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’s laws."
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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
My hatred for valve? Where the fuck does that come from? I couldn’t care less about them.
Their billionaire owner on the other hand, can go on the burn pile with the rest of them. How he made the billions doesn’t matter. I don’t make exceptions when it comes to eat the rich.
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!
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.
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
To be frank, lootboxes are gambling, and Steam is a functional monopoly.
(Note that being a functional monopoly and being an exploitative monopoly are not the same thing, though it does get complicated when you consider all the laws of all the countries in the world)
I think this particular lawsuit is legitimate and should proceed.
But!
The other part of that is that Valve is basically the only major player in the gaming space that isn’t currently completely imploding or massively downsizing or dissapointing investors or having to get bought out by foreign royal families.
So, they all really hate that Valve can ‘do nothing’, and continue to win.
Valve doesn’t have a board of investors… they’re a private company, that’s their secret sauce… and… all the other publically traded gaming companies?
You got a whole bunch of people who sit on multiple boards, of multiple different companies in the space, at the same time, and/or just cycle through actually working for one of them in an executive position and bounce around from one company to another, every roughly half decade.
They either know each other or literally are the same people, and functionally constitute a big club, that Valve isn’t part of.
So, those people can work together, literally conspire, to pull various levers in various game industry lobby groups, and talk to other people to convince them they should really go after their shared, common competitor.
Corporate tactics.
Losses from legal outcomes are literally a cost of doing business: These people factor that in to the moves they make.
They do not ‘play fair’. If they did, they wouldn’t be on these boards.
Ironically… you can describe and model this kind of behavior, tactics and strategy… with game theory.
I think this particular lawsuit is legitimate and should proceed.
How? I’m not a lawyer, but the law says that gambling is when you’ll get “something of value”. The law defining “something of value” includes “exchangeable for money”… But you can’t exchange loot box rewards for money.
I don’t like the lootbox scheme, but it should be coded better into the laws instead of gambling on the courts.
But you can’t exchange loot box rewards for money.
You can.
Steam has a market place for items that result from opening lootboxes.
Thats… the entire CS2 gun skin market.
You can sell those for actual money, that money is now in your Steam Wallet, and you can now say, buy a game with it.
I’ve done this a few times, selling off a bunch of random crap items I forgot I had, from a game I don’t play anymore.
Then go buy a $10 - $20 game with it.
Hell I think I very partially bought my Steam Deck using similarly generated funds, paid roughly for the sales tax or whatever.
Beyond that, the actual lawsuit has whole sections dedicated to showing that Valve knows people buy/sell/trade these kinds of things on third party platforms, and they have very inconsistent policing of this.
I don’t know enough about the law specifically to know if that in and of itself is some kind of actual crime, but it certainly doesn’t look good that in a fair number of instances, Valve knows real money is changing hands for these items, and chooses to do nothing.
Hell, going further with all this:
I once knew a guy on a the dev team for a game that had been approved for Steam Marketplace items.
If him and a buddy wanted to try some new game?
He’d look at the Steam Market to see what of his game’s in game items were very rare and thus highly priced.
Then, being the dev, he’d poof some of those items into existance.
Post em up for sale on the market and hey in 30 minutes, now he’s got the Steam Wallet money to buy a game.
tl:dr: you very much can exchange the lootbox results for money, even technically literally physical tangible goods.
They are a natural monopoly. They didn’t use anti-competitive tactics to get to where they are. They simply had no competition for a very long time and now that they do, the competition fucking sucks and does not even try to be a better service, instead they all pull anti-competitive BS.
Lootboxes are pretty fucking awful tho, and this is one lawsuit they definitely deserve since they are the ones that pretty much invented and popularized the idea in the West (technically a Chinese/Japanese only game that never left the Asian market did lootboxes first).
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.
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.
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.
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.
ID checks are a solution used when there are different rules for both adults and children. I don’t see how that would apply here, since the rules in NY appear to be the same in this case.
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.
Didn’t read the story, but how are loot boxes different than trading card game booster packs? I don’t like the consumerist nature of both, but just curious.
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
They aren’t. I’m sure if it went to court that lawyers would find a way to convince a jury otherwise, but we all know that’s bullshit. Booster packs are gambling.
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.
In gw2, I’m assuming you mean that you can’t gain black lion keys?
But you can buy gems?
I like how if you can pay money and get something useful, it’s shitty for the company to do and pay2win.
But if you can pay money and it only be skins, it’s shitty for the company and purely for addiction.
But then if they can have value, now it’s really gambling and trading?
Yet we can pay money to play games which get us nothing and that’s fine.
