Submitted 1 day ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6300-A6C4-519D-A3F5
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!
Valve needs to win this. Or at least stop this part:
The NYAG also proposed to gather additional information (beyond what we normally collect in the course of processing payments) about each game user on the off-chance someone in New York was anonymizing their location to appear outside of New York, such as by using a VPN. This would have involved implementing invasive technologies for every user worldwide. Similarly, the NYAG demanded that Valve collect more personal data about our users to do additional age verification—even though most payment methods used by New York Steam users already have age verification built-in. Valve knows our users care about the security of their personal information, and we believe it’s in our and their interest to only collect the information necessary to operate the business and comply with law.
Loot boxes are overall bad for users and should be regulated. But not by getting valve to collect personal information on everyone in the world.
I’m not a lawyer, and even having perused the official filing, it’s still legalese that I can’t swear I fully understand. There are two possibilities of what NY state actually wants:
And I don’t know for sure which is true. Of course it’s in Valve’s best interests to represent this to their customers as the government trying to violate your freedoms, because it gets the public on their side. Remember the Epic case against Apple, where Epic knowingly broke a contract with Apple allowing in-game purchases to cut Apple out, then they had a trailer parodying the 1984 Apple ad to garner public support with “Free Fortnite” ready to go.
These are two different things. You don’t need to let valve sell loot boxes to stop new York from implementing mass surveillance.
I’m not a big fan of Valve’s use of loot boxes. But I’m also not happy about the proposed solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users”. That doesn’t protect kids, and risks harm and increased surveillance to many other users. It also means companies in similar situations to Valve are forced to safeguard data they didn’t want to be involved with.
I don’t buy that Valve is fully at fault on the concept of targeting children. I don’t see how parents are held at gunpoint to attach credit card data to Steam accounts, or to check the “remember my info” box. Valve has also attempted to add adequate parental account controls. The main reason I oppose Valve on loot boxes is those shouldn’t be used on anyone. I’d like the NYAG to equalize pressure on sports betting sites.
I’m not a big fan of Valve’s use of loot boxes. But I’m also not happy about the proposed solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users”.
It also might not be exactly what NY is asking for, even if that’s how Valve would like to frame it. The actual ask might be to just stop profiting from gambling.
Right, as if anyone actually cares about the children ™️
The TF2 loot crates were the worst, but you could get around them for crafting except for visuals. What’s crazy to me is that people are getting mad over visuals in loot boxes and that the gambling is largely over that. I don’t think you can put all the shit leading up to that to one company, yet bureaucrats persistently try to do it to avoid acknowledging their own dismal efforts to get their feet wet in implementing some basic legislation on the matter.
Before it used to be Asian MMOs that basically targeted people with addictive personalities with paid for RNG boosts that gave actual in-game advantages (and they will still exist, because they are not loot boxes, just dice rolls), now people are getting this invested over skins and 3D models. We need to address the core of the problem, because the same people falling for this bullshit are also the ones who fall for populist reactionary political bullshit pushing scammers onto our governments. Education and our social nets are clearly failing, and going after one of the better companies that’s guilty of this is not going to do anything when the problem is literally coming from the highest tiers of government as they rush to get their friends and family invested in predatory ventures. It’s sort of like living in Nazi Germany and thinking the most important thing to complain about is whether businesses forced to be sold are really getting their money’s worth instead of being forced to sell to whomever can buy them up the soonest.
The solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users” is the law. Gambling laws require that the company providing a gambling service verify the age of the user to prevent underage gambling. If Valve is providing a gambling service then by law they should have age verification. So far, legally, what Valve has been doing is not gambling and part of this lawsuit is proving that what Valve is doing is gambling, and if it is gambling then Valve is doing an inadequate job at verifying the ages of the users and thus is breaking the law.
I’d like the NYAG to equalize pressure on sports betting sites.
As far as I know online sports betting sites are already required to verify the age and identity of the user. Outside of changing the laws I don’t see what pressure you’re expecting.
Yeah I’m getting pretty tired of the “everyone must pay the price to protect kids”
Why are kids able to access adult sites without ID? Everyone must prove they’re an adult online to read books with adult themes. Why are kids able to use installed applications that could have some forbidden social features? Everyone must prove their age to their operating system to use an electronic device. Why are kids able to access alcohol at their homes? Adults should have to keep their legally purchased alcohol at government approved holding facilities, where they may take a drink after proving their age. Why are kids allowed to stay out after curfew? Everyone must wear a shirt with their name, address, and birthdate printed after 11pm on week nights.
