It has been almost 2 weeks since the the first update. So, here’s what has happened since then.
On March 12, 2025 (the same day Packs were released), we got the following response from Pharlain (the same Team Gimkit member who gave us the original response) after clarifying our concerns:
Hi Hexaheximal,
Thanks for writing back in.
I really do understand how personal this is for you, and how strongly you feel about it. I admire and respect you, and am honored how important Gimkit is to you.
I promise I read your complete letter including all suggestions, concerns, and quotations from other players before responding. I’ve read this letter in its completion as well. Additionally, we follow the feedback and discussions being had about this in all the different official community spaces.
We deeply appreciate how passionately you and others have been discussing this, and we always take this sort of feedback under consideration.
I do apologize for not answering the specific question about creative. Your email had a lot of information, and I was bound to forget a thing or two in my response. Gambling in creative maps is still prohibited. And any casino maps etc will continue to be removed.
Now. On to the rest.
Receiving feedback doesn’t mean we have to take feedback. At the end of the day we’re making decisions based on the realities of running a company in a way that makes sense to us. While your feedback and suggestions are a factor, they’re far from the only factor. A lot of the factors are boring things like Josh only having 40 hours a week to work on Gimkit stuff. We want to remain small and that factors into all of our decisions. It’s also important to remember that the people on the forums and discord represent a tiny fraction of our users, and an even smaller fraction of our paid customer base. I know you’re all concerned that we’re doing this to scrape more money away from students somehow, but student payments are not and never have been our revenue source. We make the money to keep gimkit going from teacher accounts and school licenses. So packs have never been about Gimkit making money, and they never will be. Additionally, we’ll always have limits in place and we are never designing anything with the intent to make it addictive.
I’ve spent a lot of my life studying game theory. My husband has a doctorate in education and has given presentations on this at major education/gaming conferences. I have close friends in all the game industries, from boardgames, to ttrpgs, to video games. So this is something I actually do know a little something about and I love discussing!
There is an essential distinction between random chance elements in a game and gambling. All gambling includes random chance elements, but not all random chance elements make something gambling. The vast majority of games throughout history have included random chance elements. It’s a massive part of what makes games fun. It makes games exciting and unpredictable. It can help to make things fun even when players of varying levels are playing with each other. Random Chance Elements make games more rewarding and fun. Gambling on the other hand requires a particular element of actual risk, and I’d argue the type of harmful gambling you’re describing with lootboxes requires the intent to pressure the player into more real risk. With lootboxes and gambling, encouraging more purchases are the point. Not more fun.
When you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, rolling the die to see if you defeat the dragon is a Random Chance Element. The random loot generating table the GM uses is a Random Chance Element. We have a good friend who was a member of Gary Gygax’s original game group, and he has all sorts of stories about the random generation tables they used and how elaborate they got. When you’re playing a video game like Elden Ring, the game is constantly using Random Chance Elements in the background. Even when you’re playing a pure strategy game like chess, there is a random element since you can never know for certain what the other player is going to do. You can guess what’s probable and estimate the likelihoods of each possibility, but you’re always taking a chance that your opponent will react to your moves in a certain way.
I have two young children (Who both use Gimkit), and my husband is a career educator. Neither of us object to the packs. And the biggest reason is that packs are clearly not intended to create any sort of addictive behavior. The reason this is clear is that they don’t create more investment of time or resources. Rather, they function to create less of an investment of time and resources from players, which is pretty much the opposite of gambling. The intent is to ensure players get more cosmetics, not fewer. A player who maxed out the possible earned gimbucks for a week would be able to buy 50 packs. This gets them 10 or more cosmetics for 1500gimbucks, whereas when purchasing from the shop you’d only be able to get one or maybe two a week. And since there’s still a store, players can always choose to wait and instead spend those 1500 on a single specific gim if they’d like.
I know none of this is likely to change your mind. And that’s ok. At the end of the day what’s important to takeaway is that we heard all of your concerns, but we’ve come to a different conclusion than you have.
We’ll continue to listen to feedback from students and teachers. But we’re not going to be able to respond to the same concerns over and over again. This will likely be the last response I’m able to provide you. I’m sorry, I really do wish I had the time to go point by point with you. But I don’t.
At a certain point, we all just need to move on.
Thank you again for the thoughtful discourse. I hope the end of your week is utterly delightful. 😊
This is deeply concerning. In fact, this is arguably even more concerning than the original response.
To start, they addressed hexaheximal (the main author of this open letter) specifically rather than us (as in the full open letter team, and the Gimkit community members that signed the letter who we’re speaking on behalf of) as a whole. The same can be said about the initial response, and we actually asked in our reply to keep in mind that this is not just one person.
