The EU has just banned virtual premium currencies in video games that represent, requiring the games use the actual currency amounts. Thoughts on this new law?

For those who do not understand this change, in the EU any in-game purchase that can be made for paid/premium currency must display the actual cost in local currency to players. Here is my MS Paint mockup of how such a thing would look as required.

The new regulation also requires the conversion rate of premium currency to real money at the baseline exchange rate (e.g. buying the smallest pack of premium currency).

This would have some obvious first-order/immediate results - players would now be able to see how much it would cost them to buy an item outright. This would provide additional friction in direct purchases to players, making them incrementally less likely to purchase items directly.

This would also have some less obvious second-order/derivative results. This also has the side effect of making the more efficient currency bundles look better in comparison, because players can get the premium currency at a discount if they buy those instead of the baseline. It would likely increase engagement by showing that players are earning "value" when they finish quests and obtain premium currency through playing the game by reinforcing that they are obtaining things worth money. I think that the in-game stores will use this to direct players toward better value bundles and packs to buy.

I also think that this would only be the beginning - game designers are clever folks, and we can find many ways to adjust things given a set of constraints. Remember, one of the secondary effects of requiring all gacha games to show the actual percentages was the creation of "pity rates" where continued failed pulls actually incrementally increase the success chances in future pulls. These kind of incentivization changes will continue, including thinking up ways to leverage the "real price" display to make the purchase more appealing. I like to think of it in this way - "just because I can't imagine it myself doesn't mean such a thing can't exist, only that it doesn't exist... yet." If there's a possibility, somebody will probably figure it out.

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