This is a new trend in law and we need to stop getting tricked into allowing it. It is the parent’s responsibility to be aware of what their child is doing and either allow or prevent it. I don’t want parents spying on their kids and think there’s an element of trust for sure, but I’d much rather have the parents spying on kids than the government and their contractors spying on EVERYONE. It’s ridiculous and infringes on rights established through rigid SCOTUS precedent including Stanley V. Georgia, and NAACP V. Alabama.
We’re a bunch of pansies now that lick the boot with ID verifications online in red states and OS-level requirements in the blue ones. The internet and all of its offspring are not meant for children’s unsupervised use, but it isn’t the public’s responsibility to bear the burden.
Just call Nintendo and tell them this will fuck the Pokémon cards. You’ll get the most rabid lawyers in the world at your side
Don’t forget about the NYSE! If that ain’t gambling, then I guess I don’t know what is.
Oh, it’s gambling because I’m addicted
As much as I like Valve, I really hate their virtual items trade market and the lootboxes in some of their games. I hate if EA does that, so I hate if Valve does that. And comparing them to real cards falls flat, because virtual cards are not real cards. Valve does not want give up the trade market, because they get money for doing nothing with each transaction.
This topic is the biggest flaw and problem I have with Valve, otherwise I am a Valve lover and fanboy.
You drew a really strong link between what EA did and what Valve does, and that gives me the idea that you build your stance on that. EA lootboxes gave you nothing of monetary value, whereas that’s objectively untrue with valve.
You can say that the items are virtual so they’re not really valuable, but you can say the same thing about baseball cards in a sense; they provide no tangible value, only monetary value from sentiment, which is either real and applies to virtual items equally, or it isn’t in which collectable cards are in the same camp as weapon skins.
EA’s lootboxes gave items that could not be transferred, that’s also different from csgo boxes.
EA’s lootboxes locked core gameplay content behind them, and went so far as to reduce the playtime of people without them because the contents of the boxes were so overpowered making them a must have. I don’t recall ever having a noticeably worse experience playing CS because I didn’t have a skin, and I’m not already $60 in on the game y’know?
I agree that kids should not be able to buy cases unsupervised, and parents should be aware that this exists. But I also think that about pokemon and baseball and MTG cards as well, for the exact same reason.
I know I’ve done a lot of writing, so to summarize I’m not convinced by your logic. I believe CS cases are much closer to opening a pack of cards than you’re giving them credit for, and I think they’re an entirely different product than EA’s infamous lootboxes for a number of reasons.
I just briefly mentioned EA for having lootboxes. It could have been any other company. My point is, if any other company did what Valve did, I would hate that too. Also that the items in Steam / Valve games are transferable doesn’t matter, because it is still lootbox, a chance and gamble to get something and to get addicted. In fact, being able to transfer and sell or trade makes this even worse than static micro transactions to me. It is the same problem with collectable sports or Pokemon cards (which is in my opinion worse, because kids can buy them and get addicted…).
To make that clear: To me the trade market of Valve is a huge problem. This should not be a thing with videogames. Not even EA does that, or any other company for that matter (I am not focused on EA, it was just an example).
My bro in example got addicted to CS:GO skins and wasted lot of money. Because he could get the one expensive item and could sell it for lots of money. And that is not okay!
I think it’s possible that loot boxes (and real-world equivalents like trading cards) don’t violate existing anti-child-gambling laws, but if so, that’s a flaw in those laws that needs to be fixed rather than an indication that they’re totally fine and should be allowed to exist in their current form. They cost money and give an unpredictable reward where different options have different perceived value, so they’re quite clearly gambling to anyone who defines it based on its characteristics rather than an individual territory’s specific legalese.
There are also child gambling machines, like crane games, coin pushers, or that one with the moving light. I don’t get why stuff like that is okay. I’m not defending loot boxes, but I do think it’s really weird to single them out. Why don’t they just work to pass a law which bans all of them?
Yeah I don’t really think so, GabeN. Loot boxes should go the way of the dinosaurs.
Become bird
oh yes please delete all the analogue gambling for children too. make it something everyone has to follow
You’re right! We should stop that too!
Then it needs to be done through legislation, not targeted court cases.
