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.”
Good
I quit playing games with loot boxes. Having said that my experience and valve with loot boxes were they were cosmetic only. I may be wrong about that.
Them being cosmetics doesn’t change anything. People want cosmetics, they made a gambling system to get them, easy-as.
Cosmetic or not, they are still mechanically the same as a slot machine.
Not same lol, trust me, not even close…
Maybe not to you, but you don’t speak for all of humanity.
It’s content you unlock by gambling with real money. Doesn’t matter what the content is.
For some reason, even though I have been using Steam for a long time, I am not privy to the “lootboxes” they talk about. And my account was never parented. I feel like I would actively need to look for what they are talking about.
disgorge all ill-gotten gains
Why is this the only lawsuit where I see this phrase?
Why do other companies go away with a few million $ in fine?-> Now I want to know how much Valve has “ill-gotten” out of this thing.
I definitely prefer GoG and being able to play all my games with the internet off and don’t consider Steam as some angel. But from what I see, the very fact that so many Gaming companies are trying to destroy Valve, tells me that Valve is giving value that these others don’t want given to the customer.
So, using what laws to sue a group of companies for the malicious use of court to attempt to reduce the overall quality of product options available to the consumers?
The lootboxes are a Counterstrike thing. They’re like Labubus except with digital guns and knives.
Loot boxes have been illegal in my country for quite some years now.
For CS I can’t buy any keys and open the boxes but I can buy the weapons on the market.
On the one hand, good. Valve needs to be held responsible for this.
On the other hand, steam has the best parental controls of any platform I’ve ever seen. You can just not let your kid play those games. Parents should take responsibility for their kids. Games already have ratings and warnings and such.
On the third hand, I forsee this as being yet another means of forcing ID checks and face scanning into the platform. I don’t trust our government not to fuck this up in the worst way possible right now.
How is this valves problem? Shouldn’t the NY state government be banning shit like this? This is a policy thing
ID checks are a solution used when there are different rules for both adults and children. I don’t see how that would apply here, since the rules in NY appear to be the same in this case.
Didn’t read the story, but how are loot boxes different than trading card game booster packs? I don’t like the consumerist nature of both, but just curious.
First of all: Trading cards are also abusive as fuck. What those Magic and Pokémon people are doing is not ok.
But loot boxes can be even worse: You can built them so that they will give you not a fair chance to get an item, but some companies are doing this the more evil way. Imagine that you need some specific item to get your full set, which will give you some buff. And the company knows that you are missing only that item. And it knows that you are willing to spend money, because you have just bought a loot box. So they will manipulate your odds so that you will not get the item you want. You’ll get several other “near misses”, but they also do know how many loot boxes other players opened before giving up. That is some additional evil that printed Magic cards in Walmart can’t do to you
They aren’t. I’m sure if it went to court that lawyers would find a way to convince a jury otherwise, but we all know that’s bullshit. Booster packs are gambling.
They aren’t different. Both are a form of gambling.
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.
Gotta love how they just randomly threw in that long-disproved little tidbit about violent videogames making kids into psychopaths. Way to discredit your whole stance.
Way to discredit your whole stance.
People can be right about one thing and wrong about another at the same time. Do you have to be right about everything ever for one of your opinions to count?
You do if you’re building a lawsuit based on those opinions…
If I’m gonna be sticking them together like this, yes.
Sure, but doesn’t help when you go out of your way to say something stupid.
Nothing discredits a health lifestyle advice more than being followed by a rant about vaccinees. Same here.
Yeah, I agree the whole “video games cause violence” thing is incredibly stupid.
I don’t think having a dumb opinion about something discredits your other opinions though. They should each be taken on their own merits.
You’ll have a hard time convincing someone to change their mind if you just write them off because one of their opinions is dumb.
I didn’t write them off, just said they wanted to reinforce their position with something dumb, which has the opposite effect.
This is not a quote of something they said some other time about other topic, this was on the and breath.
To be clear, fuck loot boxes, hope they are banned. That’s why it’s bad to shot yourself in the foot appearing either uninformed or actively lying.
Sorry, I meant you as in people in general, not you specifically.
The downvotes, the shameful, wrong downvotes.
Guess everyone who did so is wrong about everything.
God I love downvoting people who complain about downvotes. I don’t even know why. It’s just incredibly funny to me for some reason.
It’s the same thing as stabbing a guy who says “what are you gonna do, stab me?”
Yeah. That is really fucking funny. You right.
I love blocking people who are gleeful about being shitty. I know exactly why.
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…
Man what’s with the whole world suing Valve? Can’t we go after ANY other big tech company?
To be frank, lootboxes are gambling, and Steam is a functional monopoly.
(Note that being a functional monopoly and being an exploitative monopoly are not the same thing, though it does get complicated when you consider all the laws of all the countries in the world)
I think this particular lawsuit is legitimate and should proceed.
But!
The other part of that is that Valve is basically the only major player in the gaming space that isn’t currently completely imploding or massively downsizing or dissapointing investors or having to get bought out by foreign royal families.
So, they all really hate that Valve can ‘do nothing’, and continue to win.
Valve doesn’t have a board of investors… they’re a private company, that’s their secret sauce… and… all the other publically traded gaming companies?
You got a whole bunch of people who sit on multiple boards, of multiple different companies in the space, at the same time, and/or just cycle through actually working for one of them in an executive position and bounce around from one company to another, every roughly half decade.
They either know each other or literally are the same people, and functionally constitute a big club, that Valve isn’t part of.
So, those people can work together, literally conspire, to pull various levers in various game industry lobby groups, and talk to other people to convince them they should really go after their shared, common competitor.
Corporate tactics.
Losses from legal outcomes are literally a cost of doing business: These people factor that in to the moves they make.
They do not ‘play fair’. If they did, they wouldn’t be on these boards.
Ironically… you can describe and model this kind of behavior, tactics and strategy… with game theory.
They are a natural monopoly. They didn’t use anti-competitive tactics to get to where they are. They simply had no competition for a very long time and now that they do, the competition fucking sucks and does not even try to be a better service, instead they all pull anti-competitive BS.
Lootboxes are pretty fucking awful tho, and this is one lawsuit they definitely deserve since they are the ones that pretty much invented and popularized the idea in the West (technically a Chinese/Japanese only game that never left the Asian market did lootboxes first).
So in what law or lawsuit is a lootbox specifically counted as a form of gambling?
The randomly selected virtual items have no in-game functionality
No? The hat I opened cannot be used?please would anyone think of Gabe‘s yachts?
What about EA?
Literal whataboutism
Unpopular opinion but valve is way worse than EA when it comes to gambling.
Not only did they invent the concept of loot boxes but they also allow real money trading of the randomly dropped items which fosters an entire underground of secondary gambling markets that are literal digital casinos.
Markets that currently sponsor the majority of esports teams.
Maplestory invented them with the Gatchapon.
Setting precedent is important.
Well, this precedent is going to end up helping all the pro-rootkit companies a lot.
Here’s hoping GoG still stays on its own tracks.
And when they end up doing EA and others, they will get no more than a few million in fine.
Although, I am now interested in knowing the extend of these “ill-gotten gains” Valve has…
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!
In a subsequent press release the attorney general’s office called out Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 specifically.
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:
…attorney general’s office called out Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 specifically
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.
