The lawsuit aims to “stop Valve from promoting gambling features in its games, disgorge all ill-gotten gains, and pay fines for violating New York\u2019s laws.”
The lawsuit aims to “stop Valve from promoting gambling features in its games, disgorge all ill-gotten gains, and pay fines for violating New York\u2019s laws.”
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.
How? I’m not a lawyer, but the law says that gambling is when you’ll get “something of value”. The law defining “something of value” includes “exchangeable for money”… But you can’t exchange loot box rewards for money.
I don’t like the lootbox scheme, but it should be coded better into the laws instead of gambling on the courts.
You can.
Steam has a market place for items that result from opening lootboxes.
Thats… the entire CS2 gun skin market.
You can sell those for actual money, that money is now in your Steam Wallet, and you can now say, buy a game with it.
I’ve done this a few times, selling off a bunch of random crap items I forgot I had, from a game I don’t play anymore.
Then go buy a $10 - $20 game with it.
Hell I think I very partially bought my Steam Deck using similarly generated funds, paid roughly for the sales tax or whatever.
Beyond that, the actual lawsuit has whole sections dedicated to showing that Valve knows people buy/sell/trade these kinds of things on third party platforms, and they have very inconsistent policing of this.
I don’t know enough about the law specifically to know if that in and of itself is some kind of actual crime, but it certainly doesn’t look good that in a fair number of instances, Valve knows real money is changing hands for these items, and chooses to do nothing.
Hell, going further with all this:
I once knew a guy on a the dev team for a game that had been approved for Steam Marketplace items.
If him and a buddy wanted to try some new game?
He’d look at the Steam Market to see what of his game’s in game items were very rare and thus highly priced.
Then, being the dev, he’d poof some of those items into existance.
Post em up for sale on the market and hey in 30 minutes, now he’s got the Steam Wallet money to buy a game.
tl:dr: you very much can exchange the lootbox results for money, even technically literally physical tangible goods.
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).