The presence of randomized "loot boxes" in games has received renewed critical attention of late, with aggregator OpenCritic planning to flag the controversial business model on its site's review collections. Now, some gamers are using a glitch to get around part of the loot box grind in the recently released Middle-Earth: Shadow of War.

PC Shadow of War players can get infinite amounts of Mirian—one of the game's fictional currencies—by using a script that edits memory addresses through the popular Cheat Engine tool. In and of itself, that's not all that exceptional; "infinite money" cheats and exploits are relatively common in single-player games (and even in some online games, with much more disruptive results).

What makes the "infinite Mirian" cheat more significant is that it can be used to purchase infinite Silver War Chests, which in turn grant new "Epic" orc followers and consumable in-game items. These followers and items can be earned through regular game play, but doing so requires a lot of grinding through battles and challenges, especially near the end of the game, according to reviews.

Publisher Warner Bros. hopes some players will avoid that grind by purchasing Gold War Chests, which can be purchased with actual money. These Gold Chests provide better, "Legendary" tier orc followers that can't be found in the Silver Chests, but otherwise just provide a larger quantity of the same Silver rewards. And while the in-game gold required for Gold Chests can't be duplicated with Cheat Engine, and can be found in small quantities through normal gameplay, the availability of infinite Silver Chests obviates at least some of the impetus to purchase that gold with real money.

It's unclear if or how Warner Bros. plans to respond to this (the company has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars), but it seems that subverting the "natural" method of acquiring some of the game's loot boxes could have an indirect effect on the publisher's bottom line. As one conflicted player put it on the NeoGAF forums, "Is this a bad thing or a good thing? I'm not even sure anymore lol."