A teenager in Santa Monica spends $20 on a pack of virtual soccer players. The pack is randomized. He does not know what is inside until he pays, opens it, and watches an animation designed to stretch the reveal across several seconds. Most of the time the contents are worthless to him. Occasionally they are not.
Whether that transaction is a game mechanic or a slot machine is a question courts on three continents have now answered differently, and the industry writing the code is headquartered a short drive from where the argument is loudest.
What The Packs Actually Are
The mechanic is simple enough to explain to a child, which is part of the concern. A player buys in-game currency with real money, spends that currency on a sealed container, and receives a randomized item. In Electronic Arts’ Ultimate Team modes — attached to its soccer, Madden and NHL franchises — those items are athletes, graded by rarity, who make a squad measurably stronger.
The revenue is not incidental. Ultimate Team generated $1.62 billion in a single fiscal year, a figure that appears repeatedly in the litigation now consolidated against the publisher. Activision Blizzard, headquartered in Santa Monica, runs comparable systems across its own catalogue.
Industry bodies have moved on disclosure rather than the mechanic itself. The ESRB now labels affected titles as containing in-game purchases with random items, and major publishers began voluntarily publishing drop rates after regulatory pressure. Critics counter that a disclosed probability is not much use to a thirteen-year-old with a parent’s card on file.
Where The Line Actually Sits
The sharper problem is what happens after the pack is opened. Items from games like Counter-Strike 2 hold real resale value, and an ecosystem of third-party sites has grown up to let players wager them on roulette, coinflip and crash games. Those sites are not run by the publishers. They are overwhelmingly licensed offshore — Curaçao, Costa Rica, Anjouan — and they accept American users without holding a US gaming licence.
That distinction matters more than most coverage allows. A domestically licensed operator answers to a state regulator with deposit limits, verification requirements and a complaints process. An offshore licence is a different instrument entirely, and the gap between the two usually surfaces only when a player tries to withdraw. Readers who want that landscape laid out properly can read the full breakdown of platforms operating outside conventional US oversight.
Valve has spent a decade trying to put distance between its game and those sites, issuing cease-and-desist letters in 2016 and tightening its tournament rules in late 2025 to bar skin-gambling brands from sponsoring licensed Counter-Strike events. New York’s attorney general sued the company in February over the underlying item economy; Valve publicly disputed the claim, saying it had been explaining its systems to that office since 2023.
If any of this appeals, the ordinary cautions apply with force: these are unregulated venues, the money is real, and recourse is minimal. BeGambleAware.org is the appropriate starting point for anyone whose spending has stopped feeling recreational.
Courts Keep Disagreeing
European regulators reached the question first and produced a genuinely contradictory record.
Belgium banned paid loot boxes outright in 2018, classifying the mechanic itself as gambling regardless of whether a prize is offered. The Netherlands initially agreed, then reversed: its Council of State ruled that Ultimate Team packs were a component of a skill-based game rather than a standalone game of chance. Austria produced the same whiplash on a compressed timeline, with lower courts ordering refunds to players before the Supreme Court ruled in December 2025 that loot boxes embedded in skill-based games fall outside gambling law altogether.
Elsewhere the movement has been toward age restriction rather than prohibition. Brazil banned loot box sales to under-18s effective March 2026, and Poland drafted licensing amendments in late 2025. The UK Gambling Commission’s advisory board has catalogued the international responses, noting that nineteen regulators have jointly signed a declaration of concern without agreeing on a remedy.
California’s Version Of The Fight
There is still no federal loot box law in the United States. Gambling regulation sits with the states, and most have not legislated on the question at all, which has pushed the argument into consumer-protection and product-liability claims instead.
California has become the centre of that effort. A 2020 class action argued that Ultimate Team packs constituted an illegal slot machine under state Penal Code section 330 — a claim that never reached a jury, because the court enforced the arbitration clause buried in the user agreement. In May 2025 the Judicial Council established a coordinated proceeding consolidating more than a hundred video game addiction suits against publishers including EA and Activision Blizzard, arguing that variable-reward design exploits known psychological vulnerabilities without adequate warning.
Federal regulators have been petitioned but have not acted. In June 2022 a coalition of fifteen advocacy organisations, including the National Council on Problem Gambling, asked the FTC to investigate Ultimate Team’s marketing to children, arguing that most adults could not calculate the odds involved, let alone a child. The broader pattern is familiar to anyone following California’s legislative approach to platform design and minors, where Sacramento has consistently moved ahead of Congress.
What Parents Can Actually Do
Platform-level controls are more effective than most households realise, and they are free. Every major console and storefront supports spending limits, purchase approval requirements and disabled item trading, which closes the route from a game library to a third-party wagering site. Steam’s family settings in particular can restrict trading and marketplace access outright.
Local awareness efforts have started folding this into broader digital safety messaging — Beverly Hills marked its own Social Media Safety Day earlier this month, aimed at exactly the gap between what parents assume is happening on a device and what is.
The regulatory question will take years to settle, and the courts have so far declined to settle it consistently. In the meantime the mechanic remains legal, profitable and installed on tens of millions of devices — including, in all likelihood, one in the next room.
