20 consumer organizations from 18 European countries are launching a coordinated action to ask relevant authorities to adopt regulations on unpacking. These groups supported a new report by the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC) entitled "inserting coins: how the game industry uses the box to squeeze consumers out of the box".
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These consumer organizations are calling for a series of measures, including "Prohibition of fraudulent designs, additional protection for minors and transaction transparency". The report accused game companies of exploiting consumers by using mechanisms such as "predatory" and "promoting addiction".
Although the call for legislation on unpacking has been going on for many years, this new move is still remarkable, because this coordinated action represents many countries, including Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Spain and Switzerland. NCC coordinated and led the campaign with the European consumer organization in Brussels.
NCC's document on page 59 uses "FIFA 22" and "raid: shadow Legends" as case studies, claiming: "both games use a wide range of deception techniques to encourage consumers to spend as much time and money as possible to exploit consumers, who want to get a return, although the chance and probability are very low."
