Loot boxes have mostly avoided the hammer of legislation - for now | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Rob Fahey

Friday 3rd June 2022

Just a couple of years ago, it felt distinctly possible that the first dominoes had started to fall in what was set to be a wave of legislation against exploitative F2P game mechanisms.

Media reporting of especially egregious cases -- many of them involving children racking up huge credit card bills unbeknownst to their parents -- had fuelled public anger, and the infiltration of loot box and gacha mechanisms originally designed for F2P games into high-visibility premium titles had raised the profile of the issue massively, especially once legislators across many countries realised that some of these cases were, at best, nuzzling up very intimately against the line dividing games from outright gambling.

Legislation would quite likely have been the worst possible scenario, and even those within the industry who had absolute disdain for the exploitative extremes to which some companies pushed their monetisation models were still keen to avoid national governments from getting involved.

"It's not that regulation of industries is inherently a bad thing... but in this instance, it was apparent that government intervention would likely result in babies being thrown out with bathwater"

It's not that regulation of industries is inherently a bad thing -- it can be a very good thing, in circumstances where market incentives are fundamentally misaligned with social, individual, and environmental goods -- but in this instance, it was apparent that government intervention would likely result in babies being thrown out with bathwater. The distinction between a regular F2P monetisation model or a reasonably balanced random-draw system for in-game items and bonuses, versus an exploitative gacha system or a game