When lootboxes were making headlines I was surprised how seldom blind bags and collectible card games were being brought up. Instead people seemed to be more concerned with debating the definition...
When lootboxes were making headlines I was surprised how seldom blind bags and collectible card games were being brought up. Instead people seemed to be more concerned with debating the definition of gambling rather than if they're reinforcing unhealthy behaviours.
I'm still unsure how I feel about TCGs, even though they employ similar tactics as far as I know.
This article touches on the fact that children need to buy many items to complete their collection. Here's a wikipedia page that discusses this a bit more....
If each box of a brand of cereals contains a coupon, and there are n different types of coupons, what is the probability that more than t boxes need to be bought to collect all n coupons? An alternative statement is: Given n coupons, how many coupons do you expect you need to draw with replacement before having drawn each coupon at least once?
EDIT: There's discussion on the WIkipedia page about how complex the page is. I think that shows that many people are not going to be able to work this out themselves, and certainly not when they're in a toy shop looking at a bag.
When lootboxes were making headlines I was surprised how seldom blind bags and collectible card games were being brought up. Instead people seemed to be more concerned with debating the definition of gambling rather than if they're reinforcing unhealthy behaviours.
I'm still unsure how I feel about TCGs, even though they employ similar tactics as far as I know.
This article touches on the fact that children need to buy many items to complete their collection. Here's a wikipedia page that discusses this a bit more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem
So, for LEGO minifigs series 19 there are 16 figures to collect. If we make some assumptions about distribution you'd expect to buy 55 packs to get one of each figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem
EDIT: There's discussion on the WIkipedia page about how complex the page is. I think that shows that many people are not going to be able to work this out themselves, and certainly not when they're in a toy shop looking at a bag.