Following Valve's decision to disable trading in the Netherlands due to that country's legal statutes regarding gambling, the company is now taking other steps to comply with the country's Dutch Gaming Authority. Players in the Netherlands and Belgium "will be restricted from opening containers" following this week's patch, according to the patch notes. This will prevent players in those countries from even opening the lootboxes. As the "Miscellaneous" section of the patch notes reads:

• Updated Steam and CS:GO account restrictions for users in Netherlands and Belgium:
• Steam Trading and Steam Market features are now re-enabled for Steam accounts in Netherlands.
• Customers in Netherlands and Belgium will be restricted from opening containers.

Not long ago, the Netherlands ruled that loot boxes in games are gambling, and have been designed to get people addicted, in order to spend more money. Gaming companies had until June 20 (yesterday) to either change their game mechanics accordingly or to apply for a gambling license.

This has now caused Valve to disable trading of items on CS:GO and Dota 2, as the current interpretation of the law has a little loophole that considers loot boxes as gambling only, when the in-game goods are transferable between players.

As lootboxes have increasingly fallen on the radar of gamers looking for complete experiences that they don't need to invest a kidney to unlock the full content that's being "offered", the ESRB has moved to include a label on all future game releases that features in-game purchases of any kind. The new label will sit next to the age rating, but separate from the other content warning labels - such as graphical violence, nudity, and others. Its aim? To keep users "well-informed" on the content purchases that are included with the full game. Strangely, the label will not discriminate different types of content - so a game that has a dreaded lootbox system such as Star Wars: Battlefront II, or a well-implemented, non-obtrusive one such as Gwent, will see exactly the same label. As the ESRB puts it, any in-game transaction may live inside this label, such as "bonus levels, skins, surprise items (such as item packs, loot boxes, mystery awards), music, virtual coins and other forms of in-game currency, subscriptions, season passes and upgrades (e.g., to disable ads)". Talk about an informed customer decision.