Citation: Johnson, M. R. & Brock, T. (2020). The 'Gambling Turn' in Digital Game Monetization. Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, 12:2. The ‘Gambling Turn’ in Digital Game Monetization Dr Mark R Johnson, Lecturer in Digital Cultures, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, Australia. Dr Tom Brock, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Abstract This paper examines how ‘gambling’ secured a central economic and cultural position in the development of modern digital games. We first trace how developers have monetized ‘games’ and ‘play’, from slot machines to PC, console and mobile platforms, before considering the recent controversy over ‘loot boxes’ as an emblematic case study of the ongoing gamblification of digital play. We argue that: (i) the rising costs of development and marketing for “blockbuster” games, (ii) an overcrowded marketplace, and (iii) significant shifts in the corporate culture of the games industry, are creating cultural conditions which legitimize gambling as a form of digital game production and consumption. This is evidenced in developers’ capacity to innovate around legal challenges and player demand for further customisation and rewards. What emerges is a question about the future direction of game development and the impact of a logic of money, rather than play, which now underwrites it. Introduction ‘I grew up playing games my whole life’, were the fond words of Chris Lee, the Hawai’i member in the House of Representatives, in a recent interview. This was followed, however, by a declaration that he has watched ‘first-hand’ the apparent transformation of the games industry from one ‘that seeks to create new things’ into one that has now ‘begun to exploit people, especially children, to maximise profit’ (Good, 2018). This was in reference to the recent release of Electronic Arts’ multiplatform game Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (2017), a game that quickly became notorious for its monetization methods and their potential impacts on both its players as individuals, and the wider ecosystem of digital play within the game (Kain, 2017). This is what led Lee to declare that the game was nothing more than ‘a Star Wars-themed casino designed to lure kids into spending money’ (Phillips, 2017), a damning condemnation that subsequently led to proposed Hawai’i legislation on the issue (Orland, 2018a). The US state has not been the only one to take action, spurred on the same unusually extreme use of a so-called “loot box” (spending real-world money in pursuit of unpredictable sets of in-game items) system in Battlefront 2. Belgium (Hood, 2017), the Netherlands (Yin-Poole, 2018), China (Grayson, 2016), and a number