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.”
Gotta love how they just randomly threw in that long-disproved little tidbit about violent videogames making kids into psychopaths. Way to discredit your whole stance.
Way to discredit your whole stance.
People can be right about one thing and wrong about another at the same time. Do you have to be right about everything ever for one of your opinions to count?
If I’m gonna be sticking them together like this, yes.
By your own rules, you’ve invalidated your existence.
The downvotes, the shameful, wrong downvotes.
Guess everyone who did so is wrong about everything.
God I love downvoting people who complain about downvotes. I don’t even know why. It’s just incredibly funny to me for some reason.
I love blocking people who are gleeful about being shitty. I know exactly why.
The downvotes are because this is an attack and steam and their rapid fan boys will do the needful to defend their favorite billionaire.
Yep. As ever, all that matters are vibes. “Valve bad” = WRONG VIBES! Attacking someone who says “Valve bad” = GOOD VIBES! UPVOTE! Criticising the attack = BAD VIBES! DOWNVOTE!
Doesn’t matter whether it’s bollocks.
Criticising the attack = BAD VIBES! DOWNVOTE!
And that’s not exactly what you’re doing in response to someone criticising the attack on Valve?
No, there are defences of Valve that are perfectly reasonable.
You know what’s super funny about this? Your hatred for Valve is so god damned strong that your deep-fried head-circuitry can’t process that something might not be about that. So, I’ll spell it out in very simple terms.
Stopping gambling in video games = Good
Enabling people who can and have tried to censor and destroy the industry in the past = bad
My hatred for valve? Where the fuck does that come from? I couldn’t care less about them.
Their billionaire owner on the other hand, can go on the burn pile with the rest of them. How he made the billions doesn’t matter. I don’t make exceptions when it comes to eat the rich.
edit: I responded to the wrong person, my bad
Is anyone else wondering if this is going to turn into another attempt to try to force face scans and id uploads?
Ideally the rule would be to just flat out not allow loot boxes, but I feel the government is going to try to use this opportunity to justify age verification requirements instead.
Finally a lawsuit against valve I can support.
The lawsuit also claims that CS2 and other FPSs are causing kids to become violent
Finally a lawsuit against valve I can support 99% of.
In this thread: a complete lack of moral clarity as gamers simp for one of the most profitable companies in the industry. Valve was a pioneer of loot boxes. When they got in trouble for CS:GO skin gambling, they did the minimum to make it look like they didn’t allow it and allowed it to make an easy comeback. They sit back and make 30% off the sale of every game on the platform. People should be saying that Valve is very bad and Epic is even worse. Instead gamers feel this strange need to pick sides with a giant company that controls almost all PC gaming. No, we can easily say they’re all bad.
They need to get rid of Steam to begin rolling out cloud computing. They’ve already started the phase were people can no longer realistic build the rigs they could build a year ago.
You are right, they are all bad. Singling out any company isn’t helping out. That’s the problem with this lawsuit, it is not legislative, it is going only after one company under the telltale of politicization “it’s for the children” with a fair amount of false accusations that “CS2 and other FPSs are causing kids to become violent”. This is to build up Leticia James’ political career by going after an easier target that does not have the political ties other marketplaces have and it will not fix the system, but just allow the competitors to thrive.
Now that doesn’t mean she’s doing as part of some conspiratorial shift to cloud computing, it just means that the parties interested in that shift generally encourage and do nothing to oppose this sort of intervention whereas in the past it might have been opposed to because of the hurdle of precedence they could help to establish - which no longer matters as much because half the Supreme Court is corrupt anyway and can just hallucinate the precedence away in an exercise of mental gymnastics in their opinion.
You don’t think it matters, just look at the shitshow YouTube is increasingly becoming, because that’s what a lot of rich assholes want to appropriate and coerce Steam into becoming. Fear the day Steam goes public.
I think you’re probably right. I still think it’s important to point out that this lawsuit, even if successful, won’t take down Valve. Steam and CS2 will still be around. If it is successful, it might force other platforms to change how they handle lootboxes too. Singling out Valve won’t mean that steam is down and we all need to use the Epic store. The flaws of this lawsuit and it’s motivations don’t mean that we need to excuse Valves bad behavior. You aren’t doing that here but many people feel the need to pick sides. We can call out the lawsuit for being largely a political stunt and call out Valve for profiting off of child gambling.
Not everyone has loyalty to Valve or any company.
Not everyone, but plenty of people in this thread do. And plenty of gamers in general excuse their bad behavior.
You’re a citizen in a village. The Nazis have come to your village and decide to destroy you. You attack the friendly village toymaker for hosting gambling nights for everybody.
Yes, it’s wrong.
No, it’s not the time.
Nuance is dead.
Village toymaker? Wow.
What do you think would be a more apt analogy, then? Maybe I’m painting them in an unfair light. But, my point is that they’re a toymaker that makes and distributes entertainment for everybody, but also do this thing that kinda sucks.
Billionaire owned tech companies that controll a market so tightly they pretty much have a monopoly shouldn’t be anthropomorphized so fondly. I want you to vomit up that Kool aid.
The village must be quite famous and populous to even have one! Perhaps it’s a whole ass-town, even!
That’s true. I’ve gotten pushback for criticizing Valve and there is a lot to criticize.
They might be better in some way than other US tech companies, but that’s doesn’t mean much.
Reminder most vg marketplace charge 30% on sale on they’re platform. Steam isn’t charging much different then it used to.
Again, those other marketplaces are bad too. Saying Valve is bad isn’t saying another company is good and calling another company bad doesn’t mean I have to say valve is good.
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.
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).
I think this particular lawsuit is legitimate and should proceed.
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.
