Austrian Court Rules FIFA Loot Boxes Violate Gambling Law, Orders Refunds from Sony

mmorpg.com:

An Austrian court has ruled that FIFA loot boxes violated the country’s gambling laws, and ordered refunds from Sony for those players who paid for them. This isthe latest development in various countries’ efforts to regulate loot boxes, and sometimes to ban them. 

According to a report from GamesIndustry.biz, the plaintiffs were a group of PlayStation owners who also bought the FIFA game and so they sued Sony because they purchased their loot boxes through the PlayStation store. This means that FIFA developer Electronic Arts is not being held up for those refunds at this time, instead that is Sony, which has been called upon to refund affected players a total of €338.26 each. 

Sony will likely appeal,setting this case up for another round. 

Several countries in Europe do have laws that classify loot boxes under gambling laws, and in many cases, effectively banning them. Sometimes publishers  will avoid releasing their games to anyone in those countries, as with last year’s Diablo Immortal release skipping The Netherlands and Belgium. Both of those countries have such laws on loot boxes. 

Whether loot boxes are a form of gambling and should  be regulated or banned is an ongoing discussion that has beengoing on for years now. 

The debate will continue, and so will the different laws in various countries as long as there's no overarching consensus and policy moves on the practice. This latest round isn’t going to clear anything up just yet, though the report does note that the high court in the Netherlands that said that FIFA card packs didn’t violate the law because loot boxes were not gambling, but instead cards were being used in the game and, as part of that game, that couldn’t be played apart from it, it was not