Targeted court cases are how you get the ball rolling. You can’t just go after everyone all at once. You gotta start somewhere.
You literally can, that’s what legislating and voting is. When did society become so utterly braindead?
The targeted court cases are to argue that the previously passed legislation already covers these particular facts.
If the legislature passes a law that says “making false statements to another in order to obtain something of value is fraud,” you can expect litigation about the actual contours of what is or isn’t fraud.
Same with legislation against driving at an unsafe speed, causing a nuisance to your neighbors, discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, etc. Court cases decide the edge cases.
If the legislature passes a law banning gambling outside of licensed institutions, and banning gambling for minors, you can expect litigation about what actually is or isn’t gambling.
This shouldn’t be an “edge case”, and it really shouldn’t be only about just minors.
Gotta wonder why the NY AG is so interested in prosecuting Steam and so blase about pursuing anyone in the Epstein Files.
The NY AG doesn’t generally bring criminal suits. And “was a rapist in FL and a private island” may not be enough to give anyone standing to empanel a grand jury and indict.
If you live in NY and then take a vacation in Texas during which you open carry a AR15 and then “self defense” somebody at the Alamo who called you a Yankee, there wouldn’t be much NY could do if the local DA accepted your defense.
And “was a rapist in FL and a private island”
They want exclusive rights to exploit children.
How Valve sounds right now: “It’s totally cool to rip off kids with blind box stuff and get them addicted to gambling mechanics!”
I’m with you OP, we need to stop it in physical games as well. Just because Magic the Gathering does is and Labubu does it doesn’t make it okay. It actually just creates artificial scarcity and pushes children and the families providing them the money to gamble ever harder to get the rare drops, on the off chance that those are valuable.
Even Beanie Babies never stooped that low.
stop it in physical games as well
I think the connection to physical cards is pretty weak really - the crucial difference being that if you want to get some physical cards, you go out and buy them (or stay in and buy them I guess). You start with nothing except some cash, and you end up with some random cards, which may or may not be valuable.
Loot boxes in F2P games are not like that - you play a free game, have fun and then end up with this “loot box” without having done anything to ask for it. It’s just there in your inventory, and it stays there until you fork over some cash and see what’s inside.
It’s way more of a temptation than physical cards that you won’t encounter until you buy them.
I’m not a psychologist or any sort of expert who can properly evaluate something as “gambling” or “not gambling”, but I’ve seen kids going through pack after pack of Magic cards at the shop and I’ve seen people going through scratch-off after scratch-off at the corner store, and to my eye, it’s the same picture.
I agree in theory with these kinds of rules, but I don’t trust legislators to do it properly.
For an example, I remember back in my rs2 days, RWT (real world trading) was relatively common and things like loot dropped from certain monsters was randomized, you might have to kill it 100 times to get that one drop or pay $5 or whatever to get it now.
Where would a legistlator fall on that? Is that gambling? Does RNG and the ability to transfer goods on a game then become illegal just by way of interpretation?
I guess G*mers love loot boxes now.
Fuck Valve for the profiteering off child gambling.
And fuck the G*mers that keep giving Valve a free pass because they’ve been a monopoly longer then they’ve been alive.
Fuck valve for loot boxes but also fuck you twice as much.
Valve is the only market place and game company that isn’t as fucking consumers at every step of the way.
They have ONE problem. Instead of ALL the problems like everyone else.
Valve is the only market place and game company that isn’t as fucking consumers at every step of the way.
I have physical copies of games that won’t work because of Steam making back alley deals with publishers to push their DRM into securing a monopoly.
Fuck you for excusing monopolistic shithead behaviour because your favourite billionaire has to buy Aston Martins to race.
They hate billionaires except when it involves their treats
Fuck you Valve is the most pro consumer company there is. Go suck off zuckerberg and Tim cook you bootlicker.
You can tell a lot of money is being moved on the dark web to push shit onto Valve. I wonder how much pressure they are under to try to get them to go public. The change needs to be legislative, not targeted.
Valve is the most pro consumer company there is.
Is that why they argued against refunds for years until the EU forced them to do the bare minimum?
Is that why they happily sell broken games with zero quality control?
Is that why they happily continue to sell abandoned early access products?
Is that why they make back alley deals with publishers to use Steam as DRM for physical releases?
Is that why platform most-favored-nations is used to prevent games being sold for cheaper on other platforms.