But you can’t exchange loot box rewards for money.
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.
Didn’t read the story, but how are loot boxes different than trading card game booster packs? I don’t like the consumerist nature of both, but just curious.
They aren’t. I’m sure if it went to court that lawyers would find a way to convince a jury otherwise, but we all know that’s bullshit. Booster packs are gambling.
First of all: Trading cards are also abusive as fuck. What those Magic and Pokémon people are doing is not ok.
But loot boxes can be even worse: You can built them so that they will give you not a fair chance to get an item, but some companies are doing this the more evil way. Imagine that you need some specific item to get your full set, which will give you some buff. And the company knows that you are missing only that item. And it knows that you are willing to spend money, because you have just bought a loot box. So they will manipulate your odds so that you will not get the item you want. You’ll get several other “near misses”, but they also do know how many loot boxes other players opened before giving up. That is some additional evil that printed Magic cards in Walmart can’t do to you
While this is true of the most predatory loot box systems, no valve game has cosmetics that directly impact gameplay. They are decorative.
They aren’t different. Both are a form of gambling. Same with blind boxes.
They’re not wrong, it is gambling.
A good few years ago now, I watched as my two cousins, Steam voucher in hand (and he didn’t even have a gaming PC btw), faffed about with one of those sites promoted by shady Youtubers.
Codes went in. Buttons were pressed. Glances were exchanged.
“Now what?” asked the younger one who’s Steam voucher it was.
“Oh nothing,” said the older one. “You lost.”
I think it was only teenage emoism that stopped him bursting into tears right there.
He’s an accountant now, so I assume he learned an important lesson about gambling that day.
He’s an accountant now, so I assume he learned an important lesson about gambling that day.
Or it fully broke his spirit…
Why not both?
I’ve never been a gambler because I’ve only ever lost. I’d say I’m down ~$30 in the last 30 years.
I’m not really a gambler either. I’ve been to the casino a few times in my 20s with friends, but either for one of their birthdays or they were celebrating something. I only ever brought like $50 to drink with and another $50 to play with, knowing full well the most enjoyment of that hundo I was getting was the beers.
I did however win exactly once. Turned my last $10 of the 50 into $900. And that was also the last time I ever gambled.
I did once have someone give me a roll of quarters and I walked out with $70. I figured the only reason I won was because it wasn’t my money.
I mean, that’s pretty sweet!
It’s like me and lotto tickets. If I buy one, I lose every time. If someone buys me one I win either a free play or the value of the ticket…then lose on the free play
Gambling is pointless.
For some reason, even though I have been using Steam for a long time, I am not privy to the “lootboxes” they talk about. And my account was never parented. I feel like I would actively need to look for what they are talking about.
disgorge all ill-gotten gains
Why is this the only lawsuit where I see this phrase?
Why do other companies go away with a few million $ in fine?-> Now I want to know how much Valve has “ill-gotten” out of this thing.
I definitely prefer GoG and being able to play all my games with the internet off and don’t consider Steam as some angel. But from what I see, the very fact that so many Gaming companies are trying to destroy Valve, tells me that Valve is giving value that these others don’t want given to the customer.
So, using what laws to sue a group of companies for the malicious use of court to attempt to reduce the overall quality of product options available to the consumers?
Lotta billionaire sucking in this thread. Just because you like his platform doesn’t make GabeN a good person.
Everyone say it: There’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
I am honestly a little bit in shock how people are willing to do volunteer PR for Valve.
They are an American technology, they can’t escape the culture of corruption and criminality that dominates their region.
What about EA?
Literal whataboutism
Unpopular opinion but valve is way worse than EA when it comes to gambling.
Not only did they invent the concept of loot boxes but they also allow real money trading of the randomly dropped items which fosters an entire underground of secondary gambling markets that are literal digital casinos.
Markets that currently sponsor the majority of esports teams.
Maplestory invented them with the Gatchapon.
Setting precedent is important.
Well, this precedent is going to end up helping all the pro-rootkit companies a lot.
Here’s hoping GoG still stays on its own tracks.
And when they end up doing EA and others, they will get no more than a few million in fine.
Although, I am now interested in knowing the extend of these “ill-gotten gains” Valve has…
This is coming in so late that it basically seems to be more of a move for someone to run their political career off of. There are so many worse offenders now, while Steam was basically one of the least gregarious ones. Unfortunately for Steam, it is a corrupt market nowadays, and it’s always going to be the least corrupt, private entities who get singled out. You can specially tell its political when it’s flying under the “protect the children” flag, gambling in general has gotten out of hand and needs to be toned down, for all ages. Going after one company isn’t going to fix this, it needs to be legislation wide.
Reminder: this was Epstein’s idea.
Valve doesn’t make the games. You’ll need to take this up with the game developers. They’re the ones who inserted the “surprise mechanics” into the game.
this is about Counterstrike loot boxes, so Valve absolutely makes the game in question
Are all loot drops gambling? Raid bosses in World of Warcraft, they have a percent chance to drop certain loot. This is what motivates people to do it over and over. It that a gambling addiction? Why is a box different than a boss?
It’s not just the random chance; it’s the fact you need to pay every time you pull the handle like a slot machine.
Because the way valve does it you need the purchase a key with real money to unlock the box, to get the random drop from it. Random loot isn’t the problem, it’s paying real money for the chance to get the random loot.
imagine if each time, to kill the boss, you had to pay $1.
You pay $1, watch your avatar hit the boss once, and it immediatly explodes into a shower of common, uncommon, and mayber a rare… Drat, no epics.
Better throw another $1 in… and another $1.
$25 in, you get a rare! great, you can throw that on the AH for $20 worth of currency… so you better ‘reinvest’…
