Key Takeaways
• Belgium banned paid loot boxes as illegal gambling in 2018, and an Antwerp court confirmed that position in January 2025 by holding Apple liable for hosting the mechanic in a mobile game.
• The Netherlands went the opposite way. Its top administrative court ruled in 2022 that FIFA Ultimate Team packs are not gambling, because most players earn them through play rather than buy them outright.
• The UK and the US have both declined to bring loot boxes into gambling law, relying instead on voluntary codes and general consumer protection powers, and both show real compliance gaps once independent researchers checked.
• An operator running the identical build of a game across all four markets faces genuinely different legal exposure in each one, and that gap, not any single ruling, is what boards need to hold in view.
1. What are loot boxes, and why is this a gambling question?
Loot boxes are randomised in-game reward mechanics, purchased with real money or virtual currency, that give the player a chance-based selection of items rather than a guaranteed one. The regulatory question they raise is whether that randomness makes them a form of gambling that should sit inside licensing law rather than consumer protection law. The benchmark applies almost entirely to games played online or on connected consoles and PCs rather than to land-based casino floors. The underlying legal test, whether a wager, a chance element and a prize of value are all present, is the same test regulators use for slot machines and other online games of chance. Four jurisdictions show four different answers to that test, and the gap between them, rather than any single ruling, is what boards operating across markets need to hold in view.
2. How do Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK and the US compare?
Belgium classified paid loot boxes as illegal games of chance in April 2018, when its Gaming Commission ruled that mechanics in titles including Star Wars: Battlefront II and FIFA met the legal definition of a game of chance. It ordered publishers to remove or amend them or face criminal liability. Enforcement then went quiet for years, so the position looked settled but toothless. That changed when the Antwerp Enterprise Court ruled on 16 January 2025 in a case brought by a consumer who had spent over 67,800 euros on loot boxes in the mobile game Top War over ten months. The court found the mechanic met the four-part test for an illegal game of chance and held Apple liable for facilitating access to it through the App Store. It referred the platform liability question to the Court of Justice of the European Union, so the ruling is now the first judicial confirmation of Belgium’s position, not the end of the story.
The Netherlands took the opposite path through its courts. The Dutch gambling regulator, the Kansspelautoriteit, fined Electronic Arts over FIFA Ultimate Team packs and set a weekly penalty of 250,000 euros for non-compliance. The Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, overturned that penalty on 21 March 2022. It ruled that because most packs are earned through play rather than bought, and because they sit inside a broader skill-based game mode rather than functioning as a standalone product, they fall outside Dutch gambling law. That reasoning, that how the majority of players actually obtain the mechanic matters more than the mechanic’s design, is now cited across other EU jurisdictions weighing the same question. That includes Austria’s courts, which have reached contradictory results in FIFA and Counter-Strike cases in recent years.
The UK government has consistently declined to extend the Gambling Act 2005 to cover loot boxes, and the Gambling Commission has confirmed it has no statutory authority over them, so protection has instead run through a voluntary industry code. After a call for evidence and a government response in 2022 that called for parental consent controls and spending limits rather than legal reclassification, UK Interactive Entertainment published voluntary guidance in July 2023. The government said in May 2024 that it was monitoring implementation over a 12-month review period while keeping legislative options open. Independent research published in Royal Society Open Science found compliance with the parallel labelling scheme run by the ratings bodies ESRB, PEGI and IARC to be patchy. Separate analysis found fewer than one in ten social media game adverts disclosing loot box content as the voluntary principles required, so the self-regulatory model has real gaps even where it exists on paper.
The United States has no federal or state gambling law bringing loot boxes into licensing, and a 2018 push in Hawaii to introduce restrictive bills failed to advance, with no state since passing binding loot box-specific legislation. Protection instead runs through disclosure and consumer protection law. The Entertainment Software Rating Board introduced an ‘In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items)’ label as a mandatory content descriptor for rated titles. The Federal Trade Commission has used its general consumer protection powers rather than gambling law to act on the substance of harm, most visibly in a settlement announced in January 2025. In that case, HoYoverse, publisher of Genshin Impact, agreed to pay 20 million US dollars and to bar loot box sales to players under 16 without parental consent. This followed FTC allegations of misleading odds disclosure and unlawful collection of children’s data under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
3. What does the divergence actually mean for operators?
The starkest contradiction in this benchmark is that Belgium and the Netherlands apply the same underlying EU gambling framework and reach opposite conclusions. Belgium bans the mechanic outright as a matter of form, while the Netherlands permits it based on how most players actually use the mechanic. That divergence exists because gambling law in the EU remains a national competence rather than a harmonised one. It means a publisher operating the identical build of a game across both markets is legally compliant in one country and criminally exposed in the other. That is not a sustainable position for any operator with EU-wide distribution, and it explains why the Belgian ruling was referred upward to the Court of Justice rather than settled at national level.
