New York sues Valve for 'letting children and adults illegally gamble' with loot boxes
8 months ago by Agent_Karyo to c/pcgaming
The lawsuit aims to "stop Valve from promoting gambling features in its games, disgorge all ill-gotten gains, and pay fines for violating New York\u2019s laws."
Way to discredit your whole stance.
People can be right about one thing and wrong about another at the same time. Do you have to be right about everything ever for one of your opinions to count?
Sure, but doesn't help when you go out of your way to say something stupid.
Nothing discredits a health lifestyle advice more than being followed by a rant about vaccinees. Same here.
Yeah, I agree the whole "video games cause violence" thing is incredibly stupid.
I don't think having a dumb opinion about something discredits your other opinions though. They should each be taken on their own merits.
You'll have a hard time convincing someone to change their mind if you just write them off because one of their opinions is dumb.
I didn't write them off, just said they wanted to reinforce their position with something dumb, which has the opposite effect.
This is not a quote of something they said some other time about other topic, this was on the and breath.
To be clear, fuck loot boxes, hope they are banned. That's why it's bad to shot yourself in the foot appearing either uninformed or actively lying.
They are related opinions. If I read some diet and exercise advice that includes how to remove the negative energy from my crystals then I'm not going to waste time seeing if the other advice is valid.
Yep. As ever, all that matters are vibes. "Valve bad" = WRONG VIBES! Attacking someone who says "Valve bad" = GOOD VIBES! UPVOTE! Criticising the attack = BAD VIBES! DOWNVOTE!
Doesn't matter whether it's bollocks.
You know what's super funny about this? Your hatred for Valve is so god damned strong that your deep-fried head-circuitry can't process that something might not be about that. So, I'll spell it out in very simple terms.
Stopping gambling in video games = Good
Enabling people who can and have tried to censor and destroy the industry in the past = bad
On the one hand, good. Valve needs to be held responsible for this.
On the other hand, steam has the best parental controls of any platform I've ever seen. You can just not let your kid play those games. Parents should take responsibility for their kids. Games already have ratings and warnings and such.
On the third hand, I forsee this as being yet another means of forcing ID checks and face scanning into the platform. I don't trust our government not to fuck this up in the worst way possible right now.
I am not physically walking into a liquor store.
I am not physically walking into a casino.
If I am a legal child, then I am supervised by my parent or guardian. Otherwise, I can do as I want.
I get that online casinos are a thing. Parents are supposed to parent their children.
I actually would be in favor of id checks at the OS level IF AND ONLY IF I could trust the government.
I'll admit I have marginally more trust in steam for ages verification than a lot of the other options.
As a parent of a small child, I'm very impressed with the options available via steam. Just the fact I can let them play games from my personal library surprised me. I don't need to buy them a copy.
The gambling thing is definitely something that needs addressing. It's one of the few black marks I have against valve.
Well they are suing Valve, so obviously the NY Attorney General's opinion is that it is already banned according existing policy.
This similar thing happened in Belgium and the Netherlands nearly a decade ago.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49674333
While the court case was ongoing, the real world effect was that games with certain lootbox features could not be released in the Dutch or Belgian market without restricting its sale to adults. In practice this just meant that game publishers either disabled the feature in the Netherlands and Belgium, or didn't release the game at all.
To my knowledge lootbox mechanics in games are still banned in Belgium
However, in the Netherlands, lootboxes were eventually found to not be gambling. The courts went along with EA's argument that while lootboxes are a game of chance, the game around them is a game of skill. And therefor videogames with lootboxes should not be considered gambling under Dutch law.
Since the US has a similar requirement for something to be considered gambling (that is how people argued in favour of pinball machines at the time), I would suspect that companies that make money on lootboxes will defend themselves against this lawsuit with a similar argument.
Well here in the netherlands I couldn't download the mobile pokemon trading card game. And I can't bet points on twitch either when someone does a prediction. So there are still sometimes restrictions.
I live in Belgium and the law is there, but it seems pretty much ignored. At the time there were some games that were changed (battlefront II 2, overwatch, FIFA, etc...) But it seems like everything after just ignores the law. CS2 still had lootboxes, genshin impact, rocket league, apex legends, league, etc...
