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.”
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.