The Dutch gambling authority, the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), opened its conference on the risks that result from the mix of gaming and gambling in The Hague yesterday.
Said René Jansen, chairman of the KSA: “It is important to look together at the exact location of the problems and how to respond to them.”
Opening the session, Joop Pot, a board member, said that the large turn-out and the pressure on places at the meeting, showed that there was a clear need to exchange ideas about the increasing mix of gaming and gambling. He was addressing a big turnout of people from the games and gaming industries, game developers, lawyers and addiction care experts.
Pot said that ‘loot boxes’ are an example of the problem that keeps arising in games and led to the KSA raising the issue earlier in the year. The loot boxes come in amusement games and can be bought but there is no influence on what the loot boxes may contain.
After investigation, the KSA concluded that the loot boxes were in conflict with the country’s Betting and Gaming Act, but if it is proved that they are not illegal, then it warns that there are indications that they are contributing to gambling addiction.
After the warning, he said that some providers had made adjustments to their game, but some did not.
He was followed by Jan-Johan Belderok, editor-in-chief of Gamekings, a platform for gamers. He said that only in the Netherlands is the turnover more than €1bn and that meant that more was being spent on games than on music or movies. He also referred to loot boxes which now earn game companies more money than the sale of the games themselves.
"In the present, the online identity of young people is perhaps just as important as their offline identity. It used to be that brand of those pants or that type of sneakers. Now it is also about how good you are in a game. If you then have the choice to improve quickly by doing microtransactions, then the temptation is great. '
Dick de Bruin, a research partner of the KSA, said that there is now a smaller division between playing a game and gambling and called for more research. The following discussion concluded that the delegates saw a shared responsibility to take the mix of gaming and gambling in the correct direction.
The statement 'the games sector is currently taking sufficient measures to prevent gambling addiction' generated a lot of discussion. On the one hand, the commercial gain through which the large game companies are driven, was mentioned, on the other hand the example of a new game was also mentioned whereby it was explicitly stated that this game does not contain loot boxes, as a marketing expression.
In this context, it was also pointed out that it is technically possible to protect players from games of chance in games. For example, it is possible to arrange for minors to be excluded, but the will must be there. Given the large commercial interests that are involved, many people wondered whether companies would like to voluntarily switch to this.
