When Gaming Meets Gambling: How Video Games Borrow From Casino Mechanics

From loot boxes to daily rewards, today’s video games often feel like a roll of the dice.

It has become abundantly clear to even the most casual gamers that modern gaming has borrowed heavily from casino-style mechanisms.

As a result, the lines have been blurred between gaming purely for entertainment and fun and gambling for real stakes.

Loot Boxes and Slot Machines: Separated at Birth?

The obvious parallel between video games and online casinos are Loot Boxes and Slot Machines.

In gaming, loot boxes first appeared in 2004 in free-to-play mobile gaming but became widely adopted through the mid-2010s with Star Wars Battlefront II, a hugely popular PlayStation 2 game and notable example from the period.

Nowadays, EAFC‘s Ultimate Team Packs and Overwatch‘s free loot boxes offer cosmetics that players can use in-game.

These are similar to Slot Machines which offer the opportunity to pay for a chance of a big reward while the flashy animations and rarity system are another parallel.

It is no surprise then that the two have been compared previously to criticise what some see as ‘play to win’ elements in video games.

Daily Rewards, Streaks, and Free Spins

Video games and online casinos are both motivated to keep players playing regularly.

Therefore, you can find daily rewards, rewards for login streaks and timed rewards in both.

The prime example of this in video games currently is the hugely popular Call of Duty: Warzone. The free-to-play battle royale has a biometric scanner that players can find in the map and use daily to claim their rewards.

With online casinos, users will be rewarded by signing in to selected websites each day with free spins, daily bonuses and multipliers.

Skill vs. Luck: The Blended Experience

Finally, a lot of modern video games mix skill and chance as do a lot of table games offered by online casinos, such as poker and blackjack.

‘Roguelike’ games, a type of role playing game, offer a similar balance of skill and chance available to play on the PlayStation 5.

Popular games of the genre on PlayStation 5 include Returnal, Hades and Hades II. In Returnal you play as an astronaut caught in a time loop on the planet Atropos while Hades follows the son of the titular character as he attempts to escape from the Underworld to reach Mount Olympus.

Roguelike games fill a space in the landscape for PlayStation gamers looking for controlled unpredictability and poker and blackjack do for casino gamers.

Why Gamers Find Casino Games Familiar

The aforementioned reasons are not the only similarities and probably not why online casino games will feel so familiar to PlayStation gamers.

PlayStation gamers will find online casinos familiar and vice versa that is partly due to both using random number generator mechanics (RNG).

However, an even bigger part of the familiarity are the computer generated visuals, sound design and suspense.

For players curious about experiencing these mechanics in their pure form, there are a wide range of online casinos that offer a range of classic and modern games built around the same principles