The legal system still can’t figure out digital goods, it seems. Not a criticism, just an observation. If it were easy, it would be solved and everyone would be happy.
Maybe we should just listen to gamers. If it feels shitty, it is, and if it doesn’t feel shitty, it isn’t. But then also, we know that people in the throes of addiction don’t always know they are.
But also, why do we even ban gambling? To protect people from that which is an obvious abuse and manipulation of their senses to seal their money? Fair trade being allowed.
So then why does the definition of gambling have anything to do with randomization? Would it be better or worse if there was no randomization? To me, that seems irrelevant.
Ugh I’m getting too deep in this and society is starting to unravel. I’m starting to think about stuff like different geographic social contracts for how to medically research and agree on scientific findings, and how those do or don’t eventually define law. Like your country may accept certain expectations of law structure and how close it’s defined to the findings of whatever medical conventions you have, such as how addiction is formed and the level of social contract in result or even awareness of said findings. And also that much of games in general is randomized…
Hmmmmm. I wish there was a good answer for this stuff.
In gw2, I’m assuming you mean that you can’t gain black lion keys?
But you can buy gems?
You can gain them from map completion but you can’t buy them using gems. Gems can be bought for IRL money though and used for anything that isn’t randomized.
But also, why do we even ban gambling? To protect people from that which is an obvious abuse and manipulation of their senses to seal their money? Fair trade being allowed.
As I said, in my country it’s not illegal or banned. I have gambled on local gambling websites before. It requires a business to have a gambling license here, which isn’t something game companies seem to want. (I guess this would also set a precedent for other countries to tackle this sort of gambling.)
So then why does the definition of gambling have anything to do with randomization? Would it be better or worse if there was no randomization? To me, that seems irrelevant.
You can’t gamble if there is only a single outcome.
Hmmmmm. I wish there was a good answer for this stuff.
Maybe ban any sort of IRL money purchases of anything that has randomization and borders on gambling. I guess if it gets banned in the EU and US the rest will probably follow.
It would also have to have some sort of repeatability. If you only get one lootbox per account, even if it’s random, I wouldn’t consider it gambling.
It brings me back to valve adding skins in. They probably wanted it to be random so people wouldn’t just buy a handful of great looking skins but not the more normal ones. Honestly, if lootboxes were free and timegated and you only got one per day… Then the skin makers wouldn’t get any money. Unless Valve hired them, which they probably don’t want to do. But then also the game benefits from having high quality skins and they should just hire them… but then fans can’t really get involved in skinmaking.
So give free crates at a slow rate, but sell cheaper keys with count and rate limits. But kids shouldn’t be gambling.
Soo… The free crates are random, the paid keys are more expensive and let you manually select from a set like in gw2 mount select license.
That way, you can tie royalties to the set but give more to the skin that’s chosen. And, since the money isn’t spent on randomization, it isn’t shitty gambling.
Eh? Yeah? What do you think about that? See any flaws?
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.
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?
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.
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.
I quit playing games with loot boxes. Having said that my experience and valve with loot boxes were they were cosmetic only. I may be wrong about that.
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.
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
No Let’s Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates.
(Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources.
If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
deleted by creator
What about EA?
Setting precedent is important.
Well, this precedent is going to end up helping all the pro-rootkit companies a lot.
Here’s hoping GoG still stays on its own tracks.
And when they end up doing EA and others, they will get no more than a few million in fine.
Although, I am now interested in knowing the extend of these “ill-gotten gains” Valve has…
Literal whataboutism
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.
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.
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?
The downvotes, the shameful, wrong downvotes.
Guess everyone who did so is wrong about everything.
The downvotes are because this is an attack and steam and their rapid fan boys will do the needful to defend their favorite billionaire.
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
My hatred for valve? Where the fuck does that come from? I couldn’t care less about them.
Their billionaire owner on the other hand, can go on the burn pile with the rest of them. How he made the billions doesn’t matter. I don’t make exceptions when it comes to eat the rich.
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.
And that’s not exactly what you’re doing in response to someone criticising the attack on Valve?
No, there are defences of Valve that are perfectly reasonable.
God I love downvoting people who complain about downvotes. I don’t even know why. It’s just incredibly funny to me for some reason.
I love blocking people who are gleeful about being shitty. I know exactly why.
You could have just chosen to not say dumb shit if you didn’t want people to downvote you. But here we are.
Dumb shit like not checking the usernames so you’d know the post in question was not mine? Hmm.
Also that comment was 100% reasonable. Nobody has come up with a sensible criticism of it.
See, no one has to check the username. The dumb shit was inside the post all along.
It’s the same thing as stabbing a guy who says “what are you gonna do, stab me?”
