The mental health director of United Kingdom’s National Health Service (we’ll shorten it to NHS onwards) has stood up against the loot boxes.

If it wasn’t for Claire Murdoch, the United Kingdom might have been less talkative of loot boxes this year than in 2019. However, the NHS director thinks loot boxes are dangerous for children. They get sucked in by them, causing them to be gambling addicts „under the radar.” „Frankly no company should be setting kids up for addiction by teaching them to gamble on the content of these loot boxes. No firm should sell to children loot box games with this element of chance, so yes those sales should end,” Murdoch wrote in her report.

The loot boxes aren’t regulated by England’s Gambling Commission, as their contents can’t be monetised. Murdoch calls it a loophole: „Despite this, third party websites selling gaming accounts and rare items are commonplace and easy to find on places such as eBay across the internet.” She called on game publishers to ban games that encourage children to gamble with those loot boxes (while we agree with the initiative, we’re pretty sure the UK studios of said publishers laughed and moved on…), introduce spending limits (we see something similar in China), tell the players the odds of receiving each item before buying a loot box, and finally, „Support parents by increasing their awareness on the risks of in-game spending.” (Wishful thinking: if those boxes earn money for the publishers, they won’t do anything. See Electronic Arts.)

The risks are also mentioned: „Investigations have found numerous cases of children spending money without their parents’ knowledge, including a 16-year-old paying £2,000 on a basketball game and a 15-year-old losing £1,000 in a shooting game,” Murdoch wrote.

Murdoch might have wasted time with the report: loot boxes are still legal. (Not in the Benelux countries, though.)

Source: PCGamer

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