Steam maker says settling the case would be easier but would set a bad precedent.

Last month, the New York Attorney General (NYAG) brought a lawsuit against Valve accusing the company of promoting “illegal gambling” through its randomized in-game loot boxes. On Wednesday, Valve issued its first public comment on the case, comparing its digital loot boxes to randomized real-world purchases like blind-bagged toys or packs of trading cards.

“Generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive,” Valve wrote. “On the physical side, popular products used in this way include baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu.”

Though that may seem like an apt comparison on the surface, Valve’s loot boxes differ from these real-world examples in large part because of Valve’s control of the Steam Marketplace, which serves as the only legitimate way to exchange or resell those items. While owners of real-world items are free to trade or sell them however they want, Valve has cracked down on many third-party sites that enable the exchange of in-game items—especially when those items are used as glorified chips for gambling games.

Lawyers told Ars last month that Valve’s control of that marketplace—and its 15 percent commission on item resale—helps establish the inherent economic value of the randomized items it sells, both to players and to Valve itself. That could be a crucial legal element in a courtroom in turning a mere “random purchase” into legally defined “gambling.”

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    11·
    7 hours ago

    Except slot machines do allow different wagers to get different monetary returns. Also, casinos are not just slot machines, but lots of other gambling games as well.

    • Tim@lemmy.snowgoons.ro
      1·
      6 hours ago

      Some slot machines do. Some slot machines have a fixed wager. Does that make them not gambling?

      And I’m not sure what the relevance of casinos having more than one type of gambling is. I’ve worked in the industry more than 30 years, and not once do I remember a regulator saying “it’s OK, as long as you only do one of these things, you don’t need a license.”

      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
        1·
        3 hours ago

        I don’t know where you got the idea that sports betting is the only betting with a wagered outcome, that’s basically all card or table games at a casino.

        My point of mentioning casinos having more than just slot machines is to say that they are first and foremost gambling establishments. Not every game in a casino actually is gambling, either; a lot of them have regular arcade games too.

        The question of whether trading cards and loot boxes are gambling from a legal perspective is down to how the laws are written, and the laws in the US currently haven’t defined them as such so far, because there is no wager on a specific outcome.

        If loot boxes allowed you to pay more in order to get more good items on a ‘win’, my guess is they’d be smacked with a gambling designation instantly.

        Or if trading cards allowed you to wager on the presence of specific cards in the pack, and win additional booster packs if correct, for instance.

        If casinos want to say some of their games have been improperly classified as gambling because those games don’t have those characteristics, they certainly can go to the gaming commission or take them to court and argue that (and depending on the game they may even be correct), but since they have to have a license anyways for all their other games that definitely are gambling, they probably won’t care to.

        And there are in fact slot machine games that aren’t gambling (e.g. CloverPit), that just simulate playing a slot machine without actually having any real monetary mechanic (apart from paying for the game), so just being a slot machine doesn’t inherently make it a gambling game.

        Not to go too philosophical, but every physical item you buy is physically unique from each other one. Even with processes like Six Sigma to minimize variations, each car, table, chair etc is physically unique, and each in ways that affect its performance. You could buy 100,000 chairs of the same kind, and figure out which one is ‘best’ based on some characteristic (e.g. max weight), but that doesn’t make “buying a chair” gambling, just because you may will get a worse or better chair each time.