US Federal Trade Commission outlines the agenda for a lootbox-related workshop on August 7

August 6, 2019 7:00 PM

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Conversations, studies, and outright rancor over video game lockbox practices have caught the notice of several world governments as readers of MOP already know, reaching all the way to the US Senate Committee, which ordered the Federal Trade Commission to investigate. As part of those efforts, and in an attempt to perhaps provide context and information about the practice, the FTC will be holding a workshop on Wednesday, August 7th, to discuss the variety of effects of lootbox monetization.

The workshop is broken up into three different panels. The first panel will feature a number of games industry representatives from the International Game Developers Association, the Entertainment Software Association, and the National Consumers League among others, all of whom will discuss the role of lootboxes in the games industry. The second panel will explore the potential social, psychological, and economic motivations behind lootbox spending, and the third panel seeks to discuss current initiatives in place for lockbox transparency and explore other methods to apply consumer protection.

This is the first workshop the FTC is holding since announcing plans to do so in February, though one certainly can (and very likely will) argue the amount of good it will do. For those who happen to be in the Washington, D.C., area, the workshop will be free and open to the public at Constitution Center starting at 10:00 a.m. EDT. For those interested in watching this whole thing unfold, there will also be a live broadcast at the FTC website.

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