Agent_KaryoNew York sues Valve for 'letting children and adults illegally gamble' with loot boxes
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.”
dukemirageplease would anyone think of Gabe‘s yachts?
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.
MagnificentSteinerWay 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.
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.
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.
CileTheSaneAlso 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.
Really weird how you’re leaping to the defence of this person who thinks I was the one being downvoted. Aren’t you here in support of ignoring everything said by anyone who says something dumb? The person above said something dumb, so you should be chucking the rest of what they say out, too.
Of course, I didn’t really expect consistency from someone like that.
The downvotes are because this is an attack and steam and their rapid fan boys will do the needful to defend their favorite billionaire.
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.
Criticising the attack = BAD VIBES! DOWNVOTE!
And that’s not exactly what you’re doing in response to someone criticising the attack on Valve?
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
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.
Sorry, I meant you as in people in general, not you specifically.
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.
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.
Slyke
carrylexWell, 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…
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, well, fuck you for being a reasonable person.
Is anyone else wondering if this is going to turn into another attempt to try to force face scans and id uploads?
Ideally the rule would be to just flat out not allow loot boxes, but I can’t help for feel the government is going to try to use this opportunity to justify age verification requirements instead.
HumaniusThis similar thing happened in Belgium and the Netherlands about a decade ago.
While the court case was ongoing, the real world effect was that games with certain lootbox features could not be released on the Dutch 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
scl.org/12540-loot-boxes-are-not-gambling-under-d…
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.
JustEnoughDucksI 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 that came out after just ignores the law. CS2 still had lootboxes, genshin impact, rocket league, apex legends, league, etc…
With digital drivers licenses starting to roll out now, it doesn’t have to require a scan anymore.
𝕲𝖑𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍🔻𝕯𝖃 (he/him)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 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.
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.
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.
luciole (they/them)Man what’s with the whole world suing Valve? Can’t we go after ANY other big tech company?
sp3ctr4lTo be frank, lootboxes are gambling, and Steam is a functional monopoly.
(Note that bring 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… and… all the other publically traded gaming companies?
You got a whole bunch of people who sit on multiple boards, at the same time.
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 and talk to other people to convince them they should really go after their shared, common competitor.
Corporate tactics.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 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).
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, for 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 highlt 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.
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.
They aren’t different. Both are a form of gambling. Same with blind boxes.