Study: many top iOS games in China "bypass" the law on the disclosure of chances in loot boxes

The Chinese authorities require developers to indicate with what probability items fall out of the loot boxes. But as it turned out, not all game authors fully comply with this requirement. And while some developers carefully hide information from gamers, others completely ignore the law.

This conclusion was reached by a group of researchers from China, who analyzed one hundred of the highest-grossing iOS games in the country.

According to the report, 91 iOS games use loot boxes. Of these, 23% of games indicate the drop—out rate only within the applications themselves, 39% of games — only on the project website, and 34% of games – both there and there. At the same time, 4% of games did not write the drop-out coefficient at all.

As the researchers noted, only five out of a hundred top iOS games in China automatically show the chances that a valuable item may fall out of the loot box. Whereas, for example, 52 games write about it in news feeds along with other messages, which is why gamers may miss information.

There are more complex maneuvers:

“One game requires the user to go into the settings, contact the support service and then ask the chatbot in English about the coefficients,” the researchers gave an example. “Another game forces him to click on several hyperlinks, visit several pages and scroll for a long time before it shows him the probabilities in the loot boxes.”

Nevertheless, it cannot be said that all these games (except those 4% that do not mark the chances in the loot boxes) really violate the law.

According to the researchers, the Chinese law on loot boxes gives too much freedom to developers. Formally, it does not prohibit publishing information about probability only in one place: in the game or on the website. Nor does he talk about how easy gamers should find these recordings. But the researchers are sure that the developers still contradict his “spirit”.

They believe that the law would work much more effectively if everything was clearly spelled out in it. The researchers proposed to introduce a single standard for the disclosure of coefficients. For example, so that the information is automatically displayed where the loot boxes are sold.

Recall that from the first of December 2021, a similar rule will take effect in South Korea. But it was not accepted there by the authorities, but by the Gaming Industry Association (K-Games).