They changed the loot boxes in e.g. dota2 to always show what's in them, the argument being that you're no longer gambling then since you see what you buy. This of course conveniently ignores the fact that the gambling aspect just moved to the lootbox you buy after the one you see
With digital drivers licenses starting to roll out now, it doesn’t have to require a scan anymore.
Finally a lawsuit against valve I can support.
The lawsuit also claims that CS2 and other FPSs are causing kids to become violent
Finally a lawsuit against valve I can support 99% of.
Good
country finally starts cracking down on gambling
oh no wait nevermind they just want to sue a videogame company
Not mechanically the same at all. The reason they can skirt by and have not been considered 'gambling' is largely due to the fact that you always win something, even if the player to player market dictates that item as worthless.
A slot machine literally just takes your money and you are left with nothing but having pushed a button for the pretty lights and fun noises.
A slot machine literally just takes your money and you are left with nothing but having pushed a button for the pretty lights and fun noises.
What do you think video game cosmetics are if not pretty lights and fun noises?
I mean, fair, but it's a digital item that you get to keep.
It may be problematic but I see it as less problematic than non-cosmetic items like Magic card packs
Maybe not to you, but you don't speak for all of humanity.
Them being cosmetics doesn't change anything. People want cosmetics, they made a gambling system to get them, easy-as.
They are only cosmetic, but absolutely still gambling. That said, the design and use of the market and operations did mean it was far easier to avoid and far cheaper. For example, you could get basically a full loadout of skins, without ever opening a lootbox, for far less. Doesn't change the fact that the lootboxes in CS (and everything else) need to be regulated though.
It's content you unlock by gambling with real money. Doesn't matter what the content is.
A good few years ago now, I watched as my two cousins, Steam voucher in hand (and he didn't even have a gaming PC btw), faffed about with one of those sites promoted by shady Youtubers.
Codes went in. Buttons were pressed. Glances were exchanged.
"Now what?" asked the younger one who's Steam voucher it was.
"Oh nothing," said the older one. "You lost."
I think it was only teenage emoism that stopped him bursting into tears right there.
He's an accountant now, so I assume he learned an important lesson about gambling that day.
Why not both?
I've never been a gambler because I've only ever lost. I'd say I'm down ~$30 in the last 30 years.
I'm not really a gambler either. I've been to the casino a few times in my 20s with friends, but either for one of their birthdays or they were celebrating something. I only ever brought like $50 to drink with and another $50 to play with, knowing full well the most enjoyment of that hundo I was getting was the beers.
I did however win exactly once. Turned my last $10 of the 50 into $900. And that was also the last time I ever gambled.
I did once have someone give me a roll of quarters and I walked out with $70. I figured the only reason I won was because it wasn't my money.
Gambling is pointless.
Not for the House. It's sort of their bread and butter.
I enjoy low stakes gambling. I'll walk into a casino with $20-40 bucks for gambling, buy a few drinks, and see what I can get. If I win enough to break even and pay for the drinks, I came out on top. I'll throw 5 bucks down on a parlay during Football season once a month or so. Outside of that, I couldn't imagine the stress of higher stakes. I do it for fun and maybe turning 5 bucks into 30.
Finally someone standing upto Valve for the right reasons.
KELSHI LITERALLY HAS SUPER BOWL ADS. WHAT DO YOU MEAN GOOD SIR.
People never cease to amaze me.
I'm assuming you mean Kalshi? Polymarket too, of course.
Games are all rigged, btw. But the spill-over has been eyebrow raising.
please would anyone think of Gabe‘s yachts?
They should sue Epic Games because Fortnite greatly popularized loot boxes and Microtransactions. Also other games which are the real culprit such as Overwatch, League of Legends, and more. Though granted Valve did make CSGO which was one of the first big games to popularize buying and selling video game skins. But of course lots of other games do it much worse like Gatcha games and mobile games.
Can start with the OG loot boxes of Magic the Gathering amd Pokemon? So much gambling & its targeted at children.
