Paper by Daniel Joseph (MMU/MGC) and Florence Chee (Loyola University), at DiGRA 2026, 14–16 June 2026, Maynooth University, Ireland.

A prediction market is, at its root, a form of gambling on current events like elections, wars, and, of course, sports. In a recent interview with the New York Times’ podcast Hard Fork (2025), co-founder and CEO of Roblox David Baszucki said that he would welcome the development of a prediction market based on the Polygon blockchain network in Roblox and that “it’s a brilliant idea if it can be done in an educational way that’s legal.” Baszucki’s interest in mixing children’s gaming and virtual worlds with gambling should be taken quite seriously for what it heralds for the future, especially considering the source of the comment coming from one of the most powerful online game CEOs of a game world like Roblox which operates at an unprecedented international scale and is aimed at children (Ball, 2024).

The phenomenon described by Brock and Johnson (2021) as the “gamblification of digital games” continues apace. With the ability to place bets on world events through prediction markets, our everyday gamified existence has already become thorougly engineered towards gamblification with all signs pointing to reaching even greater audiences including children. In this research, we explore the political, economic, and ethical implications of how largescale, mainstream digital games like Roblox may soon have their own built-in prediction market.

PREDICTION MARKETS AND GAMBLIFICATION

As local policy changes across the world trend towards more permissive attitudes towards traditional gambling, digital games have enthusiastically embraced gamblification as a strategy for continuously increasing market growth in an already highly competitive and saturated market. The work undertaken here contributes a critical analysis of the rise and spread of prediction markets as intersections of gamblification, ludic pleasures, and inequalities.

As prediction markets and crypto go hand in hand, research has shown that crypto and gambling industries target vulnerable communities that have a legacy of being the targets of exploitation and financial discrimination (Kelleher and Dumas 2024). With advertising and marketing practices targeting particular vulnerable segments of the population through shared traits, including psychographics and creditworthiness, leveraging games and gaming through longstanding strategies dating back to the 1970s (Guadagnolo, 2021; Meehan, 2002). Globally, we see this happening with the breakneck pace of predatory inclusion of children and their data. However, as a key audience and vulnerable constituency, children and their ludic pleasures, digital rights in terms of games, play, and leisure warrant specific efforts to design ethical worlds (Livingstone and Sylwander, 2025; Crepax and Mühlberg, 2022; Grimes, 2021; Milkaite et al., 2025). 

MAGICAL THINKING IN POLICY CIRCLES

In light of and perhaps despite the alarms raised in policy circles worldwide about the adverse effects of embedded gambling-adjacent designs in games, the heady promises of short term gains have been even more persuasive and poised for adoption. Prediction markets in their current form rely heavily on crypto and blockchain technology. Their awkward theoretical origins derive from the field of economics of prediction markets as information processors, linked to a class project to justify capitalism as superior to socialist central planning (Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2017). Despite the various crypto busts of the last half decade, cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies have continued to spread while bitcoin climbed in perceived value. Based on blockchain technology, the inclusion of hyper-marketized social relations that could include prediction markets is almost a necessary condition (Di Amato and Orsini 2022). While there has yet to be a huge crypto gaming “success” story that goes mainstream, it is not impossible to imagine one (Serada et al. 2021).

It is important to draw attention to the structural shift in international gaming and gambling policies as well as their specific geopolitical drivers. In the USA, since the 2018 repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 more than 35 states have legalized some form of US-based sports betting. Moreover, as a revenue generator for strained public finances many states have justified gambling activity and its regulation. As a product of this shift in December 2025, gambling firm Fanatics has just launched prediction markets in 24 states in the USA (Neelakandan, 2025). Since 2023, there is also firm user growth across Europe with a 5% revenue increase in revenue with casino apps and sports betting apps use by young adults driving growth (EGBA, 2025; Mordor, 2025). Worldwide, the effort to regulate loot boxes because they share nearly all of the attributes of gambling, suggest a serious social risk that threatens the general sustainability responsibilities of the industry (Busch, Chee, and Sihvonen 2025; Xiao, 2021).

A GAME INDUSTRY UNDER PRESSURE

In the game industry, there is overwhelming economic pressure to introduce gamblification mechanics in the form of loot boxes, with very few games and platforms holding out against it. Nonetheless, loot boxes continue to spread their tendrils across the gaming ecosystem, almost always augmented by other forms of in-game purchases such as battle passes and in-game cosmetics (Joseph, 2021). The strain on growth and profits in the wider digital games industry has led to a wider adoption of free-2-play and other hyper-marketized business models (Ball, 2025, Paul, 2020).  As just one recent example of this, Fortnite, which predominately relies on battle passes and cosmetics for its revenue (and which was found to have violated Dutch consumer protection laws in Fortnite (McEvoy, 2024)), has now allowed third-party creators to introduce paid random items into their personally created worlds (Epic, 2025).

GAMING PREDICTION MARKETS IN THESE UNCERTAIN TIMES

Indeed, while prediction markets are not the only form of gamblification that is currently sweeping across the digital games industry, we do see them as a particular, hyper-capitalist ludic form of gambling that fits with the spirit of the times in the industry. We find the possibilities of including a predictive market in Roblox unsettling from the standpoint of how the endeavor of designing games may be driven by unfettered profit motives targeting vulnerable audiences. As such, we see our study of prediction markets as an opportunity to see where digital games are going next, and to ask ourselves what role we will play in the pleasure and pain of our collective future.

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