The most recent PUBG update that went live today includes new loot crates, and the devs also published the drop rates of each item. The rares is set to drop just 0.01% in the free crate. Oh, and there is now also a 40% chance to get a crate you need to buy, with real money, a key to open. Grab your pitchfork, its outrage time!
I’m all for this system. First and foremost, I like this method of people paying the developers. It’s basically the Riot/LoL model, where the majority of the money coming in will be from cosmetics, and people can ‘whale out’ on said cosmetics if they want. PUBG isn’t a single-player game, and while it does have a box cost, long-term there needs to be money coming in if development is to continue, and as a player, I absolutely want development to continue. If that continuation is funded by fluff, that’s perfect IMO.
Publishing the drop rates is likely to get ahead of the whole ‘but but gambling’ outrage going on right now, and as you might have seen by some reactions, is evidence why usually developers don’t do that. People see that 0.01% drop item and jump to crazy conclusions of nefarious dev schemes, when the default answer, some items being rare for the sake of rarity is basic game design, is the correct one.
If you absolutely must have a checkered bandanna on your character in PUBG, you can either hope to get very lucky with a crate, or buy it. The only people actually ‘harmed’ by that 0.01% drop rate are those who aren’t lucky and can’t afford the bandanna but ‘must’ have it, and for those people, sorry, that’s just how life works. I’d love to have a second Ferrari from pimping Darkfall, but the devs stopped listening to me and that game died, such is life.
Hardcore Casual 
Remember when “ongoing game development” was financed by ongoing sales of a game? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Pepperidge Farm has a bad memory then. Either games got full-priced expansions in the long-distant past, or they didn’t get updated. What was so super-rare back in the day was a WarCraft 3 getting the occasional balance patch, or a D2 patch hitting. And compared to the on-going development of games today, that was legit nothing.
So given the option between fluff+development, or box and nothing, I’ll take fluff+dev all day every day.
This is the future Gaben created for us when he took a wildly popular paid game and made it f2p with lootcrates.
I am fully satisfied with loot boxes in any game as long as there is transparency on the % chance. That allows me to make an informed decision on whether I am willing to gamble that money for that item.
I still hope that you can buy the item outright for 2x-3x the cost of a loot box, for people that just want that one thing and that’s it, but I know that makes it easier for people to avoid buying 100 =)
Loot boxes don’t bother me, so long as they are cosmetic. However I am annoyed at their lackluster efforts in combating the hacking epidemic. I’m sure they have separate teams working on different things but introducing a paid crate update while their game is besieged by Chinese hackers just looks bad.