The fun part is that a lot of trading cards have their roots in the early movements for cigarettes. Same idea for the most part, except it was typical for pinups instead of monsters or magic. You bought tobacco to get the cards, so tobacco became popular amongst kids. If you wanted to collect em all, you would buy more boxes of cigarettes, so imo it's even more of a parallel than just calling out TCGs
The fact that the idea swapped to hooking kids on gambling is honestly a no brainer, especially since the cards were the things helping sell the cigs anyhow.
First of all: Trading cards are also abusive as fuck. What those Magic and Pokémon people are doing is not ok.
But loot boxes can be even worse: You can built them so that they will give you not a fair chance to get an item, but some companies are doing this the more evil way. Imagine that you need some specific item to get your full set, which will give you some buff. And the company knows that you are missing only that item. And it knows that you are willing to spend money, because you have just bought a loot box. So they will manipulate your odds so that you will not get the item you want. You'll get several other "near misses", but they also do know how many loot boxes other players opened before giving up. That is some additional evil that printed Magic cards in Walmart can't do to you
While this is true of the most predatory loot box systems, no valve game has cosmetics that directly impact gameplay. They are decorative.
Where in the world trading is a form of gambling?
Trading is completelly different thing. There is risk of loosing money when selling or buying at the wrong time, but the product is still allways there and you have the opportunity to appraise the price of what ever you are trading.
In gambling there is promise of payout, but you have no way of knowing what you are getting.
The EU! That's surprising that there's that limitation. Do you know why that restriction is there? Is Valve the one imposing that restriction, your country, the EU? Or maybe you aren't old enough and there's protections? I'm curious.
It's my country that chose to do it yes. And no, I'm old enough. Any sort of gambling requires the provider to have a gambling license (and it must be 18+).
The lootboxes don't even need to provide something that can be sold for real money. As long as there is randomization it's gambling. Most games block such lootboxes from being sold in my country because it's the easiest for them. In Guild Wars 2 I can't even buy a lootbox that only contains untradeable armor dyes because it's randomized.
For some reason, even though I have been using Steam for a long time, I am not privy to the "lootboxes" they talk about. And my account was never parented. I feel like I would actively need to look for what they are talking about.
disgorge all ill-gotten gains
Why is this the only lawsuit where I see this phrase?
Why do other companies go away with a few million $ in fine?
-> Now I want to know how much Valve has "ill-gotten" out of this thing.
I definitely prefer GoG and being able to play all my games with the internet off and don't consider Steam as some angel. But from what I see, the very fact that so many Gaming companies are trying to destroy Valve, tells me that Valve is giving value that these others don't want given to the customer.
So, using what laws to sue a group of companies for the malicious use of court to attempt to reduce the overall quality of product options available to the consumers?
The lootboxes are a Counterstrike thing. They're like Labubus except with digital guns and knives.
Ok, so I looked into it further and looks like they also take a tax on every trade, meaning they are actually profiting off of people's auctions after they run their slot machines.
Seems to be quite a bit of ill-gotten gains to be found here.
Gabe might have to pass on a few of his future yachts.
If this stops loot boxes in general I'm all for it... can we also ban the sale of suprise toys also then because its the same thing as this...
Fuck we can go maximum carnage and stop the sale of card packs like pokemon and mtg and everything else as those are loot crates also
This wouldn't "stop loot boxes" though. They aren't bringing in EA, Activision, Epic, or any other big company pushing loot boxes.
It feels like they are trying to specifically target Valve until they go public and get controlled by the same BS financiers that run the rest of "the market".
My tinfoil hat is getting a lot of use lately. :(
Yeah it's bullshit, you can't say some of the least toxic and manipulative loot boxes are the problem... I understand valve is one step on the edge of evil but for the most part they have used that power to help control the gaming industries greed...
If this goes through I can see them banning any games with loot boxes from steam or some petty shit like that which im all for...
Let people buy the things they want...
Loot boxes allowed valve games to be free to play for most people. I'm fine with sacrificing the people who aren't smart enough not to gamble so that the rest of us can play for free, they weren't going to make it anyways.
the people who aren’t smart enough
So children
You are fine with sacrificing children
Yes I am specifically fine with sacrificing children.. the younger the better.
