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Why loot boxes could be regulated as gambling

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 11 August 2020

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Do purchasable randomised reward mechanisms in video games (loot boxes) constitute gambling? Opinions often rest on whether virtual items obtained from loot boxes have real-world value. Using market data from real transactions, we show that virtual items have real-world monetary value and therefore could be regulated under existing gambling legislation.

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Fig. 1: The relationship between gamers’ spending on video games and virtual items contained within video games.

Data availability

The Steam Market data are available at https://osf.io/8xmrt/ and the survey data are available at https://osf.io/2jgph/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Marsden Fund Council from Government funding, managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi New Zealand; MAU1804 awarded to A.D. and J.D.S. The funders had no role in study design, data analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank C. Ferguson for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

    Aaron Drummond, Lauren C. Hall & Malcolm R. Loudon

  2. International Media Psychology Laboratory, Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

    Aaron Drummond, James D. Sauer & Lauren C. Hall

  3. Department of Psychology, School of Medicine, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    James D. Sauer

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    David Zendle

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  1. Aaron Drummond
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  2. James D. Sauer
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  3. Lauren C. Hall
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  4. David Zendle
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  5. Malcolm R. Loudon
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Correspondence to Aaron Drummond.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Drummond, A., Sauer, J.D., Hall, L.C. et al. Why loot boxes could be regulated as gambling. Nat Hum Behav 4, 986–988 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0900-3

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