Microsoft Appears to Be Throwing in the Towel on Loot Boxes

The loot box fad appears to be coming to an end.  After a year that saw incredibly egregious tactics used across the board when it comes to loot boxes, many games have made an about face.  It started with Electronic Arts and their Battlefront 2 pivot, then Warner Bros. followed suit with Shadow of Mordor.  Now, it looks like Microsoft is the latest to throw in the towel on loot boxes in one of their biggest franchises, Forza Motorsport.

The developer for Microsoft’s racing franchise has announced that they’ll be removing loot boxes entirely from Forza Motorsport 7 later this year, and in the interim will be changing the items that are found in them.

In the immediate future, Forza Motorsport 7 players will still be able to purchase and open prize crates in the racer, but cars will be completely removed from them.  This aims to offer no competitive advantage, with the prize crates containing cosmetic items like driver gear, badges, and mods that increase rewards in the single player portion of the game.

In a post to the Forza community, Turn 10’s Alan Hartman explains the process as a complex one, and that the full removal of these systems has a winter time frame.

Though this might sound like a little late for Forza Motorsport 7, this sort of thinking will impact Forza Horizon 4.

So what is Turn 10 going to replace this system with?  It’s not going to be paid tokens like in previous Forza games.  Hartman says that neither Forza Motorsport 7 or Forza Horizon 4 will see the introduction of these paid tokens.

It’s hard to tell what prompted this shift from publishers and developers in less than a year’s time.  Could it be scrutiny from regulators worldwide?  Backlash from the fan bases for these games?  A mixture of both?  Or do the evil geniuses at publishers have something even more diabolical up their sleeves.

Regardless, it looks like Microsoft is done with loot boxes for the time being.