I feel like this argument held a lot more weight before polymarket.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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Yup, just a nice stark reminder that gaming corporations all suck to some degree.
Corporations, really.
Like in casinos where the surprise is that you won nothing
Yeah, people love that, and gambling is addiction is real
Come on Valve. Abolish the loot box. Set an example.
But then Gabe could only afford 3 mega yachts instead of 6.
not only megayachts but the entire megayacht company.
This is one of the few times I'd agree that Valve is the bad guy. I think other companies are also wrong for this. I think they all should be part of this lawsuit and I think legislation needs to have more repercussions for loot box BS.
They are brining up the good argument that this would essentially make baseball and pokemon cards gambling and illegal as well, I'm not a lawyer but with the way the law is written and from my understanding of it valve has a very good chance of getting this dismissed or wining in court. It would suddenly make many other things illegal if they loose.
In its motion to dismiss, Valve continued to heavily criticize the lawsuit. “Can parents purchase packs of baseball cards for their children?” it said. “Can families go to Chuck E. Cheese to play games of chance and exchange winning tickets for prizes? Can a child reach into a cereal box and grab a surprise toy? All these actions and more could lead to chargeable crimes under NYAG’s interpretation of gambling.”
Nah. I actually thought the same at first. I literally asked when this was first announced in the news if it wasn't basically the same as Pokemon cards.
The problem is this. The company producing the Pokemon cards isn't I hope actively providing a service to trade or resell them for monetary value based on rarity. Secondary markets exist for that but a first party Pokemon company market doesn't exist for that.
This is where valve fucked up. They allow you to get a rare drop by chance, trade it for points, and use those points to buy something with real world value. It's a lot more like pachinko than it is Pokemon cards or baseball cards.
In a casino you buy chips. Those chips can then be traded back to the casino for cash. When you bet on things at the casino you bet chips with the understanding that those chips are work a real world amount of money.
That is what makes gambling illegal in a lot of places. The ability to convert the gambled assets directly into spendable currency.
Pachinko does it a little different. You pay to play and when you win you get little trinkets. The pachinko parlor doesn't let you trade them for cash or anything else. But you can go next door to a place that will buy those little trinkets for actual cash. Valve shouldn't let you trade the points for anything with a fixed actual monetary value. Which is likely what they will do going forward if this lawsuit is successful.
Steam wallet funds expressly have no monetary value in the steam user agreement, and it explicitly states in the steam user agreement it's against their tos to sell items off of their market. So they are covered. Second hand markets exist but it's without valves support or consent, they aren't breaking the law. A court can't compel valve to restrict user freedom (trading digital items) because they don't shut down websites that they have no ability to shut down.
Valve allows users to cash in on the virtual items they have won in two ways. Users can sell the items they won through Valve’s own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, where they can use the proceeds to buy other video games, video game hardware, and other virtual items. Users can also connect their Valve accounts to third-party marketplaces where the virtual items can be sold directly for cash. The OAG’s investigation found that Valve facilitates and even assists these third-party marketplaces in their operations.
All three games feature an optional mechanic where players can pay real money in exchange for “loot boxes”: a virtual item that drops a randomly-generated piece of cosmetic gear that can be used in-game. Most of these items have no mechanical impact and are there strictly for looks, such as silly hats in TF2 or neon-painted “weapon skins” in CS2.
Despite their lack of actual effect, loot boxes and item trading are both an extraordinarily lucrative market for Valve. Virtual items for these three games have been sold for staggering amounts of real money. One estimate cited by the AG’s office indicates that the market for Counter-Strike skins alone was worth over $4.3 billion as of last year.
While Valve absolutely benefits from the strangely frenetic market for virtual items in CS2, TF2, and Dota 2 — it sells these loot boxes in the first place, and hosts the secondary market for them via the in-app Steam Marketplace — the occasionally shocking prices for these items is part of a player-created economy. The lawsuit may be partially aimed in the wrong direction.
There is no evidence I have seen that Valve supports 3rd party market places, and like I said the steam user agreement explicitly forbids them. There is nothing illegal about their own market place because you are paid in steam wallet funds and steam wallet funds cannot be exchanged for real world money. This case is going to flop, valve will win this one.
