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Paid loot boxes have been confirmed as illegal by a Belgian court and now Apple faces potential liability for allowing games with them to appear in the country’s App Store.
The Enterprise Court of Antwerp ruling dated January 16, which referred some questions that remain unanswered to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), favoured a player of Top War: Battle Game, who is suing Apple, not the developer RiverGame, for €67,813 in damages.
The latest decision confirms that loot boxes are illegal gambling in Belgium, but it has not yet been decided whether Apple is responsible for paying damages for allowing the game on its digital platform.
“The judgment is unsurprising,” Leon Xiao, a policy research consultant at beClaws.org, told Vixio GamblingCompliance.
He believes the 2018 legal opinion from the regulator that deemed loot boxes illegal made this an “inevitable result” but “it was surprising to see Apple attempting to deny this very unsuccessfully”.
“Interestingly, the player went after the platform (Apple) rather than the game company offering the illegal loot boxes. This is likely because it is easier to obtain damages from Apple as compared to the Chinese company operating the game. Accordingly, not just game companies, but also platforms that host games should also take note to comply with gambling law,” Xiao said.
Outside Belgium, it is hard to assess the wider impact of this ruling.
“The Belgian court has referred to the CJEU to receive guidance on how to decide whether Apple has immunity because it is perhaps merely hosting illegal content without sufficient knowledge of the illegality of the specific game. Until we get the answers from the CJEU, we cannot know the potential impact,” Xiao said.
In some EU countries and the UK, laws mean it would not be easy to argue loot boxes are illegal gambling, but some could be breaching consumer law for failing to disclose probabilities.
“That might be another line of attack that companies should be prepared to address,” Xiao said.
He advises that companies and platforms should only offer loot boxes that comply with both consumer and gambling laws.
“This means not offering paid loot boxes at all in Belgium,” Xiao said.
