Gambling has appeared in video games in two very different forms. The first is simulated gambling — fictional casinos, poker tables and slot-machine minigames inside larger games, from Pokémon‘s Game Corner to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) and Fallout: New Vegas (2010), where in-game currency is at stake and nothing is paid out for real money. The second is real-money or chance-based monetisation built into the games themselves — chiefly loot boxes and gacha mechanics — which from roughly 2017 to 2020 drew formal scrutiny from regulators in Belgium, the Netherlands and elsewhere over whether they constitute gambling. The two categories are frequently confused but are legally and culturally distinct.
Few cultural subjects sit at the intersection of entertainment, law and psychology as awkwardly as gambling in video games. For decades, fictional casinos and card games were uncontroversial set-dressing — a way to add texture, risk and reward to an imaginary world. Then, in the 2010s, a separate set of mechanics that resembled gambling but used real money entered mainstream games, and the question of where simulation ends and gambling begins became a matter for parliaments and gaming commissions. This overview traces both threads: the long history of make-believe gambling inside games, and the more recent regulatory debate over the systems that monetise chance.
Simulated Gambling: Casinos as Set-Dressing
Long before any regulator took an interest, gambling appeared in games purely as a fictional pastime. The earliest examples were licensed adaptations of real casino games — video versions of poker, blackjack and roulette — produced for home consoles and computers from the late 1970s onward. These are covered in detail in the history of casino video games and simulations. The crucial point is that none of them involved wagering real money; the “money” was a score.
From there, gambling migrated from being the whole game to being a feature inside larger games. Role-playing games and open-world titles began including casinos and card games as optional diversions — places to spend in-game currency, win prizes, or simply soak up atmosphere. This is the form most players encounter, and it remains, in the great majority of cases, entirely fictional.
Pokémon and the Game Corner
One of the most-cited examples is the Game Corner in the Pokémon series. From Pokémon Red and Green (1996) onward, several games featured arcades where players fed coins into slot machines to win prizes, including rare Pokémon and powerful moves. The slot machines used a dedicated in-game coin currency with no real-money value.
The Game Corner became a notable case study in regional content adaptation. Because of changes to the PEGI age-rating standards in Europe, content that could be seen to “encourage or teach gambling” risked a higher age rating. In response, the European release of Pokémon Platinum (2009) disabled the playable slot machines — players could still obtain coins, but not operate the reels — and Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver (2009/2010) replaced the slots entirely in Western and Korean versions with a puzzle minigame called Voltorb Flip, in which a player could win coins but never lose them. Later main-series games dropped the Game Corner concept altogether.
Grand Theft Auto and the In-Game Casino
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) gave players access to functioning fictional casinos in its Las Vegas analogue, Las Venturas. Venues such as the Four Dragons Casino and Caligula’s Palace offered blackjack, roulette, video poker, a wheel-of-fortune game and slot machines, all played with the game’s fictional dollars. Gambling was woven into the story — one casino served as a front for a criminal faction — and winnings or losses affected only the player’s in-game bankroll.
The series returned to the theme much later with a casino update for Grand Theft Auto Online, which prompted some regional regulators to examine whether its chip-purchasing systems crossed into real-money gambling territory. As with loot boxes, the dividing line regulators looked for was whether anything of real-world value could be won or cashed out.
Fallout, Final Fantasy and Red Dead
Fallout: New Vegas (2010), developed by Obsidian Entertainment, built an entire post-apocalyptic story around the casinos of a surviving Las Vegas Strip. Players could play blackjack, roulette and slots, plus an original card game called Caravan. In a nod to real casino behaviour, winning too consistently would get the player quietly barred from a venue’s tables — a design choice that turned an authenticity detail into a gameplay limit.
Final Fantasy has used gambling minigames since the 1990s, most famously the Gold Saucer amusement park in Final Fantasy VII (1997), with chocobo racing and games of chance paid for in special tokens. Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) modelled period-accurate frontier gambling — poker, blackjack and dominoes in saloons across its 19th-century American setting. In every one of these cases the stakes are fictional in-game currency.
Loot Boxes, Gacha and the Monetisation of Chance
The second, more contested thread is not simulated gambling at all — it is a real-money mechanic that some argue functions like gambling. A loot box is a purchasable or earnable in-game container whose contents are randomised; a player who buys one does not know exactly what they will receive. The closely related gacha model, named after Japanese capsule-toy vending machines, applies the same randomised-reward principle and has been central to many free-to-play mobile games.
