Official statement from Valve.
We shared with the NYAG that these types of boxes in our games are widely used, not just in video games but in the tangible world as well, where generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive.
You’re right! We should stop that too!
Honest question I’m curious to hear peoples opinions on: Gambling is obviously dangerous, and I think we can all agree that exposing kids to it easly is bad. At the same time, for any form of virtual gambling, how do you ensure that kids can’t access it without putting a significant limit on adults’ freedoms? Like, Lemmy is very pro-privacy, but would this be a case where the (few) merits of ID based verification would be justified, or should we be just be banning all gambling outside of designated casinos, or…
Edit: Honestly, thinking it over and reading responses, my personal thoughts are to require clear disclosures on products that include gambling (physical or not), possibly put stricter regulations on how it is accessed, such as a safety warning before accessing it to add another step of friction each time, and put limitations on the mechanics of it to prevent rigging the odds in ways that are manipulative or abusive. Be curious to hear people’s opinions on this too.
In this case the NY lawmakers have already banned gambling for adults as well. I honestly think a lot of the pushback they’re likely to get from. the community has to do with the fact that they included this phrasing about child gambling at all. The games in question aren’t really made for children, and Valve didn’t really market any of their games to kids (while Pokemon cards absolutely are marketed toward children and amount to gambling, but NY’s AG doesn’t appear to go after New Yorkers who sell or buy Pokemon cards).
If their logic was: “Gambling = Illegal, and running a web shop where the proceeds of gambling can be exchanged for real world cash” is the bar to clear then it doesn’t really matter who was able to gamble, that’s just a way to avoid backlash from parents who don’t want their kids gambling but don’t understand the world their kids live in.
Or… parents can parent their goddamn children. All this deanonymize the internet shit is absolutely not about protecting children anyway and would have grave consequences.
Oh, that’s easy. Find some kids who gambled and make an example out of them on national TV. Problem solved!
Make it so that gambling leads to a higher age rating for the game, and then let parents manage that the same way they would violence or language in a game. I think (hope) this would lead to a huge drop in lootboxes, rather than changes to ratings, but either way works for me.
We need punishments for parents neglecting their kids like this, letting them gamble and play things rated above their age rating is not good parenting.
I mean, currently Counter Strike already has (had?) an ESRB M rating, as did TF2. Dota isn’t rated, but would clearly also be M, given abilites like Rupture. Do you think we just need to reduce the normalization of it?
But how many children are playing those games and buying lootboxes without their parents’ knowledge?
I am absolutely in favour of less lootboxes in games though. They are an unfortunate natural progression of microtransactions, and the fact that they make so much money means they’re unlikely to go anywhere without any systemic measures being put in place.
I don’t really partake, so I’m always hesitant to have a really firm line in the sand, but we’ve seen a ton of harm come from the constant access to gambling that we’ve got now via sports betting that we didn’t have before deregulation in the wake of Draft Kings, so I’m inclined to lean toward it only being in designated locations. The problem here is similar in that you can access it everywhere and definitely exacerbated by not even doing the bare minimum amount of countermeasures against underage gambling, because they want to pretend that it isn’t gambling.