Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players in France can now reveal the contents of the game’s loot boxes before deciding to purchase a key to open the box, a transaction that previously required players to pay up before unveiling what randomized in-game good they'd receive.
The new feature is implemented in-game as an x-ray scanner item French players can use to scan a single loot box and reveal its contents.
Players can then decide whether or not to purchase a key to claim that item after seeing what they’ll receive, but there is a caveat as the revealed item must be claimed before the x-ray scanner item can be used on a different box.
The brief change log detailing the update doesn’t dive into why Valve opted the make the decision, but given the rising public concern about the sale of loot boxes in video games and previous regulator criticism of the practice, it isn’t hard to understand why more and more companies are making changes to how the monetization scheme fits into their games.
Psyonix made a somewhat similar change to how loot boxes work in Rocket League, a shift that itself resembles a change its parent company Epic Games made in Fortnite’s single player mode prior to that.
Unlike Rocket League and Fortnite’s loot box transparency steps, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s new change is confined to one region and, for now, doesn’t even appear to apply to other countries like Belgium and the Netherlands where the game has faced loot box-related criticism and outright regulation in the past.