Depends on the company, most allowed you to get what you wanted within a reasonable amount of chance and some were always rare valued. Around the late 80s early 90s trading cards starting losing momentum from over saturation which saw the super omega rare cards being printed to drive sales. This worsened with eBay and online platforms because basic supply and demand.
I agree with everything you just said. So, that means enshitification caused things to become gambling that didn't used to be gambling? Or, depending on the person who is purchasing intended purpose?
I think loot boxes are gambling. That makes games loot boxes in less fun for me.
Basically. The need to min/max profits drove trading cards to be more than fun collectibles. Most trading card companies would not exist today without that secondary market being the main driver of sales.
Today everything gets sold. Even kids think to sell things first these days. Garbage Pail Kids were just shared in my neighborhood. All the trendy toys end up in drama threads, and I have no idea wtf the item is. It's always one set of parents think the kids should just have fun with the toy, and the other set of parents know the value of the trendy toy so they want their kid to end up with the expensive one so they can sell it.
They're teaching the kid to be materialistic, which only helps sell loot boxes.
Yeah I grew up with Pokémon cards and realized they were a scam very early on. Kids would look up rare cards, find clueless kids who had them and conned them out of it.
Depends on the company, most allowed you to get what you wanted within a reasonable amount of chance and some were always rare valued. Around the late 80s early 90s trading cards starting losing momentum from over saturation which saw the super omega rare cards being printed to drive sales. This worsened with eBay and online platforms because basic supply and demand.
I agree with everything you just said. So, that means enshitification caused things to become gambling that didn't used to be gambling? Or, depending on the person who is purchasing intended purpose?
I think loot boxes are gambling. That makes games loot boxes in less fun for me.
Basically. The need to min/max profits drove trading cards to be more than fun collectibles. Most trading card companies would not exist today without that secondary market being the main driver of sales.
Today everything gets sold. Even kids think to sell things first these days. Garbage Pail Kids were just shared in my neighborhood. All the trendy toys end up in drama threads, and I have no idea wtf the item is. It's always one set of parents think the kids should just have fun with the toy, and the other set of parents know the value of the trendy toy so they want their kid to end up with the expensive one so they can sell it.
They're teaching the kid to be materialistic, which only helps sell loot boxes.
Yeah I grew up with Pokémon cards and realized they were a scam very early on. Kids would look up rare cards, find clueless kids who had them and conned them out of it.