I have two points I'd like to make.

First, I disagree with those who have been saying that piracy or purchasing keys from the grey market are solutions: those are just making the problem worse, not better. These gambling-like mechanics are coming from companies looking for a way to remain economically viable when their base prices stay the same even as the cost of development goes up, and stealing the product is just going to make this already bad situation much worse.

That being said, I am also firmly against the loot box model. While many genres of games use behavioral conditioning as a means to the end of making the game entertaining, the conditioning inherent in loot boxes represents a much tighter loop: one where the primary act of deriving enjoyment comes not from the experience of the game, but rather comes exclusively from that conditioning itself. When you look at it that way, the only difference between a loot box and gambling is that gambling has the additional harmful effect of being a "closed loop": that is to say, the solution to gambling may appear to a user to be "gamble more to make up your losses." But to me, that doesn't excuse loot boxes; it merely makes gambling a particularly egregious cousin within the genre of variable ratio scheduling-based "entertainment".

When I look at loot boxes, I see something that is (at least, in the general case) well-intentioned: the designers feel a need to find a way in this difficult market to retain viability, as mentioned recently by Extra Credits. They're in a hard spot, and a very personal one: indeed, their jobs and the jobs of their co-workers are on the line. Designers may also look at the entertainment caused by the reinforcement of conditioning and see that as providing value in itself: the act of "scoring big" on a random roll is indeed thrilling to people, and it is easy to believe that providing that to people provides them "value". But is it thrilling for the right reasons? Is that really value? Are we optimizing for the wrong measurement? My feeling is that this potentially well-intentioned pivot to loot boxes has and is derived from models of behavioral conditioning that feel harmful to end users even if they came from well-intentioned reasoning.

I would like to see the industry move away from this model; I know that right now a higher initial price tag is a hard pill to swallow, but at various times in the industry the price has been higher (adjusted for inflation), and the market accepted it. I think for example about the SNES era, where SNES games defaulted even back then to $80 for a new AAA game (adjusted for inflation, that'd be ~$140 today): the initial price was steep, but the market held and the people found value in it. There is also something to be said about profitability being obtained by being able to reach our much wider target audience - profit by volume, which is something that loot boxes take advantage of but that other models could take advantage of as well.

This is by no means an easy problem to solve, and I don't know where the industry will end up. The kinds of pressures mentioned recently by Extra Credits are very real, and loot boxes present a very obvious way to circumvent that issue. But I hope that an alternative model can be found; one that derives itself less from gambling and behavioral conditioning and more toward providing an obvious, easily calculable cost-to-benefit.