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.”
PissmidgetLove 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.