The End of Loot Boxes By Jon Poret

Recently, Belgium's legislature has decided that "loot boxes" or similar mechanics in video games are to be outlawed in the country, and publishers/developers who release games with these loot boxes in their games are to be fined close to $1,000,000 USD and will be put in prison for five years.

That sounds great and all, but what are loot boxes?

To put it simply, loot boxes are the video game equivalent of buying a pack of Pokemon cards. You pay to open them, but you don't know what you are going to get. This has proven to be a problem, as Belgium considers them a form of gambling and that they go against gambling laws in the country.

A loot box from the game Overwatch

The controversy with loot boxes originally started with the game Star Wars: Battlefront II by EA Games, in which reddit user /u/MBMMaverick called out EA for the loot box mechanic in the game locking away most of the playable characters. EA replied to the thread, stating that the loot boxes gave players "a sense of pride and accomplishment" for either obtaining the characters via the loot boxes, or as another reddit user stated, grinding 40 hours to unlock each hero. This was met with tons of backlash, and the comment became the most downvoted comment on reddit, with over 670,000 downvotes. EA removed the loot boxes from the game after this, so they were not targeted by Belgium with this law.

One of the games that has been under heavy fire concerning these laws, however, has been Counter-Strike: Global Offensive developed by Valve. In the game, players can obtain "weapon crates" once or twice a week while playing the game, which they can open for $2.50 in game to receive a "weapon skin," a paint job for their weapons in game that they can see in game during normal play.

It doesn't sound like an issue because players get no competitive advantage, right?

Wrong.

Items opened from these crates have a real life market value, with prices ranging from a few cents to thousands of dollars. To put these into perspective, one of the rarest skins in the game sold for about $50,000 USD. Because of their real world value, weapon skins in Counter-Strike have been used in many ways, some good and some evil. Some people use them to trade in an attempt to make money off the skin economy. I took part of this, turning about $40 into $180, just to get scammed for my items. Some websites also took to using the skins in another way, one much more nefarious. 

CS:GO skins have been used to gamble with on many sites, which is somewhat ironic considering the way you obtain them is gambling in itself. Some websites exist where you can deposit your skins onto the website for credits that allow you to gamble in hopes to withdraw better, more expensive skins. This became the center of controversy as some websites started rigging their sites, some using bots to bet against other players in 1v1 coin toss games, and some allowing YouTubers to play on the site with altered win percentages on jackpot games in hopes to get more people to gamble in their sites. 

The biggest scandals involving skins in Counter-Strike involve a few popular YouTubers, mainly "PhantomL0rd", "TmarTn", "ProSyndicate", "McSkillet", and "Anomaly". PhantomL0rd was given access to a backdoor win rate changer on a website that he was sponsored by, on which he would gamble on livestreams with altered win percentages in an attempt to get more people on the site gambling. He was eventually found out when he accidentally showed a script on screen and the backdoor he had access to. In the Case of TmarTn and ProSyndicate, they gambled on their own site against other players, altering their win percentages, while not disclosing they owned the site. McSkillet was well known for making videos about rare skins and skin combos that fit a certain theme, and had an in game inventory worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. His inventory got trade banned, meaning he couldn't trade or sell his skins. In a moment of poor judgement, he took his McLaren car, crashed into a school's fence that had a sign that said "STEAM", the name of the service Valve uses to sell games. He then went onto the wrong side of a highway driving at 100 miles per hour, crashing and killing himself and two others. Anomaly's controversy is both the most recent, and the most interesting, as this one may have caused the most damage. He was sponsored by a site for a while, and was paid about $100,000 per video he made on the site, which was owned by a Russian billionaire who was infamous in the CSGO community for running another scam site, and was scamming people on this site as well, as he would use bots with altered win rates against players in 1v1 cointoss matches for skins. Someone pointed out the issues and exposed the website in a YouTube video, and the owner of the site responded by live streaming himself on twitter, giving out the exposer's full name, his address, his family members' address, their names, pictures of all of them, and other private information that he dug up about him.

Because of issues like these and many others in similar games, Belgium decided it would be best to completely ban loot boxes in order to avoid controversies like these.

I decided to get a closer look at how bad these loot boxes really are, and recorded myself opening a few cases in Counter-Strike to showcase how bad these really are.

As you can see in the video, the loot box system in Counter-Strike is almost identical to gambling online or in a casino, as you pay money to open, and you don't know what you will get back, and when I opened my cases, I wasted my $5. 

Seeing how the loot box system really is gambling, Belgium made the right decision in banning them, as underage players can get into gambling through these games. This poses many issues, especially with children who don't understand the fact that they are gambling with money in the form of skins, which can lead them to having a gambling addiction later in life, which they may not be able to afford.