Yeah. That is really fucking funny. You right.
edit: I responded to the wrong person, my bad
If I’m gonna be sticking them together like this, yes.
By your own rules, you’ve invalidated your existence.
Nah
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.
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.
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.
I meant you as in people in general, not you specifically.
You do if you’re building a lawsuit based on those opinions…
deleted by creator
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
https://www.scl.org/12540-loot-boxes-are-not-gambling-under-dutch-law/
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.
deleted by creator
Man what’s with the whole world suing Valve? Can’t we go after ANY other big tech company?
To be frank, lootboxes are gambling, and Steam is a functional monopoly.
(Note that being a functional monopoly and being an exploitative monopoly are not the same thing, though it does get complicated when you consider all the laws of all the countries in the world)
I think this particular lawsuit is legitimate and should proceed.
But!
The other part of that is that Valve is basically the only major player in the gaming space that isn’t currently completely imploding or massively downsizing or dissapointing investors or having to get bought out by foreign royal families.
So, they all really hate that Valve can ‘do nothing’, and continue to win.
Valve doesn’t have a board of investors… they’re a private company, that’s their secret sauce… and… all the other publically traded gaming companies?
You got a whole bunch of people who sit on multiple boards, of multiple different companies in the space, at the same time, and/or just cycle through actually working for one of them in an executive position and bounce around from one company to another, every roughly half decade.
They either know each other or literally are the same people, and functionally constitute a big club, that Valve isn’t part of.
So, those people can work together, literally conspire, to pull various levers in various game industry lobby groups, and talk to other people to convince them they should really go after their shared, common competitor.
Corporate tactics.
Losses from legal outcomes are literally a cost of doing business: These people factor that in to the moves they make.
They do not ‘play fair’. If they did, they wouldn’t be on these boards.
Ironically… you can describe and model this kind of behavior, tactics and strategy… with game theory.
How? I’m not a lawyer, but the law says that gambling is when you’ll get “something of value”. The law defining “something of value” includes “exchangeable for money”… But you can’t exchange loot box rewards for money.
I don’t like the lootbox scheme, but it should be coded better into the laws instead of gambling on the courts.
You can.
Steam has a market place for items that result from opening lootboxes.
Thats… the entire CS2 gun skin market.
You can sell those for actual money, that money is now in your Steam Wallet, and you can now say, buy a game with it.
I’ve done this a few times, selling off a bunch of random crap items I forgot I had, from a game I don’t play anymore.
Then go buy a $10 - $20 game with it.
Hell I think I very partially bought my Steam Deck using similarly generated funds, paid roughly for the sales tax or whatever.
Beyond that, the actual lawsuit has whole sections dedicated to showing that Valve knows people buy/sell/trade these kinds of things on third party platforms, and they have very inconsistent policing of this.
I don’t know enough about the law specifically to know if that in and of itself is some kind of actual crime, but it certainly doesn’t look good that in a fair number of instances, Valve knows real money is changing hands for these items, and chooses to do nothing.
Hell, going further with all this:
I once knew a guy on a the dev team for a game that had been approved for Steam Marketplace items.
If him and a buddy wanted to try some new game?
He’d look at the Steam Market to see what of his game’s in game items were very rare and thus highly priced.
Then, being the dev, he’d poof some of those items into existance.
Post em up for sale on the market and hey in 30 minutes, now he’s got the Steam Wallet money to buy a game.
tl:dr: you very much can exchange the lootbox results for money, even technically literally physical tangible goods.
They are a natural monopoly. They didn’t use anti-competitive tactics to get to where they are. They simply had no competition for a very long time and now that they do, the competition fucking sucks and does not even try to be a better service, instead they all pull anti-competitive BS.
Lootboxes are pretty fucking awful tho, and this is one lawsuit they definitely deserve since they are the ones that pretty much invented and popularized the idea in the West (technically a Chinese/Japanese only game that never left the Asian market did lootboxes first).
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!
Yeah, well, fuck you for being a reasonable person.
I mean, these games are all made by Valve.
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.
Believe it or not, Valve do actually make games too, and these games do contain lootboxes. From the article:
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.
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.
How is this valves problem? Shouldn’t the NY state government be banning shit like this? This is a policy thing
Well they are suing Valve, so obviously the NY Attorney General’s opinion is that it is already banned according existing policy.
ID checks are a solution used when there are different rules for both adults and children. I don’t see how that would apply here, since the rules in NY appear to be the same in this case.
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.
Didn’t read the story, but how are loot boxes different than trading card game booster packs? I don’t like the consumerist nature of both, but just curious.
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.
