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!
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.
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 directly plays the role of the Yakuza exchange parlor 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.
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.
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