packs that contain cards that cost thousands aren't still for sale, at least not from Wizards, though you might still find a few unopened ones around. Some of the cards available in current standard legal boosters might cost quite a bit, but not thousands

Your first point is actually the opposite of what the law says.

> At present, the Gambling Commission states that purchasing loot boxes does not meet the regulatory definition of licensable gambling under the Gambling Act 2005 because the in-game items have no real-world monetary value outside the games.

Depending on the game they kind of do. There's trading and gambling on CS-GO skins, places where you can get real world money for them. For games like EA sport games in their online competition thing, you need to have the best players in order to compete, therefore there's a minimum you need to spend in order to get those players. You need to do that in order to have a hope of winning competitions and earn some money. So while you can't just cash out directly there are ways in which it can be done.

The thing with Magic Cards though is that when you buy a pack you still end up with a bunch of physical magic cards which you own and can do with as you please. Either sell them, trade them, give them away, or burn them in a fire. With digital goods from loot boxes this is rarely if ever possible.

Now ask yourself which would you rather have, something physical which you can do something with once you no longer want to play the game, or something digital which is useless and has no value once you stop playing the game (or even when next year's game comes out).

No, it has a monetary value, But you can't resell it.

People spend thousands on skins, with some of the items only accessible by repeatedly rolling the dice on a loot box. (Others have price ceilings for direct purchases).

The closed nature of the economy just means you can only purchase from the one person who is setting the price and you have no ability to trade it back in for cash.

Magic cards you can resell your cards to another player at a later date. You can't in Apex Legends.

It has value sure but it's not monetary if you can't convert it to money. These things have no monetary value. So you should know going in you will never make your money back. You will only get better or worse game items.

That's farther than gambling than the trading card model.

> So you should know going in you will never make your money back.

You don't require this to be sucked into destructive tendencies in the same way as gambling. This isn't a logical choice, it's kids getting manipulated by the game into purchasing these lootboxes.

I erred in my use of monetary value, I mean that kids are very willing to spend lots and lots of money to get these skins - just as much as magic, if not more.

As I originally commented, I don't think magic is a good thing either, and Hearthstone is basically the equivalent of it in video game form - but at least you can sell out of Magic at a later date, and there is some form of market for trading old cards with others. Hell, you can even just be given your deck by a friend - this is not possible in hearthstone or fifa or Apex Legends (for cosmetics), you can't with games like Hearthstone and Apex Legends, you never get your money back, and people are just as willing to drop lots of cash on it as Magic.