The casino industry and the gaming industry are among the biggest ones in the world, raking in billions upon billions of dollars every single year. Think about it – the combined sum that people spend on videogames and microtransactions in one year is almost as big as the money people spent on books! No, I’m not kidding, in 2016 the gaming industry generated $100 billion in profits, while book publishers only raked in $115 billion. That’s crazy! Well, not that crazy when you realize that, while the overwhelming majority of people can read and not that many people can game, people tend to be active gamers more often than they are active readers. Do you like to play a round of two of “Candy Crush” while waiting for the bus? Congratulations, you’re a gamer. Not many people read books with that frequency, and the results show.

But, unfortunately, it’s not enough. Games are becoming too expensive to produce, especially those on consoles where the $60 retail game that offers at least 50 hours of content and launches with a $40 season pass for DLC is the norm that all big publishers strive for. Those games often cost hundreds of millions of dollars to be made by a team of hundreds, the games that need to sell millions of copies in order to turn in a profit – which, of course, most of them absolutely won’t. So if you can’t make your money with sales, and you can’t increase the price from $60, and DLC is no longer cutting it, what else is left to generate revenue? For a while, the big fad was microtransactions. Want a better sword? That’ll cost you $1.99, please! But that fad quickly gave way to something FAR more profitable – loot boxes. Random items placed in blind boxes that you could purchase for a small (and very real) fee, some of which are cosmetic, while others will improve your stats. Maybe you’ll get just another ordinary sword like all of the others, or maybe it’ll be a legendary weapon that you can’t get anywhere else! It’s almost like… Gambling?

Yep, in a surprising move, many videogames (including huge titles like “Star Wars: Battlefront II” and “Overwatch”) are suddenly employing tactics usually reserved for slot machines – pay a flat fee for a completely random chance to win something good, or nothing of value at all. That’s literally gambling, even if you receive no monetary reward out of it… Which is weird because, while games are becoming more like casinos, casinos are, for the first time ever, introducing videogames. In an attempt to attract younger gamblers, some Vegas casinos have introduced skill-based games like Frogger, where you bet a certain amount of money and then your winnings depend entirely on how well you do in the game. It’s a bit funny to think that, nowadays, actual gambling relies more on player skill than videogames one plays for fun.

Of course, this likely won’t last forever. Multiple countries, such as Belgium, are currently trying to outlaw loot boxes, and chances are that sooner or later it’ll just be too much of a hassle for developers to plug them into their games. Similarly, skill-based casino games haven’t really had the impact that developers have hoped (which makes perfect sense – why would you go to a casino and bet money on Frogger when you can play it right now on your phone for free), so it seems rather unlikely that the legislature which allowed them to happen in Vegas in the first place will find its way out of the States and in other markets like the UK, especially in online markets where skill-based gambling can potentially be very easily exploited. Before too long, chances are that the industries will go back to the way they used to be, with certain changes here and there, but in any case, 20-30 years from now it’ll be kind of funny to remember that, at one point in the mid to late 2010s, the gaming and casino industries switched places for a bit.