Video Game Loot Boxes and Gambling: Should Parents Worry?
Written by Chris Beerman, MSW, LCSW, CADC · Last reviewed and updated September 2026
If your kid plays video games, they have met loot boxes — paid, randomized rewards that look and sound a great deal like a slot machine. Parents ask me some version of the same question: is this actually gambling, and is it doing something to my child?
The honest answer has three parts. The mechanics really are gambling-like, and not by accident. The research consistently finds a link between loot box spending and gambling problems in young people. And nobody has established which way that link runs. All three parts matter, and most of what you will read online gives you one and drops the other two.
Here is what is known, what isn't, and what is actually worth doing about it.
What a Loot Box Actually Is
A loot box is anything you pay for without knowing what you will get: a crate, a pack, a chest, a summon, a card pack in a sports game. The reward is randomized by design, and the good ones are rare by design.
The category is broader than the name suggests. Card packs in FIFA-style Ultimate Team modes are loot boxes. Gacha pulls in mobile games are loot boxes. So are most "mystery" bundles, and some battle-pass tiers. The ESRB, the US games rating body, has a label for exactly this: In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items), which it applies to games containing "in-game offers to purchase digital goods or premiums with real world currency (or with virtual coins or other forms of in-game currency that can be purchased with real world currency) for which the player doesn't know prior to purchase the specific digital goods or premiums they will be receiving."
That parenthetical is the important bit. Most games do not let you buy a loot box directly with money. You buy currency with money, then spend currency on boxes, and the currency is sold in bundles that never quite match the price of anything. That is a deliberate design choice, and it does two things: it obscures what you are actually spending, and it puts a step between the payment and the purchase so the purchase stops feeling like one.
Why It Feels Like a Slot Machine
Because structurally it is one, minus the cash payout.
The reward schedule is variable. You do not know if this pull is the one. That uncertainty is not a side effect of the design; it is the product. Rewards delivered on an unpredictable schedule are far harder to stop chasing than rewards delivered reliably — this is the single best-established finding in the psychology of reinforcement, and game economies are built on it.
The near miss is engineered. Openings are animated, drawn out, and frequently show you the rare item spinning past before landing on something ordinary. A slot machine does the same thing for the same reason.
The losses do not look like losses. You always get something. A duplicate, a common skin, a scrap of currency. Getting nothing would read as a loss; getting something worthless reads as almost.
The money is abstracted twice. Real money buys gems, gems buy pulls, and by the third layer most people — adults included — have genuinely lost track of the cost.
None of this requires anyone at the studio to be a villain. It requires an economy optimized for revenue, tested at scale, on players whose brains are still developing the machinery for weighing a delayed cost against an immediate reward.
What the Research Actually Shows
This is where I want to be careful, because the honest version is more useful to you than the alarming one.
The association is real and it replicates. A 2021 meta-analysis pooling 15 studies found a significant small-to-moderate positive correlation between loot box spending and problem gambling symptoms — around r = 0.26, rising to about 0.37 after adjustment for publication bias — and a similar-sized correlation with excessive gaming (Garea, Drummond, Sauer, Hall & Williams, International Gambling Studies, 2021). That is not a huge effect, but it is a consistent one, found across many separate samples.
It holds up when you control for the obvious explanation. The natural objection is that kids who buy loot boxes are simply kids who already gamble. A 2022 study in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions tested that directly in two Australian samples of 12- to 17-year-olds. Controlling for age, gender and actual monetary gambling in the past month, recent loot box purchasing still increased the odds of problem gambling by roughly 3.7 to 6 times, and of at-risk gambling by 2.8 to 4.3 times.
And nobody knows which way it runs. The same paper says so plainly: causal relationships remain unclear, and the results indicate that loot boxes "disproportionately attract adolescents experiencing gambling problems." That is a different claim from "loot boxes cause gambling problems." It may be that loot boxes prime kids for gambling. It may be that the kids most drawn to gambling are also the ones most drawn to loot boxes. It may be both, feeding each other. The UK government reached the same conclusion when it reviewed the evidence in 2022: there is "an association between loot boxes and harms, but we have not found whether there is a causative link."
So: most children who open loot boxes will not develop a gambling problem. That is true, and it is not a reason to relax about it, because the association is strongest exactly where you would least want it to be — in the small group of kids who spend heavily.
How Common Is This?
Common enough that assuming your child has not encountered it is the wrong default.
In the Gambling Commission's 2024 Young People and Gambling survey in Great Britain — nearly 3,900 young people — 63% knew they could pay to open loot boxes, packs or chests, and 27% had actually done it, with money or in-game currency. Boys were more than twice as likely as girls to have paid.
There is no reason to think the numbers are meaningfully different in Illinois.
Don't Count on Regulation to Handle It
Parents often assume that if loot boxes were really a problem, someone would have stopped them. Here is where that actually stands.
The UK looked and declined. After a formal call for evidence, the government concluded in July 2022 that it "does not intend to amend or extend the scope of gambling regulation to cover loot boxes at this time," opting instead for industry-led measures — including the principle that loot box purchases "should be unavailable to all children and young people unless and until they are enabled by a parent or guardian."
Belgium banned them, and the ban did not hold. In 2018 the Belgian Gaming Commission declared paid loot boxes to be games of chance under existing law. Four years later, a study published in Collabra: Psychology found that 82% of the highest-grossing iPhone games in Belgium were still using a randomized monetization method, as were 80% of games rated suitable for players aged 12 and over (Xiao, 2023). The conclusion was blunt: the ban "has not been effectively enforced."
