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Edging the Max Win: Loot Box Practices of Popular Live Streamers
This paper examines how popular live streamers on Twitch normalise loot box gambling as a form of play, focusing on the Counter-Strike 2 streamer ohnePixel.
- The paper argues that popular Twitch streamers normalise loot box gambling as play, and that this community-level normalisation, layered onto loot box and gamble-play mechanisms, creates a pathway from social gaming into gambling and potentially problem gambling.
- The study is an ethnographic project of roughly 300 hours of observation across ten streamers, selected from an initial sixty, analysed with reflexive thematic analysis.
- The central case study, ohnePixel, a Counter-Strike 2 streamer who averages over 100,000 viewers, dramatises his gambling through recurring rituals and integrates loot box, trade-up, and terminal systems into gameplay and tournament commentary.
Digital Blind Boxes: Can Sensory Interaction Improve the Player Experience and Reduce the Potential Harms of Loot Boxes?
This study examines whether interaction design borrowed from physical blind box opening rituals can improve user satisfaction in digital loot box-style reward systems, and whether added friction in the opening process might also mitigate potential harms.
- A controlled within-subjects study with only 14 participants found that a drag-based 'digital blind box' opening mode scored significantly higher than a conventional button-click mode on enjoyment, gratification, perceived agency, anticipation, overall satisfaction, and interaction preference, and produced lower frustration.
- Visual aesthetics and usability/playability showed no statistically significant differences between the two modes, leading the authors to attribute the satisfaction gains to the interaction itself rather than to visual or usability factors.
- The authors frame the results as support for 'perceived hapticity,' the idea that visual and motor engagement can simulate tactile sensation in digital environments.
Protecting Minors from Blind Boxes: Procuratorial Public Interest Litigation as a Supplementary Regulatory Mechanism in China
This paper examines how China's procuratorial organs use administrative public interest litigation (APIL) to fill regulatory gaps in the sale of blind boxes to minors.
- Chinese procuratorial organs use administrative public interest litigation (APIL) as a supplementary regulatory tool to protect minors from blind-box sales where existing administrative rules leave psychological and social wellbeing underprotected.
- The analysis rests on nine cases published by the Supreme People's Procuratorate and provincial procuratorates between 2022 and 2026, all designated as typical or guiding examples on blind-box sales and minor protection.
- Two main obstacles impede APIL in this area: harms to minors are largely psychological (gambling attitudes, impulsive spending, competitive consumption habits), and existing rules do not clearly establish that such effects meet the public interest harm threshold.
Views on Gacha Games and Mechanics from a Canadian Context: A Qualitative Study
This qualitative study examines how Canadian video game players perceive gacha games, a monetization system that lets players spend real money on randomized virtual rewards, and how they distinguish it from loot boxes.
- Canadian players largely see gacha and loot boxes as functionally similar, both involving spending currency for randomized rewards and sharing an element of randomness, with some comparing the experience to slot machines.
- The main perceived difference is that gacha is integral to progression and competitiveness, whereas loot boxes were more often viewed as purely cosmetic.
- Of 29 Canadian gamers who had opened loot boxes, 70% reported familiarity with gacha, with HoYoverse titles the most frequently mentioned, followed by Umamusume: Pretty Derby and Fate/Grand Order.
Gambling-Like Mechanics in Roblox Player Generated Content
A study by Callum Deery examines the prevalence of gambling-like purchases in player-generated games on Roblox, a platform whose content is produced largely by independent developers rather than the platform itself.
- Gambling-like mechanics are widespread in popular player-generated Roblox games: 68 of 100 sampled games contained loot boxes or gacha systems, 19 included simulated slot-style or prize-wheel machines, and 2 featured simulated card games such as poker.
- In some titles these mechanics are central to gameplay, including simulated case-opening systems modeled on popular shooter and sports card-collecting products.
- Buy-in costs are substantial: minimum buy-ins averaged 86.9 Robux (median 50) and maximum buy-ins averaged 1,501 Robux (median 449), roughly HK$23 and HK$158 at the most efficient Hong Kong bundle prices.
How Do Players Experience Win/Loss Patterns? An In-The-Wild Study of a Casual Mobile Game
This study investigates how the sequencing of win and loss outcomes shapes player experience in games, a question that has received little systematic empirical attention despite widespread design intuition that event order matters.
- The study used an in-the-wild, between-subjects experiment with the casual mobile game Pizza Time!, analyzing data from 94 players across sequences of ten pseudo-random wins and losses per level.
- Prefix/suffix patterns replicated primacy and peak-end effects: sequences beginning or ending in wins produced higher continuation.
- Loss streaks, but not win streaks, significantly reduced play duration and continuation, suggesting clustered defeats discourage players from persisting.
