“Since then, the rapid innovation of technology has revolutionised gambling,” explains Atkinson. YGAM is keen to point out that the government’s review will be the first large-scale development on the Gambling Act since it was first passed in 2005. Most of the gambling laws that would govern all this are outdated. On the Apple App Store it’s rated 17+, on the Google Play Store it’s ‘E for Everyone’. YGAM highlights Pirate Kings, a cartoon-like game with millions of downloads that features ‘spin to win’ slots that can lose you real money. That can often lead to inconsistent or lacking oversight. Instead of the independent PEGI ratings that console games get, mobile games are policed by the very app stores that host them. Restrictions are also less sturdy for mobile games. Alex Dale, a former vice president of King, which created Candy Crush, has described how companies use data from Facebook and Google to target adverts at those play and spend money in games. Simply put, if the mechanics that make that money are gambling, then the profitable, often underage minority repeatedly spending on them are gambling addicts.įor mobile games things can be even worse. “The industry has seized on these things, but there are clearly ethical considerations here,” says Brian Bagelow, founder of industry body the Scottish Games Network. Roughly half of the over £10 billion spent on loot boxes worldwide each year came from just five per cent of players. This business model works, not because everyone spends money in-game but because there are huge revenues to be made from a small minority who spend a lot. By one 2018 estimate, 80 per cent of all digital games revenue came from free-to-play games. Free-to-play games, as well as paid games that receive regular updates like GTA Online (sometimes known as ‘Gaming as a Service’ or GaaS games) can offer revenues incomparable to those made from standalone games. Part of the reason gambling can be an appealing mechanic to developers comes down to business models. That addictive impact has led to children regularly losing hundreds or thousands of pounds on loot boxes as they chase losses they’ve already spent. While recent research suggests 40 per cent of children who play video games have bought loot boxes, the vast majority of studies on the topic have found “unambiguous” links between the lottery-style mechanic and gambling, which would normally be illegal for under-18s. Normally when people discuss gambling in video games, they’re talking about loot boxes, the controversial mechanic where people spend money on the slight chance of winning rewards. James is one of tens of thousands of people being swept up in a new wave of gambling in video games, which is helping to drive a surge of underage gambling addiction. “I remember going on my daily walks and crying, thinking that I was losing all this money and there was nothing I could do about it,” he says. He spent weeks gambling on the random outcomes, eventually emptying his entire bank account on the virtual betting site. “Everything you could bet on in a normal American Football game you could do in this one,” James recalls. Instead of poker or real-life sports games, he started betting on the outcomes of computerised matches on Madden, the NFL video game. Years later, while in the midst of recovery during lockdown, he relapsed on an entirely new form of virtual gambling. James* first began to develop a gambling addiction as a teenager after winning over £50,000 on his dad’s betting account.
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