Blizzard has publicly revealed its Overwatch loot box probabilities as new Chinese regulations aimed at online gaming kicked in this month.

These regulations, reported by Eurogamer sister site Metabomb, went live at the start of May and mean that games offering random loot systems in exchange for money (including Dota 2 and League of Legends) now need to disclose the probabilities working behind the scenes. There's a great writeup of what this means over on video game industry analyst ZhugeEX's blog, if you're interested.

Blizzard is one of the first major companies to comply with these new regulations.

The company's official announcement states, in Mandarin, that every loot box always contains at least one Rare (blue) item. On average, players receive an Epic (purple) item every 5.5 loot boxes and a Legendary (orange) item every 13.5 loot boxes.

There's no guarantee these figures are identical in other regions, of course, but it'd be very surprising if they weren't.

It'll be interesting to see if other game developers comply with this request and indeed, if other countries follow suit and make similar demands in the near future.

I'm a big fan of Overwatch and its loot boxes, but if we're given the option to pay money for these things, it only seems fair that we know exactly what we're buying.