Yeeeeah, you're way less down on age verification on principle than I do.

You're also more down on loot boxes than I am, in that I still dispute the equivalence to gambling. It's not absurd, but it requires ignoring a lot of nuance.

Still, the problem I have with this situation in general is that the loot box element (which isn't that heavy, it mostly establishes by law that loot boxes will make a game be automatically listed as 18 and up) is masking the mandatory age verification element. And the mandatory age verification is baaaad. It effectively does the magical wishful tech thinking thing we've been seeing recently elsewhere where it just... says it should be private and comply with privacy regulations but doesn't explain how that's possible, while at the same time demanding that every single store and service provider both design a perfect age verification system AND somehow magic up an API to share that information with each game while remaining entirely private. Which is pretty much impossible.

But nobody is talking about that, everybody just wants to dunk on loot boxes. Like four years too late, because most of the industry saw the writing on the wall and moved on to battle passes instead on the PR hit alone.