Limiting the loot box: overview and difficulties of a common EU response

Abstract

2019 has seen loot boxes remain a prime target of concern for regulators, legislators and industry bodies alike, yet despite the work carried out in the Gambling Regulators European Forum in this regard, there have been no substantial efforts to develop a common EU response to date. This article aims to argue that such inaction at a European level is unsatisfactory from both the perspective of the European consumer and games companies alike, while highlighting that any broad regulatory attempts to limit loot boxes to date should be viewed with scepticism.Having examined the three main approaches that could form the basis of a common EU response (gambling law, self-regulation and consumer law) that could deal with some of the issues that national fragmentation in the field have presented to date, it is submitted that a hybrid system, which draws together principles from these three main approaches, can strike the right level of balance between protecting innovative monetization systems for developers, whilst safeguarding consumers from practices deemed to be 'predatory'.

Regulating Gambling-Like Video Game Loot Boxes: a Public Health Framework Comparing Industry Self-Regulation, Existing National Legal Approaches, and Other Potential Approaches

“…The perceived urgency of the loot box regulation issue and the divergent interpretations of the emerging evidence base on potential loot box harms have meant that various countries (including those that are otherwise ideologically quite aligned, e.g., Western European countries) have taken very different policy approaches, as previously comprehensively collated by the legal literature [95][96][97][98]. Players, including children, in different countries are therefore provided with varying degrees of consumer protection: players in Belgium (where all paid loot boxes have effectively been 'banned' [13]) are provided with the highest degree of protection, whilst players in the UK are provided with no dedicated loot box consumer protection measures (because, although paid loot boxes that contain rewards that can be transferred to other players and therefore possess real-world monetary value technically contravene gambling law according to the national gambling regulator [15], no enforcement actions have been taken against known illegal implementations [5•, 85]).…”