New 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.”
New 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.”
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.
This 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.