The Game Has Changed. South African Laws Haven’t.

By Kavisha Pillay

I grew up in the nineties with two older brothers, which meant I grew up several steps behind whatever games they were playing, watching over a shoulder long before I was ever handed a controller of my own. At the local spaza shop, there was an arcade machine where a fistful of coins bought you a round of Pac-Man or Street Fighter, standing shoulder to shoulder with kids from the neighbourhood, winners facing off against the reigning champion. At home, it was Sega, with Sonic and Tetris cartridges, then eventually Doom and Quake on a computer that took an age to boot up. Once we graduated to a PlayStation, Crash Bandicoot, Mortal Kombat, Tekken and God of War became the great fixtures of weekend entertainment. I still half-believe that whatever capacity I have to stay calm and think clearly under pressure was built, at least in part, behind a games controller playing Gran Turismo, because losing meant being sent to bed while the actual race carried on without me.

None of that childhood was uncomplicated. My parents had firm opinions about Mortal Kombat’s fatalities and its violence. There were, in that era, entire moral panics organised around whether violent games made children more violent. But looking back now, I can see that the argument was at least the right shape. It was a fight about content: what the game was showing children, and exposing them to. Nobody was asking, at that point, whether the game itself had been designed to extract money from a child the way a casino extracts it from an adult, because for the most part, it hadn’t been. You bought the cartridge or the disc once, and the transaction ended there.

That is the part that has genuinely changed, and it is not a small change. Gaming is, by most current industry measurements, the single largest entertainment sector on earth, generating more annual revenue than the film and music industries combined; global games revenue reached roughly $189 billion in 2025, against a global box office of around $33 billion and a recorded music industry worth about $32 billion. This is one of the largest commercial machines on the planet, and it has spent the last decade re-engineering how it makes its money.

One release, an entire industry’s logic

You can see the scale of that re-engineering in a single upcoming release. Grand Theft Auto VI, a franchise I played in its earlier instalments, is confirmed for a global launch on 19 November 2026. Neither Rockstar nor its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, has ever officially confirmed a production budget. Take-Two’s chief executive, Strauss Zelnick, would only say that “it was expensive.” But the best-supported industry estimates, drawn from analyst reporting, place development spend at upwards of $1 billion, with total investment, once marketing and years of live online support are counted, likely running higher still. Analysts project the game could generate in the region of $3 billion in revenue within its first year alone.

Sit with that figure and compare it to the arcade games of the nineties, where a coin bought you a fixed and finite thing. We are no longer discussing the same industry, nor the same relationship between a child and a screen. We are discussing a machine built, at a scale approaching a small country’s GDP, to keep a player inside it for as long as possible, spending as much as possible, for as long as their attention can be held.

Where the real risk now lives

This is where the new risk actually resides, and it has almost nothing to do with the violence my parents worried about. It lives in the loot box: a randomised in-game reward that you pay real money to open without knowing what is inside. It lives in the “skin,” a cosmetic in-game item that has developed a genuine secondary market, with rare examples reselling for thousands of dollars. It lives in a Roblox economy used by children as young as five, where a third-party site once let children gamble the platform’s own currency on digital coin-flips.

And it lives in the small design details that most players never consciously register: the near-miss animation engineered to make a loss feel like an almost-win, and the small, cheerful chime that fires regardless of whether a child has won or lost, because the point was never the outcome. The point was getting them to spin again.

A patchwork of answers

Different countries have reached markedly different conclusions about what to do with this, which is itself worth noting, because it tells you how unsettled the ethical ground still is.

Belgium concluded in 2018 that paid loot boxes with tradeable contents amount to unlicensed gambling under its Gaming and Betting Act, and it still treats them that way, with fines of up to €800,000 and possible prison time for non-compliant publishers. Enforcement, it should be said, has been patchy; independent research has found that the large majority of top-grossing games in Belgium continued to offer paid loot boxes years after the “ban”.

The Netherlands took a similar position in 2018, only for its highest administrative court to overturn the finding in 2022, ruling that loot boxes integrated into a game of skill are not automatically a game of chance, a reminder that even where regulators have acted, the legal ground has kept shifting under them.

Brazil took a narrower, more targeted route. President Lula signed Brazil’s Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents, in September 2025; it came into force in March 2026 and explicitly prohibits loot boxes in any game aimed at, or likely to be accessed by, minors, backed by fines. Within months of the law taking effect, a Brazilian court had already ordered major publishers and platform operators, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sony and Nintendo, to pay a combined R$298 million, in damages for offering loot boxes to minors, and to build in probability disclosure and real age verification.

The country that popularised the modern loot box, the United States, has passed no federal statute addressing it at any level of government, leaving individual states to draft their own uncoordinated patchwork of bills.

I list all of this not because I think any single country has fully solved the problem. Several plainly have not, and Belgium’s own experience shows how easily a ban can become a ban in name only. Whatever one’s view of loot boxes, an entire community of national regulators are looking at this mechanic and concluding that it requires an answer.

South Africa’s National Gambling Act was written in 2004, before any of this existed, and it has never been amended to so much as acknowledge that a game can function as a casino. We are not only late to a difficult debate, we haven’t even arrived yet.

What we owe the next generation of players

I think about my own childhood gaming often, and I do not want to romanticise it into something purer than it was; my brothers and I spent plenty of allowance money on games too, and the industry has always wanted our attention and our cash. But there is a real difference between an arcade machine that took your coin and gave you exactly what the coin bought; a round, a life, a chance to get a little further than last time, and a system engineered by people holding behavioural data that most parents will never see, built specifically to make a child feel that the next spin, the next box, the next crate, is the one that finally pays off. The first is a transaction. The second is a design built around a child’s undeveloped impulse control, dressed up as play.

South Africa now needs more than parental vigilance. We need legislation that recognises loot boxes and other randomised, paid rewards for what they are; meaningful age verification; transparent disclosure of probabilities and spending; enforceable limits on manipulative design; and consequences for companies that profit from children’s vulnerability. Parents cannot reasonably protect their children from systems whose inner workings they are never permitted to see.

The games have changed, the risks have changed, but the law has not. Until it does, children will keep entering spaces designed to look like playgrounds, while some of the most powerful companies in the world  treat them like gamblers.

 

A Short Glossary

• Loot box: a randomised reward, usually bought with real money, whose contents are unknown until it is opened. Structurally similar to a lucky-dip or scratch card: you know the price, not the prize.

• Skin: a cosmetic item (a character outfit, a weapon design, a vehicle finish) that changes how something looks in a game but not how it performs. Skins have no practical use outside the game, yet rare ones can be resold on secondary markets for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

• Near-miss effect: a design technique in which a randomised outcome is made to appear as though it almost produced a rare or valuable result, even when the outcome was, in reality, no closer to a win than any other loss. It is used because a “near miss” keeps players engaged for longer than a plain loss does.

• In-game currency: a virtual currency (Robux on Roblox, V-Bucks in Fortnite, gems or coins in mobile games) bought with real money and spent inside the game. Converting real money into an abstract in-game currency is a deliberate design choice: it makes spending feel less like spending.

• Secondary market: an unofficial marketplace, usually outside the game itself, where players buy, sell or trade virtual items for real money or cryptocurrency. These markets typically operate outside the game publisher’s own systems, thus they usually sit outside consumer protection and gambling regulation entirely