Additionally, they have stated that the Gimkit community (as in the Discord & Forums - although some people are elsewhere) is just a small part of the overall userbase. While this is correct factually speaking, it’s very telling about what their priorities are. Sure, the people involved with the Gimkit community may only be a small faction of the total userbase, but that’s small fraction of it matters because it’s where the most passionate users are.
We also got a response to the issue we pointed out of the addition of Packs contradicting the Gimkit Creative (custom gamemode creation tool) rules banning gambling in community-made games:
[…] Gambling in creative maps is still prohibited. And any casino maps etc will continue to be removed.
This addresses the question, but definitely doesn’t address the irony of the situation.
Then the aspect of gambling was addressed:
There is an essential distinction between random chance elements in a game and gambling. All gambling includes random chance elements, but not all random chance elements make something gambling. The vast majority of games throughout history have included random chance elements. It’s a massive part of what makes games fun. It makes games exciting and unpredictable. It can help to make things fun even when players of varying levels are playing with each other. Random Chance Elements make games more rewarding and fun. Gambling on the other hand requires a particular element of actual risk, and I’d argue the type of harmful gambling you’re describing with lootboxes requires the intent to pressure the player into more real risk. With lootboxes and gambling, encouraging more purchases are the point. Not more fun.
This is highly misleading. It is true that random chance elements are not inherently gambling, but that really can’t be said about Packs. As for the part about “real risk”, this misses the point entirely. People will continue to keep opening packs desperately until they get a legendary cosmetic (as many already have!), and this is not “fun” in any way.
In fact, Blooket (which Team Gimkit seems to have gotten the idea of Packs from) already has this problem.
You may recall this from the original open letter:
Three years ago, I was depressed. Every day followed the same pattern, with the ‘highlights’, as they were, playing video games. The cycle I’d gotten into was a cycle of addiction. Specifically, an addiction to Blooket. Out of [curiosity], I checked my Blooket account this morning, which had sat unopened for the last two years. My statistics suggest that I spent over 100 hours of my childhood grinding for worthless 130x130 pixel squares, and I don’t even have close to a full collection. By contrast, even the most expensive cosmetic in Gimkit can be obtained in 67 minutes, and without any luck, or even any skill. Gimkit is (currently) also free of the one of most addictive game elements: the daily reward. I never feel any obligation to sign in every day, or even every week, just to collect a reward to gamble away. The proposed change to the season ticket that grants a daily reward, is thus distasteful to me, even without factoring in the real money spent. I highly doubt any parents will support buying their child the ability to open a ‘free’ pack every day; from the reaction so far, the community probably won’t buy many tickets either.
– @cassiusdoomlorde (Discord)
But that’s not even all there is to it. Far from it, in fact.
A professional report published by GambleAware, written by James Close and Joanne Lloyd, details a few common features of loot boxes (see page 7 / Figure 1) such as:
When opening a pack in Gimkit, the following happens:
Is this starting to sound familiar?
If it looks like a loot box and sounds like a loot box, it’s probably a loot box. Team Gimkit doesn’t seem to think this way though.
It’s almost suspicious, given this part of the response:
I know you’re all concerned that we’re doing this to scrape more money away from students somehow, but student payments are not and never have been our revenue source. We make the money to keep gimkit going from teacher accounts and school licenses. So packs have never been about Gimkit making money, and they never will be.
It kind of feels like they’re hiding something. And in a pretty big way.
On top of that, the response also states the following:
I have two young children (Who both use Gimkit), and my husband is a career educator. Neither of us object to the packs.
Yet, despite this, whenever any one of us tells teachers at school about Packs, all of them object to it.
The response then goes on to state the following:
I know none of this is likely to change your mind. And that’s ok. At the end of the day what’s important to takeaway is that we heard all of your concerns, but we’ve come to a different conclusion than you have.
We’ll continue to listen to feedback from students and teachers. But we’re not going to be able to respond to the same concerns over and over again. This will likely be the last response I’m able to provide you. I’m sorry, I really do wish I had the time to go point by point with you. But I don’t.
At a certain point, we all just need to move on.
This is basically telling the community to give up and move on, that the opinion of the community doesn’t matter, and that no further response will be provided.
What does this say about how Team Gimkit is handling this?
Unfortunately, not that many people did the things we suggested doing in the first update. However, we are aware of at least 3 schools which have blocked Gimkit due to the Packs sytem. At least 2 of which made the decision after a Gimkit community member emailed the school asking them to block Gimkit.
The source code for this open letter can be found here. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please send an email to hexaheximal@proton.me.