Before the internet was as prevalent as it is today, and back when the most popular video gaming system required players to wait for over 30 minutes as the game loaded from an audio cassette a child's spending money typically went on three things; sweets, toys or packs. Of course, the first two are still as popular today as they have always been, both for the young and the young at heart, as for the latter, well they are more popular than ever. 20-30 years ago packs came in two forms; paper and foil. Paper packs usually contained a random half dozen stickers, usually intended to be collected within an accompanying album. Whereas foil packs usually contained a random half dozen cards, and usually a stick of bubble gum. These packs covered virtually everything such as movies, sport, TV shows & cartoons, video games, the latest craze etc. With the growing popularity of consoles birthed from the 16-bit generation of machines, one would be forgiven for thinking such a simple thing as packs would fall into obscurity, but they would also be very wrong. The
Nintendo Game Boy title
Pokemon saw packs become even popular, with another generation forever scarred with the keywords 'got', 'need', and 'swap.'
Pokemon is still going, as too probably are the Pokemon packs, as well as packs covering other elements of popular culture. More recently though packs have found a new home, within video games. In a time when most video game titles have expensive season passes, multitudes of game patches, carefully priced microtransactions, and a plethora of DLC (DownLoadable Content), the inclusion of packs is a welcome approach.
Hearthstone's card packs,
Overwatch'es &
Heroes of the Storm's loot chests,
Gears of War 4's weapon crates,
Fortnite's Pinata's, and
Gwent's kegs are all examples of a digital version of packs. Either available for a small amount of in game currency or as a reward for leveling up or completing a task, each contains a handful of randomly generated rewards, usually cosmetic content, with at least one reward guaranteed to be of higher value.
In-game packs have also given us the rarity system, which offers on average half a dozen classes of rarity ranging from common up to legendary/epic, in which the rarer a reward/item is the more expensive/valuable it is.
While I personally feel that most in-game currencies are too inflated, with extortionate scrappage prices, those that allow you to purchase their version of packs do so at a reasonable amount, especially
Injustice 2's mother boxes, which has a variety of packs available each with a different number of random rewards. DLC may have become an expensive way for developers to withhold content from players that really should be in-game at launch and microtransactions may allow developers to charge for in-game content that otherwise would have been free, but in-game packs are a sign that developers are getting things right.
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