PEGI 16 for paid loot boxes: how Europe's new game ratings work

From 2026, the age label on a game in Europe speaks not only about what a player sees but about how the game is built to make money and keep people playing. PEGI, the European age-rating system for video games, announced in March 2026 that it would add new categories to its classification criteria to address online risks, and from June it applies them to games newly submitted to it. The change that reaches loot boxes is simple to state: a game in which a player can pay for a random item gets a PEGI 16 rating.

A second phase reaches games already on sale. From October 1, 2026, PEGI starts to revisit some of them and names the ones it will look at: online-only live services.

This guide sets out what PEGI is and who does the rating, the new categories and the age each one triggers, how the rule on paid random items is worded, what happens to games already on sale, where the system stops, and how the change sits beside Germany's own rules and the European Union's work on in-game spending. It describes ratings, not legal duties: how a rule applies to a given game depends on that game's design and on the classifier's assessment.

Better Internet for Kids summary of an online meeting with PEGI, June 25, 2026; Bavarian State Government answer to a written question, Bavarian State Parliament printed paper 19/3110, September 13, 2024.

What PEGI is and who rates the games

PEGI's labels tell buyers, and above all parents, the age a game is suited to. The European Parliament noted in January 2023 that many parents find the label useful when they decide what to buy.

The ratings are not given from a desk. According to the summary of an online meeting held with PEGI on June 25, 2026, published by Better Internet for Kids, the European Union's portal on children's online safety, the actual classification work is done by two bodies: NICAM in the Netherlands and the Games Rating Authority in the United Kingdom. Their staff play the games and issue the final decisions, with input from the companies. PEGI was represented at that meeting by Dirk Bosmans, and the other attendees came from Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Norway.

PEGI is also part of IARC, the International Age Rating Coalition, which brings it together with Germany's USK and rating bodies in the United States and Australia. The coalition pools resources and shares practices, the summary says. It adds that Roblox will soon adopt the IARC system, so that PEGI ratings will appear on the individual games played inside it.

The four new categories

Spending features were not new to PEGI's labels. In January 2023 the European Parliament welcomed an update by which PEGI informed consumers when a game included paid random features. The 2026 change goes further: the answers on online features can now raise the age rating itself.

In practice, the Better Internet for Kids summary says, a game newly submitted from June 2026 answers four additional categories of questions, and the answers can push its rating up. The categories cover in-game purchases, paid random items, communication features, and features that encourage players to keep playing, which PEGI calls play by appointment.

Each criterion carries its own rating, which can raise the age a game would have received for its content alone.

The rule on paid random items

The new rating for loot boxes rests on a short test. A loot box is a virtual container a player pays to open without knowing which item is inside. The meeting summary states the rule in one sentence: "If a player can pay for something and there is a chance-based outcome then the rating is 16."

Three points stand out in the summary. First, the test combines payment and chance: the player pays, and what comes out is left to luck. Second, the 16 rating is applied to all games with paid random items. Third, it applies to new games and to existing ones alike: games with loot boxes move to PEGI 16 whether they are new or old, the summary says.

The summary is frank about how the line was drawn. Academics consulted by PEGI noted that there was no hard evidence that loot boxes cause harm or lead to gambling, it records, but it was still agreed that the rating should be 16. It also expects that some people will be unhappy, because the 16 rating will be applied to all games with paid random items.

Mechanics that are plainly gambling sit in a separate place. The summary describes social casino games, usually on mobile, as clearly gambling-related, and records that PEGI's gambling criteria have been completely overhauled.

Spending pressure and play by appointment

The other new categories reach the pressure to spend, the habit of daily play and the safety of online chat.

On purchases, the summary's rule is that a game with a paid subscription or a countdown timer is rated 12. The reasoning given is that pressure to pay is not acceptable for younger children.

Play by appointment is entirely new, the summary says, and addictive elements are difficult to define. Its answer turns on loss. If a player can lose status or content already acquired by not coming back every day, the game is rated 12, because this works like a punishment that younger children do not understand. Incentives to return daily without that loss are rated 7, which the summary compares to a streaming episode that ends on a cliffhanger. The main purpose of that lower rating, it says, is to inform parents.

The communication criterion carries the highest of the new ratings. A game with no muting, blocking, moderation or reporting would be rated 18, and the summary notes that few games of that kind are expected in the European Union.

What happens to games already on sale

The new criteria are applied first to new submissions. From October 1, 2026, PEGI will look at existing games and re-classify some of them, the summary says.

It does not treat every game alike. Online-only live services are the ones PEGI will revisit. Disc-based games have a natural lifecycle, the summary explains, so re-rating them is less useful.

Germany got there first

Germany does not use PEGI's labels as its legal ratings. Games there go through the USK, a voluntary self-regulation body of the games industry, where representatives of the supreme state youth authorities issue the rating as a binding administrative decision under the federal Youth Protection Act. The country made the change PEGI is now making earlier.

The Bavarian State Government set out the sequence in its answer to a written question from two members of the Bavarian State Parliament, printed on September 13, 2024. The 2021 amendment of the Youth Protection Act gave section 10b its current form, which brings usage risks into age ratings alongside content. Since 2023, games have carried additional notices beside the USK age mark, among them pressure to play more, increased purchase incentives, and in-game purchases with random items.

The concern behind the rule had been documented. A study commissioned by Germany's state media authorities and published in February 2024 found that loot boxes can encourage problematic gaming and gambling behavior among children and young people, the Bavarian government noted in the same answer.

