Kinda lazy for New York to do this.
When there are countless gaming companies that are more cutthroat about it.
Tech company is doing an evil practice
Government wags finger and collects a 0.02% net profit fine
Spends the money on anti-homeless grenades.
I don’t care at all. When I play cs2, I get a new case and shit skin every week. I sell the case for a few euro cents and trade up the shit skins to rarer skins that I sell. I make money playing cs2.
If people are stupid enough to get caught up in gambling, it’s on them.
I deal with crack and I’m fine! It’s those damn addicts who are the problem.
It’s the same thing every time. Someone tries to stop a corporation from preying on vulnerable people and others jump to its defense because they “aren’t affected”. Have some empathy, man.
Sir, valve is letting 14 year olds develop life altering gambling addictions without any limits
Parenting? 14 year olds don’t have credit cards to my knowledge.
They do actually
Maybe not a US thing but it’s very common in the EU
I care when shitty influencers get their bag by scamming children out of money. It shouldn’t JUST be valve involved in this BS lawsuit though.
Sure but that’s not on valve.
So are they going to do the same thing against EA, ActiBlizz, Epic Games, etc etc? Or is this just “Valve has the most money and we want money and dont actually care about this issue” yet again?
There’s a fundamental difference between what Valve does and what other companies are doing. In most games the things you get from a lootbox have no monetary value. You can’t sell those things to make money. You could get around it by selling the whole account but that is pretty much universally against the TOS so companies get a free pass when that happens.
But even if it did have some monetary value as long as it’s a value set by the community and never acknowledged by the company the company gets a free pass even if they unofficially acknowledge the value (see how WOTC manipulates the secondary market of MTG cards).
And this is where Valve is different from the others. Valve acknowledge the monetary value of an item, because the trades happen on their platform and Valve takes a cut from all the trades. No other lootbox or lootbox-esque game does this.
As for why it’s a lawsuit now, I’m guessing it’s related to what was said in the article. I’m guessing previously Valve could hide behind the fact that the outcome of the trades is essentially Steam credit, which technically has no monetary value because it can’t be cashed out, at least not through Valve. But supposedly now with the Steam deck, in a roundabout way, it is possible to cash out through Valve.
Valve lootboxes have always been the closest iteration to gambling and Valve has been hiding behind technicalities for a decade to keep their gambling ecosystem going. Just because Valve does a lot of good shit doesn’t mean we should be defending their bad shit when it’s obviously bad.
This isn’t true at all. A lot of games now allow you to sell the boxes on their platform.
Give some examples.
Two that I have played off the top of my head, war thunder and Diablo 3…there is an entire gatcha industry. The amount of f2p mmos as well. EVE online has had a way to sell it’s currency for I’m thinking a decade+ now.
Diablo 3 has no real trading. You have only limited time trading of things you find while playing with other people. Maybe you meant Diablo Immortal but I don’t know enough about that to talk on that subject.
As for War Thunder and EVE. Yes, they have lootboxes and yes there’s a perceived monetary value to the boxes and things in the box, but they’re not the same as Steam because those games do the common thing (which IMO should also be banned) where you stick a premium currency between real money and the thing you want to purchase and obfuscate the actual value of things. I don’t agree with what they’re doing but they are making sure value of items is not directly translatable to real money. It’s one of the tactics companies hide behind (while also manipulating players to spend more). Steam doesn’t even do that. Steam literally puts real money value on the market. You want to buy a Factory new Marble Fade talon knife you know the starting price is exactly 732,98€.
I’m pretty sure in EVE and War Thunder you also get to open some of those lootboxes for free which is another difference from Valve games, where you literally have to pay real money to open the box. I imagine that also plays a role in how companies defend their practices, by saying it’s not gambling because you don’t have to pay to open lootboxes, you just pay to get EXTRA lootboxes to open.
And to make it clear, I’m not defending the gatcha industy. IMO that should be struck down the same way Valve’s gambling machine should be struck down.
