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.”
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.
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…