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It's about targeting the ones you can legally target. I'm not going to get into it again but Valve does their lootboxes differently to almost every other big developer/publisher and that way of doing things has gotten them in trouble. Should all companies that in practice are gambling get into legal trouble? Yes. Should Valve get a pass because others get away scot-free? No. If 6 people rape someone but legally there's evidence to convict one of them you don't give that one person a free pass because the other 5 can't be convicted.
In this case there's one company, Valve, where you have some legal basis to get them in the court and there's no legal basis for other companies even though they're largely doing the same thing. You may not like it and might consider it unfair but that's just how the legal system works.
I'm trying to understand what's different. If you don't want to explain again here, that's fine but can you link me to your other comments or something.
I haven't played Dota or TF2. I don't know how the loot boxes work and I'm trying to understand.
Epic was taken to court over loot boxes several years ago. They lost. It's why Rocket League removed crates/keys.
I think they're referring to valves community market in tandem with loot boxes.
Valve drops boxes in cs2, which you pay to open. You get a weapon skin. But the difference is that I can sell that skin on the steam marketplace, and then turn around and buy Helldivers 2 with that credit.
Valve provides a pipeline for skins and ingame items to be traded for goods and services outside the game ecosystem.
I assume that makes them easier to go after in some way.
This explains quite a lot. I've only ever played a couple of games that have loot boxes (Destiny and Overwatch and like Battlefield) and you don't pay to open those.
I think I was missing that key detail which is you're paying to open the loot boxes and that's the "wager".
If the loot boxes were free to collect and open then they wouldn't have a starting value.
After that, assigning a value based on rarity for resale of the items would be on the players, not on Valve.
But now I agree that that is problematic even if I don't agree with the way the NYAG is going about trying to fix it.
I especially object to the save the children angle as none of the games are rated E or even rated for children.
Someone else in the thread brought up how kids can get around this with a gift card, but I question why they'd need a gift card to buy free games. Sounds to me like that's a case of parents not doing parenting.
Even if you used the gift card to pay to open the loot boxes, that seems like a problem with the parents too. I don't know why it's any more acceptable to sue Valve over this than it is to legislate who can buy gift cards. Like technically the parents own the gift card in the same way we don't let kids have legal ownership of anything else.
A literally solution would be preventing the purchase of gift cards by minors or preventing gift cards from being used to buy anything not rated for everyone. Or not rated for kids.
I'll put it another way, kids aren't allowed to buy x-rated content. But you absolutely can use a gift card to purchase x-rated media from x-rated sites. It's one of the things being proposed by several people in the wake of age verification stuff. So by the same logic a child could do that.
The example NYAG was providing was:
Which I think is a bit far fetched to "launder" or somehow convert a digital item to physical cash.
I mean the simpler option is likely just selling a cs2 skins for crypto or just a direct paypal payment on one of many skin gambling or exchange sites. But sure, you could scalp hardware once valve has it back in stock, especially considering pc part prices and shortages.
Well that is against the Steam TOS.
Buying a Steam Deck and reselling it, isn't.
I think that's what the NYAG was trying to get at here.
Again, far fetched.
Is Pachinko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko?wprov=sfla1
Really not a form of gambling in your mind? What makes it different? That Valve plays the role of Yakuza as well?
Oh let me clarify a bit more...
I do believe all of these digital unboxing of items, where you don't know what you're gonna get, is all gambling and should be banned, straight up.
I just think the way the NYAG is trying to attack this is completely asinine and might make them lose the case more than help it. And if what Valve is saying is true(NYAG wanting them to collect all kinds of data from everyone) then frankly I hope the NYAG loses this if that's the "solution" NYAG wants.
I think the solution should be to just ban all this crap.
Yeah, surveillance and the incoming extra goverment cut definitely aren't measures against gambling more than measures for the goverment with the excuse of regulating gambling.
The biggest difference compared to the likes of EA and Activision is that the items have real monetary value. In Activision or EA games the money spent on the lootbox is effectively wasted. You generally can't trade the content to recoup the costs and in some cases where you can those trades tend to happen for in-game currency which again, has no real monetary value. There's no monetary incentive to "gamble" because from a monetary point of view it's always a loss. The lawsuit actually makes a case that with Valve there is a monetary incentive to "gamble" because the value of the item you receive from the lootbox translates to real world money. And while the lawsuit has to take sort of a roundabout way of proving that, I think most people agree that the stuff you pull from Valve's lootboxes has real monetary value.
The second point is supporting the infrastructure to make trades happen. One of the things that separates trading cards from gambling is that the cards themselves officially have no value. You can buy a pack of MTG cards and get something really valuable but you can't sell that back to WotC (Wizards of the Coast, the makers of MTG) and actually WotC doesn't even acknowledge that you pulled something really valuable because they claim all the cards have their value based on rarity and not the card itself. But it's valuable because there's a secondary market that has nothing to do with WotC. That's not entirely true for Valve because all trades happen on Valve's infrastructure and Valve literally shows the real world value of the items. Now Valve gets to claim they don't set the price, the market does, and that's not an acknowledgement of the value, but Valve still benefits and supports that market which itself is a vessel for gambling. Worth mentioning that it's not an argument that is being made in the lawsuit (at least I didn't notice it there) so it's less relevant or even completely irrelevant from a legal perspective, at least for now.
Yeah I was missing the key detail that you need to pay to open the loot boxes which gives them a base monetary value as the starting point and does essentially equate to pay for the contents inside. That combined with them also running a market for trades and sales of the item is very synonymous with the pachinko machine setup and I do agree that this is gambling.
Thank you for taking the time to explain. I haven't played any of Valve's games that have loot boxes so I didn't understand how it was different from loot boxes in Destiny or Battlefield.