Loot boxes are games of chance, not baseball cards.

In June, the Australian Parliament's Reference Committee on Environment and Communications began looking for video game loot boxes. Two and a half months later, the group presented its findings. According to the Lexology news site, this is bad news.

Lead investigators Dr. David Zendle and Dr. Paul Cairns examined close to 7,500 people. The researchers say that people who have gambling problems tend to spend more on loot boxes. I contacted the committee to get more details on its methodology. I will update this message once I have this information.

"Our large-scale study found significant links between loot-related spending and problem gambling," says the committee's report. "The more serious the gambling problem was, the more likely they were to spend large amounts of money on loot boxes. These results strongly support the contention that loot boxes are psychologically related to gambling. "

The loot boxes caught the attention of regulators around the world after gamers triggered a reaction against the business model. Consumer outrage reached its peak last year with the release of Electronic Arts' Star Wars: Battlefront II. This game and countless others give players the opportunity to spend extra money in crates that work like a pack of baseball cards. You do not know what's inside, but you'll always get something. Most of the time, it's junk mail, but sometimes it's useful and valuable. Upset gamers said the model is operating like an unregulated slot machine and the people in power in Europe and Australia have begun to listen to them.

Are loot boxes harmful? Perhaps

Cairns and Zendle claim that loot boxes could cause gambling-related damage. They speculate that loot boxes could serve as a gateway to the real game or could exploit unregulated gambling problems.

"Industry statements generally separate booty boxes from gambling," Cairns and Zendle said in a statement. "They highlight the similarities between loot boxes and harmless products such as trading cards or Kinder Surprise eggs. … On the other hand, the researchers argue that "booty boxes" share as many formal similarities with other forms of play as they respond to "psychological criteria" to be considered playing themselves. These results support the position of academics who claim that loot boxes are psychologically related to gambling. "

Investigators pointed to their findings that people who spend a lot on loot boxes also spend a lot on gambling.

"That's what we could expect if loot boxes were psychologically a form of play," Cairns and Zendle said. "This is not what you would expect if the loot boxes were, instead, psychologically comparable to the baseball cards."