I’m happy with loot boxes being categorized as gambling when money is involved, and regulated as gambling.
By “cool with this” are you refering to age verification? That wasn’t a comment on age verification. You’re putting words in my mouth, or I was ambiguous in the above comment, or both.
Let’s talk about this. Online age verification is not trivial to do right, ie balance effectiveness and privacy. That’s true of any age restriction, whether it’s for loot booxes, other kind of gamblings. Existing age verification has bad effectiveness, bad privacy, or both. That not a reason to give up on regulating gambling, or give up on improving age verification.
Yeeeeah, you’re way less down on age verification on principle than I do.
You’re also more down on loot boxes than I am, in that I still dispute the equivalence to gambling. It’s not absurd, but it requires ignoring a lot of nuance.
Still, the problem I have with this situation in general is that the loot box element (which isn’t that heavy, it mostly establishes by law that loot boxes will make a game be automatically listed as 18 and up) is masking the mandatory age verification element. And the mandatory age verification is baaaad. It effectively does the magical wishful tech thinking thing we’ve been seeing recently elsewhere where it just… says it should be private and comply with privacy regulations but doesn’t explain how that’s possible, while at the same time demanding that every single store and service provider both design a perfect age verification system AND somehow magic up an API to share that information with each game while remaining entirely private. Which is pretty much impossible.
But nobody is talking about that, everybody just wants to dunk on loot boxes. Like four years too late, because most of the industry saw the writing on the wall and moved on to battle passes instead on the PR hit alone.
Good point, it’s a bit late, and may hit hard on some games that already implemented loot boxes. But it’s never too late, assuming it’s indeed a kind of gambling.
Hopefully it’ll lead to less games integrating loot boxes, so that going forward people of all ages can play games with neither loot boxes, nor the age verification that comes with it.
Update: I just remembered, most games can get updates nowadays, both on PC and console. Game editors can chose to remove loot boxes even for existing games if the regulation is too heavy for them.
Who is still doing loot boxes? Valve, for sure, they still have them on CounterStrike, sports games and then… what? Hearthstone/Magic and that type of CCG stuff and… I guess mobile gacha RPGs?
If you haven’t encountered loot boxes recently that’s great. It means you already managed to avoid games with loot boxes, and shouldn’t be negatively affected by this regulation.
That site raises so many flags on my online security, but I went ahead and opened it elsewhere and… can’t find a source. What is “a recent study”? 2024? 2020? Do you have a primary source?
The link above is the primary source, they mention “OUR recent study”. The article publication date is February 2025, but they don’t give the exact date on their study.
Even if that figure already decreased since the study, or was overestimated, would it change the point of the regulation?
If less mobiles games integrated loot boxes, let’s say 50%, or even 30%, would that change whether loot boxes is gambling or not? Or worth regulating?
Well, no, it can be a report by the authors of the study, but if they don’t publish the study I don’t know what they’re talking about. I didn’t poke around much, because if all my security is blocking content and blaring warnings it’s probably not a great idea, but at a glance in the article I didn’t find a link to the contents of the study proper.
To your question, it wouldn’t change whether loot boxes are gambling, in that my position is that they are not, regardless of their frequency. It also wouldn’t change whether they’re worth regulating, in that my position is age ratings agencies should have a policy about it, but that’s about it. Brazil deciding that the policy is they should be 18 and up is not a big deal, although setting that by law may be overkill, but either way the outcome is similar.
But in practical and political terms that’s not what originated the panic in the first place, so whether the presence of loot boxes is growing or shrinking does go towards whether the PR impact of abusive practices and self-regulation is sufficient to address the issue. If loot boxes were on the wane even before hard regulation was passed, then maybe the hard regulation wasn’t particularly needed.
On the other hand, there is evince linking paying for loot boxes to gambling addiction, and plausibility since loot box exploit human’s tendency to look for rewards to extract money from players. There’s clearly a problem, and I wouldn’t bet on the companies that created it solving the problem.
I’m happy with loot boxes being categorized as gambling when money is involved, and regulated as gambling.
By “cool with this” are you refering to age verification? That wasn’t a comment on age verification. You’re putting words in my mouth, or I was ambiguous in the above comment, or both.
