Legal Nature of Loot Boxes under Russian Law

Currently, the legal nature of loot boxes, as well as issues related to their legal regulation, remain largely unexamined in domestic doctrine. Nevertheless, this topic is of legitimate interest to society, since, as the practice of developers using this mechanism within games shows, opening containers of this type (loot boxes) can be addictive and, in some cases, lead to financial losses. The purpose of this study is to determine the legal nature of loot boxes and lootboxing. Legal doctrine often supports the trend in some European countries to recognize the purchase of loot boxes as gambling and to introduce a complete or partial ban on games with loot boxes. The article, on the contrary, defends the view that the heterogeneity of loot box mechanics in various online games necessitates a differentiated approach to regulation. Dividing loot box mechanics into those that correspond to the legal nature of gambling and those that can be recognized as an aleatory structure only from the point of view of the approach to risk as the player’s psychological attitude to the outcome of the game will allow for the most fair approach to the issue of licensing or non-licensing the activities of developers of such games. As a result, the author puts forward a number of proposals for the legal regulation of legal relations related to the acquisition of loot boxes.