Assessing the Landscape of Illegal Advertising of Loot Boxes in Belgium

This study examines whether video game companies are advertising loot box-containing games in Belgium, a country that has banned loot boxes and social casino games as gambling, despite the ban's contested effectiveness. Researchers compiled 390 game titles known to contain loot boxes from prior open datasets, yielding 372 unique games, and searched them in Meta's Ad Library. Because the Netherlands is culturally and geographically similar to Belgium but has not banned loot boxes, the authors used Dutch advertising as a benchmark for detecting deliberate exclusion of Belgium for compliance purposes.

The core finding is that advertising of prohibited games in Belgium is widespread rather than exceptional. Of the 372 unique titles, 176 (47.3%) advertised in either Belgium or the Netherlands, and 172 advertised in Belgium, with only four of the 174 games advertised in the Netherlands (2.3%) absent from Belgian advertising entirely. In total, 1,574 ads for loot box and social casino games were identified, viewed at least 4.5 million times. A particularly concerning result is that 72.5% of these ads, 1,141 in total, were set to potentially reach users under 21, an age group that Belgian law excludes even from licensed online gambling apart from National Lottery products.

The study covers Belgium and the Netherlands within the Meta advertising ecosystem, drawing on Meta's Ad Library, which is mandated under the EU Digital Services Act and records ad content along with intended and actual audience demographics. The authors argue that this independent, third-party repository offers an objective basis for studying social media advertising. They conclude that a blanket ban may be insufficient without accompanying enforcement infrastructure, noting parallels with UK research finding that only 7% of games complied with loot box disclosure requirements.