Diablo 3 had a RMAH (real money auction house). I didn’t play the game long so it was still up when I stopped playing it. Since fuck blizzard.
WT requires you to buy keys to open the boxes, and you can sell the boxes you find on their store.
Eve has a full blown cash economy.
I honestly don’t care about any of this. I think if a fool wants to waste their money on digital skins for a game. Let them.
But I’m not a prohibition type. Blackmarkets pop up because people are shouting “think of the children”. It’s not kids buying this shit, it’s adults with jobs.
Diablo 3 had a RMAH (real money auction house). I didn’t play the game long so it was still up when I stopped playing it. Since fuck blizzard.
Which got removed roughly when the expansion launched due to there being huge backlash on this bullshit.
WT requires you to buy keys to open the boxes, and you can sell the boxes you find on their store.
For premium boxes. You still get free boxes that you can open, but fair enough. That said, being able to sell premium boxes is not the same thing as being able to sell the things you got from the premium box and it changes nothing about the rest of what I said in the previous comment.
Eve has a full blown cash economy.
Not even going to bother with this one because who know what the fuck you mean here. Don’t bother explaining, I don’t care.
I honestly don’t care about any of this. I think if a fool wants to waste their money on digital skins for a game. Let them.
So why comment in the first place? Because now I have to waste my time correcting your vague bullshit and I’m pretty pissed off about it because this is something I care about and you’re here just talking shit about things you don’t understand and don’t care to understand. Good for you for not knowing how damaging addiction can be for addicts and the people around them, next time do everyone a favor and stfu when you don’t give a shit.
It seems as if someone has been lobbying against Valve recently… Probably Epic for failing to compete.
Bingo. It’s also widely known across the industry that Valve has had these crates and keys for nearly a decade. No lawsuit.
It’s all about the Benjamins.
So they should be left alone with their online gambling business because they’ve been doing it for a long time and also there are other companies doing it too? Valve glazing is really out of control.
While I certainly agree with the “competition fails at being a competitor and sues instead”, it is also false to say that because of Valve having lootboxes for over a decade, we should let it be.
Well, if Valve loses the case and this would force EA, Epic and all other bunch of shitty companies that utilize FOMO and gambling mechanics to stop doing so - I see it as a enormous W.
You are technically correct, except no one will try to enforce it on the lobbying companies, who probably kickstarted the lawsuit in the first place.
I can’t believe that I side with a corporation but that just shows how immensely idiotic this is. We have so many straight up evil companies but they’d rather pick up on the one which is somewhat beneficial to our freedom and digital rights. Until we get a good competitor I’ll stand with steam even if though hate corporations. Lesser evil
What’s wrong with making valve stop an actually bad thing they do?
This is how we got refunds lol
So your argument is that they’re mostly alright so you’ll look the other way here?
100%
If loot boxes are illegal then send Valve a cease and desist for selling games that have loot boxes and be done with it.
Because you can do the same thing by buying the required hardware from any of those companies and selling it with the digital items on it for cash. That’s not really supposed to be allowed (plenty of companies including steam do crack down on selling accounts). But while I agree that lot boxes are gambling there really needs to be a hard line that doesn’t require the ability to convert assets to cash. Otherwise the loot box problem will persist and we will have shittier resulting services with no real added benefit.
People were selling animal crossing residents on eBay. People have been selling accounts for things like WOW and Call of Duty. I believe there was even a market for Destiny accounts at one point.
By NY’s definition of gambling, buying a pack of Pokemon cards is gambling.
Or, alternatively, sue the game developers themselves. Because I note they aren’t suing Xbox, Nintendo, or PlayStation.
the main argument seems to be not that steam has games with loot boxes in them, but that steam allows people to exchange the assets for steam wallet cash, which allows people to buy real products (games AND hardware), so it is equivalent to money. And steam is obviously enabling that system. as far as i know, xbox, nintendo and playstation don’t have that in their systems
(also, NY argues that valve knew about and did not enough to stop third-party marketplaces that work with real money, based on internal communications, which might not be the same (or just be harder to prove) for the other companies)