The UK and US cases show a different kind of tension between a government that accepts the potential for harm and a government that declines to use gambling licensing law to address it. Both administrations cited the same categories of financial and psychological risk in their public statements. In both markets, the reasoning is the same: the causal link between loot box spending and diagnosed problem gambling has not been established to the evidential standard regulators say they need, so proportionality arguments favour lighter-touch consumer protection tools over reclassification. The practical effect, shown by the UK’s own compliance data, is that voluntary codes without independent audit or penalty produce, at best, partial adherence. Enforcement has fallen instead to secondary bodies, the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK and the FTC in the US, using tools designed for deceptive marketing rather than gambling harm.
This benchmark also hides a genuine land-based versus online divergence, though it rarely gets named. None of the four jurisdictions extends loot box scrutiny to physical trading card packs or arcade prize machines sold in equivalent random-reward form on the high street, even though the same wager, chance, and prize structure exists there. That asymmetry is defensible only if regulators accept that scale and frictionless repeat purchasing, both hallmarks of the digital and mobile environment rather than the physical one, are doing the real work in the harm case. That in turn suggests the current legal tests are measuring the wrong variable.
The Belgian court’s decision to pursue Apple rather than the game developer is the detail boards should weigh most heavily, because it shifts liability toward the distribution layer, the app stores and platforms that host these mechanics, rather than the publisher alone. That logic, if it survives the Court of Justice referral, would reframe platform terms of service and app store review processes as a compliance surface for gambling law across the whole EU rather than a single title-by-title question.
4. What should boards do about it?
Boards operating across the EU should treat Belgium and the Netherlands as proof that a single global build is not a compliance strategy. Market-by-market legal review of loot box mechanics, refreshed at least annually given how fast the case law is moving, needs to be owned by legal and compliance rather than by product teams alone. Any business with exposure to app store distribution should monitor the Court of Justice referral from the Belgian case closely, because a ruling that extends liability to platforms would change risk allocation in supplier and distribution contracts well beyond the games sector itself. Where a market relies on a voluntary code, as the UK does, boards should ask for independent audit data rather than self-reported industry figures before treating the code as adequate mitigation, given the compliance gaps the academic research has already surfaced. US-facing businesses should read the HoYoverse settlement as a template for FTC enforcement priorities, odds transparency and under-16 consent rather than an isolated case, and age verification and disclosure practices should be benchmarked against it now rather than after an investigation opens. Finally, any organisation adjacent to this sector, payment providers, platform hosts, and marketing agencies, should map their own exposure under a facilitation theory of liability, since the Belgian ruling shows regulators are willing to look past the immediate publisher to the wider commercial chain.
5. Boardroom Questions
1. Do we know, market by market, whether our loot box or random reward mechanics would meet the legal definition of a game of chance under that jurisdiction’s current gambling law, not the position as it stood two years ago?
2. If the Court of Justice extends platform liability along the lines the Belgian court proposed, what is our exposure as a distributor, host or payments processor rather than as the mechanic’s designer?
3. Where we rely on a voluntary code rather than statutory regulation, what independent evidence do we have that our actual practice, not just our published policy, meets it?
Sources
1. Taylor Wessing, ‘An iPhone, a Gambling Problem, and the Loot Box Debate: Antwerp Enterprise Court’s LS v. Apple Ruling’, March 2025, https://www.taylorwessing.com/en/insights-and-events/insights/2025/03/an-iphone-a-gambling-problem-and-the-loot-box-debate
2. AKD, ‘Loot boxes are legal in the Netherlands’, 2022, https://www.akd.eu/insights/loot-boxes-are-legal-in-the-netherlands
3. iGamingBusiness, ‘Dutch court rules loot boxes are not gambling’, 2022, https://igamingbusiness.com/esports/esports-regulation/dutch-court-loot-boxes-not-gambling/
4. House of Commons Library, ‘Loot boxes in video games’, 13 August 2024, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8498/
5. GOV.UK, ‘Government response to the call for evidence on loot boxes in video games’, 2022, https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/loot-boxes-in-video-games-call-for-evidence/outcome/government-response-to-the-call-for-evidence-on-loot-boxes-in-video-games
6. Royal Society Open Science, ‘Beneath the label: unsatisfactory compliance with ESRB, PEGI and IARC industry self-regulation requiring loot box presence warning labels by video game companies’, March 2023, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/10/3/230270/91968/Beneath-the-label-unsatisfactory-compliance-with
7. Perkins Coie, ‘ESRB Issues Labeling Requirement for Video Games Containing Loot Boxes’, https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/esrb-issues-labeling-requirement-video-games-containing-loot-boxes
8. Federal Trade Commission, ‘Genshin Impact Game Developer Will be Banned from Selling Lootboxes to Teens Under 16 without Parental Consent, Pay a $20 Million Fine to Settle FTC Charges’, January 2025, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/genshin-impact-game-developer-will-be-banned-selling-lootboxes-teens-under-16-without-parental
9. Hawaii Tribune-Herald, ”Loot box’ bills fail to advance’, 24 March 2018, https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2018/03/24/hawaii-news/loot-box-bills-fail-to-advance/