What you do get is disclosure. Apple's App Store guideline 3.1.1 requires that apps offering loot boxes "must disclose the odds of receiving each type of item to customers prior to purchase," and the ESRB label above tells you a game contains random paid items before you buy it. Those are genuinely useful, and they are about the extent of it.
The practical upshot: the controls that matter in your house are the ones you set.
The Part That Is Straightforwardly Gambling
There is a version of this that stops being loot-box-adjacent and becomes the real thing.
Items won from loot boxes — particularly weapon skins — have resale value on third-party marketplaces, and a set of offshore sites let people wager those items on casino games, coin flips and esports matches. That is unlicensed gambling with a currency your child may already hold, usually with no age verification worth the name.
If you are going to watch for one thing, watch for that. A child opening card packs in a football game is in a grey area. A child logging into a skin-betting site is not.
Signs Worth Paying Attention To
Most of these are about money and secrecy rather than about how much your child plays.
Requests for gift cards or currency top-ups that are getting more frequent, or larger, or more urgent
Charges you did not authorize, or a card that has quietly stayed saved on an account
Real distress after an opening — not disappointment, distress — or a mood that tracks the outcomes
Spending down a balance immediately every time it goes up, rather than saving it for something specific
Vagueness about how much has gone in overall, or an answer that keeps revising downward
Trading, selling or cashing out items, or accounts on third-party marketplace or betting sites
Borrowing from siblings or friends to keep opening
One or two of these on their own are not a crisis. The pattern that matters is the same one that matters in adult gambling: escalating spend, secrecy about the total, and a mood that has started to depend on the outcome.
What Actually Helps
Turn off stored payment. This is the single highest-value thing on the list and it takes four minutes. Remove saved cards from the console account, the app store account and the game launcher. Every major platform — PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, Steam, iOS, Android — supports either purchase approval for a child account or a hard spending limit. Use one.
Move to gift cards, deliberately. A fixed balance is a budget your child can see. An open card is not.
Read the ESRB label before the game, not after. "In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items)" is doing real work. It tells you what kind of economy your child is walking into.
Look up the odds together once. They are published, because Apple requires it. Opening the disclosure and reading the actual number for the rare item is more persuasive than anything you will say, and it is a conversation about a document rather than an argument about a person.
Talk about the design, not the child's character. "These are built by people whose job is to make you want to open one more" lands. "You're wasting your money" starts a fight and teaches them to hide the next purchase.
Decide your position on refunds before you need one. Most platforms will reverse unauthorized charges by a minor once. Knowing in advance whether you would ask, and what you would want to happen afterwards, is better than deciding it angry.
Keep the door open on the money conversation. The thing you most want is for your kid to tell you when a number has gotten away from them. That depends almost entirely on what happened the last time they told you something you didn't want to hear.
When It's More Than a Conversation
For most families this stays a parenting question about money and screens, and the steps above are enough.
It is worth more than that when the spending keeps escalating after limits are set, when your child is chasing losses — putting more in specifically to make up for what a bad run cost — when there is genuine deception about amounts, when mood or sleep or school is visibly affected, or when actual gambling has entered the picture through skin betting or sports wagering.
If that describes a teenager in your house, start with their pediatrician or the school counselor; a minor should be assessed by someone whose practice is built for that, and mine is not. My practice is with adults. If it describes a young adult child, or if you are the one carrying it and want help thinking through what to do, that is squarely what I work on — and my page for parents and family covers what that looks like. You can also reach out to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.
If the worry is broader than loot boxes, my guide to talking to your teen about betting covers the conversation itself, and helping without enabling covers the money question when the child is an adult.
The Short Version
Loot boxes are built on the same reinforcement schedule as a slot machine, and the resemblance is deliberate. Kids who spend on them are more likely to have gambling problems, consistently, across many studies — and the direction of that relationship is genuinely unresolved. Regulators have mostly declined to act, and the one country that did ban them has not enforced it.
None of which means your child is in trouble. It means the guardrails are yours to set, and that the two things worth watching are the money and the secrecy, not the hours.
Research and Sources
Garea, S. S., Drummond, A., Sauer, J. D., Hall, L. C., & Williams, M. N. (2021). Meta-analysis of the relationship between problem gambling, excessive gaming and loot box spending. International Gambling Studies, 21(3).
Loot box purchasing is linked to problem gambling in adolescents when controlling for monetary gambling participation. Journal of Behavioral Addictions (2022), 11(2), 396–405. doi:10.1556/2006.2022.00015
UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Government response to the call for evidence on loot boxes in video games (July 2022).
Xiao, L. Y. (2023). Breaking Ban: Belgium's Ineffective Gambling Law Regulation of Video Game Loot Boxes. Collabra: Psychology, 9(1).
Gambling Commission, Young People and Gambling 2024: Official statistics (Ipsos, November 2024).
ESRB Ratings Guide, Interactive Elements. Apple App Store Review Guidelines, 3.1.1.
If You Need Support Right Now
Free, confidential help is available 24/7.
Illinois gambling helpline — 1-800-GAMBLER. You can also text GAMB to 833234.
National Problem Gambling Helpline — call or text 1-800-MY-RESET, or chat at 1800myreset.org.
If anyone is in a mental health crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.
This article is general information, not a diagnosis or a substitute for care from a licensed professional who knows your family.