Valve wins against the Rothschilds
Okay, tap the breaks. Can you field a link on that one?
lootboxes being available for the past 10 or so years in Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2.
In a lot more games than that. EA, Ubisoft, and Activision/Blizzard have been dolling out lootboxes for at least as long. So targeting Valve exclusively definitely raises some eyebrows.
But I'm curious to know what this has to do with "the Rothschilds" and not an actual financial, business, or government entity.
Not everything is a conspiracy and the jews are not behind everything.
Billionaires like Gabe Newell?
For example
But it seems from the outside that Newell's business strategy is against the push of the billionaire clique that bought the White House, and that's why some people here act like he's a hero.
He just makes his undeserved amount of money without also actively trying to make everything worse using the undeserved and frankly harmful political power that amount of money grants.
Reminder: this was Epstein's idea.
Okay, but who do you want the NY DA's office to go after? Jamie Dimon? Bill Gates? Steve Bannon? Half of Activision/Blizzard?
Valve was the obvious choice.
All of them.
I am honestly a little bit in shock how people are willing to do volunteer PR for Valve.
They are an American technology, they can't escape the culture of corruption and criminality that dominates their region.
What about EA?
Unpopular opinion but valve is way worse than EA when it comes to gambling.
Not only did they invent the concept of loot boxes but they also allow real money trading of the randomly dropped items which fosters an entire underground of secondary gambling markets that are literal digital casinos.
Markets that currently sponsor the majority of esports teams.
Maplestory invented them with the Gatchapon.
This is coming in so late that it basically seems to be more of a move for someone to run their political career off of. There are so many worse offenders now, while Steam was basically one of the least gregarious ones. Unfortunately for Steam, it is a corrupt market nowadays, and it's always going to be the least corrupt, private entities who get singled out. You can specially tell its political when it's flying under the "protect the children" flag, gambling in general has gotten out of hand and needs to be toned down, for all ages. Going after one company isn't going to fix this, it needs to be legislation wide.
Love how they chose Valve specifically. I'd think it'd be better going after the companies making those games rather than a distributor.
Not really gonna discourage the game creators from making loot box mechanics.
Though I will say that I think any and everyone profiting from loot boxes should get fined wherever and whenever possible. I'd just start somewhere more impactful.
Edit: I see I had a proper logical short circuit in my original statement.
I only considered loot boxes as mechanics required for game changing advantages, gear, and loot. Not things like cosmetics.
Last time I played CS it didn't even have cosmetics, I only played DOTA as a Warcraft 3 mod, and I thought TF2 was limited to hats and sidegrades that could be unblocked through playing and achievements still.
Furthermore, I didn't stop to consider that people would actually gamble their money away on in game cosmetic items.
That's on me, not taking the time to consider things properly in the early morning hours.
I'd like to thank the people who pointed out my error, and I'm pleasantly surprised about how civil and to the point everyone was. A nice throwback to how I remember the internet used to be, though I'm probably looking at that with rose tinted goggles too.
Cheers!
Believe it or not, Valve do actually make games too, and these games do contain lootboxes. From the article:
...attorney general's office called out Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 specifically
They have been burnt for this in some other countries in the past and so they have developed alternatives which are location specific. Not sure if New York would've been too specific a place for this to be enabled or if they just didn't care enough here.
Valve do have a history of popularising shading monetisation techniques e.g. battle passes. They are better than a lot of the competition, but far from being the saint that a lot of gamers believe them to be.
In NL and BE opening crates /cases is disabled, because of a lawsuit.
The fun part is that in NL if you are 18+ you are allowed to gamble, online or offline. So I contacted steam a couple years back asking why I could gamle my lifesavings away, but why I am not allowed to spend 2 bucks on a key to open a crate for a virtual item.
What do you mean by this, especially 'companies making those games rather than a distributor?' If I understand correctly, this insinuates valve is not creating games that do this?
In that case I'd have to disagree. They were the 'originator' of modern loot box design and subsequently pushed them in all their multiplayer games - Team Fortress, Counter Strike and Dota that i know of for sure.
