After months of debate, Australia finally announces new game ratings

Over the past two years, the Australia government has been tying itself in knots over the topic of video games and gambling. This has nothing to do with Australia’s online pokies or blackjack games – at least not directly – but instead with adventure games and RPGs that have gambling elements within the gameplay. 

New restrictions will come into force in 2024 that effectively slam any game with even a sniff of gambling in its subgames or peripheral activities with an R18+ rating. The new rules will also address the question of loot boxes, a topic that has been stirring up controversy for the past decade.

Simulated casino and gambling games get R18+ rating

Casino games are fun and simple, so you will often see them in games that are mission-based or that provide side games where you can earn in-game currency to spend on power ups and so on. This is nothing new. Back in 1984, Firebird Software released The Wild Bunch, an action-adventure game set in the Wild West. Alongside the main mission of the game, the player could take on the Town Gambler at poker to earn money to spend in the shop on food, bullets and other provisions. 

In the mid-80s, The Wild Bunch was a good seller among Australia’s MicroBee and Commodore players. But under the new rules, it would be rated R18+, which would decimate the original sales figures. It’s not just obscure retro adventure games, either. Red Dead Redemption 2 has a whole series of gambling challenges and caused plenty of ructions among the Australian ratings decision makers when it came out a couple of years ago. Ultimately, they agreed to an MA15+ rating.

Under the new rules, this game would automatically be rated R18+. This is part of the wider anti-gambling agenda that has had so much airtime in recent years. It is not the games of chance within video games that are a concern so much as the fear that playing blackjack in Red Dead Redemption or indeed poker in The Wild Bunch will be a springboard to playing casino games for real money at online casinos in Australia. These have been collectively waging war with the regulator for several years in a battle that shows no sign of ending any time soon.

Loot box games default to M15+

Loot boxes are ostensibly prizes – but like those claw grabber games in arcades, the “prizes” can sometimes come at a significant cost. We’ve all seen loot boxes across every type of game. Click the box to open it and find out what you get, whether it is in-game currency or some sort of power-up or a key to a secret level, the possibilities are endless. 

The issue is that loot boxes are often available not as reward for gameplay but as in-app purchases, so you can buy them with real money. The question is whether buying a loot box blind in the hope that there is something of value in it constitutes gambling. Intuitively, it certainly feels as if it does. 

Loot boxes are a lot more ubiquitous in games than you might initially think. They can also take the form of treasure chests or even card packs. These latter feature in many sports games. When you are trying to assemble a winning team, you can buy a “mystery card pack” with three players in it. You don’t know what you will get, but you hope for players with skill ratings than are better than you currently have. 

It is an issue that is not restricted to Australia – influential bodies in the UK have also raised concerns, and the UK Gambling Commission agrees that loot boxes need to be looked at but says it currently has no power to act in this area.

Bringing online games into line

The above two steps are set in stone and will come into effect in September 2024. But the Australian government also has an eye to the longer term. Mobile gaming, cloud gaming, subscription services like PlayStation Pass and platforms like Twitch have all contributed to a shift towards online gaming over the past five years. 

There is little in the way of concrete data, but the growth of online gaming is significant. It takes no great leap to see that games on discs or cartridges are going the way of CDs and DVDs. 

Yet it is these physical games, bought in a game store or purchased online and sent through the mail that the current ratings are really set up for. The Australian government is seeking feedback from players, people in the gaming industry, and other governments to help them to come up with a games rating system that makes sense in today’s Australian gaming market.