belgium gaming commission
The Video Game Industry Needs To Self-Regulate, Avoid Government Involvement
All it takes is enough headlines for lawmakers to notice. They’ve noticed. Today I read that Belgium declares it wants loot boxes declared as gambling, and wants them banned in Europe. Before you scoff at a single example from Europe, we now have the U.S. State of Hawaii initiating an investigation into predatory practices at EA, precipitated by the headlines Battlefront II has been making. Once enough dollars are at stake and enough people are aggravated, the hackles are up. Microtransactions, as many have pointed out, have been extremely successful. Success is a double-edged coin. With a massive flood of new revenue coming in based on, essentially, a different way of packaging and selling the same content amount going out, this should have been expected. Scrutiny. Loot boxes, as a ...
Lootboxes To Get Banned In Europe – “Mixing Gambling And Gaming Is Dangerous”
The recent controversy over lootboxes in Star Wars: Battlefront 2 had caught the eye of many outside the gaming media, so much so that government officials were paying attention to the claims of lootboxes being similar to gambling. This led to the news that the Belgium Gaming Commission had started an inquiry into the whole matter in order to determine whether lootboxes and microtransactions did really lead to gambling and addiction. Well, turns out that they have come to the conclusion that lootboxes with microtransactions attached to them do constitute a form of gambling, and since children are also playing these video games, lootboxes need to be banned. Belgium’s Minister of Justice, Koen Geens, had this to say: “The mixing of money and addiction is gambling. Mixing gambling...