England's National Health Service, or NHS, has drawn a link between loot boxes and youth gambling. It's yet another instance of anti-loot box sentiment that has been steadily building for the past few years - a sentiment that may eventually lead to loot boxes being banned as they have been in Belgium.
Claire Murdoch, mental health director of the NHS, warned that video games are "setting kids up for addiction" and urged video game companies to stop using them in games. Previously, the UK stated that loot boxes are gambling, which has lead to increasingly negative opinions of the practice from the general public. Gamers also tend to be opposed to the practice, though loot boxes regularly rake in money for giant gaming corporations.
"Frankly, no company should be setting kids up for addiction by teaching them to gamble on the content of these loot boxes," Murdoch stated, " No firm should sell to children loot box games with this element of chance, so yes those sales should end." Of the companies that do implement loot boxes in their work, EA has earned a reputation as the worst, specifically after Star Wars: Battlefront 2 was overrun by the micro-transactions.
According to the NHS, the latest figures from the UK Gambling Commission has shown 55,000 children classified with a gambling problem. The NHS also reports multiple instances of children spending money without their parents' knowledge, with the report specifically mentioning a 16-year-old spending £2,000 on a basketball game and a 15-year-old losing £1,000 in a shooting game. Stories of high spending on micro-transactions have grown more and more common. Recently, a Runescape player spent $62,000 on in-game purchases.
While the video game industry has managed to stay fairly self-regulated in the past, public opinion of loot boxes has begun to raise a few eyebrows all over the world. The United States, the UK, Belgium, and many more countries are beginning to grow increasingly opposed to the practice, with legislation against loot boxes beginning to pop up more frequently. It's possible that the practice could wind up being banned, though that may have major implications for the video game industry in the future.
Source: NHS England