Because loot boxes can be bought with real money and deliver randomised outcomes, critics argued they shared the structural features of gambling. The mechanic became a flashpoint in 2017 around Star Wars Battlefront II, whose progression-linked loot boxes drew enough backlash that the publisher temporarily removed paid boxes before launch. The full story of these mechanics and the response to them is told in loot boxes and gacha: how gaming’s gambling debate began.
The 2017–2020 Regulatory Response
The most consequential rulings came in 2018. In April that year, the Netherlands Gaming Authority found that loot boxes in several games violated Dutch gambling law where their contents could be traded or sold, and the Belgian Gaming Commission concluded that paid loot boxes in certain titles met its legal definition of gambling. Belgium’s test asked whether an activity was a game involving a stake, an element of chance, and a possibility of winning or losing — and judged that some loot-box systems qualified. Publishers responded by altering or removing paid loot boxes in those markets rather than risk the penalties involved.
Other jurisdictions took softer routes. Several adopted disclosure requirements — for example, obliging publishers to publish the probabilities, or “drop rates,” of items in randomised purchases — rather than classifying loot boxes as gambling outright. The major console platform holders adopted such disclosure rules around 2019–2020, and age-rating bodies updated their labels accordingly: the ESRB introduced an “In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items)” descriptor, and PEGI added an in-game-purchases notice. The result, by the early 2020s, was a patchwork: the same game could legally include paid loot boxes in one country, sell them only with disclosed odds in a second, and be required to remove or modify them in a third.
An earlier precedent had already been set in Japan, the home of the gacha model. In 2012, the country’s Consumer Affairs Agency signalled that a particularly aggressive variant known as “complete gacha” — which rewarded players for assembling a full set of randomly dropped items — ran afoul of consumer-protection law, prompting major operators to withdraw the format. That intervention is often read as a forerunner of the Western loot-box debate that arrived several years later.
Why the Two Categories Are Confused
Public debate frequently conflates “gambling in games” (fictional casinos) with “gambling-like monetisation” (loot boxes), but the distinction is the entire point. Simulated gambling risks nothing of real-world value; the player can lose only fictional currency. Loot boxes and gacha involve real money spent on randomised outcomes — which is precisely why regulators scrutinised them and largely left fictional casinos alone.
A useful way to separate the two is to ask what is being staked and whether anything of real value can be won. By that measure, a poker table in a role-playing game is a minigame, while a paid randomised reward bought with real money is the thing regulators have examined. Age-rating bodies such as PEGI and the ESRB reflect this in their content descriptors, distinguishing “simulated gambling” from features involving real-money transactions.
Arcades, Pachinko and the Wider Gambling-Adjacent World
Outside the home console, a parallel history runs through arcades. Redemption machines — the ticket-dispensing games long found in family arcades — borrow the visual language of slot machines and games of chance while paying out only tickets exchangeable for prizes. In Japan, the enormous pachinko and pachislot industries occupy a distinctive legal space, treated as amusement rather than gambling under a specific arrangement that separates winning from any direct cash payout. These machine-based traditions, and how they relate to the digital game industry, are covered in arcade gambling, pachinko and redemption machines explained.
The overlap matters for gaming history because major game companies have long had a foot in both worlds. Several well-known developers and publishers produced or licensed pachinko and arcade-amusement machines alongside their console games — groups associated with major console and arcade names, including Sega Sammy and Konami, are among the significant manufacturers of media-themed pachinko and pachislot machines — and franchises that began as video games were later adapted into pachinko cabinets in Japan. The boundary between “video game” and “gambling-adjacent amusement” has therefore never been as clean as it appears from the living-room console alone.
That history also helps explain why the loot-box debate felt familiar to anyone who knew the arcade world. The questions regulators asked of randomised digital rewards — what is being staked, whether chance decides the outcome, and whether anything of real value can be won or cashed out — are the same questions that have for decades determined where pachinko, medal games and ticket-redemption machines sit relative to gambling law. Viewed this way, the loot-box controversy is less a sudden break than the newest chapter in a long-running conversation about machines, chance and money.
A Subject Still in Flux
The cultural status of gambling imagery in games continues to evolve. Fictional casinos remain a staple of open-world and role-playing design, generally rated and labelled but rarely controversial. The monetisation of chance, by contrast, remains an active policy question, with consumer-protection bodies, researchers and legislators continuing to debate disclosure, age limits and classification well into the 2020s. For the broader context of how games became a mass medium subject to this kind of scrutiny, see the history of video game consoles and video games in pop culture. The console that hosts much of today’s debate — including digital storefronts where randomised purchases are sold — is most often a modern platform such as the Nintendo Switch.