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.”
Are all loot drops gambling? Raid bosses in World of Warcraft, they have a percent chance to drop certain loot. This is what motivates people to do it over and over. It that a gambling addiction? Why is a box different than a boss?
imagine if each time, to kill the boss, you had to pay $1.
You pay $1, watch your avatar hit the boss once, and it immediatly explodes into a shower of common, uncommon, and mayber a rare… Drat, no epics.
Better throw another $1 in… and another $1.
$25 in, you get a rare! great, you can throw that on the AH for $20 worth of currency… so you better ‘reinvest’…
It’s not just the random chance; it’s the fact you need to pay every time you pull the handle like a slot machine.
Because the way valve does it you need the purchase a key with real money to unlock the box, to get the random drop from it. Random loot isn’t the problem, it’s paying real money for the chance to get the random loot.
The distinction is usually “can the rewards be converted to real-world currency?”
Casinos use poker chips, and they have exchange counters or machines that can directly convert those to/from real money. So that’s 100% gambling.
Go to a Dave and Busters, use a claw machine, or am IRL gacha machine? You don’t get money. You get an item, or tickets/points that can be exchanged for an item, but not money. Theoretically you can take that item to another market and sell it, but that’s a completely separate transaction that does not involve the party you got it from, so that’s not gambling. Not anymore than buying a Beanie Baby in the hopes that it’s worth more in a couple years is gambling.
According to the article, it is 3rd parties that are exchanging these digital rewards from Valve with real-life currency. This is not new: there have been a handful of lawsuits over the past decade trying to go after Valve for this. Every time, Valve points out that they cannot control these 3rd party sites and that illegal gambling activity violates their terms and conditions. Valve has even offered to cooperate with governments to help them go after these 3rd party sites, but afaik that has not happened.
There have been lawsuits from Florida, Connecticut, Washington, and federal RICO cases that have all been dismissed pretty early on because what Valve is doing is legal.
You could argue whether or not they SHOULD be legal, and whether these governments should go through their (hopefully) democratic processes to pass laws to that effect, but so far the courts have ruled in favor of Valve. And I am skeptical any such law would be passed democratically, because… People like loot boxes.