They aren’t different. Both are a form of gambling. Same with blind boxes.
They aren’t. I’m sure if it went to court that lawyers would find a way to convince a jury otherwise, but we all know that’s bullshit. Booster packs are gambling.
Loot boxes have been illegal in my country for quite some years now.
For CS I can’t buy any keys and open the boxes but I can buy the weapons on the market.
Can you sell, or only buy?
Because trading is still a form of gambling.
Also, curious what country you’re from.
I can sell and buy. I’m from a country in the EU.
And yeah, I can still “play the markets”. And I can also trade with those shady gambling services.
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.
Probably for the better? Not sure though.
In gw2, I’m assuming you mean that you can’t gain black lion keys?
But you can buy gems?
I like how if you can pay money and get something useful, it’s shitty for the company to do and pay2win.
But if you can pay money and it only be skins, it’s shitty for the company and purely for addiction.
But then if they can have value, now it’s really gambling and trading?
Yet we can pay money to play games which get us nothing and that’s fine.
The legal system still can’t figure out digital goods, it seems. Not a criticism, just an observation. If it were easy, it would be solved and everyone would be happy.
Maybe we should just listen to gamers. If it feels shitty, it is, and if it doesn’t feel shitty, it isn’t. But then also, we know that people in the throes of addiction don’t always know they are.
But also, why do we even ban gambling? To protect people from that which is an obvious abuse and manipulation of their senses to seal their money? Fair trade being allowed.
So then why does the definition of gambling have anything to do with randomization? Would it be better or worse if there was no randomization? To me, that seems irrelevant.
Ugh I’m getting too deep in this and society is starting to unravel. I’m starting to think about stuff like different geographic social contracts for how to medically research and agree on scientific findings, and how those do or don’t eventually define law. Like your country may accept certain expectations of law structure and how close it’s defined to the findings of whatever medical conventions you have, such as how addiction is formed and the level of social contract in result or even awareness of said findings. And also that much of games in general is randomized…
Hmmmmm. I wish there was a good answer for this stuff.
You can gain them from map completion but you can’t buy them using gems. Gems can be bought for IRL money though and used for anything that isn’t randomized.
As I said, in my country it’s not illegal or banned. I have gambled on local gambling websites before. It requires a business to have a gambling license here, which isn’t something game companies seem to want. (I guess this would also set a precedent for other countries to tackle this sort of gambling.)
You can’t gamble if there is only a single outcome.
Maybe ban any sort of IRL money purchases of anything that has randomization and borders on gambling. I guess if it gets banned in the EU and US the rest will probably follow.
It would also have to have some sort of repeatability. If you only get one lootbox per account, even if it’s random, I wouldn’t consider it gambling.
It brings me back to valve adding skins in. They probably wanted it to be random so people wouldn’t just buy a handful of great looking skins but not the more normal ones. Honestly, if lootboxes were free and timegated and you only got one per day… Then the skin makers wouldn’t get any money. Unless Valve hired them, which they probably don’t want to do. But then also the game benefits from having high quality skins and they should just hire them… but then fans can’t really get involved in skinmaking.
So give free crates at a slow rate, but sell cheaper keys with count and rate limits. But kids shouldn’t be gambling.
Soo… The free crates are random, the paid keys are more expensive and let you manually select from a set like in gw2 mount select license.
That way, you can tie royalties to the set but give more to the skin that’s chosen. And, since the money isn’t spent on randomization, it isn’t shitty gambling.
Eh? Yeah? What do you think about that? See any flaws?
Where in the world trading is a form of gambling?
Some people buy with the intent to sell later and turn a profit, like stock trading, is what I meant.
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.
Good
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.
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.
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.
It’s not just the random chance; it’s the fact you need to pay every time you pull the handle like a slot machine.
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’…
I quit playing games with loot boxes. Having said that my experience and valve with loot boxes were they were cosmetic only. I may be wrong about that.
Them being cosmetics doesn’t change anything. People want cosmetics, they made a gambling system to get them, easy-as.
Cosmetic or not, they are still mechanically the same as a slot machine.
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.
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.
Not same lol, trust me, not even close…
Maybe not to you, but you don’t speak for all of humanity.
And you do. God damn people are stupid comparing tramadol to heroine
I never claimed to speak for all of humanity.
It may be problematic but I see it as less problematic than non-cosmetic items like Magic card packs
It’s content you unlock by gambling with real money. Doesn’t matter what the content is.
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.
So in what law or lawsuit is a lootbox specifically counted as a form of gambling?
Lotta billionaire sucking in this thread. Just because you like his platform doesn’t make GabeN a good person.
Everyone say it: There’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
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.