Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens said that he wants to ban games with a certain type of loot boxes in Europe. We are talking about loot boxes that gamers buy without knowing what kind of rewards can be waiting for them inside.
“The combination of gambling and video games can have a bad effect on the development of children, especially at a young age,” the official told local media VTM News.
Gens did not specify when and how exactly this ban will be implemented.
Recall that last week the Belgian gaming commission decided to find out whether loot boxes can be considered a type of gambling activity on the example of online shooters Overwatch and Star Wars Battlefront II.
A number of gaming sites managed to report that loot boxes have already been recognized as a type of gambling in Belgium, but this information was denied today by colleagues from the Dutch publication InsideGamer. According to them, the investigation did not come to final conclusions.
Along with this, the North American rating organization ESRB did not recognize loot boxes as a type of gambling, and their European colleagues from the European PEGI said they were not authorized to make such decisions, and shifted responsibility to the state gambling commissions.
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