It’s a bizarre scenario that this is not allowed, yet if you’d visit the Netherlands right now. You’d be swarmed with gambling ads since online gambling has been legalised since a year now.
Even worse is that if you visit any nice museum there’s a huge chance you’d find some folks there try to recruit people to join the national lottery. It’s a disgrace. Especially as they do it all under the guise of non-profit and all that while only giving 45% to charities of which none are supporting addiction prevention.
I think it’s good that this game is not allowed here as loot boxes are a sham, but it does seem weird that gambling is such an overt and condoned activity by almost everyone, including the parliament.
Presumably the Dutch government had an agreement with the industry to voluntarily stop the public advertising. Presumably also a number of parties held to that agreement, while some others are still advertising. An excuse I've seen is that they had advertisement scheduled before the agreed-on date, but billboard space and such didn't come available until later. It sounds like the government will introduce regulations if the self-regulation doesn't work. It may still wind down and be fine?
To my knowledge the one law introduced was the disallowance of public characters (mostly footballers at this moment) appearing in advertisements. Other than that it was indeed hoped that the industry would regulate itself.
The very odd thing is that a lot of shows still include them. The intent of the Dutch government is to be the largest shareholder in most gambling activities, to not allow the illegal field to take over. Yet you can find it being normalised in so many shows. TOTO has been winning the advertisement prize awards years on end already. And not be targeted to the younger audience yet you find most advertisements especially targeted to them.
The latest change in legalisation of online gambling made it explode to ever more absurd levels. There is very little reason to expect the market to manage itself.
It’s great that these loot boxes are banned and I hope it stays that way, and the severe advertisement industry around these gambling practices is winded down.
Even worse is that if you visit any nice museum there’s a huge chance you’d find some folks there try to recruit people to join the national lottery. It’s a disgrace. Especially as they do it all under the guise of non-profit and all that while only giving 45% to charities of which none are supporting addiction prevention.
I think it’s good that this game is not allowed here as loot boxes are a sham, but it does seem weird that gambling is such an overt and condoned activity by almost everyone, including the parliament.