The effect of the rating change was measurable. According to the supreme state youth authorities, as the Bavarian government reported, usage risks, loot boxes among them, helped decide a higher age rating for about 30 percent of the games rated under the Act in 2023. The PEGI meeting summary recalls that the USK's equivalent changes came two years before PEGI's, and that a game whose spending is switched off by default can receive a lower USK rating, since parents then have nothing to turn off. Such settings are very rare: the USK has seen one such game in two years, according to the summary.

The Bavarian answer also shows that Germany chose not to set one rating for every loot box. A blanket 18 rating was not appropriate, the government wrote, because loot boxes differ in their design and in the risk they pose to young people, and each game that has them should be assessed on its own. It described PEGI ratings as a voluntary industry assessment resting on the publisher's answers to a standardized questionnaire, and as recommendations that bind neither the public nor retailers, while the German process ends in a binding decision by the state. Replacing it with PEGI, the government wrote, would be a clear step backward.

The same answer shows the limits of what the state knew and where the rules were heading. The Bavarian government had no data on how widespread loot boxes were in Bavaria, or on how many children and young people regularly played games that contain them. It also reported that the interstate treaty on the protection of minors in the media was being revised to add the protection of personal integrity, so that usage and interaction risks, loot boxes included, could be weighed under it as well; the draft was then going through the European Commission's notification procedure.

Where PEGI does not reach

A rating system works only where the games are sold through it, and the summary is open about the gaps. Steam, a store for computer games, is outside the PEGI system: it shows a PEGI rating only if the publisher chooses to. Apple runs its own rating system for its app store.

PEGI sees developers moving to Steam, which has fewer rules, as a problem, according to the summary, and suggests that the Digital Services Act, and another European text it calls the DFA, could open ways to bring Steam into the system. Those are PEGI's views, reported from the meeting, not decisions of the European Union.

The other limit is what happens after the label. The summary records PEGI's view that tools to switch off spending, follow a child's contacts and limit playing time exist but need an active parent, and not every parent is one, so education has to continue. Age verification is part of the answer, it adds, but not a cure-all. In PEGI's own research, 75 percent of parents wanted the final say whatever the bans in place.

The European backdrop on in-game spending

PEGI's change arrives after several years of pressure from European institutions on how games sell items.

In its resolution of January 18, 2023 on consumer protection in online video games, the European Parliament asked the Commission to analyze the way loot boxes are sold, called for a common European approach on them, and asked for more transparency from developers on the probabilities inside loot box mechanisms. It also asked the Commission to assess how the PEGI system is applied and to explore enshrining it in EU law, to create a harmonized, mandatory age-rating system. It asked the Commission to assess whether current law covers loot boxes and in-game purchases and, if it does not, to propose legislation, considering options such as in-game payments and loot boxes switched off by default, or a ban on paid loot boxes.

The same resolution set out what players should be told and when. Information on in-game purchases, loot boxes included, should be given before the game is bought and before each purchase, and where a game sells through a virtual currency, the real-money value should be shown for each purchase. Games built on paying to win should inform players of that feature before they start to play. It also regretted the lack of EU-wide data on average in-game spending and asked for it to be collected every year. It described PEGI as a source of important information for consumers before they buy, which should be complemented by further measures, and encouraged campaigns to make the system better known.

Consumer authorities moved on a related front. On March 21, 2025, the network of national consumer protection authorities, known as the CPC Network, published key principles on in-game virtual currencies, led by the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets and the Norwegian Consumer Authority, the European Commission reports. The principles ask for clear and transparent pricing, no practices that hide the cost of in-game content or force players to buy virtual currency, respect for the right of withdrawal, and respect for the vulnerabilities of consumers, children above all. The same day, the network set out its concerns about Star Stable Online, after a complaint from the Swedish Consumers' Association. Among the practices it considered harmful to children were advertising that urged children to buy currency or items, or to persuade adults to buy them, and purchase offers limited in time that put pressure on children. The second of those concerns is close to what PEGI now rates 12 when a game uses a countdown timer on its offers.

The Commission had already set out its reading of loot boxes in a letter to the industry's European federations in September 2022: their sale must meet the information duties of EU consumer law on price and main characteristics, and games must not directly urge children to buy paid extras such as loot boxes.

PEGI's rating is a separate instrument from those rules. Consumer law governs how items are sold to everyone; the rating tells parents at what age a game that sells them is considered suitable.

How it compares with other jurisdictions

Paid random items in competitive games are being examined well beyond Europe, under different tools.

In Brazil, the law known as the ECA Digital bans loot boxes in games aimed at or likely to be accessed by children and adolescents, with rules in force since March 17, 2026. On June 16, 2026, a Brazilian court ordered Riot Games' Brazilian subsidiary to pay R$15 million in collective moral damages over the loot boxes sold in League of Legends, in a judgment of the 1st Children and Youth Court of the Federal District, in Brasília, that can still be appealed.

In the United States, New York's attorney general sued Valve on February 25, 2026, alleging that the paid boxes in Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 amount to illegal gambling under state law. That is a complaint, not a ruling.

The European rating takes a narrower path than either. It neither bans the mechanic nor treats it as gambling. It sets an age, 16, and leaves the decision about who plays to the stores, the platforms and the parents.

What comes next

Two dates frame the rest of 2026. Games submitted since June are already rated under the new criteria. From October 1, 2026, PEGI begins revisiting games already on sale, online-only live services among them.

The summary does not say how many existing games will be re-rated or in what order. That scope will show in the ratings themselves, game by game, as NICAM and the Games Rating Authority work through them.

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