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.”
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.”
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.Edit: I see I had a proper logical short circuit in my original statement.
I only considered loot boxes as mechanics required for game changing advantages, gear, and loot. Not things like cosmetics.
Last time I played CS it didn’t even have cosmetics, I only played DOTA as a Warcraft 3 mod, and I thought TF2 was limited to hats and sidegrades that could be unblocked through playing and achievements still.
Furthermore, I didn’t stop to consider that people would actually gamble their money away on in game cosmetic items.
That’s on me, not taking the time to consider things properly in the early morning hours.
I’d like to thank the people who pointed out my error, and I’m pleasantly surprised about how civil and to the point everyone was. A nice throwback to how I remember the internet used to be, though I’m probably looking at that with rose tinted goggles too.
Cheers!
I mean, these games are all made by Valve.
Believe it or not, Valve do actually make games too, and these games do contain lootboxes. From the article:
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.
In NL and BE opening crates /cases is disabled, because of a lawsuit.
The fun part is that in NL if you are 18+ you are allowed to gamble, online or offline. So I contacted steam a couple years back asking why I could gamle my lifesavings away, but why I am not allowed to spend 2 bucks on a key to open a crate for a virtual item.
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.
Tf2 hat’s where expensive even back in the day yeah, the fun part is that the economy in that game was studied due to it being a near perfect economy or something.
But back in the day you couldn’t really sell your items for money. You would need to trust somebody to swap it for cash and trust that they actually paid you. Which is a lot more different than it currently it where you can just sell it on the market or to marketplace.tf or other sites like that.
It got way worse once CSGO became a thing due to the game being vastly more populair.
Imo it wouldn’t be a bad thing to bad lootboxes all together, but I do wonder where it stops. Because trading card game boosters while part of the game (you require them for sealed formats) are very similar to lootboxes. Banning those would destroy people playing trading card games. Or at least there is a lot less incentive, especially for Pokemon.