Let’s talk about this. Online age verification is not trivial to do right, ie balance effectiveness and privacy. That’s true of any age restriction, whether it’s for loot booxes, other kind of gamblings. Existing age verification has bad effectiveness, bad privacy, or both. That not a reason to give up on regulating gambling, or give up on improving age verification.
Yeeeeah, you’re way less down on age verification on principle than I do.
You’re also more down on loot boxes than I am, in that I still dispute the equivalence to gambling. It’s not absurd, but it requires ignoring a lot of nuance.
Still, the problem I have with this situation in general is that the loot box element (which isn’t that heavy, it mostly establishes by law that loot boxes will make a game be automatically listed as 18 and up) is masking the mandatory age verification element. And the mandatory age verification is baaaad. It effectively does the magical wishful tech thinking thing we’ve been seeing recently elsewhere where it just… says it should be private and comply with privacy regulations but doesn’t explain how that’s possible, while at the same time demanding that every single store and service provider both design a perfect age verification system AND somehow magic up an API to share that information with each game while remaining entirely private. Which is pretty much impossible.
But nobody is talking about that, everybody just wants to dunk on loot boxes. Like four years too late, because most of the industry saw the writing on the wall and moved on to battle passes instead on the PR hit alone.
Good point, it’s a bit late, and may hit hard on some games that already implemented loot boxes. But it’s never too late, assuming it’s indeed a kind of gambling.
Hopefully it’ll lead to less games integrating loot boxes, so that going forward people of all ages can play games with neither loot boxes, nor the age verification that comes with it.
Update: I just remembered, most games can get updates nowadays, both on PC and console. Game editors can chose to remove loot boxes even for existing games if the regulation is too heavy for them.
Less than what?
Who is still doing loot boxes? Valve, for sure, they still have them on CounterStrike, sports games and then… what? Hearthstone/Magic and that type of CCG stuff and… I guess mobile gacha RPGs?
Everybody else is doing battle passes now.
A majority of Android and IOS games, and 36% of PC games according to a recent study.
If you haven’t encountered loot boxes recently that’s great. It means you already managed to avoid games with loot boxes, and shouldn’t be negatively affected by this regulation.
That site raises so many flags on my online security, but I went ahead and opened it elsewhere and… can’t find a source. What is “a recent study”? 2024? 2020? Do you have a primary source?
The link above is the primary source, they mention “OUR recent study”. The article publication date is February 2025, but they don’t give the exact date on their study.
Even if that figure already decreased since the study, or was overestimated, would it change the point of the regulation?
If less mobiles games integrated loot boxes, let’s say 50%, or even 30%, would that change whether loot boxes is gambling or not? Or worth regulating?
Well, no, it can be a report by the authors of the study, but if they don’t publish the study I don’t know what they’re talking about. I didn’t poke around much, because if all my security is blocking content and blaring warnings it’s probably not a great idea, but at a glance in the article I didn’t find a link to the contents of the study proper.
To your question, it wouldn’t change whether loot boxes are gambling, in that my position is that they are not, regardless of their frequency. It also wouldn’t change whether they’re worth regulating, in that my position is age ratings agencies should have a policy about it, but that’s about it. Brazil deciding that the policy is they should be 18 and up is not a big deal, although setting that by law may be overkill, but either way the outcome is similar.
But in practical and political terms that’s not what originated the panic in the first place, so whether the presence of loot boxes is growing or shrinking does go towards whether the PR impact of abusive practices and self-regulation is sufficient to address the issue. If loot boxes were on the wane even before hard regulation was passed, then maybe the hard regulation wasn’t particularly needed.
That’s if and maybe. I would assume neither, but will keep an open mind in case evidence appear.
Let’s assume Loot Boxes are on the wane. Do we actually know they were on the wane BEFORE regulation passed (which started happening several years ago), or whether regulation caused them to wane? Do we know that self-regulation is efficient for loot boxes? Results of industry self regulation vary a lot, and is often ineffective, so I’m skeptical.
On the other hand, there is evince linking paying for loot boxes to gambling addiction, and plausibility since loot box exploit human’s tendency to look for rewards to extract money from players. There’s clearly a problem, and I wouldn’t bet on the companies that created it solving the problem.