Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
A team of researchers from Newcastle University and Loughborough University in the United Kingdom had pressing questions about a peculiar feature of many popular video games. More and more, digital games seemed to be incorporating something called “loot boxes”—a surprise bag of random in-game goodies players could acquire in exchange for real-world money. Take the popular “FIFA” video game franchise, for instance, which has introduced loot boxes in the form of player packs. Gamers can purchase packs and collect famous soccer stars to play on their team. In addition to an aesthetic benefit, packs have a small chance of containing “rare” or “legendary” players that can strengthen one’s team in-game. Loot boxes don’t meet the legal definition of gambling, but they often take pages out of the same book.
Selling loot boxes in popular video games, the U.K. researchers wrote in a 2022 report, is “problematic,” in no small part because these games are regularly played by children and young people. Gambling, meanwhile, is restricted to adults above 18. In their study of 42 English families with children between the ages of 5 and 17, the researchers investigated how young people engaged with these paid reward systems—and their findings were striking and concerning.
One young person they interviewed routinely spent up to seven hours each day playing a popular mobile card game. He watched YouTubers who played the game and aspired to compete with them—but to do that, he needed better cards. The game sold him loot boxes in the form of packs of random cards that he purchased with real money. Since buying a pack didn’t guarantee that he’d get the rare cards he wanted, he kept purchasing packs, again and again. Over the course of a month, he had spent nearly $550 on the game.