Participants in ICPEN Sweep find a range of manipulative design practices in Mobile and Online games

Gaming is a rapidly growing industry, with an estimated 3.3 billion[1] people of the global population playing games in 2024. It has reached consumers across all age groups and geographical regions. Gaming can be great fun, unless unfair or deceptive practices harm consumers.

The global sweep, which examined 439 mobile and online games, found frequent use of manipulative design techniques, especially sneaking, nagging and obstruction practices. 

This year’s annual sweep by the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN) took place between March 31 and April 11, 2025. It involved participants, or “sweepers,” from 22 consumer protection enforcement agencies around the world.

The ICPEN Sweep focused on a number of potentially harmful consumer practices, including loot boxes, virtual currencies, manipulative design techniques, and conduct concerning minors. Although the legal qualification for whether these practices constitute a misleading consumer practice varies across jurisdictions, these practices were chosen given their previous identification in academic research and enforcement cases as being likely harmful to consumers. Manipulative design techniques were particularly prevalent, with the sweep identifying that some games used urgency style tactics seeking to pressure players to purchase items that were represented as scarce or only available for a limited time, when this may have been untrue.

The ICPEN Sweep also found that the presence of loot boxes, in-game purchases and in-game advertisements was just as common in games rated ages 3 and up as it was in any other age classification. Moreover, only 30% of games with loot boxes disclosed the presence of this monetization mechanism on the platform pages where the game could be downloaded.

The participating sweep members are committed to making sure that consumers are protected from unfair and deceptive acts in gaming.

The ICPEN report can be found here.

[1] Gill, Sunil. 2025. “How Many Gamers Are There in 2025? Latest Stats.” Priori Data. January 27, 2025. https://prioridata.com/number-of-gamers/.