last bit of an article from today's FT - the end of loot boxes???9 Oct 2019 08:57
"But the hottest question around this subject is how closely an addictive, cash-ingesting game of chance skirts your definition of gambling. Some authorities, most prominently in Belgium, have decided that it steps clearly over the line and have banned games with certain gacha elements.
As a measure of how serious the issue has become, a forum of gambling regulators from 19 European countries has for the past year been locked in a study into gacha-style transactions in games. On October 2, it strongly recommended that individual countries should take the initiative in setting out clear rules.
Just days before, Nintendo launched Mario Kart Tour — a mobile game that, to a staggering degree, incorporates gacha mechanisms into the pantheon of cartoonish characters that gamers of all ages know and love. Better vehicles, new characters and other equipment all lie hidden in fixed-odds gacha, which can be bought for real money.
Some analysts are already predicting that gacha and other micro-transactions used to make games more addictive and lucrative are due a grand reckoning — not just in the court of public opinion, but in actual courts. That may be a way off but, with Nintendo’s latest move, it feels like a Rubicon may have been crossed.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo correspondent"
can post all if anybody is interested.
GLA