Loot boxes, pay-to-win microtransactions targeted by US lawmaker’s bill
Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, has announced a piece of legislation targeting microtransactions and loot boxes aimed at minors.
One of my first jobs in the video game industry was a community manager for a small MMO overlooking the North American version of a Korean product. The concurrent users at any given time were less than a thousand people, and the game was free-to-play, but even this no-name product saw a handful of people spend thousands of dollars a month gambling on pay-to-win microtransactions to make their equipment better. Loot boxes have only made things worse.
Even on such a micro scale, I could see the dangerous effects a lousy game with a monumentally small community could have if gambling for a pay-to-win edge could be accomplished with purchases of hundreds of dollars at a time. With games like Fortnite becoming mainstream successes and CS: GO being popular farms for skin gambling, some sort of regulation has been long overdue.
Since publishers haven’t done it on their own to themselves, one US senator appears to be willing to bring this conversation to the political forefront. As reported by Kotaku, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has introduced The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act. His proposed legislation would apply to “games targeted at those under the age of 18” and those where “developers knowingly allow minor players to engage in microtransactions.”
What is or isn’t a microtransaction isn’t defined, but Hawley’s bill will “prohibit several forms of manipulative design” in video games available for US citizens, including loot boxes and microtransactions in pay-to-win games where “artificial difficulty” induces people to buy microtransactions to access content that would otherwise be available for free.
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There’s a lot to unpack about Hawley’s proposed act, but introducing it in the US Senate would mean the involvement of dozens upon dozens of people who barely know what video games are to vote on its merits with additions and subtractions invariably made before a vote.
The video game lobby group ESA has provided a comment, pointing to other countries that were fooled into arguing that loot boxes that have people gambling with real money on odds to receive items to prove it’s not gambling. They also argue parents already have tools to implement controls on kids’ purchases of microtransactions.
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One thing’s for sure; the video game industry, while not as wide-reaching of a lobbyist arm as many other groups in US politics, will not take this decision laying down. Because EA makes hundreds of millions of dollars on annualized video games selling ultimate teams based on artificial scarcity in full-priced titles, there’s no way there won’t be pushback on this topic.