That last bit should worry the industry. Its failure to self-regulate, to develop wide ranging ethical standards for the practice, will lead inevitably to the imposition of regulations from without. Gaming studios have, for the moment, been glorying in the grey area created by technological novelty, after all. Most people still don\u2019t know or care what a \u201clootbox\u201d is, much less regard its contents as in any way valuable.<\/p>\n
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The law agrees, for now. A recent Eurogamer article<\/a> by Wesley Yin-Poole on gambling-esque microtransactions in FIFA 18<\/em> made clear at the start that:<\/p>\n The law says loot boxes are not gambling because the items obtained from them cannot be exchanged for real-life money. Here’s the blurb, from the Gambling Commission:<\/p>\n “Where prizes are successfully restricted for use solely within the game, such in-game features would not be licensable gambling.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But reality will catch up to us. These in-game practices are, after all, in line with the letter of the law, but not their spirit. And even the former is getting a bit dodgy, as Yin-Poole notes, because a cottage industry has grown up around buying FUT Coins, FIFA 18<\/em>\u2019s currency. The coins can be acquired by using the in-game auction house to, say, rid yourself of a card\/player you don\u2019t like.\u00a0<\/p>\n This underground economy is hardly limited to FIFA 18<\/em>. A recent scandal that was here and gone involved Counterstrike: Global Offensive<\/em> (CS:GO<\/em>) and two gaming YouTubers–Trevor Martin and Thomas Cassell–failing to disclose that they were the owners of CSGOLotto<\/a>, which they promoted to their often young viewers. It is explicitly advertised as a gambling site.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Engadget explained:<\/p>\n The site run by the pair, CSGO Lotto, allowed players to bet gun “skins” from the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that alter the look, but not the function, of weapons. Such skins can essentially be used as gambling chips, since they can exchanged at Valve’s Steam Marketplace for real cash, with Valve taking a 15 percent cut.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So, yes, the line between real currency and in-game items is already quite blurry. From a psychological standpoint, so far as dopamine hits and addictions are concerned, there is no material difference between this sort of behavior and going to a casino. I can\u2019t credit Marin and Cassell with much in the way of honesty, but at least on CSGOLotto they make no bones about what\u2019s happening. The only irony is that its name invokes legal, regulated gambling.<\/p>\n But I would go a step further and say that even if there were safeguards preventing the exchange of real money, or at least tightly regulating it, it doesn\u2019t address the fundamental issue. When you open a lootbox in, say, Star Wars: The Old Republic<\/em>, you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re going to get.<\/p>\n You can buy boxes in bulk (like, say, a wad of scratch cards) to increase your odds of getting the thing you want. You commit actual money to this. You feel the frisson of chance gnawing at you. When you get The Thing, be it a swishy lightsaber, a speeder, an exotic pet, or a rare outfit, you feel like you\u2019ve won something tangible. It tickles you so much that you forgot you spent sixty dollars to get it.<\/p>\n The old standby excuse, \u201cyou don\u2019t need any of this,\u201d isn\u2019t enough. This is a widespread practice for a reason. It generates money because it works. Simply saying \u201cyou don\u2019t have to\u201d is as much a non-sequitur here as it is at a casino. It misses the point. You\u2019re deliberately enticing people, then they get on the treadmill, and it\u2019s damned hard to get off. You\u2019re spending money on a probabilistically uncertain outcome, specifically a reward that you value enough to spend on. It\u2019s as real as winning a hundred bucks through your state, provincial, or national lottery.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s far more ethical to show players what they\u2019re buying and guarantee it to them upon purchase, there\u2019s still questions to be asked about the unlimited spending potential inherent to these sorts of microtransactions as well. I recently wrote about Star Trek Online<\/em><\/a> and found its microtransaction system to be intriguing, but also a bit eyewatering.<\/p>\n A pack of nine starships–one for each of the three factions and three specializations–can go for 90 to 120 dollars. There\u2019s no cap on how much you can buy, no limit to what you can convince yourself you need. Twenty dollars for a replica of the Galaxy-class interior, four dollars for an exotic Tribble, 25 for a Tier 5 ship or 30 for Tier 6 (buy three at once and save twenty dollars! A ninety dollar value, yours for sixty! I could almost hear the Billy Mays voice).<\/p>\n As Jim Sterling recently observed<\/a> while discussing the 60 USD price point of AAA games, that money now constitutes the cost of admission rather than the purchase of a complete experience. There is a \u201ctall tail\u201d of buying potential available to players now, where 60 dollars becomes 120 or 250 or 500 or even 1,000 over months of play because of everything being put in front of you in an online bazaar.\u00a0<\/p>\n It may not be gambling per se, by even the most futurist of definitions, but it should raise serious ethical questions about what studios are trying to make players do, if this isn\u2019t just a bit of shady hucksterism. Even if what players are buying has no value outside of the game, and exists only as 1s and 0s.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n We come back to the bugbear of every ethical discussion about the virtual world, then. \u201cIt\u2019s not real, so we don\u2019t need rules.\u201d It was a lie when it was about online harassment, and it\u2019s a lie when discussing whether or not these microtransactions are a form of gambling. The terms of socializing are indeed different from that of the physical world, but it involves things that are real enough to the participants. The consequences of words and deeds in virtual worlds have always been real. This is no different.<\/p>\n\n
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“Even if there were safeguards preventing the exchange of real money, or at least tightly regulating it, it doesn\u2019t address the fundamental issue.”<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Japan’s game developers faced government regulation of in-game gambling after they refused to self-regulate. In 2012, the Consumer Affairs Agency outlawed<\/a> virtual games of chance. Devs had to remove “complete gacha” systems from their games.<\/em><\/p>\n