MILK–A Lootbox Mod for Skyrim

MILK–Many Immersive Lootboxes and Keys, is a parody mod that adds lootboxes and golden keys to Skyrim.

Bold adventurer! Have you ever felt that there was something missing from your adventures? A feature that you enjoyed so much in other games, that you couldn’t bear to play without it in Skyrim? Worry not, traveller, because the feature that everybody loves has finally found its way into Skyrim: Loot boxes! Loot boxes that you can buy with your hard-earned gold! Instead of finding new loot in the depths of a mysterious dungeon, or crafting it with the skills you’ve spent time and resources to improve, we offer you a shortcut! Now you can stroll into a general store, and ask the merchant about loot boxes! After buying some, simply activate them in your inventory to crack them open and receive a random cache of loot! All the loot you could ever ask for! Who needs to play the game when you can buy your way to the top?

The comments and FAQ on the mod page are a hilarious send-up of the bullshit that AAA companies like EA try to use to justify loot boxes.

Isn’t this pay to win?

Let me stop you right there, buddy! Playing to win is old-fashioned, outdated! What you call “ruining the spirit of the game”, we call “huge profits”! Everybody wins!

Doesn’t it cost more gold to buy enough loot boxes to get something you want than it does to just purchase the specific item?

I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m no mathemetician. Our team of expert analysts, who have math degrees or something, assures us that this is the best way for us to make enough gold to continue to support the game. And you don’t want us to stop supporting the game, do you? I guess if you don’t like it, we can always start charging for [trivial content that is not worth paying for] instead of giving it to you for FREE!

YouTuber Popon Top has a video review of the mod,

Nintendo’s Howard Lincoln: Video Game Rentals Are “Commercial Rape”

Recently saw a video claiming that Nintendo so despised the video game rental system in the United States during the 1980s that former Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln once referred to it as “commercial rape.”

This quote appears to originate from David Sheff’s 1993 book, Game Over, Press Start to Continue: How Nintendo Conquered the World. Someone has uploaded the 1999 edition of the book to the Internet Archive, and the quote appears on page 283 of that book.

Howard Lincoln said that video-game rental was “nothing less than commercial rape. I can spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars creating a game,” he says. “I expect, therefore, to be compensated every time the thing sells. All of a sudden, out of the blue, comes a system that distributes my game to thousands of people and I get no royalty. The video-rental companies exploit the thing — renting it out over and over again, hundreds and even thousands of times — and I get nothing. The guy who developed the game and Nintendo get screwed. What does the guy who’s renting the cartridge contribute? What does he pay in terms of a royalty for the commercial exploitation of copyrighted work? Zip.”

Unfortunately, Sheff’s book lacks any citations, and the source for this quote is not referenced.