The CEO of Digital Arts, Andrew Wilson, said in an investor forecast Tuesday that loot boxes shouldn’t be considered gambling. Mr. Wilson’s comments came shortly after the in-game objects have been found to be violating gambling laws in many of countries.
It was actually an Electronics game that stirred the continuing debate over the nature of loot boxes and if these constituted a kind of gambling. EA launched the latest installment of the Star Wars: Battlefront show last fall. The game — Star Wars Battlefront II, immediately found itself in the middle of a bitter controversy within the arbitrary contents of its loot boxes. The game publisher pulled those from its latest Star Wars game after the adverse publicity surrounding the game’s launch.
A number of gambling regulators, including those of the Netherlands and Belgium, started probes into loot boxes and if purchasing them represented gambling. Broadly, the boxes contain various things which can be of small value to a player or will help them boost their performance within the game.
Regulators have expressed worries the truth that players become aware of a loot box’s contents just after it has been bought could signify a kind of gambling. In addition, it seems that gamers aren’t correctly informed about the probability of getting one valuable object or another in their own boxes, which includes further intensified the debate over the nature of the controversial products.
Mr. Wilson said in Tuesday’s investor forecast that they ardently believe loot boxes shouldn’t be considered gambling. The executive proceeded on that gamers are always assigned a specified variety of items per box and EA doesn’t authorize the cash-out or purchase of things found in the boxes or virtual money for real cash.
The Dutch and Belgian gaming jurisdictions carried out separate investigations into loot boxes and published their findings each month. They both probed many video games that comprised loot boxes and generally found that a few of the breached gaming regulations in their countries.
The Dutch Gambling Authority, Kansspelautoriteit, investigated ten video games also discovered that loot boxes in at least four of them ran afoul of the Netherlands’ Betting and Gaming Act. According to the regulatory figure these integrated elements of games of chance into skill-based games. Under the nation’s gambling law, the provision of games of chance with no specific license is strictly prohibited.
The Belgian Gaming Commission discovered that three video games violated its gambling law, together with those being FIFA 18, Counter Strike: International Offensive, and Overwatch. While Star Wars Battlefront II was the game to begin the loot box dialog, Belgium’s gambling regulator said that the game’d publisher had addressed the problem in a timely manner and it did not believe the game, in its existing form, violated the nation’s gambling regulations.
It became known last week a Norwegian scholar would carry out his own review of the matter and would refer his findings to the nation’s government since it’s considering the possibility to introduce specific loot box regulations.
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