The App Store already tells you which games sell loot boxes

There is a disclosure on every App Store listing that answers a question people usually try to answer by reading reviews: does this game sell randomised items? It is not buried in a policy document. It is on the product page, a few scrolls down, in the box that shows the age rating.

Apple asks developers to fill in an age-rating questionnaire before an app can ship. One group of questions covers chance-based activities — simulated gambling, contests, gambling, and loot boxes — and each is answered as none, infrequent or frequent. The answers set the age rating and are then printed on the listing as short descriptor lines. One of those lines reads, simply, Loot Boxes.

Where to find it in ten seconds

1. 1

   Open the game's App Store page

   From search, or from a link. You do not need to install anything.

2. 2

   Scroll to the Information section

   Past the screenshots and the description, below the ratings and reviews.

3. 3

   Read the Age Rating row

   It shows the rating — 4+, 9+, 13+, 16+ or 18+ — and, tapped, expands to the descriptor lines the developer declared. “Loot Boxes” is one of them.

What the sixteen games we cover declare

Ratings read from the sixteen App Store product pages on 13 August 2026, for the United States storefront; the label column comes from Apple's lookup service on the same day and records whether the developer declared loot boxes. The two are listed separately for a reason given below.

The ratings in that column are new

Apple announced an expanded set of age ratings on 24 July 2025, adding 13+, 16+ and 18+ to the existing 4+ and 9+, and said every existing app and game rating would be updated automatically to fit the new system. The values now published on the store are 4+, 9+, 13+, 16+, 18+ and Unrated. The older 12+ and 17+ bands are gone.

A low rating and a loot box are not a contradiction

The most useful row in that table is Pokémon TCG Pocket. It carries one of the lowest ratings in the set — 9+, alongside Clash Royale, Pokémon GO and MONOPOLY GO! — and it declares loot boxes, and both are correct at once: the rating describes violence, language and themes, not commerce. A game can be entirely appropriate for a young child to look at and still be built around buying randomised packs.

This is the part that catches people out. Parents read the age rating as a summary of whether a game is suitable, and it is not — it is a summary of its content. The purchasing model is disclosed separately, on the same panel, and has to be read separately.

If the label is there, the odds should be too

Both stores require the numbers to exist somewhere you can find them. Apple's App Review Guidelines say that apps offering loot boxes or other mechanisms giving randomised virtual items for purchase must disclose the odds of receiving each type of item “prior to purchase”. Google Play's payments policy sets out the same duty in more detail, requiring the odds be disclosed in advance of the purchase and in close and timely proximity to it.

So a listing declaring loot boxes is also, indirectly, a promise: the rates are published somewhere in the game, usually behind a details or information button on the purchase screen itself. If you cannot find them, that is worth knowing before you spend.

Finding the number is only half of it. Gacha odds explained covers what a published rate does and does not promise you — the short version being that it describes the long run and says nothing whatsoever about your next ten pulls.

What the label does not tell you

• What is randomised. A cosmetic-only crate and a system that gates the strongest characters behind draws produce the same one-word label.
• What it costs. No price, no currency conversion, no bundle structure. The label is a yes or a no.
• How central it is. A game where you can ignore the mechanic entirely and one built around it are indistinguishable here.
• Anything about the Android build. These descriptors are Apple's. Google Play uses a separate ratings system, so the two listings for the same game will not look alike.

Which is to say it is a starting point rather than an answer. For the rest of what a store page will quietly tell you before you install, how to spot a pay-to-win mobile game works through the other signals on the same page.