This article will be discussing why loot boxes are getting banned and if they should or should not be banned. Countries like China, Japan, Belgium, and the Netherlands already have made some laws against loot boxes. Many other countries are thinking about banning loot boxes because they are letting young children essentially gamble with real-life money in video games.
The concern people have with loot boxes is that since they are technically a form of gambling that kids have access to maybe sometime in the future, they might get into gambling in a real-life casino which in most cases is not a good thing. Some game developers are trying to save loot boxes say because there is no such thing as an empty loot box even if it is a duplicate or something no one wants. It isn’t that different from other in-game purchases which are completely fine. For example, if you bought coins for a game and bought a cosmetic with it you are guaranteed to get something you want out of it. But a loot box will give you something random that you could get for 50 cents or if you get lucky something worth more than what the loot box cost.
In some games like OverWatch (a non-pay-to-win game with only cosmetics purchasable) you cannot buy in-game currency and instead only loot boxes with real money. So, if loot boxes were banned from a country, any cosmetics in OverWatch would be pretty much impossible to get.
Some games aren’t like OverWatch and have a purchasable in-game currency. So Overwatch might have to make a currency which you can only buy with real money although some free-to-play players might dislike that as an option. Or the developers could make it so you can just buy the currency that you get from the loot boxes.
Most people think loot boxes shouldn’t be banned because they don’t see it as allowing the younger community to gamble. At casinos, you roll the dice with real money to get more real money, but in a loot box you’re not getting real money out of it but some in-game items or an in-game currency.