If the public of the classical loot box is made of individuals that are easier to exploit, our SI17 could research on ways to generate relations within the public.
Homogeneous public?
The classical loot box assumes two main things:
- That the public is an homogeneous group of individual users
- That the relation between the loot box and its public should be always the same
The loot box offers a limited amount of agency to the player. There is no quality in the interaction with it. The only way to use and access its content is to open it (and this usually means to pay). From the point of view of the loot box every player is the same, an their abilities or features or uniqueness have no meaning at all. One could say that the loot box is a popular device since is an object with a common interface for everyone, but is this really the case?
The interaction with the loot box has no quality, but for sure it implies some kind of quantity. To access is it required to spend a certain amount of money or time. This quantifiable expense is presented as a flat access scheme with homogeneous outcomes, but it is not. The effects of spending hundred €€€ in Fortnite skins are different for a kid and a streamer, for example. While the streamer on Twitch spends 800€ in a row to gain a thousandfold through sponsorizations and views, the average kid just throws away half of his mother's monthly income.
The public of the loot box is not homogeneous.
Keeping that in mind, we could rethink the basic way of interaction with the loot box. What if we offer something different from the flat price scheme? What if someone can pay less to access to the contents and someone else must pay more? Could this be a way to inject different qualities in the interaction with the loot box?