Jacques Strydom looks at Counter Strike cases on his phone. it's just easier to just give it all to her.'
'As a person with an addiction, you'd always find some sort of 'I'll just cut on this this week so I've got a little to spend'. He could no longer trust himself with a credit card, so he left it to his wife to look after, he said. He was in no doubt that loot boxes were designed to be addictive. Strydom said he felt 'terrible' whenever he looked at the amount of money he'd spent. 'If you put all that money aside in a bank account, I would have had about 16k now, that I could have put towards a home deposit or something.' It was the thrill of clicking on and opening the boxes that drew him in, rather than the prizes themselves.īecause he was only spending a few bucks at a time he felt he wasn't a big deal, but it all added up. Jacques Strydom got hooked on loot boxes while playing the hugely popular online first-person shooter Counter-Strike. Problem gambling groups are worried about the sums of money being spent on loot boxes, which they say operate in much the same way as real-life gambling.
Games like Counter-Strike and FIFA, now EA FC, allow players to spend real money to open them and have a chance at winning in-game rewards. A Kiwi gamer says he has spent about $16,000 on loot boxes, which could be described as virtual treasure chests, in online video games.
