Loot Boxes and Slots – A Growing Comparison

Amongst the fastest growing gaming genres recently has been found in the online gambling space as online casinos and online have managed to grown hand in hand – but there have also been a number of crossovers between the two markets too as the growth of esports betting has promoted a new opportunity for gaming fans to bet as you can at esportsbetting.site, but much of the focus has been put more toward the growing problem with loot boxes in gaming, and their link to gambling services with slots in particular.

Loot boxes as a whole aren’t a new instance in gaming, first emerging back in 2004 with a popular Korean game that had a gachapon system, a random ticket loot box system, but it was most widely reported for use in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as an update release in 2013 saw a huge wave of cosmetic items enter a market with a real-world value sometimes stretching into the tens of thousands of dollars, and a betting and gambling market that had grown alongside it. The success of loot boxes within Counter-Strike spurred some of the biggest games to adopt a similar cosmetics box of their own but had also put more eyes onto what could be considered a growing problem.

(Image from theverge.com)

The issue many have has is within the way the loot boxes present themselves, the first instances of them featured a very familiar appearance and sound – the ticker of the slot machine and a reel scrolling along to show what you could have won and what you ultimately will win, and this is where much of the problem had initially come from. There have been a number of changes made, namely, to display this action a little differently to make the comparison less likely, as well as other requirements such as showing the odds of winning certain items, but with how widespread the loot box phenomenon has become, not all have fallen in line and there are still many that operate much in the same way.

There is a lot of change being proposed to fix the issue, and already some proceedings to show that attitudes are changing as Dutch courts recently ruled against EA for their own version of loot boxes in player packs, and as other countries gear up to potentially place a ban on loot boxes as a whole, the comparison may be drawn to an end, but as it stands there are many links between slots and boxes, and it has certainly soured thoughts for both.