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.”
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).