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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.
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.
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.
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.
Finally a lawsuit against valve I can support.
The lawsuit also claims that CS2 and other FPSs are causing kids to become violent
Finally a lawsuit against valve I can support 99% of.
Good
country finally starts cracking down on gambling
oh no wait nevermind they just want to sue a videogame company
They're not wrong, it is gambling.
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.
Cosmetic or not, they are still mechanically the same as a slot machine.
Them being cosmetics doesn't change anything. People want cosmetics, they made a gambling system to get them, easy-as.
They are only cosmetic, but absolutely still gambling. That said, the design and use of the market and operations did mean it was far easier to avoid and far cheaper. For example, you could get basically a full loadout of skins, without ever opening a lootbox, for far less. Doesn't change the fact that the lootboxes in CS (and everything else) need to be regulated though.
A good few years ago now, I watched as my two cousins, Steam voucher in hand (and he didn't even have a gaming PC btw), faffed about with one of those sites promoted by shady Youtubers.
Codes went in. Buttons were pressed. Glances were exchanged.
"Now what?" asked the younger one who's Steam voucher it was.
"Oh nothing," said the older one. "You lost."
I think it was only teenage emoism that stopped him bursting into tears right there.
He's an accountant now, so I assume he learned an important lesson about gambling that day.
He's an accountant now, so I assume he learned an important lesson about gambling that day.
Or it fully broke his spirit.....
Finally someone standing upto Valve for the right reasons.
please would anyone think of Gabe‘s yachts?
They should sue Epic Games because Fortnite greatly popularized loot boxes and Microtransactions. Also other games which are the real culprit such as Overwatch, League of Legends, and more. Though granted Valve did make CSGO which was one of the first big games to popularize buying and selling video game skins. But of course lots of other games do it much worse like Gatcha games and mobile games.
Can start with the OG loot boxes of Magic the Gathering amd Pokemon? So much gambling & its targeted at children.
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.
KELSHI LITERALLY HAS SUPER BOWL ADS. WHAT DO YOU MEAN GOOD SIR.
People never cease to amaze me.
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.
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.
In this thread: a complete lack of moral clarity as gamers simp for one of the most profitable companies in the industry. Valve was a pioneer of loot boxes. When they got in trouble for CS:GO skin gambling, they did the minimum to make it look like they didn't allow it and allowed it to make an easy comeback. They sit back and make 30% off the sale of every game on the platform. People should be saying that Valve is very bad and Epic is even worse. Instead gamers feel this strange need to pick sides with a giant company that controls almost all PC gaming. No, we can easily say they're all bad.
Interesting how this just happens after Valve wins against the Rothschilds in court, despite the lootboxes being available for the past 10 or so years in Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2.
If this stops loot boxes in general I'm all for it... can we also ban the sale of suprise toys also then because its the same thing as this...
Fuck we can go maximum carnage and stop the sale of card packs like pokemon and mtg and everything else as those are loot crates also
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).