My enjoyment of Dragalia Lost is threatened by this push for regulating loot boxes. I could potentially lose hours of progress and so much time I spent on what I consider to be a pretty good game if this bill advances far enough to ban loot boxes entirely. And even more strongly thanI wrote two years ago, I believe this is legislation is exactly what the mobile market needs.

Before we dive too deep into how it would affect the mobile market, let’s recap what The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act actually is, assuming it isn't watered down in the legislative process. As its name suggests, it aims to block games played by minors from selling addictive microtransactions. Hawley clarified in an interview with Kotaku that this bill is targeting “both loot boxes and pay-to-win,” which would also regulate microtransactions like buying extra turns in Candy Crush and so on. Technically this spares adult-only games, but I'm pretty sure minors can legally play every game published by EA, Nintendo, or any other company a typical mobile player might recognize POE currency trade. The only exceptions the bill outlines are cosmetic items, difficulty levels, and single-purchase add-ons.

Should this bill pass, the gacha game market probably won’t go extinct. The power of waifu-starved adults will make sure it won't. But it will undergo an exodus leaving a Grand Canyon-sized hole in the mobile market. If this bill is successfully enforced, that leaves three foreseeable options for… almost every mainstream mobile game, really. Is Super Mario Run still mainstream?

Option one to simply shut down, at least in North America. Most obscure, low-performing gachas in the endless sea of mobile shovelware would probably have no other choice. Massive companies like DeNA and GungHo, on the other hand, have too much of a stake in the mobile market to let that happen so easily. Belgium is a small player in the mobile market, but the US is one of that market's biggest fishes. In the event these companies fail to successfully lobby against the bill, their biggest games will probably fall back on the other options.

The second option is to lock these games behind an Adults Only barrier or something equivalent. Yeahhh… no.

That leaves the most complicated option, which I’m hoping for most — to redesign these games with some other form of monetization in lieu of gacha pulls POE currency buy. Remember, this law covers more than just loot boxes. Given that its goal is to prevent monetization that promotes addiction, we can assume that any repeatable purchase with gameplay repercussions would fall under abusive. That means no time skippers, no grind boosters, no last-chance revives, or anything else loathed in pay-to-win games.