Fuck you. You brainwashed G*mer cunt.
I don’t get why these target valve and how they are a scourge if it’s purely cosmetic. Only complaint I could see is possibly for tf2, though that never seemed pay to win like.
I’d highly recommend you check out People Make Games’ videos on Counter-Strike gambling, which include testimonials from child gambling addicts. And if you still need more convincing, there’s also some videos by Coffeezilla.
But I’d also like to see more companies held accountable for this than just Valve.
How exactly are the children buying stuff in the first place? Me thinks the parents play a role in this…
Did end up watching it (I’ve always enjoyed PMG vids and Quinns). In a way I see it, I just don’t quite fully understand why the onus is on Valve. If valve was directly running the gambling sites, that would be one thing. I would give them flack for accepting sponsorships for dota with some of them. Though it’s a similar vein to sport kings advertisements on shows and such.
Biggest argument: it’s bad to get children addicted to gambling.
Secondary argument: if you buy a game, you shouldn’t have to gamble to get the game’s content.
Secondary argument: if you buy a game, you shouldn’t have to gamble to get the game’s content.
This one doesn’t apply to Valve’s games, both because the base games are free and because the items can be bought directly. Other games though…
They didn’t even mention the little toy vending machines where you put in a quarter and get a random toy or sticker. Those are what I always equated lootboxes to. You always get something; but it’s almost never what you’d like to get.
Gachapon machines. They’re extremely huge in Japan, hooked me young since they were always in the entrances/exits of grocery stores here in the usa.
Wow I had no idea that’s where the term gacha games came from.
Honest question I’m curious to hear peoples opinions on: Gambling is obviously dangerous, and I think we can all agree that exposing kids to it easly is bad. At the same time, for any form of virtual gambling, how do you ensure that kids can’t access it without putting a significant limit on adults’ freedoms? Like, Lemmy is very pro-privacy, but would this be a case where the (few) merits of ID based verification would be justified, or should we be just be banning all gambling outside of designated casinos, or…
I don’t really partake, so I’m always hesitant to have a really firm line in the sand, but we’ve seen a ton of harm come from the constant access to gambling that we’ve got now via sports betting that we didn’t have before deregulation in the wake of Draft Kings, so I’m inclined to lean toward it only being in designated locations. The problem here is similar in that you can access it everywhere and definitely exacerbated by not even doing the bare minimum amount of countermeasures against underage gambling, because they want to pretend that it isn’t gambling.
Make it so that gambling leads to a higher age rating for the game, and then let parents manage that the same way they would violence or language in a game. I think (hope) this would lead to a huge drop in lootboxes, rather than changes to ratings, but either way works for me.
“Gambling” is one of the tags the ESRB labels games with already. A higher letter rating won’t really help when parents aren’t parenting and don’t pay any attention to what their kids are doing. Hella little kids are already in most M rated games, squeaking out racial slurs over the mic.
We need punishments for parents neglecting their kids like this, letting them gamble and play things rated above their age rating is not good parenting.
I mean, currently Counter Strike already has (had?) an ESRB M rating, as did TF2. Dota isn’t rated, but would clearly also be M, given abilites like Rupture. Do you think we just need to reduce the normalization of it?
Oh, that’s easy. Find some kids who gambled and make an example out of them on national TV. Problem solved!
I thought I remembered loot crates being rewarded randomly between matches. Did Valve start selling them and I missed it? Or what’s the real issue here?
I’m pretty sure they are still given in CS2 but now you have more chance of getting a bad skin or graffiti spray then a loot crate.
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I love Valve, but I don’t think this one is going away and I don’t think it SHOULD go away. F2P games with RNG loot boxes are a scourge and I don’t play games that have them for that very reason.
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It shouldn’t go away. It should extend to all of the big players using gambling and addictive conditioning in video games starting with EA and Microsoft.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But you don’t start 20 lawsuits for the same thing at the same time against everybody. You start with one case against one company, and if it rules in your favor, that sets stronger precedent to go after the others.
As for why Valve, I’m guessing it’s easier to demonstrate more specific examples of harm when you have a larger pool of consumers to draw from, and easier to get an American entity in an American courtroom.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
I don’t care if they exist, but you’d have to make it an 18 an over type of deal. I don’t really care how adults choose to blow their money, gambling included. You want to verify you’re over 18 so you can get loot boxes, you do you.