The loot box phenomenon isn't dead yet and if anything it's accelerating, but there are growing pressures from different governing bodies around the world who are looking to stop it in its tracks. One such governing body is the U.S. senate, where Washington state senator Kevin Ranker, has introduced a bill to figure out whether loot boxes should be constituted as gambling and therefore regulated in the U.S. as such.
"What the bill says is, ‘Industry, state: sit down to figure out the best way to regulate this,’" he said (via PCGamer). "It is unacceptable to be targeting our children with predatory gambling masked in a game with dancing bunnies or something."
It's entirely possible that if the bill passes and loot boxes are determined to be gambling, that they would be banned in a number of U.S. states and likely regulated at least to some extent at the federal level. It may be that like in China, the odds of certain outcomes must be revealed, but they will certainly be limited to R rated games, since children cannot legally gamble anywhere.
Washington isn't the only state looking into loot boxes either. Hawaii's state representative, Chris Lee, gave the practice a dressing down in a video late last year, describing the practice as "predatory."
Elsewhere in the world, Belgian officials are looking to regulate the practice, and the British gambling authority is said to be keeping an eye on the practice to see how it impacts gaming as a whole.
