this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Said this elsewhere, but it seems to me a bigger story that it also mandates age verification for 18 plus content, including porn and at the platform level.
Steam needs to verify your age now if it wants to carry porn games, or indeed any 18+ games.
~~And I do have problems with the loot box regulation, in that it doesn't qualify the boxes having to be paid, so technically Diablo II should be a 18+ game, along with every single RPG in existence. I have to assume courts or downstream definitions will do a sanity check on that, because the law they passed makes zero qualifiers, it just says "loot boxes".~~
So... maybe look into what they passed before being too celebratory about it?
They also mandate parental controls being present, which I do agree with and should have been enough. Of course that would not have changed anything, since they're already present in pretty much all current platforms.
EDIT: To clarify, someone questioned the unpaid loot boxes definition and on double check, they do define them as paid, so scratch that part. The age verification requirement is present, though.
I had to translate the law but it does seem to define lootboxes as something you purchase. But legal texts are very specifically worded so I can't be sure some nuance didn't get lost in translation.
I wrote a first response referencing the one mention I had found of loot boxes, but you are correct, I missed that they did include one in the definitions section. They reference them slightly differently so the first time I looked I only found one of the two.
So yeah, you are right, they do define it as paid. Carry on.
Not as far as I can tell. This translates to "Loot boxes offered in electronic games aimed at children and teenagers or likely to be accessed by them, in the terms of the corresponding age rating".
You can argue that "offered" here specifically implies "offered for purchase", but... I mean, my Brazilian Portuguese isn't perfect, but I don't think that's explicitly the case, the word means what you think it means in English. It'd be a problem of hermeneutics at that point.
Is that the reasonable interpretation? Sure. Is that what the legislator probably intended? Almost certainly. It's not what they wrote, though.