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.”
country finally starts cracking down on gambling
oh no wait nevermind they just want to sue a videogame company
Finally a lawsuit against valve I can support.
In this thread: a complete lack of moral clarity as gamers simp for one of the most profitable companies in the industry. Valve was a pioneer of loot boxes. When they got in trouble for CS:GO skin gambling, they did the minimum to make it look like they didn’t allow it and allowed it to make an easy comeback. They sit back and make 30% off the sale of every game on the platform. People should be saying that Valve is very bad and Epic is even worse. Instead gamers feel this strange need to pick sides with a giant company that controls almost all PC gaming. No, we can easily say they’re all bad.
Not everyone has loyalty to Valve or any company.
Not everyone, but plenty of people in this thread do. And plenty of gamers in general excuse their bad behavior.
You’re a citizen in a village. The Nazis have come to your village and decide to destroy you. You attack the friendly village toymaker for hosting gambling nights for everybody.
Yes, it’s wrong.
No, it’s not the time.
Nuance is dead.
Village toymaker? Wow.
That’s true. I’ve gotten pushback for criticizing Valve and there is a lot to criticize.
They might be better in some way than other US tech companies, but that’s doesn’t mean much.
Good
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not same lol, trust me, not even close…
Maybe not to you, but you don’t speak for all of humanity.
It’s content you unlock by gambling with real money. Doesn’t matter what the content is.
steam? you mean EA, yea?
No. Valve. The creators/owners of the Steam platform.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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. 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.
They aren’t different. Both are a form of gambling. Same with blind boxes.
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.
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 do if you’re building a lawsuit based on those opinions…
If I’m gonna be sticking them together like this, yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 feel the government is going to try to use this opportunity to justify age verification requirements instead.
With digital drivers licenses starting to roll out now, it doesn’t have to require a scan anymore.
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…
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.
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).
please would anyone think of Gabe‘s yachts?
So in what law or lawsuit is a lootbox specifically counted as a form of gambling?
The randomly selected virtual items have no in-game functionality
No? The hat I opened cannot be used?