Loot Box Purchasing in Adolescents: Three-Wave Trajectories, Transitions, and Prospective Associations with Online Gambling Behavior
A three-wave, school-based longitudinal study of Spanish adolescents examines loot box (LB) purchasing, a chance-based microtransaction in videogames, and its links to online gambling, Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), and Online Gambling Disorder (OGD).
- Loot box purchasing was common among Spanish adolescents aged 11 to 17, with point prevalence of 27.7% at wave one, 32.2% at wave two, and 29.4% at wave three over roughly six-month intervals.
- Purchasing was strongly sex-differentiated: 44.7% to 49.1% of boys purchased loot boxes versus 6.4% to 11.1% of girls across waves.
- Purchasing was temporally dependent: 78.9% of earlier purchasers still purchased in the first interval and 65.1% in the second, while only 16.6% purchased at all three waves and about 56% never purchased.
Gamblification, Professional Complicity and Regulatory Failures in Mediated Live Sport on the Island of Ireland
This study, presented at the Gam(bl)ing Conference 2026, examines how gambling marketing has infiltrated live sport broadcasting and social media on the island of Ireland, arguing that existing regulation has failed to keep pace with these practices.
- Analysis of 22.5 hours of live sports programming across eight broadcast and streaming services in Ireland and Northern Ireland recorded over 2,100 direct gambling promotion references, mostly static pitchside advertising and player shirt sponsorship.
- Gambling marketing in live sport was concentrated in international men's darts, football and horse racing, and both public service and commercial broadcasters as well as professional journalists were found to promote gambling services and reuse promotional clips.
- Responsible gambling messages were frequently absent or hard to read during broadcasts, despite the high volume of gambling promotion.
Digital Gaming/Gambling Harms and Students: Financial Literacy and the Transition to Adulthood
This paper outlines early-stage doctoral research examining how UK higher education students encounter and understand random reward mechanisms (RRMs) such as loot boxes and gacha systems, which blur the boundary between digital gaming and gambling.
- The report argues that older teenagers and university students are significantly under-researched in the context of random reward mechanisms (RRMs) like loot boxes and gacha systems, despite their transition to higher education coinciding with new financial independence, reduced parental oversight, and cost-of-living pressures.
- RRMs largely fall outside existing gambling regulation in most jurisdictions, leaving young people with fewer formal safeguards against harm.
- This is early-stage doctoral research that reports no empirical findings; its current contribution is a review and mapping of scholarship on the convergence of gaming and gambling plus an emerging conceptual and methodological framework.
Loot Boxes as Gateway Drug: Findings from a Two-Wave Longitudinal Survey
A two-wave longitudinal survey of Danish citizens aged 10 to 25 examines whether loot box consumption predicts later gambling behaviour, a question that has received little empirical attention despite widespread concern about loot boxes as a form of pseudo-gambling.
- A two-wave Danish longitudinal survey of 4,771 respondents aged 10–25 (2,105 retained in the 2025 follow-up) found a clear, statistically significant association between loot box consumption at baseline and later gambling behaviour.
- The link between loot boxes and subsequent gambling was strongest for online casino gambling and skin gambling, while social media use was a stronger predictor of esports and traditional sports betting.
- Much of the loot box–gambling association was explained by age (18–21), male gender, and earlier gambling behaviour, which overlapped substantially with loot box consumption's predictive power.
The Gam(bl)ification Matrix: How Social and Mechanical Infrastructure Normalises Gambling in Video Games
This paper argues that video game gambling is sustained not only by its mechanical design but by the social and infrastructural systems surrounding it, and it proposes a "gamblification matrix" to map these relationships.
- The paper proposes a "gamblification matrix" that maps video game gambling along three axes: public versus private engagement, internal versus external sources of desirability, and tangible versus intangible rewards.
- Its central claim is that gambling-like mechanics such as loot boxes, blind bags, gacha, skin gambling and esports betting are sustained less by mechanical design alone than by community sharing, near-miss discussion and social recognition, which perpetuate engagement and sunk-cost behaviour.
- Loot boxes are tangible within the game world but rarely convertible to real-world value, except through skin gambling and account sales, a gap the author identifies as a key link to off-platform harm.
That EA-Scopely supergroup, Reform's mobile game, King strikes, Mattel, Roblox, Mizuguchi, more
The mobile games industry is currently navigating significant shifts in corporate consolidation, regulatory pressure, and platform evolution.
- Bloomberg reports that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is considering a merger of its gaming assets, including Savvy Games Group, EA, Scopely, and Moonton, to create a unified gaming supergroup.
- King faces potential strikes at its Stockholm and Malmo offices on September 25th following a year-long dispute over a collective bargaining agreement that the company rejected in June.
- Roblox announced new technology allowing creators to export games as standalone native titles for mobile, PC, and console, alongside a new 'Roblox Wallet' for daily real-currency creator payouts.