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Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, after the monumental failure of Battlefront's 2 paid transactions, loot boxes and massive community backlash, numerous states and countries have started to investigate these practices as marketing gambling to minors, even though the average age of gamers is in their 30's, countries still believe that most of the gaming demographics are young children.

I personally don't care what they think if they manage to wipe out this practice of loot boxes, my own country of Australia seems to be making headway with this as they've already introduced a bill to classify loot boxes and transactions as gambling under federal guidelines, this could have two possible outcomes one amazing, one bad.

First you have to understand a little bit about Australia, in terms of technology, our politicians keep us at least 10 years behind everyone else in the first world, it wasn't until around 2012-2014 that we got a rating higher than MA15+, which means games rated over 18 couldn't be sold in Australia, regardless of the statistics and personal liberties, but they have been useful in some regards, some companies aren't allowed to sell their products in Australia if they don't meet a strict criteria.

One of these criterion are marketing to minors in a fraudulent way, which essentially means if you release a game and fail to either disclose or obfuscate that the game requires either more money to progress or has a gambling style system that doesn't have a determined outcome, essentially loot boxes, and these have skated just under the radar as most games also have in game currency loot boxes so they could argue there's technically two ways to obtain them.
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However in Australia we have the ACCAC, an independent government branch that acts as a watchdog for all consumer products, regardless of it comes from Australia or not, which oversee's the regulations of what can and can't be sold, 99.9% of the time i'm against it but they do get it right sometimes and this time they did.

Loot boxes are dangerously close to be considered marketing gambling to minors which would make it illegal to sell in Australia, this is where the two paths comes into play, they could remove the loot boxes from a game and make it so everyone has the same advantage, or they could outright ban the game or the developers may refuse to release in Australia.

However as we're seeing in the EU, they're close to labeling Loot boxes as gambling as well which would make a huge dent in the studios who do this and make them rethink what they put into a game, Australia has a population for only 25 million, while the entire population of Europe is 743 million, and i'm hearing from friends inside the industry in America that even they're looking at this legislature and coming to an agreement with it.

This has been a long time coming, and it's sad that we can't have nice things in the gaming world anymore without being extorted, this started with Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: GO, however they were done right, there's no game play advantage what so ever with their loot boxes and they were completely optional and weren't ever really marketed to you rather they were just there.

Now it's in every 2nd game regardless of what the game is, the worst of all being Shadow Of War, a single player game that had loot boxes introduced, I don't know about you guys but iv'e never said to myself "I'm really enjoying this game, if only i could cut corners and finish it faster" but apparently someone did think that and they implemented it, but the onus of these new calls is squarely on EA's shoulders.

They jumped the shark, then charged you for the shark, the ramp and the jumping mechanic and gamers were pissed off about it, thankfully it caught the attention of some of these businesses who safeguard against this type of gouging and I know that given time Loot boxes will be a thing of the past in Australia.

It also looks like EA is clearing house with the news that Plants Vs Zombies creator was fired by EA for not wanting to make the mobile sequel and adding pay to win micro transactions, this will all come out in the next few weeks and months and individual governments and studios will start to make their moves but there is one thing that is for certain.
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### **Loot boxes are on their way out and the industry is about to change for the better, the only problem that remains is that companies like EA won't go down without a fight and will inevitably attempt to circumvent new laws should they pop up, but either way, it's a good day for gamers when the companies that actively ruin the gaming world are squarely in the crosshairs.**