And if they just shrug it off... then hey, they have to stop doing lootboxes and just sell things directly. Which would still be a victory condition! Even if not the intended one.

Because I feel like the *instant* that everything with lootboxes or other gamble-y mechanics gets delisted from Steam or whatever, larger publishers are suddenly gonna be *way* more interested in throwing around their weight to say "Hey, uh, payment processors should not be able to dictate this." 🤔

As I said to friends elsewhere...

I feel like we ought to organize a campaign to get the payment processors to similarly ban payments for anything that lets you use a purchased currency to get lootboxes or gatcha pulls, on the grounds it encourages gambling.

I honestly wish I were.

It felt pretty unbelievable at the time, too. When the would-be client left, the jr. engineer turned to me with wide eyes and asked, "Did that really just happen?"

(We did not end up working with those individuals.)

At a previous job, a potential client kept asking a nearby (male) jr. engineer their technical questions, which I (female sr. engineer) would then answer.

He kept looking more and more unhappy each time, as he'd point to me and go "She's the domain expert, not me; I'm shadowing her today."

🤔

So far as I know, literally no one knows who owns the rights any longer. If this was resolved in the years since the article I'm linking, I'm unaware of it.

www.thegamer.com/no-one-lives...