The Netherlands seek loot box ban on EU level

Dutch continue their crackdown on random in-game purchases

The Netherlands have long been a thorn in the side of EA Sports by trying to regulate one of the company’s most lucrative business models: selling card packs in FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT). A side effect of this staunch Dutch resistance against these business practices has been that the courts and authorities in other European Union countries have taken notice – recently, Sony has been forced by an Austrian court to compensate someone for in-game purchases made in FIFA on PlayStation.

The court had made arguments in a similar vein to those made in Belgium and the Netherlands for a long while now, showing that legal opinion is slowly turning against video game developers in this regard.

The Dutch government has now communicated its willingness to actually move towards a ban of so-called loot boxes – not just in its own country, but in the entire EU with its almost 450 million inhabitants. The cabinet defines loot boxes as “virtual treasure chests in games whereby a user does not know what they will get as a reward for a purchase.”

This would have been the case for things like the original Overwatch’s treasure chests and fits the mechanics of EA Sports’ golden goose, the Ultimate Team mode of its sports titles – be they FIFA, Madden NFL, or NHL. 2K’s NBA series would be another candidate having to fear such a ban. Not to mention countless other games, often from the mobile sphere, offering randomized in-app purchases.

While the audiences for basketball, football, and ice hockey games are primarily based in North America, FIFA’s main audience comes from the European continent.

Technically, EA already has the solution to this problem at hand: It has the ability to show players the contents of the pack they’re currently looking at, allowing them to make an informed decision about the purchase. Valve has been doing this in Dota 2, for example, to circumvent laws around loot box bans.