Most current best-selling mobile games break rules on disclosing loot boxes, BBC says

A new investigation by the BBC claims that almost every current best-selling mobile game containing loot boxes is breaking rules on how they’re advertised.

The BBC report notes that in the UK the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) will ban and remove ads for games if those ads don’t make it clear that the games contain loot boxes.

However, the report claims that among the best-selling games on the Google Play store, the vast majority of those with loot boxes aren’t making this clear in their ads.

Its investigation looked at the 45 highest grossing games on the Google Play Store, of which 26 were labelled on the store as including loot boxes.

Of those 26 games, just two actually made it clear in their ads that they contained loot boxes. The others only mention loot boxes on their Google Play Store listing itself, found by tapping a small information button.

The current highest-grossing game with loot boxes, Monopoly Go, is reportedly among those that doesn’t mention them in its ads.

The report also cites Leon Y Xiao, a video game regulation researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen, who says the BBC’s findings are in line with the preliminary results of his own research, which finds that around 90% of games with loot boxes don’t disclose this in their ads.

Adrian Hon, the head of mobile developer Six to Start (which focuses mainly on fitness mobile games), told the BBC that the games industry had a responsibility to be transparent with its players.

Instead, he says it has a habit of “conveniently ignoring or forgetting regulations that might interfere with their ability to sell to players”.

“We know that many people, including children, struggle with overspending on loot boxes,” he said. “The least that games companies could do is disclose the presence of loot boxes, but they won’t even do that – it’s an indictment of their priorities and lack of care towards vulnerable players.”