In fact the whole Team Fortress lootbox economy was crazy, with the unboxed hats selling for sometimes thousands of dollars and thus providing very gamble-like incentives. Not to speak of the actual real-life gambling websites that sprang up all around counter strike knifes and skins. Hell, for years Team Fortress received no updates at all besides new loot crates and hats to extract more money.
While I agree with your assessment on fining anyone targeting lootboxes at vulnerable people, I would hold that valve is a fine target to start with for that.
Tf2 hat's where expensive even back in the day yeah, the fun part is that the economy in that game was studied due to it being a near perfect economy or something.
But back in the day you couldn't really sell your items for money. You would need to trust somebody to swap it for cash and trust that they actually paid you. Which is a lot more different than it currently it where you can just sell it on the market or to marketplace.tf or other sites like that.
It got way worse once CSGO became a thing due to the game being vastly more populair.
Imo it wouldn't be a bad thing to bad lootboxes all together, but I do wonder where it stops. Because trading card game boosters while part of the game (you require them for sealed formats) are very similar to lootboxes. Banning those would destroy people playing trading card games. Or at least there is a lot less incentive, especially for Pokemon.
Yeah, well, fuck you for being a reasonable person.
Valve did make CSGO and other games in the past which did have heavy microtransactions though yes I do agree that other companies such as Epic Games are much more liable for this
steam? you mean EA, yea?
Are all loot drops gambling? Raid bosses in World of Warcraft, they have a percent chance to drop certain loot. This is what motivates people to do it over and over. It that a gambling addiction? Why is a box different than a boss?
Because the way valve does it you need the purchase a key with real money to unlock the box, to get the random drop from it. Random loot isn’t the problem, it’s paying real money for the chance to get the random loot.
The distinction is usually "can the rewards be converted to real-world currency?"
Casinos use poker chips, and they have exchange counters or machines that can directly convert those to/from real money. So that's 100% gambling.
Go to a Dave and Busters, use a claw machine, or am IRL gacha machine? You don't get money. You get an item, or tickets/points that can be exchanged for an item, but not money. Theoretically you can take that item to another market and sell it, but that's a completely separate transaction that does not involve the party you got it from, so that's not gambling. Not anymore than buying a Beanie Baby in the hopes that it's worth more in a couple years is gambling.
According to the article, it is 3rd parties that are exchanging these digital rewards from Valve with real-life currency. This is not new: there have been a handful of lawsuits over the past decade trying to go after Valve for this. Every time, Valve points out that they cannot control these 3rd party sites and that illegal gambling activity violates their terms and conditions. Valve has even offered to cooperate with governments to help them go after these 3rd party sites, but afaik that has not happened.
There have been lawsuits from Florida, Connecticut, Washington, and federal RICO cases that have all been dismissed pretty early on because what Valve is doing is legal.
You could argue whether or not they SHOULD be legal, and whether these governments should go through their (hopefully) democratic processes to pass laws to that effect, but so far the courts have ruled in favor of Valve. And I am skeptical any such law would be passed democratically, because... People like loot boxes.
Worth reemphasizing that while Valve's relatively generous trading support makes it easier to sell items, this also isn't remotely unique to Valve. For a less malicious example, look at every RPG ever, where people have 3rd party sites to buy/sell gold and items. I don't play enough RPGs to have a specific example, but I have no doubt that something similar exists for MMORPGs that include lootboxes. This also extends to other games too. For example, from my understanding, my War Thunder account is worth about $2000 if I decide to sell it, because I have so many rare items that are now only accessible via loot boxes.
The problem isn't unique to Valve. They're just one player in a very, very large market. If this is something people actually care about, we need to crack down on all of it. As it stands, even the current, very clearly illegal practices are ignored.
imagine if each time, to kill the boss, you had to pay $1.
You pay $1, watch your avatar hit the boss once, and it immediatly explodes into a shower of common, uncommon, and mayber a rare... Drat, no epics.
Better throw another $1 in.. and another $1.
$25 in, you get a rare! great, you can throw that on the AH for $20 worth of currency... so you better 'reinvest'...
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Gotta love how they just randomly threw in that long-disproved little tidbit about violent videogames making kids into psychopaths. Way to discredit your whole stance.
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