-4
Steam's Multi-Billion Dollar Gambling Problem
(www.youtube.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Not to downplay the fact that valve has popularized and continued on with this trend, but to be technical, FIFA was the first major game to introduce loot boxes in around 2008.
Nice catch, I'm not a sports game guy, so I'm not familiar with the FIFA history. It looks like it happened about a year before Team Fortress 2 first added loot boxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#History