With microtransactions having become the nexus of a storm, more and more governments and agencies around the world have started to look into how they could regulate them, or at least, better inform customers about their presence in a game they may be looking at, so they can make more informed decisions.
On which note, the Pan European Game Information board, known more commonly as PEGI, the agency that rates games for the European market, has announced that it will be adopting a new label to denote whether or not a game has in-game purchases and microtransactions. If nothing else, it’s a better way for people buying games, especially parents who may be buying them for their kids and may not necessarily be informed about them, to know what they are getting into.
“Purchase offers within games has become a broad phenomenon, and it is necessary to provide the same level of consumer information on both physical and digital releases,” Simon Little, PEGI’s managing director, said. “Considering that physical releases are an important part of the market, this was an important gap to fill.”
Of course, with many European markets moving outright to ban forms of monetization such as lootboxes, in the end, it is to be hoped that publishers themselves will drop exploitative monetization practices, and we will instead not have to rely on these labels.