Valve makes you buy a key to open the loot boxes.
Valve then allows the contents of loot boxes to be traded for platform currency.
Unfortunately that platform currency has a real monetary value because it can be traded for real monetary goods because you can use it to buy a steam deck of other valve hardware.
It is this direct chain of events that make this illegal gambling because this is not something you can do with baseball cards or Pokemon cards.
three core elements common to all gambling laws: (1) consideration, (2) chance, and (3) prize. So long as one of these three elements is not met, a loot box system is not “gambling”. The “chance” element is inevitably met in any form of loot boxes, but the “consideration” element can arguably be avoided by making loot boxes acquirable only by exchanging virtual currency that itself arguably has no “value”, and the “prize” element can arguably be avoided by making the loot box drops account-locked. Where the loot box drop cannot be transferred, sold, or “cashed out”, there is arguably no “prize” no matter how rare the drop is or how useful it is for in-game purposes.[1]
yeah valve is pretty indefensible here..
The fact that California decided to sue Valve for Counterstrike and not sue EA for FIFA is just blatant targeted harassment. Valve's right for pointing out that any precedent set here would make Pokemon cards and Baseball cards illegal, both of which are actually advertised directly to kids.
valve has a way to transfer money in your steam wallet into something with real world value: hardware.
you can not trade pokemon cards with nintendo for game cartridges or money, that is the whole distinction, no secondary market required.
How is that different from any promotion like "find the golden ticket and earn an iphone"?
Dont the cards have value?
only on a secondary market in which those companies don't participate. it's a paper thin line which keeps trading card game booster packs from beeing gambling in a legal sense
I'm not at all experienced this stuff so sorry if this is obvious - but how is that different from hardware?
Its not like valve is reimbursing cash for the hardware after bought, theyre both just some materials (that can be sold elsewhere for cash) right?
the difference is that wotc won't give you anything for your magic cards, but you can directly sell skins on steam and actually buy something with it, which from my understanding gives the skins direct, and sometimes really high value, which might make this actual gambling, simmiliar to how you exchange your chetons in a casino.
wotc and other simmiliar companies skirt around that by not acknowledging that a second marekt exists and not participating in it.
but i am not a lawyer obviously.
I don't think that's how the law is written though. You can only get steam wallet funds for your skins, steam wallet funds explicitly have no cash value. The transaction at that point is done. A video game also has "real world value" you could just as easily say well I get steam wallet funds and than sell gifted games to other people. I don't think your argument tracks with the law or steams user agreement.
So if they did not have any hardware available it would have been fine?
Maybe Steam should change the policy that store credits cannot be used to buy hardware
thats my understanding of it and if valve loses this, they'll introduce gabe bucks to buy boxes and keys with and nothing meaningful will change.
People get addicted to drugs, alcohol, and gambling too; that doesn't make it good for them.
Children yearn for the mines-ass argument
All you need is to talk to some younger gamers to see how bad CS cases can be. My younger sibling (24 now) was surrounded by case gambling growing up and I personally know some kids highschool aged that are keeping the trend going.
Valvd does a lot of good things for gaming but this is really not one of them.
I bet they'd enjoy surprises they didn't have to pay for even more.
Finally, something I can criticise Valve for
I enjoy it when the bank send me a letter saying i may or may not have missed a payment on some loan. Fun surprise!
I sure love me a surprise loot box when someone I know thoughtfully purchases what's inside and gifts it to me.
Every degenerate gambler I know tells me that it’s fun. Every single one tells me that the reason I don’t like Vegas is because I don’t like having fun.
There’s so many flashing lights and feedback systems to slot machines now, it’s kind of believable.
Like, you put $15 into Slay the Spire, and you KNOW you’re getting nothing back. But you get a bunch of flashy effects in the playing of it.
With gambling, you throw in $15, you get the flashy effects, AND you might get $30 back. When you look at it that way, it can become more understandable how people fall for it and feel happy to.
The people telling me how fun it is don’t spend $15. They spend 4,000 in one night. They always have stories about all the money they won but they always seem to work the same job as me instead of being professional gamblers.
enjoy these nuts
It’d be nice to have all those boxes I picked up to be free.
But guys, Gaben cares. He made some features in steam launcher just for me!