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.”
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.
Worth reemphasizing that while Valve’s relatively generous trading support makes it easier to sell items, this also isn’t remotely unique to Valve. For a less malicious example, look at every RPG ever, where people have 3rd party sites to buy/sell gold and items. I don’t play enough RPGs to have a specific example, but I have no doubt that something similar exists for MMORPGs that include lootboxes. This also extends to other games too. For example, from my understanding, my War Thunder account is worth about $2000 if I decide to sell it, because I have so many rare items that are now only accessible via loot boxes.
The problem isn’t unique to Valve. They’re just one player in a very, very large market. If this is something people actually care about, we need to crack down on all of it. As it stands, even the current, very clearly illegal practices are ignored.