Video game titles sold in Australia must receive a rating from the Classification Board of The Department of Communications and display it prominently on all physical content and advertisements. Since May 1st, 2020, all video games sold in Australia have included a rating for in-game purchases, i.e. microtransactions and loot boxes.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) decided to draw attention to in-game purchases back in April, and Australia’s decision to follow suit should come as no surprise. After all, the stated purpose of the rating is to “strike a balance between matters,” including alerting consumers (particularly families) to objectionable media and shielding children from inappropriate content. Though added quietly with no press release to speak of, the metric is further evidence that public opinion of the practice of in-game purchases has fallen in 2020.
The arguments for and against in-game purchases are fairly straight forward. First, it is easy for both children and adults alike to spend as much as $62,000 a year on microtransactions and loot boxes without even realizing it. This is because some in-game items require their own currency which is purchased for real money. By being one layer removed from dollars, pounds, euros, yen, or otherwise, in-game currency obscures how much the player is actually spending on content. This can pose serious problems for people with addictive tendencies, since in-game currency takes on the same role that poker chips play in casinos.
Loot boxes are considered by many to be a form of gambling, to the point that there is pressure on legislators in both the United Kingdom and the United States to ban or restrict microtransactions to age 18+ titles. Some want the statistical probabilities of loot boxes to be public information, while others would prefer to see the mechanic banned entirely.
Ultimately, the appeal of microtransactions is that they are lucrative. Microtransactions made up 41% of PlayStation’s add-on content sales figures for Q1 this year, and other game developers have attributed record sales figures to them. They can allow certain games to be free-to-play, thus expanding potential player base to everyone.
Some developers have started to notice that gamers are conscious of these arguments, and many have started making the lack of microtransactions a selling point, including Star Wars: Squadrons.
For now, whether a game is flagged or not does not appear to have much effect on the final rating, as there were plenty of titles released this summer which received a G rating with in-game purchases.
Source: Australian Government
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